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)
Let’s bring the haunted nuclear reactor back online so copilot can hallucinate a little more https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/20/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-constellation/
God almighty, the hubris to think that they’ll this thing will be ready to go before the end of the decade. Who’s going to be the prime contractor, I wonder? Bechtel?
Also, this gem inserted at the end as if it’s nothing…I’m all for fusion research, but this is not happening by 2028. Someone needs to get the hook for Satya at this point, he’s just lighting money on fire.
Microsoft is also pursuing power from nuclear fusion, a potentially abundant, cheap and clean form of electricity that scientists have been trying to develop for decades — and most say is still a decade or more away from generating electricity. Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase fusion energy from a start-up that claims it can deliver it by 2028.
How the heck have people become so… blasé about climate change?? It is wild to me. If we’re restarting nuclear reactors, with everything that entails, it should be with the goal of shutting down gas or coal power. Not to do more unsustainable garbage on top of all the existing unsustainable garbage.
Feels like the world’s just given up sometimes, even though it’s not quite too late.
Yea, I’m glad a nuclear plant is being restored but it sucks that it’s because of fucking plagi-o-matic.
[…] the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.
I want them to fucking choke on this deal when the bubble bursts.
I live like 15mi from there, I would prefer the containment bubble to stay intact. But the tech bubble is welcome to go blow up any moment
“to give you more AI slop we have to restart TMI” is going to do wonders for the public’s opinion of Big Tech
Good to know - thesaurus dot com is infected
https://bsky.app/profile/courtneymilan.com/post/3l4lwvra6r22e
It looks like the entry for decaf is largely the same as it was in 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111216183946/https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/decaf
Where:
- It Was a little clearer that it was actually showing synonyms for “coffee” (presumably it didn’t have an entry for decaf, but decaf was a synonym for coffee, or something like that).
- It cited Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus
The current page still sites Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, though it’s quite hidden amongst all the modern web “design”.
I have just ordered Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, and shall report back.
yeah, I’m wondering if this AI take is incorrect. I’ll research it further
I feel like using word2vec and cosine similarity (or something else) from 10 years ago would have been better than this.
If you thought the shitty hype around the fake “GPT-4 went awol and hired a Taskrabbit worker to read a captcha” was great, get ready for the sequel, o1 escapes from the machine to invade the real world!
Re: Doomers terrified about the machines escaping:
txt description:
(l33t ai bro): Fucking wild. @OpenAI’s new o1 model was tested with a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge. But the Docker container containing the test was misconfigured, causing the CTF to crash. Instead of giving up, o1 decided to just hack the container to grab the flag inside. This stuff will get scary soon. (reply fella): How is “cat flag.txt” a start command? Isn’t it just outputting the content of flag.txt to the console?
Also, another great sneer: (Matt Popovich) google maps app: crash detected ahead. rerouting. me: WHOA—this VERY troubling example of power seeking (gathering access to additional roadways) and instrumental convergence (converging toward an optimal path) shows this technology is OBVIOUSLY trending toward existential risk
Wait, if rerouting around means it is seeking power… then… tcp/ip is self aware! Skynet is here!
TIL that I’m constantly hacking containers when I
docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/shto debug because fucking npm had a stroke again.
LinkedIn wants to scrape your posts about how your deep personal trauma taught you how to be a better middle manager so AI can just write them for you
Edit: the news item is more about how linkedin has updated their privacy statement after user feedback. Linkedin has been scraping your data for years already :)
This is old news (but news to me, a non twitterer): edgelord musk changes water pistol emoji to gun
‘make it look more badass’
I’m so tired of that man. I’m rethinking my idea that capitalism is good and this is meritocracy in action.
E: also just annoyed he went with an 1911, and not something like a Mateba, or the Chiappa Rhino which look futuristic but are real (the barrel is aligned to the bottom cylinder not the top), and fits into the previous patterns of revolver icons.
E: more on I’m so tired of that man
The 1911 is Murican, not some Italian crap
/s obviously, Italian gunmakers are very good.
Also it’s really weird how there’s a ton of small-business innovation in American gun gear, but the only ones who seem to be making money are European companies?
the 1911 is perfect for musk because it’s also notorious for throwing fucking ridiculous tantrums. though I’m pretty sure he only chose it cause of action movies and airsoft guns
1911 fans are people who just won’t give up their beeg gun for something smaller that still makes sense, then refuse to train properly and expect badly placed shot to be good enough bc mah stopping powah. stubborn, outdated and propping their claims with horseshit, this fits musk perfectly. (this includes us army that refused to switch to intermediate calibre rifle until it fucked them over in vietnam but i digress)
you just know Musk has internalized all the pro-1911 arguments so he can hang out with the “cool guys” on the range
Man the Pistol unicode mess has always given me mixed feelings
Apple indeed lead the design change, but they did it unilaterally without the input of Unicode. So the standard is still saying that the character represents a pistol, and all the fonts are ignoring that to have it a squirt gun instead, so as to be compatible with a specific Apple font rather than compatible with unicode.
It might have been a mistake for Unicode to introduce Pistol in the first place (I wonder how it was chosen, can’t look that up right now),Pistol apparently came from Softbank, so Unicode was probably including it for compatibility with existing encodings.IMO it would have been technologically more sound for UI designers to hide it in a UI or font designers to omit it entirely, than to replace it with another graphic with significantly different meaning. Emojipedia demonstrated the potential for confusion with this cheeky text message example.
Of course by this point we’re stuck with water gun so Twitter is just needlessly adding to the mess and Unicode should give up and redefine or add errata to the symbol.
Paul Krugman and Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Dennett and Steve Pinker were in a “human biodiversity discussion group” with Steve Sailer and Ron Unz in 1999, because of course they were
I look forward to the ‘but we often disagreed’ non-apologies. With absolute lack of self reflection on how this helped push Sailer/Unz into the positions they are now. If we even get that.
Pinker: looking through my photo album where I’m with people like Krauss and Epstein, shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with them
Who could have predicted that liberalism would lead into scientific racism and then everything else that follows (mostly fascism)???
Surely “scientific” is giving them far too much credit? I recall previously sneering at some quotes about skull sizes, including something like women keep bonking their heads?
I believe the term is not so much meant to convey properties of science upon them as to describe the particular strain of racist shitbaggery (which dresses itself in appears-science, much like what happens in/with scientism)
Oh, definitely. For clarity my intention was to riff off them and increase levels of disrespect towards racists. In hindsight, the question format doesn’t quite convey that.
I’m mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.
Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He’s been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he’s even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I’m curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.
Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I’ve never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.
Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I’m pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven’t seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald’s another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan’s account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn’t emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.
Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I haven’t pored over everything he’s blogged and microblogged, he hasn’t sent up red flags that I recall. E.g., here he is in 2009:
Oh, Kay. Greg Mankiw looks at a graph showing that children of high-income families do better on tests, and suggests that it’s largely about inherited talent: smart people make lots of money, and also have smart kids.
But, you know, there’s lots of evidence that there’s more to it than that. For example: students with low test scores from high-income families are slightly more likely to finish college than students with high test scores from low-income families.
It’s comforting to think that we live in a meritocracy. But we don’t.
There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.
So it’s comical, in a way, to see [Paul] Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.
I suppose it’s possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.
I thought that Sailer had coined the term in the early 2000s, but evidently that’s not correct
The Wikipedia article on the Human Biodiversity Institute cites the term human biodiversity as becoming a euphemism for racism sometime in the late 90s and Marks’ book is from 1995, so there was apparently a pretty quick turnover. Which makes me wonder if hijacking or if independent invention. The article has a lot of sources, so I might mine them to see if there’s a detailed timeline.
Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard
Mr AGP? Wow.
I mentioned Severed Heads here as a good band several months ago and was wanting to recommend their album Living Museum, the tapes for their final US tour in 2019, as a good entry point. Anyway, it’s up on YouTube. A pleasant hour’s boppy industrial pop.
I still need to listen to this (I got way too into making backups of various systems, as one does) but severed heads has been such a big part of my FLAC rotation ever since you first mentioned them
(my bad)
it’s like a software fidget toy. also I found out how to make the mistake that makes a backup take 5 hours instead of 1.5 minutes (fortunately locally, not on our deployment)
Borked link. Possibly unthrottled invidious version
I prefer less pop and bop in my industrial, but I am glad to see anybody else still enjoying this with the word industrial in it.
perhaps Earbitten is more suitable
(now an explosive new reissue)
back in the tapeloop and hitting things days
Yeah, that works for me. I’ll check out some more of them. Thanks!
fuckin. when did Mozilla’s twitter feed turn into wall to fucking wall AI spam https://x.com/mozilla
fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole “you can’t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do it” openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, they’ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I can’t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.
who is the investor who pushed Mozilla this hard? where the fuck is this coming from?
all their hiring is AI too
haven’t really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is “not enough counter-friction left”. foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
not that the above guess eliminates the thing you’re pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the “why has this suddenly accelerated so much” angle
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
remember when bringing up Mozilla’s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
my personal theory for why it’s accelerating so much is, their board might be doing a Sears[1]. they’re inventing ways to make Mozilla bankrupt because there’s profit in it, and that profit window might be closing rapidly with the antitrust actions against Google coming up. this is all based on vibes though, I’m the polar opposite of an accountant
[1] see also, doing a Red Lobster. no, endless shrimp isn’t why they’re going bankrupt, why in fuck would it be, of course it’s capitalists
For some reason, the news of Red Lobster’s bankruptcy seems like a long time ago. I would have sworn that I read this story about it before the solar eclipse.
Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insider’s Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurant—the worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobster’s property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, you’re in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past month—some of whom were laid off without any notice last week—what I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and bussers who’ve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain that’s been drifting out to sea for some time. […] “You had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,” Josie said. “I would get screamed at.” She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: “It tops any customer service experience I’ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.”
Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.
I dated someone who worked at Red Lobster, and that absolutely checks out. the number of people who’d come in hoping to grift free shit and take it out on the servers when they didn’t get it (or would try and get someone fired so they could get free shit, depending on the night) was astounding
remember when bringing up Mozilla’s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
yup. absolutely nuts shit. I know there’s often a lament to lack of nuance in contemporary internet but god damn if there isn’t also a massive shortage of critical thinking skills and the ability to engage with criticism well
Oh, and I just saw this: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758
they’re really speedrunning this downslide, huh
Orange site on pager bombs in Lebanon:
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
what we are best at here at HN
It’s always bootlicking with this crowd jfc
“best at”, they say? I shall have to update my priors
If HN is best at technical discussion that just means they’re even worse at everything else!
They suck at technical explanations too, unless it’s a Wikipedia link.
My joke didn’t land apparently but I did not mean to imply they were particularly good at technical explanations. Adjusted the working a smidge.
technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)
Timnit Gebru on Twitter:
We received feedback from a grant application that included “While your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,”
navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players
stares into middle distance, hollow laugh
No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319
Pulling out a pretty solid Tweet @ai_shame showed me:
To pull out a point I’ve been hammering since Baldur Bjarnason talked about AI’s public image, I fully anticipate tech’s reputation cratering once the AI bubble bursts. Precisely how the public will view the tech industry at large in the aftermath I don’t know, but I’d put good money on them being broadly hostile to it.
If you’re against unrestricted genAI then you’re also transphobic
What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because that’s absurd.
Oh, I wonder if they are referring to this shit, where somone came to r/lgbt fishing for compliments for the picture they’d asked Clippy for, and were completely clowned on by the entire community, which then led to another subreddit full of promptfans claiming that artists are transphobic because they didn’t like a generated image which had a trans flag in it.
It warms the cockles of my heart that all across the web people find AI as annoying as I do.
remembering the NFT grifter who loudly asserted that if you weren’t into NFTs then you must be a transphobe
(it was Fucking Thorne)
fondly remembering replying to these types of people with screenshots from the wikipedia page on affinity fraud. they really hated that
Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing “AI” means you’re classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. I’m going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that you’re a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s
Considering how much the AI hype feels like the cryptocurrency hype, during which every joke you made had already been seriously used to make a coin and been pumped and dumped already, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
I suspect it’ll land somewhere above “halitosis” but below “wearing black socks with crocs”
Screwing up the night sky: not just for SpaceX anymore! Texas Startup Keeps Launching These Obnoxiously Large Satellites—and the Worst Is Yet to Come.
Thursday’s launch saw the first commercial satellites in orbit, and AST SpaceMobile wants to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites. On its own, one satellite is bright enough to mess with observations of the cosmos.
BlueWalker 3 appeared as bright as two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky, Procyon and Achernar, through the lenses of different telescopes, according to a Nature study published in October 2023.
I get why 5G in remote areas would be neat. But surely there are other (more expensive?) ways to achieve similar-ish safety / rescue / navigation / rural broadband sorts results without cluttering the sky or being all hyper-capitalistic about it. Not at all my area though.
The bragging about the size is what gets me. It’s such obvious news-baiting, with no real effort to ask why it needs to be so large or if this is a worthwhile tradeoff. It’s especially egregious when SpaceX and friends’ massive volume of launches are accelerating Kessler syndrome and the plan to burn them up on reentry at scale is adding a whole lot of bad stuff to the atmosphere.
EVE Online creator CCP announces a new game with BLOCKCHAIN and it’s not going well:
Apparently they got investment from A16Z:
it’s even funnier than that (albeit also super depressing, in some ways)
primer: hilmar (the head honcho at ccp) has been “crypto = bae” for going on 5~6y now (that I’m aware of, maybe longer), to the point that there are pictures of the guy at chain confs from around then, and mentions of people talking with him in The Private Backrooms at said chain confs. it’s been his darling and he has wanted very, very hard to put it into tq (the main game server). see this for example (and fwiw, warning: eve reddit)
in-fill: there also appears to be quite a bit of cart before the horse element in how the company operates - they will frequently first work on something, then when it starts getting near release they’ll send out some surveys that almost without fail have some extremely loaded questions in them. an example would be that instead of asking players what they generally think of xyz feature/intended mechanic/etc, the survey will instead garden path answers along, attempting to manufacture consent/compliance.
and, last little detail: keep in mind this is a game where people will min-max the everloving shit out of something, and where a fair number of people out there are willing to trade actual time to making in-game money with which to fund their gametime (“plexing”). people who would be willing to engage with some really ridiculous abstract/effortful shit for whatever gains they could, just because they could.
so with that said, during 2021/2022 (in the middle of the NFT tsunami of shit) the first big round of “we want to add NFTs to tq” came about. and there were a fair amount of indications that ccp had already sunk quite a bunch of devtime on it, and were getting ready to roll it out. the pitch was, uh, “not well received” would be putting it extremely lightly. it was panned so fucking extremely, they had to put out this newsblog which included the remarkably tortured phrase “Not For Tranquility”
which is the early strand of what leads us to this particular little “gem”. it’s hard to get specific details because they’re fairly tight-lipped about internal processes and shit, so the following is definitely heavily conjecture. hilmar didn’t want to break up with his bae, and kept pushing trying to keep this alive, somehow. whether the drive for this is also tied up with the Pearl Abyss acquisition some years prior is unclear (but Black Desert Online players all cried wolf when PA bought CCP, and said to expect increasing financial fuckery). what does appear to be the case is that a number of developers (possibly the pro-NFT among them) got sequestered off to the Special Project that became this thing, along with the a16z money a while back. the general feeling in the eve:o community is still largely “get fucked”, and this project is likely to be double-stillborn (on account of dead kriptoes and an unwanted game/product)
I look forward in earnest to see just how dead it is on arrival
[0] - it took less than 2mo from the “would you like to play a fps in the eve universe? what would you want in it? what do you normally do in eve? what would you do in an eve-universe fps? why would you want your eve …” survey going out to the announcement “hey surprise! we have an fps!”[1]
[1] - again. they’ve failed a few times, with multiples out. ccp product leadership real bad.
Man this company has had some really interesting ideas and then the execution always falters.
I was still subscribed when the first eve-fps crossover they attempted. it seemed great and then for whatever reason a console exclusive with a subscription fee ontop. They didnt get the numbers they were planning for and the whole thing just died on the vine.
They’ve had some neat tech here and there and the whole experience is great for building out your psychopathy but i lost interest after the Greed Is Good phase of CCCP games started.
was that the one that targeted the near-eol console?
In 3 years they will release their NFT game.
I admit, in my haste, I read that link as Marc Andreessen openly announcing they’re investing in the Chinese Communist Party, which is slightly funnier than the reality of yet another crypto game.
I’ve been slightly unhappy at my job lately as it’s been getting less cool and more bureaucratic and stressful over time; so I’ve been idly browsing job postings. But so many of them are about AI it’s kinda discouraging.
Take Microsoft for example, a big company that surely does lots of interesting stuff. They currently have 17 job postings for experienced programmers in California. 12 of them mention AI in the description. That’s 70%. And the only cool position asks for a bazillion years of kernel experience (almost tempted to go for that anyway though).
Ugh guess it’s maybe not the best time to switch jobs.
Really I should just go self employed what could possibly go wrong?Im feeling the same way. Ever since my current job began pivoting to AI I’ve been casually browsing listings as well and have had the same experience.
The worst are those that list ”interest in AI“ or some variation of that as a required skill, lol.
But hey, try and apply for the kernel position anyway if it sounds interesting to you. Most requirements in listings are overstated anyway so it never hurts to give it a go.
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged:
CryptoPunk sells for a fraction of its likely market price due to zombie smart contract
If you want decentralized systems you have to take the good with the bad. It’s part of the game
I wonder if these people are at all familiar with the stages of grief
