Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
As previously mentioned, the “Behind the Bastards” podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I’m just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.
This is something I’ve noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There’s a nostalgia for the “old” internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I’ve always thought that’s dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.
This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.
I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesn’t Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?
There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were “corrupting the discourse” way back in 1991.
why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest
I’m thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.
I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it’s the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.
The YouTube version doesn’t have the ads
basilisk save us from breathless idiocy by rubes
Altman’s investors will have had to get comfortable with at least four levels of intricacy.
ah yes the four-fold path of investing, the true religion
More head-scratching is OpenAI’s governance. Altman was ousted last year, then swiftly returned.
“I cannot look at this and analyse the power structure, and thus I am very confused as to how this happened”
But investors making that call today must surely be powered more by instinct than intelligence.
“must surely”? call the builders, we’ve found a new ultra-strong load bearing phrase
(also h/t to @self who I just realized was the one that retooted the thing where I saw this)
A redditor has a pinned post on /r/technology. They claim to be at a conference with Very Important Promptfondlers in Berlin. The OP feels like low-effort guerilla marketing, tbh; the US will dominate the EU due to an overwhelming superiority in AI, long live the new flesh, Emmanuel Macron is on board so this is SUPER SERIOUS, etc.
PS: the original poster, /u/WillSen, self-identifies as CEO of a bootcamp/school called “codesmith,” and has lots of ideas about how to retrain people to survive in the longed-for post-AI hellscape. So yeah, it’s an ad.
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fufbfm/im_a_tech_ceo_at_the_berlin_global_dialogue_w/
The central problem of 21st century democracy will be finding a way to inoculate humanity against confident bullshitters. That and nature trying to kill us. Oh, and capitalism in general, but I repeat myself.
This exchange on HN, from the Wordpress meltdown, is going to make an amazing exhibit in the upcoming trial:
Anonymous: Matt, I mean this sincerely: get yourself checked out. Do you have a carbon monoxide detector in your house? … Go to a 10 day silent retreat, or buy a ranch in Montana and host your own Burning Man…
Matt Mullenweg: Thanks, I carry a co2 and carbon monoxide monitor. … I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a day.
I have only just noticed that this is dated a year in the future
acausal sneers from our superpredictors
blake is rather more advanced in physics than we had anticipated
Voted sneerer most likely to build a fully-functional time machine!
New post from Ed Zitron just dropped which goes into a lotta detail on OpenAI’s finances around the time the deal was closing.
I’ve already cracked one Kendrick reference, so fuck it:
Given the proliferation of libertarians in SV, Ed probably wouldn’t even need to change the “A-minor” line is all I’m saying.
Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.
Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.
@blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I don’t understand the point of contributing if you don’t think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.
There are the weirdest people who make ‘content’ out there. For example, I saw a ‘how to start the game’ joke guide on steam, so I went to their page to block them (to see if this also blocks the guides from popping up, doesn’t seem so) and they had made hundreds of these guides, all just copy pasted shit. And there were more people doing the exact same thing. Bizarre shit. (Prob related to the thing where you can give people stickers, gamification was a mistake).
I am disappoint.
“The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.”
psst it’s to search and destroy
no one has seen this coming, no one
@blakestacey heroes
ah, sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension:
(This would’ve been more shocking to me in 2023, but after over a year in this bubble I have stopped expecting anything resembling basic human decency from those who work in AI)
Not a lawyer, but wouldn’t that be something her estate could kick up some legal dust about? That’s two dozen kind of fucked up.
I wanted to see how much lactose was in Monterey Jack, and this was the very first result on bing for:
monterey jack lactose per 10 grams
https://thekitchencommunity.org/the-nutritional-profile-of-monterey-jack-cheese/
It’s absolutely over. This is why every other search I make has “site:reddit.com” attached to it.
And no, the site didn’t tell me how much lactose there was per gram
StrokeSimulatorGPT
“My name is Scroder Cher. I take care of the place while the Master is away.”
I can’t decide if calimisinit is better pronounced in a surfer bro or British accent, so my brain combined the two and I hate it
i think it might be latin
it’s actually a function call,
calimisInit()calimis.innit()?;simple as
So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with “We’re living through a technological paradigm shift.”… and right there I didn’t bother reading the rest of it because I don’t want to expose my brain to it further.
But what I found funny is that also today, there’s this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support
So Hololens is discontinued… you know… AR… the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.
Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.
It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.
Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!
With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. […], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.
(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)
It’s interesting that someone thought “smoothing life’s complexities” is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.
Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life’s complexities without smoothing out people’s complexities, but it’s not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that’s if it actually worked, which it doesn’t).
I’ve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it’s hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it’s a shame we couldn’t as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).
Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.
tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.
call me when I can actually tange them
@V0ldek @sailor_sega_saturn sorry, these are Non-Tangible Tokens
re: how can a chatbot help with life?
This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.
A lot less, ‘Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email’ and more ‘Copilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor’.
I think that ‘giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf’ is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!
E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants
I think it’s also a case of thinking about form before function. It’s not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but there’s still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).
I am neutral on MSFT - to me it’s a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it’s not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it’s really impressive how they’ve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple’s 1984 ad, via the “Halloween Papers” era where they were every Linux weenie’s biggest boogeyman, to today’s bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they’re not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot’s Recall feature also know they’re the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and they’re only separate so OpenAI’s reputation doesn’t stain MS.
Despite the industry’s deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.
I can’t help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to “coding for non-programmers” akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there’s a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.
Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they’re actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)
And now they’re actually Open Source
sorta, but it’s a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)
one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains
perhaps… one of the most
Load bearing words!
life’s complexities
I don’t think there’s an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.
‘Life’s complexities’ sounds like an adam curtis bit.
CEO of cloudflare says he’ll donate the bandwidth for Wordpress dot org to shut mullenweg up https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663
Cloudflare is such a weird company in various ways. Saying loudly that they can’t judge groups when people ask them not to support the neo-nazis, harassers and worse (they have moved on this under pressure, but it takes a lot of pressure). But then they do this.
Wasn’t the first time he shut down 8chan (or was it Kiwifarms? Something along the lines), he immediately came out to say “It’s really bad that I have the power to take down a website of shitheads.” Just seemed like everything about his ideology is confused.
I guess I should be clear this is not an endorsement of cloudflare, just fun to see dickheads being dickheads to each other
I didn’t take it as such, I just was again a bit confused by the actions cloudflare takes. Assume it is some weird technolibertarian thing.
And probably also an opportunity to dunk on Mullenweg for free PR
also it gives them even more network control and data, something entirely beneficial to them
what’s the over/under on the spruce pine thing causing promptfondlers and their ilk to suddenly not be able to get chips, and then hit a(n even more concrete) ceiling?
(I know there may be some of the stuff in stockpiles awaiting fabrication, but still, can’t be enough to withstand that shock)
Building 5-7 5GW facilities full of GPUs is going to be an extremely large amount of silicon. Not to mention the 25-35 nuclear power plants they apparently want to build to power them.
So on the list of things not happening…that would be 25-35 reactors, as long as cooling is available you can just put them in one place. 5GW is around size of largest european nuclear powerplants (Zaporozhian, 5.7GW; Gravelines, 5.4GW; six blocks each) or around energy consumption of decently-sized euro country like Ireland, Hungary or Bulgaria. 25GW is electricity consumption of Poland, 30GW UK, 35GW Spain
this is not happening hardest because by the time they’d get permits for NPP they’ll get bankrupt because bubble will be over
The theoretical Three Mile Island datacentre is probably the end-point of all of this. I think that what they build there (should it actually happen) has to be AGI. Like, unambiguously AGI. Where even the most hardline AI skeptics will react with “Holy shit they actually did it.”
Anything less and it’ll be nearly impossible to justify building 5 nuclear reactors to just power one of these datacentres.
So even if it is happening, it’s still not happening.
i don’t think TMI even has space for 5 blocks
I don’t think they’re planning to build the 5GW datacentres on TMI, though.
i don’t think they’re planning to build anything, but it’d be very funny if they ended up doing that anyway bleeding MS out of money
Gonna build enough clean energy to power a medium sized industrialized nation just to waste it all on videos of babies dressed up as shrimp jesus.
If we’re lucky, it’ll cut off promptfondlers’ supply of silicon and help bring this entire bubble crashing down.
It’ll probably also cause major shockwaves for the tech industry at large, but by this point I hold nothing but unfiltered hate for everyone and everything in Silicon Valley, so fuck them.
https://fixupx.com/CultureCrave/status/1840858182840877084
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Elon musk voice: ‘So euhmmm euuhhh ummm you are ummm euhh saying it has umm some value?’
E: But wait there is more
Tweet from Paul Graham: “Renaming Twitter X doesn’t seem to have damaged it. But it doesn’t seem to have helped it either. So it was a waste of time and a domain name.”
And more
Reply tweet from Elon Musk: “You know nothing”
(And as is tradition when Musk replies to a famous person, the famous person doesn’t even react).
The tragedy of being Elon Musk: he has thousands and thousands of cryptocurrency bros and fascists that worship the ground he walks on, but what he really want is for Stephen King to reply to one of his tweets.
Stephen King is busy working him in as a villain in a new novel.
What if a social media site turned evil!
that’s his one move
I read Cell so reluctantly
This gonna end in a gofundme
hatreon
In the endless genAI shit that the bird site pushes on me, this caught my eye because it seems like a dream tool for a non-tech suit to generate blame examples for engineers https://xcancel.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1840941643223945561
i … have no idea whatsoever what the use case is here … you make the chatbot generate the code instead of cloning the repo? or it’s like generating an API that doesn’t work or something?
Think it is an attempt to make it easier to feed somebodies work into a LLM. So you know, stealing.
Yeah it just collates everything in the repo into a single text file so you can upload that to the shit machine
Astounding, they’ve made noSQL for filesystems!
… and then what…
Ok I found a similar tool in the tweets replies and here’s what it suggests prompting the chatbot with
This file contains my entire codebase. Please review the overall structure and suggest any improvements or refactoring opportunities, focusing on maintainability and scalability.
Based on the codebase in this file, please generate a detailed README.md that includes an overview of the project, its main features, setup instructions, and usage examples.
Analyze the code in this file and suggest a comprehensive set of unit tests for the main functions and classes. Include edge cases and potential error scenarios.
Review the codebase for adherence to coding best practices and industry standards. Identify areas where the code could be improved in terms of readability, maintainability, and efficiency. Suggest specific changes to align the code with best practices.
This file contains the entire codebase of library. Please provide a comprehensive overview of the library, including its main purpose, key features, and overall architecture.
These people use chatbots daily yet still seem to be under the impression that LLMs are competent. I don’t even know what to say.
This is why I say I can only imagine the non-tech suits using it to be assholes to the dev team
Yeah, I can at least understand why people would ask a chatbot about bits of codes, but feeding it an entire codebase in one go and expecting something coherent out of it is mind boggling. Awful awful.
@Amoeba_Girl this is irretrievably cursed
fucking… that’s all? some shit you can do moments after learning about the GitHub API for the first time? and I shouldn’t be surprised, but this is the code that people were fellating in the Twitter comments and/or using to advertise their own shitware?
Been waiting for this since i opened my github account. 🙏🏼
fucker, how are you like this?
@fasterandworse @blakestacey seems cursed
snrk
https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676
I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.
Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.
I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy
