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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I told one of my college professors I’d been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said “can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it” and without thinking I said “why would I use chat-gpt? It’s rubbish” and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.
This was after he’d said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.
When [musk’s new] supercomputer gets to full capacity, the local utility says it’s going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes per year.
The locals might get ornery about this, and I’d be willing to make the trip to help.
There are some steam turbine power plants (like coal-fired) (on smaller side) with power output like that
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its ‘reasoning’ when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, it’s not really clear.
Can’t wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don’t exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.
Would there ever be a way to tell that they didn’t just feed the answers into the training data?
Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:
bless you Melanie.
Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you
Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesn’t understand the rules of chess
^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)
Dog tax
I was reading David and Amy’s stuff on energy costs of AI and ended up skimming the MSFT “environment sustainability report” and… god
Like I don’t even know how to satirise this. Help me sneer pros, for I am too depressed to make fun of this.
Like a century of science: yeah we’re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. There’s no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.
MSFT: hold my beer
Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.
Anyway it’s not that great but here’s my attempt at the sneer you asked for:
“Additionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions.”
Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN
Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.
I don’t think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at what’s happening in them. in plain english, you have a cop and his band of good apples + adorably bad apples saving the ass of a dictator again and again, because sometimes you just need a clever steady hand in charge. Pratchett was informed by liberal humanist values, and there’s plenty of great stuff about tolerance in there. but the foundation of any vimes novel is an institutionalist urge to bootlicking. it just has to be the right boot
It sucks to have to decolonise your darlings. It sucks that a lot of our most enjoyable stories are copaganda. Even the most redeemable stories about cops have probably inspired people to become cops.
I think Pratchett understood that, despite people romanticizing revolution, revolutions often end up opening the door to something as bad or worse. Especially in a place like Discworld.
In Night Watch:
“Vimes/Keel tells Ned Coates not to put his trust in revolutions “They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes” This is a common theme in Pratchett regarding authority figures”That said Vimes does participate in a revolution of sorts in that book, as “John Keel”, in the past.
yeah that’s the conservative spirit right there
Books would be really boring if the protagonists were all just the author speaking as themself but using various funny voices.
there’s not a lot of ambiguity in what the novels are getting at, so no offense but this line of argument is not worth engaging directly. but I will point out that I didn’t say what pratchett’s views were. part of why people don’t look askance at these books is that his other work is at odds with the realpolitik message I’m pointing out. I can’t and I don’t draw conclusions about his ‘real’ views based on the vimes novels
The novels may be trying to say something, but how it plays out still needs to make sense in the world of the novel and be coherent with the characters as depicted.
Vimes is basically a stereotypical jaded and cynical old-timer who has ideas about how things could be better, but has seen enough to know that the powerful would never allow it.
Incremental improvements are made but larger changes are difficult except sometimes in places that are even worse than Ankh-Morpork.
It’s kind of like all the people who are aware of what’s likely needed to prevent climate change disaster, but are also aware that they don’t have the power to make it happen and that the forces of inertia and corruption are powerful enough to block or roll back anything remotely significant.
other-other-other-other scott tweeted again. apologies, it’s slightly US-pol
it’s a doozy:
spoiler of the image too, just in case
transcript of insane scott adams, creator of dilbert, tweet
I’m revising my debate scoring. My first impression was a tie, which I called a Harris victory.
But the only thing I recall about the debate today is “They’re eating the dogs.”
Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked immigration risk.
It’s the strongest play of the election.
Trump won the debate.
I gotta stop underestimating his game. Trump had no base hits in the debate but his long ball is still rising. Incredible. 6:32 :::
as a reminder, this is the same guy that’s so keen on thinking the llm can hypnotize him into orgasm
Hillary is going to assassinate him for sure this time for revealing the hidden dog lore.
Basilisks commuting
https://xcancel.com/equine__dentist/status/1832568341740851266
That is just the average The Sims/Rimworld player.
Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be “analyzing” the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
It’s remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He’s worked on that, but it’s clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn’t very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I’m thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.
But you can’t convince me that you’re really the world’s best technical interviewer if you’re also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you’re suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who’s financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they’re concerned about where he might end up otherwise?
The only thing I’ve seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.
Lex hasn’t optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee’s and the (implicitly) listener’s ego.
Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what they’re saying. I gather that it’s easy to empathize with and doesn’t require listeners to actually learn much since they’re essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.
I don’t think it’s very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new “AI” major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that “computation” is more important than electrical engineering.
some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”
Someone’s been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).
The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.
Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasn’t really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.
It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it’s a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it’s a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it’s so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don’t the people we keep electing to fix it just… do that?
Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn’t started using it and outcompeting everyone?
There’s only 2 answers to that:
- the gold standard doesn’t work in the modern economy, the one that has lifted millions out of poverty and created untold wealth (to great environmental damage, sure)
- the gold standard is being kept from them by (((they)))
Answer 2 is obvious if you’re a fascist.
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.
Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.
I’m familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they can’t print money and the populace doesn’t trust them to print money - so every year it’s more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.
So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.
Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.
The most black mirror part for me is where he’s selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future “AI”, represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn’t a parody, they’re literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.
Another fine AI lawmaker for our collection.
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Virtual Integrated Citizen: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/tech/openai-shuts-down-ai-mayor/index.html
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Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)
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AI party (performance art, unclear how much of this was actually serious): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/
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AI Mayor / AI Party: https://www.ai-mayor.com/, https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党 (their(?) earlier iteration also had a lady robot because AI Mayor AIn’t sexist yo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KomiEpEik-Q)
holy fuck awful.systems works on servo
so for posting it’s definitely less than ideal (not pictured: the 15 second delay before typing and the comment text being filled in), but it actually renders lemmy with shockingly few issues
image descriptions
screenshots of awful.systems rendering in Servo. it looks both janky and weirdly normal. for some reason, servo seems to be running inside of the emacs text editor.
Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.
A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) “if you think that’s bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱”.
Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
a new source of anxiety has formed
in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I don’t think Lemmy’s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but it’s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed
awful’s probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and they’re one of the bigger operations around
pro-tip: do not learn things about how TLDs work (and I mean the bit beyond dns architecture), it is cursed knowledge you can’t unlearn
and with that warning delivered, y’all may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late it’s a gateway drug
regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. AP’s identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/
(e: good lord I was out of it when I wrote this post)
I liked this comment on the HN post:
Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.
quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isn’t doing it:
Do you have any references/examples of this?
tons
rapid7 for example use LLMs to analyze code and identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.
Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this.
must’ve been another company then which i got confused with the name
Good thing you have tons of examples.
Right?
e: you’ll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steve’s other posts are about
I wonder if he got standard ML and LLM confused. (I did hear there was some usage of LLM/ML to help with some documentation stuff I think on a riskybusiness podcast, but I would have to relisten for the details. It could also just have been promotional stuff, while they are not actually using it).
Poor DeiSteve, it always sucks when you have a decades old username which suddenly takes up political meaning.
“created: 51 days ago”
Oh no.
Standard ML the programming language or standard as in conventional and ML as in machine learning?
Machine learning.
E: Turns out the DEI guy might have been right btw. https://www.rapid7.com/about/press-releases/rapid7s-ai-engine-supercharges-security-operations-with-generative-ai/ if by generative AI they mean a LLM.
And from their blog: https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2023/11/29/rapid7-takes-next-step-in-ai-innovation-with-new-ai-powered-threat-detections/ so there could be a chance the ‘I used to work there’ person didn’t know everything going on in Rapid7. “Rapid7 Has Been an AI Innovator for Decades”
the original post is fucking amazing
here in the future, nothing fucking works
.mobi? They became the admins of the file format? And they paid for it? Good luck with that. ;)
E: me after reading the article. Ow god nothing fucking works indeed, that is dire. I actually checked the date to see if this wasn’t some old post. Nope 9/11 2024. Buffer overflow + lapsed domains.
Fuck it, we’re going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.
you have no idea how much I’ve been tempted to do UUCP
A new substack about AI: Ludd. “Citizen Journalism on AI, Publishing, and the new Tech Landscape”. First post is about Repeater Books, Israel and AI: second is about AI and climate change.
saw this ridiculous shit on the side of a jag on the highway a little bit ago
best guess is rental-contract jag by a hustler, but the half-hearted AI non-mention is why I thought to post it here. we’re rapidly evolving in the grift cycle!
quantum finance
This reminded me of a gag from Pyramids (discworld novel) where quantum accounting is invented to manage a reality-warping pyramid building business. So I was trying to get a quote…
…only to discover that Quantum Accounting is an actual grifting term in recent use. Please marvel at this LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
yeah, the whole site’s a journey
I was hoping it’d have some content along with the buzzword headings, alas
It looks like a media prop making a soft parody of buzzword laced sites that don’t actually say anything. ‘we provide business solutions and services’ lol
And of course, due to my browser being slightly locked down (or the whole site being broken) the whole ‘check it out’ button does nothing.
The animated button that looks like it might direct you to a chat option (but actually just scrolls you back up to the start of the page for some unknown reason) is also great. (This is isn’t really their fault btw, it is that wordpress themes one (if you image search on the people being happy with the services provided you will find a few other sites with the same theme, and same stock image).
One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.
Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.
This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.
Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)
2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling
- Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously
- Development of “Schrödinger’s Ledger” prototype, allowing superposition of financial states
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
Somebody played cookie clicker.
I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting LinkedIn to become a wretched hive of “quantum” bullshit, but hey, here we are.
Tangentially: Schrödinger is a one-man argument for not naming ideas after people.
2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution
- Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
- Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
- Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements
ah good, we’re still on schedule for that I guess
you left the best one:
First successful experiments in “temporal arbitrage” using quantum prediction models
not only they know about “temporal arbitrage experiments” but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment
Frankly, it just didn’t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.
