Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    181 year ago

    Couldn’t find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:

    does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?

      Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.

      Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.


      But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.

      • @[email protected]
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        It’s so cute (euphemism for concerning) how their image of the average trans woman is a white computer science rationalist poster and not, like, a South American sex worker or something.

        Why didn’t evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.[1]

        Classics of Reason

    • @[email protected]
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      121 year ago

      Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).

      Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.

    • ebu
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      201 year ago

      it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says “okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn’t a guy or a girl”

      • @[email protected]
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        111 year ago

        Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture? And didn’t The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?

        (It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)

          • @[email protected]
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            But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.

            It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldn’t really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).

            (I’m also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you don’t die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).

            Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.

          • @[email protected]
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            71 year ago

            select the Banks extract, pass through wc: 1677

            select the yud…emanation, do same: 13442

            at this stage it’s likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

            • @[email protected]
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              71 year ago

              entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

              There’s a metal ballad in there, I swear.

              • @[email protected]
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                other album track titles:

                • cascading infinity
                • which mirror is me? [am I? - interlude]
                • the quintillionth heartbreak
                • lies of being
          • @[email protected]
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            71 year ago

            What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It’s the one HN likes best too. It’s probably the only one I’ve not re-read. Maybe it’s how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he’s coerced to infiltrate.

            Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.

            • flere-imsaho
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              91 year ago

              i would think they didn’t read it carefully, and/or until the end, and don’t realise that ultimately it’s gurgeh’s revulsion at azad’s societal rules, and him fully embracing the culture’s values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.

              • @[email protected]
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                81 year ago

                Obvsly you’ve read the novel more than I have considering your nick… I might have to give it another go.

                OTOH I’d rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.

                • flere-imsaho
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                  61 year ago

                  tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona – i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)

            • Hirvox
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              71 year ago

              @gerikson I second Use of Weapons, but I also like Excession and the Hydrogen Sonata, where the Culture has to do some self-reflection.

              • @[email protected]
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                I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he can’t rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)

                edit it’s been ages since I’ve read this books so I’ve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get

                On an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast released on April 29, 2022, the artist Grimes said that Surface Detail of the Culture series is the greatest science fiction book ever written.

                🤮

                • Charlie Stross
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                  111 year ago

                  @gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionaires—in American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)

          • @[email protected]
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            141 year ago

            holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be

            so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:

            They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I don’t quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism we’re talking about).

            yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.

            there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.

            yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.

            • @[email protected]
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              111 year ago

              Subliming

              Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.

              Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasn’t there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldn’t describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not ‘the period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinity’

              Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.

        • @[email protected]
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          121 year ago

          Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture?

          I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We don’t even blog!)). So I doubt it.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 year ago

      the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:

      ”Mirrors” is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.

      All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.

      so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?

      Q: Is this really free?

      A: If it’s not, you should already see a Pricing page.

      this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”

        • @[email protected]
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          111 year ago

          I got curious and looked up both IPs associated with the domain name and it is in fact just CloudFlare

          also, their DNS-over-HTTPS (this is new to me but I stay the fuck away from cloudflare and it looks like a standard they’ve pushed for) endpoint is just the 1.1.1.1 one with the domain name changed, but the AdGuard and Accelerator ones basically confirm they’re analyzing traffic before passing it off to cloudflare

          • @[email protected]
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            a quick check using a canary. test command:

            curl -H 'accept: application/dns-json' 'https://0ms.dev/dns-query?name={snip}.canarytokens.com'
            

            canary trigger:

            geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.70.74', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.70.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}
            

            so, yeah, the actual resolve is being done by cloudflare servers too - it’s not even just a cf frontproxy to a different backend service. could be done with cf workers or something, I imagine, would need to test a bit further to know/try see

          • David GerardM
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            that’s fabulously odious!

            yeah, think i’ll be writing this one up for the weekend

            this sort of thing does not help me have an anti-carceral attitude

            • David GerardM
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              This is slightly weird. There’s a company called “DNSfilter” that’s been advertising itself for a few years as an “AI-powered DNS resolver” - since well before the present hype. I suspect their “AI” bit is threat detection with machine learning in. They appear to be going for the lucrative boring enterprise market.

              This thread suspects the whole 0ms.dev thing was written with LLMs and the “mirrors” bit is basically an open proxy.

              You sure they’re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker …

              • @[email protected]
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                51 year ago

                and the “mirrors” bit is basically an open proxy

                could test this by setting up a simple example page and seeing the originating source for the traffic

                same technique as previous, using an http (not https) canary:

                geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.98.196', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.98.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}
                useragent: (no user-agent specified)
                request_headers: {'Host': 'canarytokens.com', 'X-Real-Ip': '141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-For': '2a06:98c0:3600::103, 141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-Host': 'canarytokens.org', 'Connection': 'close', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip', 'Cf-Ray': '89f1a3a114752508-LHR', 'X-Forwarded-Proto': 'https', 'Cf-Visitor': '{"scheme":"https"}', 'Cf-Ew-Via': '15', 'Cdn-Loop': 'cloudflare; subreqs=1', 'Cf-Connecting-Ip': '2a06:98c0:3600::103'}
                request_args: {}
                
                • @[email protected]
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                  51 year ago

                  idle thought: since this is (as @self highlighted) effectively an open proxy, you could also just resource-bomb it quite easily

                  not that I’m planning to, but it’d be dirt bloody easy and it would be a very quick test as to the claims on the site

              • @[email protected]
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                51 year ago

                You sure they’re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker …

                see I don’t have a smoking gun on this, but if it is a garden variety adblocker and whatever the accelerator does (it’s extremely unclear) running on cloudflare workers, they at least have the ability to MiTM and modify DNS queries, and open proxies are always a security nightmare. my impression is the filter list they link is either what that endpoint uses to filter, or it’s LLM vomit they kept in because it felt more legitimate.

                this might be worth poking at more in a controlled setting — a command line DNS-over-HTTP client using their endpoints and some exploration of the open proxy with curl (especially with sites that utilize credentials, with great care taken to use disposable accounts for this) might be illuminating

  • @[email protected]
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    161 year ago

    https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/

    Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.

  • @[email protected]
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    141 year ago

    Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.

    • @[email protected]
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      131 year ago

      Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

      Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

      Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

      • @[email protected]
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        i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.

        • @[email protected]
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          81 year ago

          dunno about rockets, but antenna thingy works only because you can simulate performance of antenna very reliably, precisely and quickly. This data was fed back, random small changes were made, things that were an improvement passed to the next iteration. Not sure how this approach is called but none of it is LLM

          • David GerardM
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            81 year ago

            “genetic algorithm” - something I hadn’t previously seen branded as “AI”, but I guess I’m not surprised

            • @[email protected]
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              GAs went out of the limelight before the rest of the beaus of current “AI” branding came to be, suspect that might be part of it

              (Another suspicion is that it’s because they’re…fairly observable, ito operation? So it’s far less easily claimable that one of these has gained sentience, or all the other dumb bullshit that the cluster has spun in recent years)

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

        Ugh, so many people are working the “AI will solve X problem” mill. I don’t need nor want AI to be there increasing output.

  • @[email protected]
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    181 year ago

    the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data

    • @[email protected]
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      141 year ago

      We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.

      • @[email protected]
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        if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result

  • @[email protected]
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    131 year ago

    I’m so sick of “if only we had more humanities in education the elites wouldn’t be fucking up the world.” that has nothing to do with reality, it never has, it never will

  • Mii
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    261 year ago

    So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.

    • @[email protected]
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      181 year ago

      I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.

      Hard book have hard word and make head hurt, AI make book easy! More book read for you. No hard word. This good idea!

    • @[email protected]
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      81 year ago

      It’s good that they’re offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.

    • @[email protected]
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      121 year ago

      the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming

      there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write

      thanks magibook!

      • @[email protected]
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        71 year ago

        can’t wait for this shit to show up in usage among people who have english as an additional language at different level of fluency to their primaries. totally don’t see it causing a cascade clusterfuck in communication and comprehension.

        • @[email protected]
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          61 year ago

          there’s already a strain of this out there, with a lot of english-non-first students using LLMs to “make their work sound more polished”. similar as the strain using it for CVs etc

          ran across a great thread on fedi a while back, will see if I can find it

    • ebu
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      wow, that side-by-side is so obviously bad i’m surprised it even got posted. usually AI bros try to hide the worst of the tech, or at the very least, say shit like “this is only the beginning!!”

      also, was not expecting to click that link and see FUNKe. good nostalgia

      • Steve
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        81 year ago

        screenshot of ai face tracking demo showing the ai ignoring the reference actors eyes and barely registering her mouth position

        it ignores her eyes THE WHOLE TIME!

  • David GerardM
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    131 year ago

    we finally posted Diz’s LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Let’s see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems … we’re doing Ray Kurzweil tomorrow, lol.

    • @[email protected]
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      101 year ago

      There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you’d find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.

  • @[email protected]
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    Dan Hendrycks wants us all to know it’s imperative his AI kill switch bill is passed- after all, the cosmos are at stake here!

    https://xcancel.com/DrTechlash/status/1805448100712267960#m

    Super weird that despite receiving 20 million dollars in funding from SBF & co. and not being able to shut the fuck up about 10^^^10 future human lives the moment he goes on a podcast, Danny boy insists that any allegations that he is lobbying on behalf of the EAs are simply preposterous.

    Now please hand over your gpus uwu, it’s for your safety 🤗 we don’t allow people to have fissile material, so why would we allow them to multiply matrices?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(

      Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated “poetry”

      Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn’t it? Burn it all down.

      • @[email protected]
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        What is it about growing up in insular fundamentalist communities that drives peeps straight into the basilisk’s scaly embrace?

        • @[email protected]
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          81 year ago

          Theres a specific word for that phenomena I believe, I just can’t remember at the moment. It certainly is a thing with all the high control group cults, say ex-JW’s.

  • @[email protected]
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    91 year ago

    some numbers on recent hypewave investments in here (via techmeme)

    Last year, Tom Loverro, an investor at IVP, predicted a “mass extinction event” for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs. Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the “Great Reawakening,” encouraging companies to “pour gas” on growth, particularly around artificial intelligence

    jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldn’t they?

    “Sam Altman canceled the recession,” joked Siqi Chen, founder of the start-up Runway Financial

    one day soon I’m going to get to my project of building up a graph database of every crank and issuer of batshit statements like these, so that in times to come I can easily follow up on ‘em and see how their shit aged. but all hail sammy, the saviour! no, forget about that musk fool, no-one ever liked him! sammy is where it’s at!

  • David GerardM
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    Not sure which sub a heartwarming story of Nazis shooting their own dicks off goes under, but: Nina Power of Compact gets called a nazi. Sues for defamation. In discovery, produces extensive facts not just supporting Nazi ideas but calling herself a Nazi. Loses so hard she just declared bankruptcy.

    there has been no media coverage of this, but hoo boy does there need to be

    EDIT: ohhh it’s the fuckin LD50 gallery, straight up NRX. Judgement, PDF

      • David GerardM
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        111 year ago

        we have scientifically ascertained that this is in fact that rare correct use case for the following emoji sequence: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

    • @[email protected]
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      101 year ago

      hahahaha happy garbage day everybody

      The logs also show Ms Power claiming that “the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races”, and that “black and white were alien races and very different”.

      wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on

      • Jonathan Hendry
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        61 year ago

        @self

        Have to wonder what happened to her brain since the days when she had stuff published at the Guardian.

        • David GerardM
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          61 year ago

          she had a piece in The Quietus in 2018, but by 2020 they had kicked a writer out for being pals with DC Miller, her co-plaintiff in this case

          (just for confusion one of the Quietus guys is a different Luke Turner)

        • @[email protected]
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          71 year ago

          given some of the other things I’ve seen from the guardian, not sure that would’ve necessarily been a contraindicator

          • Jonathan Hendry
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            @froztbyte

            I mean they didn’t seem very fashy at first. The later ones (2018, when she was fashy on the down-low ) started to get TERFy but earlier (2010-2014) it was all "the police aren’t your friend” and stuff about government trying to restrict the right to protest, etc.

            (I looked over her Guardian contributions after reading about the bankruptcy etc in this thread.)

      • David GerardM
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        91 year ago

        see also all the TERFs yesterday loudly coming out in support of Power and her Nazi revelation

        the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway, or perhaps just walking over to the other side of the same room

        • @[email protected]
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          91 year ago

          the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway,

          It is funny how mad TERFs get when you mention they are saying the same things as neo-nazis, and then a few days later another TERF who is also a natzi is revealed again.

      • Jonathan Hendry
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        81 year ago

        @self

        This is one of those David Icke things where you’re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if they’re some kind of code or euphemism.

        • @[email protected]
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          having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: it’s always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk

          e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask

          • Mike
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            91 year ago

            I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like

            • @[email protected]
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              91 year ago

              “ah ah but he wrote books - that surely can’t be the works of a person frothing in racism!” is something I’ve heard from a surprising number of people I’ve met

              • @[email protected]
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                91 year ago

                if racism made people illiterate every facebook group and every youtube comment section would look completely different

        • deborah
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          101 year ago

          If you always bet on “everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people”, you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.

      • David GerardM
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        61 year ago

        causally slipped “by the way fairies are real”

        wait, what? What sort of context? Multiple people? FFS TELL

        • @[email protected]
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          101 year ago

          so I think I must just have one of those faces cause it’s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and it’s usually a weird show of trust? and it’s always something like “you know, I just think fairies must be real, like they’ve got to be out there? you know?”

          and in all cases I’ve gone “…oh that’s cool” and mentally earmarked that person as “do not trust with heavy machinery”

          • David GerardM
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            71 year ago

            i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but they’re decent and politically good and trustworthy and present as normal-English, so

            • @[email protected]
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              71 year ago

              see occasionally you meet a UFO person and they’re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby that’s hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them

              but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing you’ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldn’t discuss lizard people with them.

              • @[email protected]
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                you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit

                you know, I don’t know if I’ve actually run into this kind of conversation. I don’t think I have. or if I almost did, I fairly likely applied a conversation logic-shortcircuit way before it got there (because of ambient red flag count). but fuck me, if I don’t know exactly the kind of person you’re referring to… :|

                • @[email protected]
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                  81 year ago

                  also

                  without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up

                  ZA has many problems (and oh christ could I wax lyrical), but thank fuck I do not live in fucking eaglecountry

                  it’s a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to “watch your back” in the most very literal sense because you didn’t eat some bozo’s shit :|

          • David GerardM
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            91 year ago

            just remembered someone i met decades ago going on and on about spiritualism and ESP and just happened to drop in their own massive racism, there’s definitely a type

            • @[email protected]
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              101 year ago

              The crystals to anti-vaxx to full-blown fascism pipeline is real and I have more than a few cousins deep in that KKK hole. Hate to be a science brodude, but all the spiritualism stuff can be a gullibility magnet for those prone to self radicalisation (the bad type)

          • David GerardM
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            81 year ago

            yeah i have one of those faces too (tall, blue eyes, Danish cheekbones), disconcerting number of nazis who wanted me to be in with them

              • David GerardM
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                81 year ago

                in australia the club invite is just a way of saying “hi” to your fellow white person

                • @[email protected]
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                  101 year ago

                  I’ve never had the full on “let’s be nazis together” invite but I’ve had several people launch unprompted into “now that it’s just us white folks we can talk for real” mode. internally they must have been like “I see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321”

                  funnily enough it hasn’t happened since I became visibly trans

                • @[email protected]
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                  71 year ago

                  ja that can happen/s here too

                  presumably your bones comprehend all the non-weather reasons that .au is such a popular za expat destination

      • @[email protected]
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        I know someone who’s a practicing christian and has said they’ve seen angels

        technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have … not pushed matters

        (e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that I’ve heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I don’t know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)

        • @[email protected]
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          81 year ago

          I think the connection isn’t with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but aren’t people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.

          If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), it’s only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.

      • @[email protected]
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        one day I’ll find a way to shoehorn our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.

        In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.

    • @[email protected]
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      101 year ago

      there are some phenomenal whoppers just in the opening paragraphs of that article, holy shit

      this is gonna make great piecemeal reading today!

    • @[email protected]
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      81 year ago

      Wonder how the lawyers reacted when they got that treasure trove filled with stolen nazi gold during discovery.

        • @[email protected]
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          81 year ago

          I read the judgement quite carefully and it makes no reference at all to the discovery material. the only evidence it demonstrates awareness of is public or is testimony

        • @[email protected]
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          101 year ago

          They will certainly win a lot of drinks in any ‘who has had the dumbest clients’ contests.

          ‘And then we found the “I’m definitely a Nazi now lol” message’ is a great punchline for a dumbest client ever joke