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)
just heard a podcast ad for amazon prime saying it causes “involuntary deal squeals” followed by a categorization of different kinds of customer grunts and squeals according to product. not making this up
god that’s just really icky
I swear I keep seeing Amazon ads in this same icky dehumanizing “cute” style, like some of the annoyance-based ads I vaguely remember from when I still had cable TV. is this just what ads become every time a corporation decides you have no other choice? (yes, almost every time)
Was salivating all weekend waiting for this to drop, from Subbarao Kambhampati’s group:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved block stacking abilities. It is a straight shot from here to cold fusion! … unfortunately, there is a minor caveat:
Looks like performance drops like a rock as number of steps required increases…
correct me if I’m reading this wrong — the results are that LLMs are much, much worse than classical AI at planning block placement for SHRDLU? that seems pretty damning
Yes, the classical algo achieves perfect accuracy and is way faster. There is also a table that shows the cost of running o1 is enormous. Like comically bad. Boil a small ocean bad. We’ll just 10x the size and it will achieve 15 steps inshallah.
Imo, this is like the same behavior we see on math problems. More steps it takes, the higher the chance it just decoheres completely. I can’t see any reason why this type of thing would just “click” for the models if they are also unable to do multiplication.
I mean this just reeks of pure hopium from OAI and co that things will magykly work out. (But the newer model is clearly better^{tm}! I still don’t see any indication that one day that chart is just going to be 100s across the board.)
ah yes, $42, definitely a “the same amount of compute is used” figure
these results are remarkably damning. I knew things were bad, but god damn this is impressively shit
I feel this shouldn’t at all be surprising, and continues to point to Diverse Intelligence as more fundamental than any sort General Intelligence conceptually. There’s a huge difference between what something is in theory or in principal capable of, and the economics story of what that thing attends to naturally as per its energy story.
Broadly, even simple things are powerful precisely because of what they don’t bother trying to do until perturbed.
Ultimately, I hypothesize the reason why VCs like the idea of LLMs doing simple things far more expensively than otherwise is already possible, is because, They literally can’t imagine what else to spend their money on. They are vacuous consumers by design.
So what you’re saying is that Tim Apple could save us from these people by selling Marc Andreessen a billion dollar iphone?
It’s Veblen goods again, isn’t it?
Honestly, Yes. The hardest thing for a rich person to do is spend their money. Eventually this catches up with them: to spend no money is to lose it comparatively, to spend money is to risk not getting it back. So a great deal of the money world revolves primarily around persuasion, and the very odd things that happen along the way.
It also helps to recognize how much many of these people see all of this as a competition, and trying to out-unique/out-possess their peers
Large Reasoning Models
May the coiners of this jargon step on Lego until the end of days
Sam Altman says taking psychedelics ‘significantly changed’ his mindset
Altman being a druggie would go some way to explaining his utter disconnect from reality and utter lack of moral fibre
there’s a thread too
a nsfw found in the wild
Not a sneer, but
KendrickEd Zitron just dropped.Its damn good as usual, with Zitron taking aim at the current state of SaaS and tying it into his previous sneers on AI.
Can we get a universe where Ed writes a verse on Kendrick’s hopefully-imminent Elon Musk dis track?
True believers at Vox’ Future Perfect “vertical” let out a hearfelt REEEEEE as Saltman makes the obvious move to secure all the profits
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/374275/openai-just-sold-you-out
The Zitron-pilled among us probably suspect that part of the real reason for this is, ironically, to obscure the fact that OpenAI has no real profits because of how ludicrously expensive their models are to train and operate and how limited the actual use cases that people will pay for have proven. It’s better from a “getting investor money” perspective to have everyone talking about how terrible it is that investor profits are no longer capped for humanitarian reasons than to have more people ask whether we’re getting close to the peak of this bubble.
I’m feeling a weird mix of emotions about this. It’s not the cash grab by ol’ salty dog; capitalism is doing its thing. I’m both elated that these idiot liberals feel betrayed by this turn of events and enraged that these liberal idiots exist to launder the reputation of techbros in the first place.
shocked that scorpions in a scorpion’s nest funded by their scorpion mates might have fallen into stinging
I’m calling the Louvre
this is so fucking funny. bro nobody but you is surprised
Turns out those so called “wallet inspectors” just want your money!
Governor Newsom, are you seeing this?
Congress, are you seeing this?
World, are you seeing this??
capitalist: does capitalism
liberal: Ah fuck, I can’t believe you’ve done this.
You think capitalists would do that? Go in front of the government and tell lies?
E: this is also my feeling about Altman saying ‘I did drugs and I changed bro’.
I changed*
*I decided to get a blood boy!!!
LSD powered mega-erections, all thanks to LSD (and the blood of my sons).
a most shockedpikachu article, I love it
But the move has some observers — including Musk himself — asking: How could this possibly be legal?
Because the nonprofit is there to represent the public, this would effectively mean shifting billions away from people like you and me. As some are noting, it feels a lot like theft.
it continues to be astounding how gullible some people can be (/choose to stay?)
Expanding on that, part of me feels Altman is gonna find all the rhetoric he made about “AI doom” being used against him in the future - man’s given the true believers reason to believe he’d commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buck.
Hell, the true believers who made this pretty explicitly pointed out Altman’s made arguing for regulation a lot easier:
From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:
Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.
Oh, so they publish textbooks.
“They represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste.”
🎶 Please allow me to introduce myself 🎶
now where did I leave my hammer and sickle
“…37%… That means nearly one in four…”
Eh, no it doesn’t, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.
So you’re saying that they’ve got books worth at least a grand which their owners are literally using to flaunt their wealth?
I’m legally obligated to say stealing is legally and morally wrong buuuuuuuut
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren’t getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
I just learned about this “wonderful” little item too
@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is “Veblen goods”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
“a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.”
handy to know, ty
“Complimentary Carbon Efficient Delivery”
Carbon Efficient even…
That means that DHL driver has to take bike instead of car for this one
If there is an elevator in the apartment, the driver has to take the stairs, contractually. Of course people who order that don’t live in high rise apartments where the driver can reach the door, so everybody wins.
Of course the books are just vapid art books or travel books.
Assouline! The gasoline of ass!
I vaguely remember mentioning this AI doomer before, but I ended up seeing him openly stating his support for SB 1047 whilst quote-tweeting a guy talking about OpenAI’s current shitshow:
I’ve had this take multiple times before, but now I feel pretty convinced the “AI doom/AI safety” criti-hype is going to end up being a major double-edged sword for the AI industry.
The industry’s publicly and repeatedly hyped up this idea that they’re developing something so advanced/so intelligent that it could potentially cause humanity to get turned into paperclips if something went wrong. Whilst they’ve succeeded in getting a lot of people to buy this idea, they’re now facing the problem that people don’t trust them to use their supposedly world-ending tech responsibly.
Isn’t the primary reason why people are so powerful persuaded by this technology, because they’re constantly sworn to that if they don’t use its answers they will have their life’s work and dignity removed from them? Like how many are in the control group where they persuade people with a gun to their head?
it’s easy to imagine a world where the people working on AI that are also convinced about AI safety decide to shun OpenAI for actions like this. It’s also easy to imagine that OpenAI finds some way to convince their feeble, gullible minds to stay and in fact work twice as hard. My pitch: just tell them GPT X is showing signs of basilisk nature and it’s too late to leave the data mines
I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.
Ah yes the advertisement which causes T&S people (who have seen some things) to go on long rants on why you should never put pictures of your kids online publically.
fuck that’s gross
where’d you find/run across that? can’t tell if it’s a normal ad or some gig-site thing or what
Saw it posted on Reddit. It’s apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:
People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.
ah, doman name sounds like it’s one of the microwork farms
Our anti-AI milita will be called “The Artists’ Rifles”
Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.
Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.
And now they’re suing him.
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/
Mullenweg’s the same guy who publicly harassed a random transwoman on Tumblr and had a general meltdown to the point where Tumblr staff had to distance themselves from him, so I’m not shocked. (EDIT: Somehow used the singular masc pronoun for the entirety of Tumblr staff - don’t ask me how)
(That its Tumblr is the only thing that shocks me - you’d think he’d have realised its queer-friendly rep was one of the main things going for it)
wait are there non-queer people on Tumblr even??
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
Granted, Apple’s banhammer forced Tumblr’s hand on that front (though Tumblr’s complete failure on moderation did give Apple that golden opportunity).
(The whole debacle did lead to Newgrounds getting hit by two separate waves of new users - a minor wave in November after the NSFW purges kicked in, then a major wave in December after the porn ban was officially announced. I have nothing more to add, I think it was pretty funny Tumblr shat the bed that hard)
Haha I saw it from new comments view, didn’t check the thread title
lol holy shit, he was barely getting started
shortly after the first posts, he (most likely personally, although remains to be seen) had the trademark usage page updated specifically to take aim at wpengine
and started making his employees do an astroturfing campaign on their private socials
and blocked wpengine from interacting with wordpress.org at all, by both blocking accounts and IPs
dude’s lost it. coming up soon, mass migrations off wordpress?
Sounds like someone under a lot of pressure to raise revenue and not having much success.
Hello Matt this is your lawer speaking
deleted by creator
Ah, late stage capitalism at its finest.
