2mo ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th November 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)

209 comments

re: election results. unfortunately i'm not surprised or even disappointed by now. it makes me feel sad for my 2015 self and her naivete. she didn't understand what a disgusting and evil culture she lived in
- I don’t have too much coherent to say right now
  fuck the fascists for what they’ve done and what they intend to do
  fuck the neoliberals for doing their best to convince marginalized people that they shouldn’t defend themselves against a terrible fate
  fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths
  shit’s about to get very hard and very weird and I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life
  
  what a surprise, the thread all the leftist shitposters on mastodon boosted about how you’re a class traitor if you don’t vote for the Green Party (who I don’t buy as socialist) or “any other socialist party” (fucking who??? am I supposed to write “socialism” on my ballot in crayon???) conveniently went missing
  anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight
  
  I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life
  strong agree
  minor upside: it's going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off
  fucking fuck this sucks
  
  fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths
  So much this
- Not surprised, still very disappointed, I feel sick.
- Yeah this is fucked up. I feel so bad for everybody (esp the Americans, but this will hurt the world). Shit this prob means I should start looking into seriously helping out locally when all this explodes into more international shit. (Which imho is the best you can do anyway, do things locally, build a bit of a support network for your community).
  (Note I'm not American, but I think this will end badly, just the fucker stepping out of the paris accord for example, and all the weird blowhard fascists this will make feel emboldened to do more politics locally).
  E: I really hope the people who go 'this is the same as in 2020, wait till all votes are counted' are correct and not on hopeium.
  
  i think they indeed are on hopium/copium
  
  Well, it's more like 2000, really, in the sense that the courts are being used to restrict voting rights. There's strong evidence of flagrant UOCAVA violations: thousands of absentee ballots which should affect the federal election have been challenged in swing states. Edit: Here is part 1 and part 2 from an attorney whose Pennsylvania UOCAVA ballot was challenged; he goes through the law and explains what he's going to do.
- The level of fucked we are is too big for words
  I wanted to say something darkly comedic about the AI bubble popping under the new regime, but my heart is too sick to make a joke
- are you US-based? very sorry, take care
  
  yes, i am. i've been plotting to get out for years but i've been too depressed since my partner died to make any progress tbh. i've no idea what to do
- Слава Україні. The world has failed you.
- I think I'm more angry than anything. l hadn't realized how tight my media bubble had gotten and was pretty sure this wasn't realistic. I had gotten myself ready for another round of 2020 nonsense and denial, not this.
- The American electorate has just covered itself with gasoline because eggs cost 2 dollars more. Come January they strike the match. gg. HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE NOVEMBER 5TH. My only consolation is that I'll hopefully get to watch some of the Magas/non voters/vote-your-conscience peeps suffer before the end. But Ol musky and peter thiel will be in their gilded bunkers while the fires consume us all.
  
  yeah, a lot of broke trumpists will get fucked over, along with all other broke americans, getting worse if they are lgbt or non-white or need healthcare, or are migrants. on top of palestinians, lebanese (done deal at this point), ukrainians (likely) and maybe taiwanese
  one thing that i can think of that could reduce damage is that while some policies are stupid, cruel and obviously harmful for everyone, that didn't stop them previously, but this might make line no go up for billionaire republicans, and if they have trump's ear, that could make their implementation ineffective on purpose. i mean here specifically undocumented migrant work whose deportation would make post-covid inflation look like a joke
- Nashville, here. I hear ya.
  I don't know what else to say, I can't explain any of this, but also please know that you're not alone out there.

Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:
Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.
“One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”
- a real web3 moment if there ever was one.
- unfortunately the six active players bit is a joke

For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn't a great rolemodel.
(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on 'traditional rationality')).
- Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women removed thing. Miss me with that PUA shit
  
  Considering the history of PUA stuff on lesswrong, Im going to assume this was a pro not a con for them even.
- Feynman reminds me of the brujo (one specific man, not brujería in general) from Pirsig's Lila. Feynman's safecracking and unorthodox approaches are like the brujo's routine flaunting of social norms; through routinely doing things the wrong way (sacred clowning), new possible behaviors and modes of social existence are explored. Also, Feynman's attitudes towards women remind me of that brujo's tendency to spy on women by looking through their windows into their homes while they were not necessarily dressed, which the brujo's society did not tolerate.

The worst part about Trump being president is Trump being president for a year. The second worst part is Vance being president for the next three (after Trump dies of heart failure). The third worst part is the fact that I've been owned in a way I can't even explain to my closest friends.
- The third worst part is the fact that I’ve been owned in a way I can’t even explain to my closest friends.
  Oh god, this so much. Well, third worst for me personally, as a non-American white guy. I suppose Palestinians, Ukrainians, and marginalized groups in the US might have a few issues they'd rank higher.
- the bit i wonder about is: would president couchfucker block weapons exports to Ukraine
  
  Most likely. Backing out of international obligations and supporting fellow authoritarians seem to be pretty consistent aspects of what passes for MAGA ideology.
  
  I haven't done a headcount yet and the election's not fully tallied, but I think that the Senate still has around 70% support for NATO, and historically we can expect to see a "blue dog" phenomenon in the House as a reaction to Republicans gaining seats. Effectively, both the Democrats and Republicans will function as big tents of two distinct parties, and there is usually tripartisan support (everybody but the far-right Republicans) for imperialism. We may well see votes where the legislators override presidential vetoes to force weapons sales and otherwise fulfill NATO obligations.
  And yes, you read that correctly; Democrats move right as a reaction to Republicans doing well. Go back to bed, America…
- What did sideburns ever to do that guy?
- @slopjockey @BlueMonday1984 Vance concerns me more than Trump.

The orange site is an easy target, but the lack of solidarity in the comments about the NYT Tech Guild strike fills me with dread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42040795
- A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.
  
  Said it before, I'll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out

Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:
The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.
Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
NB: am not a US voter.
- The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
  such a metal album name
  
  Their grindcore coverband is called Earthcofffin Hopecrusher. Their 2 minute long album with 14 songs was pretty good.
  
  Brb mailing this to myself
- I think "any idiot that got lucky under capitalism" is a pretty good description of Musk and his type, to be fair.
- The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the "hope" that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks he'll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.
- The thing that really grinds my gears about the escape to Mars plan is that Earth is already habitable (for now) and Mars is not. If we can make an uninhabitable planet habitable, we could just make the already habitable planet stay habitable. There is no scenario where terraforming Mars is easier than, uh, "terraforming" the Earth.
  
  This is like 30-90% of why I’m a mars hater. Not only should we rehabilitate earth first, the fact is we are dehabilitating it instead and are not making any meaningful effort in the other direction.

In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/mondays-campaign-11424-kari-lake-adds-ai-polls-rcna178681?icid=latestpost_bot
Edit: Found the map she's using:
https://xcancel.com/IwriteOK/status/1853647442740441289#m
- I'm sure her results would be very accurate if troll farms could vote and chatgpt was doing the count.
- Looks like she lost despite the polls legitimately being pretty left-biased this year. Even when it's right the hallucination machine is still wrong.

Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc
- Carbon capture, small nuclear reactors. We stopped thinking big. To really solve climate change we need to do one easy, but big thing. Blow up the Sun.
  
  Kill and dethrone God.
  
  You'll hear no complaint from me.
  
  Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?
- SMRs make me so goddamn miserable. We already know how to build nuclear plants. Build those! We're kind of on a tight deadline here, maybe don't waste time trying to invent a less efficient reactor that's supposed to solve a problem we don't have.
  We already have working carbon capture technology, too. It's called plants. Thanks to deforestation and ocean pollution we're making negative progress creating CC machines, nice job.

https://x.com/typedfemale/status/1855097494222651681
- I don't blame Saltman for this one, since it's just a more specific version of the general pathology that assumes the markets are basically Gods.
  "In our top story today, the rapture has drawn the souls of the faithful into heaven and we have entered what experts are calling a "final tribulation". We're also receiving reports that Dread Cthulhu has awoken from his deathly slumber in his house at R'lyeh, and environmental groups are claiming that increased sightings of wolves and frost giants could herald the arrival of Fimbulwinter and through it Ragnarök.
  The stock market, however, seems to be taking the literal end times in stride, with strong performances from Raytheon and other manufacturers countering a downturn in other sectors."
  
  you see, air defense is very useful against supernatural horrors beyond human comprehension
  (also they recently changed name to RTX after merger. surely no fucked up managerial cancer would spread from there, like with Boeing-McDonnel Douglas merger. not like they make anything of absolutely critical importance for Ukrainians)

Orange site envrionmentalism:
Lawns are functional though, they aren't just a status symbol.
I grew up with a mossy front yard, and I have clover and ferns in my current yards to compete with grasses; there are better options, my dude.
- They can be, but they can also be a social and recreational space.
  Your mum's a social and recreational space, but I don't see you going to bat for her despite being more useful
- I was going to call them friendless losers who never had company over to play cornhole, have a bonfire, or lounge around on a hot summer day getting doused by a sprinkler while drinking beers because they are repugnant socially awkward cave trolls who are bitter and jealous of people who use their picturesque lawns.
  But I would never do that because that is neither civil nor polite.
  dang hates this one weird trick you can use to be an asshole in spite of the orange site’s civility rules
  also what is that list of activities? did ChatGPT generate this? grass is required to play beep boop normal human games like cornhole now? you’re “having a bonfire” on grass and not in something normal like a firepit that’s safer on rocks or concrete? you’re just laying down on the grass, where the dog shits, slowly getting drunk and incredibly itchy from the grass as a sprinkler douses you?
  picturesque lawns
  oh maybe that’s it, the only people I’ve ever met with picturesque lawns are wealthy and wealthy people ain’t fucking normal
  Or you could just not water it, not fertilize it, not pesticide it and simply run the mower over it whenever the assorted vegetation (which will be mostly grass) exceeds a certain height.
  It won't look "nice neighborhood" nice but it'll still be fine.
  i love when my yard is a giant mud patch rimmed by yellow with an occasional glimmer of green when the crabgrass blooms
  the orange site is absolutely populated by the type of shithead who’s proud to be on their HOA’s board
  
  having a lawn is so easy first just hire a gardener to come every week, second live in a place where tap water’s inexpensive
  motherfuckers
- We’re anti-grass lawns now? Fuck yes. I knew this place had potential.
  I’m no landscaper so don’t quiz me on the options, but grass is in the lowest tier option for things to fill outdoor space with.
  
  lawns in addition to other things are fine, but also all the stuff self said applies pretty hard
  we're lucky in ZA that we're pretty good with getting a lot of this stuff out, which I'm often pretty happy about, but that's an incident of geography (and personal location)

You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?
Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results are... basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual "gameplay".
TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things aren't even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer they're using to render this.
Note that the person in the video isn't part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.
- maybe i'm a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren't armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming... if you look at this "game" as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging
  it reminds me of other "games" like Marian Kleineberg's Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft's Yedoma Globula. there's one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don't recall the name
  
  I do like it also, but notice how they try to hide most of these strange effects in their demo video. They're trying to pass it off as a playable minecraft. Anything interesting about the technology is a defect to these people.
  They also claim this is "the first playable AI-generated game" when the exact same sort of thing already existed in 2022 (and it looked a lot more efficient and haunted): https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/ Maybe it doesn't count if you call it "Neural network" instead of "AI".
- Showed this to my wife.
  You know what the worst part is? We're spending all this computing power to generate this bad acid trip, but if I just took a bunch of LSD you know what I'd still have? The things in my pockets. I'd have a better time just having a bunch of LSD and walking down to the 7-11
- I've seen this floating about quite a bit, and everyone I know is dunking on it - the most frequent comparison I've seen is calling it "Minecraft with dementia".
  
  It also shows why those DOOM demos were only 2-3 seconds long, because that's how long it can keep cohesion for.
- Note that the person in the video isn't part of the team/whoever that creates it, just someone who is reviewing it.
  See, there's the mistake. You can't let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.
- oh cool, Minecraft LSD: Dream Emulator edition
  which would be a cool concept, if the generative AI model weren’t incredibly prohibitively expensive to run, trained on plagiarized videos, and incapable of coherently tracking state (believe it or not, LSD: Dream Emulator does have a gameplay and progression loop… game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick)
  
  game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick
  This has been a thing with games leaning heavily on procedural generated content as well. Takes a lot of effort to make those more interesting in the longer term. The ai is the future of gaming people are sure to rediscover this fact again. Sadly compared ro pgc people they will waste a lot more energy and money.

why do neurotypical people love to do this. why can't you say sam harris sucks in a normal way
- People enjoy making amateur diagnoses of public figures, and people enjoy feeling like they're superior to neurodivergent people.
  
  actual diagnosis, inexplicably not in the DSM-5
- For a palette cleanser, you might appreciate that If Books Could Kill just released a solid dunk on Sam Harris
  
  ha, the screen cap is from the ibck subreddit. one of my favorite podcasts

Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.
- I'm about to pass out from the cognitive dissonance I'm feeling from seeing andressen and musk talking about privilege
  
  Unfortunately there aren’t enough mind altering, ego-killing drugs out there for either of these dicks to understand and internalise the (common usage of the) words they posted.

NASB - Brian Merchant's celebrating the first anniversary of Blood in the Machine's release
Reading through it, its clear an earlier comment of mine was dead-on - the public image of the Luddites has been fully rehabilitated, and we can primarily credit Merchant for pulling it off.

what a terrible fate https://archive.ph/X2s3z

Just wanted to say thanks again to the admins and community for maintaining this oasis of sanity.
How do you all suppose the Great Bullshit Implosion is going to interact with our incoming US government? When it becomes clear that the money is running out, will OpenAI be able to talk the Trump government into bailing them out, or will the fash kick them when they're down, since tech will be a nice fat scapegoat for the economy hitting the shitter?
- OpenAI you stand accused of the crime of being woke. To make the case, we call in the expert on everything woke: James A. Lindsay.
  Which is my way of saying, it will be very dumb and very paranoid, and not even wrong.
- it looks like they're trying to delay either of those in most ghoulish way possible https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/safe-ai-champ-anthropic-teams-up-with-defense-giant-palantir-in-new-deal/
- I don't think Trump's presence changes much regarding the AI bubble. It's still massive capital and operational expenditure, with ??? revenue to show for it. Trump very likely faces a big stock market correction in 2025 or no later than 2026, just as surely as Harris or Biden would have.
  
  and they just added Nvidia to the indexes, replacing Intel in at least one
  nvidia will be fine - they know damn well this is a bubble - but number is going to take a beating
- How do you all suppose the Great Bullshit Implosion is going to interact with our incoming US government? When it becomes clear that the money is running out, will OpenAI be able to talk the Trump government into bailing them out, or will the fash kick them when they’re down, since tech will be a nice fat scapegoat for the economy hitting the shitter?
  Kicking them whilst they're down would be an easy win when "the cruelty is the point" is your unofficial motto, and there's plenty of anti-tech sentiment for Trump to work with. And, of course, they're a piss-easy scapegoat - AFAIK tech's managed to piss off both political wings here.
  He's probably gonna kick them whilst they're down.
  
  the ones ending up being kicked down in this scenario have more money than god and ear of trump, not to mention that some of these were likely donors to his campaign. maybe sutskever or even saltman might be ceremonially burned at stake for posterity, but thiel and musk are gonna be safe
  
  I'm 100% down for a "Let them fight" moment

Ah, copilot is so extremely popular that MS has decided to bundle it into O365 for ~~free~~ a moderate “depends by region” price increase
I’m sure that’ll totally make people want it even more! hordes at the gate!

Atlantic writer: "better dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuh"
https://archive.is/OtYCo
Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobs' widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot "GW Bush Did Nothing Wrong" Cohen.
- what in the absolute fuck
  “you shouldn’t do anything that works to resist fascism” is going to be the neoliberal siren call for 4+ years, isn’t it
  
  It doesn't even fit with the axioms of market logic! If the platform in question has terrible content moderation, primarily generates revenue from profoundly repulsive people, and was intentionally bought out to be used as the central propaganda organ for a destructive political movement... why wouldn't you leave?! Dude just doesn't want to admit he's too lazy to redo his follows elsewhere
  
  Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
  imagine writing something like this and considering yourself to be the adult in the room. just a big ol politics understander, writing and writing and none of it means a fucking thing. you get up every morning and somehow the dread doesn’t make you collapse back into bed.
  
  Always has been.
  
  Liberals: vote for us, we are diet fascism, we are the lesser evil! We reduce harm!
  It’s been the siren call for the last 400 years.
- My radicalisation just continues and deepens.
  What deplatforming actually happened that this writer is referring to? “We didn’t deplatform anyone. Therefore deplatforming bad” ???
  
  “we’ve tried nothing, and nothing is working!” this is going to be such a common refrain
- Mass media try not to cozy up to fascists challenge: impossible!
- Story from .nl, after Wilders "won" (he got the biggest share of the votes, and quite a lot more than before) the election last year, instantly the amount of horrible posts towards visible muslim people massively intensified (other groups, women, leftwingers and lgbt people (and the various intersections) also got worse replies (which on Dutch twitter always was bad already)). So this advice is so dumb, yes expose your people to more risk and potential burnout. And guess what, as we are a year in and most of Dutch twitter is still on twitter. It doesnt help. (And I cant tell, as switching to bsky has made me realize just how much of a breath of fresh air it is, but to me it feels twitter has gotten worse, but that is more likely explained by me getting better).
  E: there is also the 'they need us more than we need them' factor. I have not seen rightwing Dutch trolls on bksy yet, Catturd however made the jump (and was promptly banned by everybody).

unrelated but we're all gonna get so many of trumpist brown-nosed sleazes as ambassadors now
it looks likely that we out there in poland might get georgette mosbacher as next ambassador. she was more of an lobbyist going hard against eu digital tax, but there's much more
- I am left thinking that many people here in the US are going to have a hard time accepting that having this person, at this stage in his life, as the national figurehead will do permanent damage to the US' prestige and global standing. Doesn't matter if Reagan was sundowning, media was more controlled then and his handlers were there to support the institution of the presidency at least as much as they were there to support a narcissist. In 2016, other countries could look at Trump as a temporary aberration and wait him out. This time, it's clear that the US is no longer a reliable partner.
  An intentional sacrifice of the US' role as head manager of the global economy is not nearly as well thought out as the people pushing it think it is.
  
  plenty of them will just shrug it off as "commie propaganda" and will ignore reality as long as they can receive coast to coast am, then blame dems for the bits they cannot ignore anymore
  bonus points to former hilary's consultants (or so i hear) running current campaign deciding that going to the right (who the fuck likes cheney?) was a good idea
- At least their shirts will accessorize nicely

My hope is that either more progressive third party options become more viable OR the dems finally understand that being essentially republican is a bad strategy and actually become progressive. I know the reality is that the dems will learn nothing from this as they have clearly learned nothing from 2016.
- I'll bet quite a lot that they'll learn the exact wrong thing from this and decide that they just weren't republican enough.
  
  Overton window, more like overton viewfinder. Point it wherever you like and the median voter will agree everything to its left is radical extremism.
  
  Hope is a mistake 2028!!!

mozilla is having another wee purge on the foundation side
this shit reads exactly like corporate raider playbook
- “Our mission at Mozilla is more high-stakes than ever,” wrote Syed in an email to staff, a copy of which was shared with TechCrunch. “We find ourselves in a relentless onslaught of change in the technology (and broader) world, and the idea of putting people before profit feels increasingly radical.”
  "which is why we don't"
- Its times like these which make me happy I switched to Librewolf.
  
  last I saw that wasn't really well-insulated from upstream's bullshit
  one of the recent things moz pulled ended up enabled in librewolf on basically the same day/timeline
  
  Is it based on Chromium?

Bitcoin peaks as Trump is elected
(Article encrypted in Finnish, see spoiler for translation)

Dry heaving at the shameless public fellatio Trump performed on Musk in his speech.

Seeing a worrying trend of people wanting to cosplay as La Resistance, going dark, hiding from the cops. "Fun" fact, the Gestapo was extremely good at finding, torturing and killing people in the resistance. If people only know you via encrypted messaging, who is gonna raise a ruckus when you're sent to a camp?

I wonder what the fuck the median engineer is even doing if "1000x" engineers supposedly exist.
- It's also incredibly misleading, maybe it was possible to "completely" re-write the UI back in 2005—never mind that most of the value would come from, the underlying geographic data being mostly correct and mostly correctly labeled—there is no way in hell that the same would achievable in 2024. (Also the notion it would take any coder 2 * 1000 / (365 * 5/7) = 7 years to achieve a comparable result is proposterous)
- Apparently the 1x engineer is taking weekends instead of working 24/7.
- @bitofhope @BlueMonday1984 Maybe he’s going to rewrite AI in a weekend to make it good!

the writer's room is [open]

that's dasha the laptop, she used to work in a corporation but is sick of that and retired to be a writer

I know this shouldn't be surprising, but I still cannot believe people really bounce questions off LLMs like they're talking to a real person. https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/47183/are-llms-unlikely-to-be-useful-to-generate-any-scientific-discovery
I have just read this paper: Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli, "Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models", submitted on 22 Jan 2024.
It says there is a ground truth ideal function that gives every possible true output/fact to any given input/question, and no matter how you train your model, there is always space for misapproximations coming from missing data to formulate, and the more complex the data, the larger the space for the model to hallucinate.
Then he immediately follows up with:
Then I started to discuss with o1. [ . . . ] It says yes.
Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which o1 says yes [ . . . ]. Then it says [ . . . ].
Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which it says yes too.
I'm not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.
- I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.
  When I was a lab demonstrator in university, one of the lab exercises was somewhat hard to get right, and our team noticed a huge raft of plagiarism. Not only were multiple students using the exact same code, but it was code that didn’t even work! The course had a policy of instant failure with evidence of plagiarism, which was made clear at the start of the course, and yet this just kept happening. To top it all off, the lab exercises didn’t change from year to year, so the same code kept showing up! This plus a number of other incidents broke me and made me realise I didn’t have it in me to be this kind of educator.
  It would be great if this was all a big psyop by big tech to gaslight educators into ending their careers for some kind of mass brainwashing conspiracy, because at least there would be some intention behind it. Instead, we’re poisoning collective consciousness with cyberslop because we think one day the virtual dumbass will reach enlightenment. We don’t actually have a way for that to happen, so we’re just going to metaphorically bash our own heads against rocks in hopes we glitch ourselves into the singularity.
  So yeah in short my head would explode too.

"brb going to make an AI blockbuster called 'Zennos Parhadox' starring Dwynne Johnson and Rebeca Fernugson and then we'll see who's laughing." -- Dick Trauma, SA

I swear to god post the map with lots of diagonal arrows one more time
- ?
  
  lol, no, but this was good post
  some inane fucking thing from bloomberg or NYT or someone’s Bad Visualisations Department. it’s at least 35 points of psychic damage
  10 centibasilisk simtime units in old money
- I have been having this feeling in a couple places too, heh

hackernews having a normal one (EDIT: Then things got worse)

HN Title: The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800
In the top comments:
dash2 55 minutes ago | next [–]
Here's an interesting extract:
We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.
This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708
red016 3 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
i’d be more interested in jewish numbers than protestant or catholic
- Ah yes, the famous European Jewish run universities. You don't have to be an idiot to be anti-Semitic, but it certainly helps.
- Audibly rolling my eyes

what do anthropic, aws, and palantir all have in common? except for being the fucking worst, of course
the dollar signs in their eyes seem to share a bit of a glow..
- Wild that "We left OpenAI and founded out own company with alignment and safety"-Anthropic decides to get into bed with Palantir of all companies.
  It's almost as if their whole safety shtick is complete bullshit. Hmm.
- Buy a defense ai system with a cool GUI but that absolutely doesn't fucking work
  PRESS RELEASES
  Leave the source code+model weights somewhere that your enemies will find it, preferably next to a big data pipe
  Watch them copy it and try to use it on the battlefield
  lol
  Just have to avoid naming it something that would give the game away like WIM-PLOW or whatever

Questions To Which the Answer is No, an ongoing series:
Generative AI - Can it actually help with the day-to-day technical work of a practising engineer?
The upcoming Autumn Panel Discussion hosted by the UCD Engineering Graduates Association (EGA) will take place on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, at ESB's Headquarters. This event will explore several pressing topics at the intersection of engineering and artificial intelligence. Attendees will gain insights into current trends in AI, particularly the latest advancements in generative AI tools and platforms. The discussion will feature case studies that highlight the successful integration of AI into real-world engineering processes, offering practical examples of its applications. Additionally, the panel will address the essential skills that engineers need to effectively incorporate AI into their workflows, providing guidance on upskilling for the future. The event will conclude with a Q&A session, allowing participants to engage directly with the panelists and delve deeper into the ethical considerations surrounding AI in engineering.
No, not software engineers, engineer engineers. Yikes!

today's a fucking trip and a half
in a mall I saw some Honor laptop[0] ads with "AI" pitch sauce slathered all over it
later walking between art galleries I saw a roadsign ad for a property sales company promising "more effective strategies using AI" (more effective strategies for.. selling.. houses..? I guess..? (x up for doubt))
and now I get this shit in my mailbox from someone who absolutely purchased a dataset with this address in it:
undefined

From: Ai Everything GLOBAL <newsletter@event.aieverythingglobal.com> Subject: Join the AI Elite—G42, TII, DIEZ, Dell & More!
[0] - I didn't even know they were in ZA, but nope, 2-floor hanging banners and ads allllll over elevator doors and shit

Fuck it, off-the-cuff prediction: I expect resistance to Silicon Valley is gonna turn violent during Trump's term.
- MOD NOTE: we ask people not to post detailed discussions of how one might conduct terrorism on awful.systems
  
  Ok but how detailed can we get then
- i see you remain an optimist https://gizmodo.com/the-worst-people-in-the-world-are-making-a-ton-of-money-after-trumps-victory-2000521095

Recently read Brian Merchant's latest piece on the upcoming election, and I felt like making a quick-and-dirty prediction:
If Harris wins, I expect there will be some pretty harsh regulation against Silicon Valley. Putting aside everything but simple political pragmatism:
Elon Musk's election antics and Trump's support from tech billoinaires have shown SV holds a significant amount of power over politics - power which will almost certainly prove a constant thorn in Harris' side. As such, it'd be in her self interest to kneecap the Valley ASAP.
Public opinion of Silicon Valley has taken a pounding over the years for a variety of reasons, with the AI slop-nami just the latest and most serious grievance the public has against them. Any tech regulation a Harris presidency makes (especially against AI) is gonna enjoy significant public support from day one.

Less election dreariness, Dr Michael Cook talking about the oasis minecraft 'game'.

Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.
I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output of format-patch into the web client but, first, I am lazy and don't wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so that git am doesn't eat it without cleanup.
Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.
- huh, I just switched to Tuta and that’s a very good point — there isn’t even a command line mail client, much less an IMAP bridge. the official word from a couple years ago is “write it yourself but we don’t support automated email” which is several kinds of wrong
  so far I’m not hating Tuta but it’s definitely much jankier than Proton. I’m kinda surprised I’ve heard good things about Tuta’a UI compared with Proton — it’s faster, but functionality so far varies from somewhat barebones to mildly broken
  no regrets on the switch on my end so far though, but this might come to bite me at some point. I wonder if a dedicated transactional mail provider could alleviate some of the pain? I can DM you a recommendation for a good one if that seems like it’d be handy
  
  Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it'd be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.
  But honestly, I feel like there just isn't a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton's bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn't even private. It's mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).
  Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I'm starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.

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