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bitofhope

@ bitofhope @awful.systems

Posts
1
Comments
218
Joined
3 yr. ago

Bistable multivibratorNon-state actorTabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindsey's video about deaccenting in English language and how "AI" speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, it's usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesn't use destressing.

    It reminded me of a particular line in Portal

    GLaDOS: (with a deeper, more seductive, slightly less monotone voice than unti now) "Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin."

    The words "the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin" are spoken with the exact same intonation both times, which helps maintain the robotic affect in GLaDOS's voice even after it shifts to be slightly more expressive.

    Now I'm wondering if people whose native language lacks deaccenting even find the line funny. To me it's hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it's unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.

    It is not lost on me that the fictional evil AI was written with a quirk in its speech to make it sound more alien and unsettling, and real life computer speech has the same quirk, which makes it sound more alien and unsettling.

  • Why Disney just put $1 billion into OpenAI

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  • The fucking hypocrisy of it all stings. Years of everyone being told not to copy that floppy or Lars Ulrich takes your girlfriend because you wouldn't download a car, would you? Turns out when Microsoft and Softbank bankroll you for billions to download all the warez the internet has to offer, Mickey will not only let you off scot free but gives you a warm sloppy pat on the back as a bonus. With enough doubloons you're not a pirate anymore, you're the navy.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Hitting the konbini in the wee hours for strong zeros, lolicon mags and pawahara ice cream

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Well that and "core". I could consider social media and even chatbots parts of internet infrastructure, but they both depend on a framework of underlying protocols and their implementation details. Without social media or chatbots the internet would still be the internet, which is not the case for, say, the Internet Protocol.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • If TCP/IP stack had feelings, it would have a great reason to feel insulted.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • From the replies

    I wonder what prompted it to switch to Elon being worth less than the average human while simultaneously saying it’d vaporize millions if it could prolonged his life in a different sub-thread

    It's odd to me that people still expect any consistency from chatbots. These bots can and will give different answers to the same verbatim question. Am I just too online if I have involuntarily encountered enough AI output to know this?

  • AI data centres — in SPACE! Why DCs in space can’t work

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  • That's a calculated risk I take with deadpan humor. This time I cut it close.

  • AI data centres — in SPACE! Why DCs in space can’t work

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  • I was just riffing on the AI "moderate" talking points. Building a data center in space is prima facie ludicrously stupid and you would need an extremely unusual justification to even consider it. I was pretending to act like a moron who blindly accepts there's probably a serious reason why they make sense just because some dumbass hype man said so.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • The follow-up is also funny:

    quote post from same poster: "Grok fixed it for me:"

    quoted post: "People were hating on Gemini's floor plan, so I asked Grok to make it more practical."

    An AI slop picture of a house floorplan at the top melding into a perspective drawing of a room interior below.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • How many aliens can damce on the head of a pin?

  • AI data centres — in SPACE! Why DCs in space can’t work

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  • Oh yea absolutely. Underwater datacenters have one upside (cooling) and massive downsides (everything else, more or less). Space datacenters trade that upside into yet another downside, make the downsides even bigger and add a few extra downsides for good measure.

  • AI data centres — in SPACE! Why DCs in space can’t work

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  • Underwater datacenters make cooling very effective and maintenance nearly impossible, so you have to treat the container data centers essentially disposable. That's only viable with economy of scale big enough to be an xkcd comic punchline. I guess Microsoft found that even they are not quite there yet. Also most computers don't tolerate seawater quite as well as they tolerate air.

  • AI data centres — in SPACE! Why DCs in space can’t work

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  • Data centers in space are a tool. You have to know when and how to use them. I'm not saying they're completely useless, but most people do not understand how to avoid the difficult and expensive orbital logistics, power and cooling issues, radiation problems or the slow and complicated networking (unlike me, of course people like me know how to avoid them). Obviously it's ludicrous to suggest space station server farms don't have their uses and I'm not the kind of luddite saying nobody should ever be putting data centers in space, but right now they should really only be used together with terrestrial data centers and not relied on exclusively. That said, it's still early days and we will inevitably be seeing a lot more compute in the orbit.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • I love the phrase ego death because everyone I've heard describe the experience sounds like the most egotistical mf in the universe with how impressed they are by their own self-enlightenment.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word "really" as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. "Very" had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant "truthfully" (as in "verify" or "verity"). If I say something is "truly massive", am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of "massive"? Is a "proper banger" of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Tołalbottl

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • She wants to be a martyr so bad, doesn't she? She desperately needs to be punished for the sake of her beliefs (and the things she did made others do). All for the great cause of… uh… y'know, the important thing she's being silenced for. Things like that.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • People who dislike C'thlaglthorp tend to come in two camps: the ones that prefer significant whitespace and the ones that don't.