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.
request for admin input on how best to run a bracket without spamming up our microforum
that’s a good question! I’ll probably have to brainstorm this with @[email protected] later today. in the meantime, is there any precedent for how to do it on Mastodon? we might be able to adopt whatever they do — or maybe at the very least, if there’s a good way to do it there, we could link to a Mastodon thread for the bracket and keep discussion on here.
nothing springs to mind. mastodon has polls, of a sort, if a bit weird in activitypub. here’s the lemmy bug.
i would say just make a thread here to fill with crap, see what happens
I mean, in the worst case, we find out if these database backups are worth a damn? but realistically, we see so much spam from activitypub already that it should be hard to make things fall over*
- unless you know which parts to push on, then it’s instant
it should be hard to make things fall over unless you know which parts to push on, then it’s instant
the IKEA model of software security
Today in finding statistical association in text data is not the same as reading
Your name appeared in a lot of articles about terrible crimes. You know who else’s name appears in those articles?
David may have won the race, but I have the first sneer!
Parents weep because making good products is insufficiently profitable.
I’m sorry but did the company not have anyone in their org who has had kids???
Bassinets are, as mentioned, used for 5-6 months. Reselling expensive baby gear that’s only used for the first months of infancy is very common. Established companies, like those making baby carriages or car seats, know this and make their money upfront at purchase time,
preying onrelying onbaby-braineddoting parents with more money than sense to buy the latest and greatest.The people designing this product and/or their financiers should be ashamed of themselves.
Or they could have open-sourced the protocol and relied on dudes like this one to keep it going:
A friend of mine recently had a kid and gave the snoo a good review. If it’s really that good a product, it should be nationalised in the name of public health.
Apparently that’s what the company wants too.
Although putting your progeny into a device named for a Reddit avatar is questionable behavior.
Oh for real? A company that wants to yeet itself into the arms of the government? Big if true.
Yes the name sucks. Considering the gamut of cringe reddit exhibitionism that’s out there, this is a probably within a few notches of all the narwhal stuff.
HN shocked and appalled that a “founder” cannot make billions running a largely unmoderated social network without facing a few consequences:
but if he’s just being held accountable for running a service where others did nefarious things, then this should be a chilling effect for all founders.
ok. chill them
deep freeze the mofos
Even Moot knew you couldn’t do this. Congrats on being slower on the uptake than 4chan HN.
outrage that the arrest order was issued while Durov was in the air, so he couldn’t evade justice (this is unconfirmed)
Clearly arrest warrants should be made like hide-and-seek where the seeker has to count to 100 days before arresting the hider and publish “ready or not here I come!” to their social media account.
lol, lmao even.
This is going to hit some crypto scammers pretty hard, innit?
OT: whats the best way to explain rationalism et all to complete normal people with no connection to tech?
It’s a little bit like a tiny version of the Mormons if Joseph Smith had read the collected works of Isaac Asimov instead of the Bible and also his name was Yud.
Or to go with less of a sneer, the Rationalist/TESCREAL/Californian Ideology is a loose grouping of fringe beliefs rooted in old-school science/tech fetishism with a lot of science fiction overlays and libertarian/reactionary politics that effectively define “let ultrawealthy tech capitalists do whatever they want” as the only reasonable choice and make it a moral imperative.
Actually the Mormon thing might work given its a priest I’m talking with. Thank you!
ah, he’d understand people then? Heavy on the slipping into cultishness then
She’s like the vicar of dibley so this is really quite funny when you think about it.
I tried to think of a smaller cult that’s still pretty well-known or influential but kept coming up with Heaven’s Gate or the Branch Davidians.
Peoples Temple?
I was trying to think of one that didn’t end in a mass murder/suicide/conflagration-of-violence though.
There are a couple 19th century ones that fit and didn’t go lethal. The New Motive Power guys would be the best match imo.
Scientology would seem like the obvious one, then.
Longer than I’d intend, but the way I describe it is probably as
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A mystical Harry Potter based sex cult deeply embedded in the techbro scene. They want what many cults want: to commune with God, achieve immortality or enlightenment, and obtain power in the current world, but they dress it in the trappings of science and computer programming.
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Do to demographic features, their desire to be clever, and a certain contrarian attitude, they will often seek to rationalise harmful social practices, which leads them to support anti-feminist and race realist positions with shocking frequency.
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Because of their close connections to the tech scene, along with the personal relationship the cult founder had with Peter Thiel, and the fact that the cult has been indoctrinating kids since the aughts, they are shockingly influential in the AI scene.
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As most cults, they claim to want to teach people to think correctly (rationally), but they actually value the community of being in a cult (and the potential social networking and financial benefits) over thinking rationally.
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In terms of style, they like long works with unclear arguments, being clever or witty over being right, and strongly signalling their rationality (sometimes even using good tools), but not allowing that to interfere with the core features of being a cultist.
(1-3) are what I’d consider core. (4-5) are what I’d add if the person seems interested. If they seem really interested, I’d also discuss other connections (e.g. to Effective Altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute, George Mason University, Future Perfect, neoreaction), their ideology in more specific terms (e.g. the Sequences, Roko’s Basilisk), and associated members (e.g. EY, SSC, Aella, SBF).
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SV Scientology, they can’t land you a leading role in a summer blockbuster but they sure as hell can put you in the running for AI policy related positions of influence or for the board of a company run by one of their more successful groomings. Their current most popular product is court philosophers for the worst kind of aspiring technofeudalist billionaire.
If this gets them interested you’ll eventually get your chance to do a deep dive to any details of cosmist lore you find relevant.
Personally I might try explaining some of the foundational stuff before going into the big R. Scientism, utilitarianism would be my starting points.
I first read this comment before having coffee and thought that “R. Scientism” was a joke about Asimov’s robot novels.
I knew R. Scientism. I went to high school with his son. He was a real piece of shit
can’t unsee
Techish (I would use the word techbro here, but that needs an explantion even) people who want to make their fictional science fiction utopia real, but got so scared of their own science fiction ideas going wrong and killing everybody they started a cult around rationality, sort of a Vulcans fan club. They have a pattern where they think they and their methods are smarter and better than actual experts.
When trying to do their own research with an open mind, but they left their minds so open that all kinds of sexists and racists crawled in. Who are welcomed as long as they are verbose enough.
Their minds are open to all ideas, so long as the idea is a closed form solution that looks edgy.
Yes, there is a certain yearning for ‘secret forbidden’ knowledge and contrarianism, but I tried to keep it short and simple. Almost never do they find a solution in anything in the left side of politics.
Yeah that’s totally fair, I just was tailgating the sneer I guess.
Almost never do they find a solution in anything in the left side of politics.
That’s a good point, and I think it speaks well to their savior complex. They want above all to push the guilt and discomfort of social issues away so they don’t have to live in the discomfort of reality. Dogma does this, and it really doesn’t matter if you have the veneer of science or the mythology.
decentralized cult which worships the concept of rational thinking as superior to evidence. has lots of little rituals which are supposed to invoke rational thinking. uses AI in the place of angels and demons. no core holy texts, but the closest things are a sequence of blog posts and a harry potter fanfic. very influential in silicon valley, very intermingled with various explicitly fascist groups
the problem of my life. I have literally found it easier to explain Scientology than Roko’s basilisk.
It can’t be that stupid. You must be explaining it wrong.
Weirdly and widely applicable, as always
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/r/AnimeCircleJerk
Always a coin flip on if circlejerk subs are fascist or not. But this one looks pretty alright at first glance! Lots of making fun of transphobia and creepy people.
things genai is good at:
- spam
- deepfakes
- misinformation
- inventing new forms of racism
This author seems to write what is fairly typical escapism porn LNs. According to this summary the plot is about as stupid and problematic as you might expect for such a thing. If the Alya-san anime goes well this will probably get at least a manga.
All this is just adding up to: hack author is formulaically chasing trends and trying to parlay some genAIed trash into a manga and maybe an anime.
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The GMO melons attached to that high school girl nearly took me out, but the boderline race-porn title is what killed me.
turns out duckduckgo does AI search result summaries too, although at least you can turn the little bastards off
Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won’t be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:
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All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren’t having their own unique dumpster fires)
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AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order
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Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now
In retrospect google since it’s inception, when it was still good, google always actually relied on human curation. Primary component of pagerank were:
- “how much have people linked to this?”
- “how much have reliable sites linked to this?”
- “how good quality are pages from this site usually?”
(Which is still a way to get value out of google by adding “site:www.reliable-website.example” tags)
It was definitely a useful product, but ultimately it relies on human labor to surface quality results closer to the top.
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it’s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble
and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, you’re right, and that’s why neither of us are advertising executives
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RE: the recent discussion about Robert Heinlein and the origins of the word “grok”, here’s an archive link about him:
TNR: A Famous Science Fiction Writer’s Descent Into Libertarian Madness
This wasn’t the first love triangle in the Heinlein residence (they had earlier been in a consensual threesome with L. Ron Hubbard)
UNSEE UNSEE
well
that’s going to be a fun fact to drop in the relevant niche circles
Scientology polycules with a Heinlein fetish?
I don’t have friends of such tendencies
or, perhaps better stated, I am not aware that I have such friends. and sincerely hope to avoid learning that I do
(e: this comment came first, and is why the other came to mind)
there’s a friend of mine that’s ex-scientology. didn’t get in if their own choice, but that of family. they got out before it could really get its claws into ‘em
but the reason I bring this up is because it’s from said friend that I learned of the fact that we have a Hubbard museum house in ZA. it looks like an episode of TNG fucked a vintage porn set, and it’s preserved in that state
and that’s twice in as many days that I have been doing a Lady Macbeth “out, out damn spot” routine with my entire central nervous system
If either of the parties involved were just about any other science fiction author, it would be the among the least damning things I’ve heard of the other one, but it just had to be these two.
Problematic developer with AI crush realizes she’s just dust under the wheels of progress
You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists? It shouldn’t be the case, because no group is doing more right now to elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity. You know who the public does trust? Open source developers.
Justine, LOL indeed.
only a month and a bit sooner and she could have answered my question herself lol
This is the girl who went off the rails and started posting about neoreaction, right?
correct
In classic Rationalist fashion, she noticed something she didn’t like, hypothesized a cause with no real evidence, and then proceeded to rant about the implications of that unproven hypothesis.
My suspicion, on the other hand, is that because Claude is just reproducing statistical patterns from its training data is simply reflecting the fact that she is referred to as a Nazi coder far more often than she is as some kind of open-source luminary. Unless her github metadata signs everything “Justine T the open-source developer” then that association isn’t reflected in the patterns extrapolated from the training data.
elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity
girl my life already too complex, ain’t no one need elevation to an even higher state of complexity
can we maybe do a lower one?
ProblematicNazi developeryeah I’ve found out a lot more since I posted that comment…
You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists?
No, but I’d say its a good sign we’re getting close to an AI winter
Problematic developer with AI crush
I thought this was gonna go in a completely different direction.
Setting: romantic sunset beach, without a crowd in sight. There is no sound but that of a gentle breeze, waves lapping at the shore, and seagulls in the distance. Ryan turns to his girlfriend Tiffany. He gets down on his knees, the sand muddying his pants. Tiffany clasps her hands over her mouth in disbelief. Ryan says: “Tiffany you are the light of my life. You have made me a better man. I can’t see me living with anyone else but you. Will… will you marry m-- bzzt. Thank you for using Virtua-Boyfriend, unfortunately we ran out of VC money so are shutting down.”.
Not really a sneer but James Gosling (one of the creators of Java) has discovered and enjoys pivot to ai https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pivot-ai-james-gosling-l06gc
Thank god I misread your comment and thought he had pivoted to AI.
One of my kids is a huge Gravity Falls fan and has recently acquired The Book of Bill. For some reason, Bill’s anecdote about silly straws reminded me of the grok discourse:
FUN FACT: When you use a silly straw to murder someone, it becomes a serious straw!
So…a yacht named “Bayesian” just sank off the coast of Sicily. It was owned by British billionaire Mike Lynch, former CEO of Autonomy. Lynch just barely managed to stay out of trouble with US authorities over fraud charges and will likely owe HP Enterprise a hefty bag for misrepresentations before their multi-billion dollar acquisition. My heart goes out to the innocents and crew who are lost. (Edit: Lynch appears to still be missing)
Hell of a metaphor, isn’t it?
Geez! It’s positively congealed.
I’m fascinated by the fucking size of that yacht and did some more research and found more stories about obscenely expensive boats going to the bottom.
https://www.superyachttimes.com/news?filter=Casualty
Still feel bad about those missing though.
It turns out that the size of the yacht doesn’t actually matter, but rather the motion of the ocean.
Self-identified emergency dept physician on my local subreddit just believes things that spicy autocorrect tells him about his job.
Dude here claims that Tennessee is ranked #3 for physicians looking for work, but when asked for a source…
Obviously you’ll find various resources. ChatGPT has it as #3 for whatever that’s worth. At least for my specialty Tennessee offered a top salary, moderate tort reform, no income tax, eliminated the professional privilege tax, and more. It’s certainly not a bad place to practice and I’d argue very few physicians are avoiding Tennessee.
Wish I knew where he worked so that I could avoid it.
My experience talking with people has been often this same situation; they have some specialty expertise and for whatever reason now accept ChatGPT as all knowing and use it a lot day to day. It worries me since the response to “why” is usually along the lines of humans aren’t always right but this is AI so it will keep getting better eventually.
Tools should be 100% correct. Your work has regressed because you swapped out good tools and practices for spicy autocorrect
