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Sailor Sega Saturn @ sailor_sega_saturn @awful.systems
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2 yr. ago

I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence... Sailor Saturn.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • More bias-laundering through AI, phrenology edition! https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/06/should-facial-analysis-help-determine-whom-companies-hire

    I couldn't actually read the article because paywall, but here's a paper that the article is probably about: AI Personality Extraction from Faces: Labor Market Implications

    Saying the quiet part out loud:

    First, an individual’s genetic profile significantly influences both their facial features and personality. Certain variations in DNA correlate with specific facial features, such as nose shape, jawline, and overall facial symmetry, defined broadly as craniofacial characteristics

    Second, a person’s pre- and post-natal environment, especially hormone exposure, has been shown to affect both facial characteristics and personality

    To their credit the paper does say that this is a terrible idea, though I don't know how much benefit of the doubt to give them (I don't have time to take a closer look):

    This research is not intended, and should not viewed, as advocacy for the usage of Photo Big 5 or similar technologies in labor market screening.

  • It’s the fake thing: Coca-Cola tries another AI Christmas TV ad

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  • Half the time the trucks are driving on the left side of the road. That's fine I guess; except half the time the trucks are driving on the right side of the road.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • 🙃🙃🙃

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • NotAwfulTech and AwfulTech converged with some ffmpeg drama on twitter over the past few days starting here and still ongoing. This is about an AI generated security report by Google's "Big Sleep" (with no corresponding Google authored fix, AI or otherwise). Hackernews discussed it here. Looking at ffmpeg's security page there have been around 24 bigsleep reports fixed.

    ffmpeg pointed out a lot of stuff along the lines of:

    • They are volunteers
    • They have not enough money
    • Certain companies that do use ffmpeg and file security reports also have a lot of money
    • Certain ffmpeg developers are willing to enter consulting roles for companies in exchange for money
    • Their product has no warranty
    • Reviewing LLM generated security bugs royally sucks
    • They're really just in this for the video codecs moreso than treating every single Use-After-Free bug as a drop-everything emergency
    • Making the first 20 frames of certain Rebel Assault videos slightly more accurate is awesome
    • Think it could be more secure? Patches welcome.
    • They did fix the security report
    • They do take security reports seriously
    • You should not run ffmpeg "in production" if you don't know what you're doing.

    All very reasonable points but with the reactions to their tweets you'd think they had proposed killing puppies or something.

    A lot of people seem to forget this part of open source software licenses:

    BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW

    Or that venerable old C code will have memory safety issues for that matter.

    It's weird that people are freaking out about some UAFs in a C library. This should really be dealt with in enterprise environments via sandboxing / filesystem containers / aslr / control flow integrity / non-executable memory enforcement / only compiling the codecs you need... and oh gee a lot of those improvements could be upstreamed!

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • Grokipedia just dropped: https//grokipediacom/

    It's a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won't copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:

    • Grokipedia's article on Wikipedia uses the word "ideological" or "ideologically" 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in it's Wikipedia article).
    • Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" or "biological males". The last paragraph of the article "The Wachowskis" is downright unhinged.
    • The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.

    Also certain articles have this at the bottom:

    The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • Check out the graphics on their homepage. It has that terrible "scroll driven" web-design but the graphics look like placeholder art cooked up by a programmer.

    Usually these sorts of VC bait companies at least hire a graphics designer but I guess that's not actually necessary.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • I'm starting to think some of these tech skeptics are only pretending to be skeptics.

  • AI boyfriend users radicalise against OpenAI — and self-host their chatbot companions

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  • Reading romance is great and I highly recommend it. The trick is to find the good ones.

    Being an actual character in a romance would also be great (for a sufficiently high quality romance with a sufficiently peaceful setting, and assuming I get to keep free will and also keep living after the story ends -- ok that's a lot of caveats but how else would it work?).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • That Wikipedia article is cursed:

    For instance, in discussions on climate change mitigation, countries with lesser contributions to greenhouse gas emissions might still benefit from global efforts to reduce emissions, enjoying a stable climate without proportionally shouldering the costs of emission reductions.

  • Framework goes full fash, supports Hyprland and Omarchy

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  • I'm getting a lot of questions already answered by my "before anyone asks I'm pro LGBTQ and pro immigrant" shirt.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1976304803744501775

    Best I can do now is try to make sure that at least one AI is truth-seeking and not a super woke nanny with an iron fist that wants to turn everyone into diverse women 😬

    Edit: It only just now occured to me that hes' probably whining about generative AI rather than an army of superintelligent robots marching across the earth transing people, but I'm leaving my comment.

  • Microsoft Copilot AI tries faces instead of a pearly blob

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  • I tend to think of Toys (1992) for these sorts of themes though I haven't watched the film from start to finish since I was a kid. It's about the militarization of a wealthy family toy factory and has a lot of scenes that stuck with me.

    It's a Christmas family movie that reviewed horribly so definitely counts as a cult classic, but those who like it tend to really like it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th September 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Rupert's Snub Cube and other Math Holes

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  • The Call of Duty Cinematic Universe:

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    Sailor Sega Saturn @awful.systems

    Rupert's Snub Cube and other Math Holes

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • The article claims that Google didn't "fall for the same trap" but that's not correct, all this garbage is indeterministic so the author just got "lucky".

    It's like saying "four out of five coin-flips claimed that an eagle was the first US president" -- just because the fifth landed on heads and showed George Washington doesn't mean it's any different than the rest.

    But here I'm preaching to the choir.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • Honestly Hanson is so awful the rationalists almost make him look better by association.