6mo ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024

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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

96 comments

Update: My previous statement was wrong, turns out @ai_shame is still around

apparently those qualcomm NPUs (the "AI assist" chips in the copilot(?) laptops) aren't very good
- wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?
  
  non processing units
- The what in the what now?
  What a terrible day to tech.
  
  Have you seen the sticker with 'Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration'
  (yes this post is a creative attempt at generating alt text for my image).

Zitron's given commentary on PC Gamer's publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:
He's also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley's worst excesses. I don't have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.

New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.
And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this one's thankfully unrelated to the article's main point):
The idea that "[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitable^tm" (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.
That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valley's failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.

lol fandom could have been even worse
- data moat
  
  ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:
  The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
  Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
  Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle
  Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.
  Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*

As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.

[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684](Roko gets dunked on.)
He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.
Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?
- If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?
  
  That launch happened Feb 2018. By that time, I was already solidified as a musk sceptic and didn’t pay attention to the hubbub. Thinking back on it:
  Why was this a thing?
  per wikipedia:
  Musk explained he wanted to inspire the public about the "possibility of something new happening in space" as part of his larger vision for spreading humanity to other planets.’
  What I like about the phrasing “possibility of something new” is that nothing new really happened with that launch. We’ve already sent all kinds of junk into space in configurations varying in impressiveness.
  Naming the mannequin Starman falls apart since the eponymous starman is an extra terrestrial. Just goes to show that Musk is not a Real Nerd^TM and just makes surface level references to look cool.
- Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.
  Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))
  
  Okay but "Elon is not smarter than me" is a universally true statement in the exact same way as "dumb as a rock" is a universally applicable idiom.

Musk's twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer
- This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.
- Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn't not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script
- twitter gon' have nothin' left but the cranks
  
  Just guys like that and guys like this
- Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that's not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.
  Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.
  (MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)
- the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
  given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends
  
  have implemented jwt (used the library, first in the company)

In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
- (Rationally) "If there's grass on the field play ball"
- Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this

Me, a nuclear engineer reading about "Google restarting six nuclear power plants"
lol, lmao even
- Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”

25085 N + Oct 15 GitHub ( 19K) Your free GitHub Copilot access has expired
tinyviolin.bmp

A quick update: @ai_shame is quitting Twitter, and Musk using posts for AI training is the reason why:

sammy boi is giving up on the pretense that any of this was about enriching lives, and is now only focusing on the eyegrab (archive)
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we'll see
- Create the problem and sell the solution.
  
  Did Sam anticipate the easily foreseeable avalanche of AI slop, decide that proof of humanity was a worthwhile investment, and only then notice that all the suggested search completions for "proof of" were crypto?

Like Vitalik Buterin creating eth because he was mad his op WoW char got nerfed, we now have more gamers lore. J D Vance played a Yawgmoth's Bargain deck.
- the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over
  
  We cannot allow a dark ritual gap.

fig. 1: how awful.systems works

Eigen "Turn the Homeless into Soylent" robot strikes again
- arggghhh no one can make me feel blind rage like this smarmy nazi piece of shit can
- You know, I can't tell if this is supposed to be "I know you're saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but it's more complicated than that" or "I know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and I'm honestly okay with that".
  Gonna guess the latter given where it's coming from and the fact that the actual "more complicated" is a salad of non sequiturs.
  
  eigen is squarely in the tpot crew
  it's definitely not coming from a good place

Ah, so apparently Google has found a new way to make Youtube comments worse.
- Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.
  
  I know you probably had no intention behind the number, but I just had to check. 2686 days ago was 12 June 2017. Pretty sure we’ve known about how google fumbles shit from way before then!

In other news, Elon actually did it
He actually went and crippled blocking
- He also put 'everything you post is now training data for ais' in his tos apparently. So nightshade poison those images and start building a following on other sites artists. (And as a non artist, reminder to self to like and repost more artists I like).
  E: quick source
- This is a license for stalkers & abusers ! No surprise from someone like Elon I suppose
- I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.
  
  my bet: tweets that came to felon's attention which he couldn't view because the poster had block felon
- I’m really really not happy about this. There is one person I’ve been trying to keep out for the last few years and now they can come crawl all my fucking posts?? And report my account!?
  Edit: apparently being protected should offer me some protection still.

Presented, without comment, this book cover:
(found on the social medias, the books' website)
- this is one hell of a hat trick
  
  only needs a quantum chapter somewhere in there for bonus scoring round..
- God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.
  This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.
  
  the upside of it listing a pile of author names: one can go look up their published works, and add them to crank trackers if necessary (seems likely)
  the ToC is some fantastical fucking nonsense

Bob Dylan has responded to a Bitcoin Groyper account

our good buddy Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux aka TP0 gives a talk to Stanford libertarians
i haven't watched this but i am confident it is the most cursed fuckin thing
one hour thirty frickin eight
- Somebody on the twitter is doing an expose on TP0 (This is part 2, part 1 also linked).

Molly White reports on Kamala Harris's recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.
VP Harris's press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.
Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected
[...]
Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.
More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.
Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.
"regulation" here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don't live in a sensible world.
- who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto
- Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.

Not a sneer, but an unsurprising development: Bluesky's seeing a surge in users:
- It really is incredible how bad twitter got to make me root for the company that thinks DID is good protocol design and that was started by Jack Dorsey.
  But heck it I'm (cautiously) rooting for Bluesky.

pivot to ai now has working dark mode! all praise to the illustrious @fasterandworse@awful.systems
i still hate dark mode, but others fucking love it so
- Thank for letting me know there are other people indifferent to dark mode. Sometimes I feel I am the only one.
  
  i have already had whiny shits demand that I (a) set dark mode default (b) remove the switch
  default is currently set to whatever your browser thinks is the default and you can switch it otherwise

this demented take on using GenAI to create documentation for open source projects
https://lobste.rs/s/rmbos5/large_language_models_reduce_public#c_j8boat
- Good sneer from "Internet_Janitor" a few comments up the page:
  LLMs inherently shit where they eat.
  
  The top comment's also pretty good, especially the final paragraph:
  I guess these companies decided that strip-mining the commons was an acceptable deal because they’d soon be generating their own facts via AGI, but that hasn’t come to pass yet. Instead they’ve pissed off many of the people they were relying on to continue feeding facts and creativity into the maws of their GPUs, as well as possibly fatally crippling the concept of fair use if future court cases go against them.

Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.
As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
The first clause of the opening line, and we've already hit a "citation needed".
He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize "science, technology, and the economy".
You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.
- After he started rambling about his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, it was obvious his brain was cooked.
  As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
  Arrow of time and all that, innit? And God help me, I actually read part of the post as well as the discussion comments where the prompt fondlers were lamenting that all it takes is one rogue ai code to end the world because it will "optimize against you!" I assume Evil GPT is constructing anti matter bombs using ingredients it finds under the kitchen sink.
  
  This is just straight-up gossip, but why not:
  Tegmark used to go around polling physicists at conferences about which interpretation of quantum mechanics they prefer. A colleague of mine said that they were sitting near Tegmark and saw him fudging the numbers in his notes — erasing the non-Many Worlds tallies from those who said they supported Many Worlds as well as others, IIRC.

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