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)
“brb going to make an AI blockbuster called ‘Zennos Parhadox’ starring Dwynne Johnson and Rebeca Fernugson and then we’ll see who’s laughing.” – Dick Trauma, SA
Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:
Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.
“One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”
a real web3 moment if there ever was one.
unfortunately the six active players bit is a joke
You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?
Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results are… basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual “gameplay”.TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things aren’t even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer they’re using to render this.
Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.
oh cool, Minecraft LSD: Dream Emulator edition
which would be a cool concept, if the generative AI model weren’t incredibly prohibitively expensive to run, trained on plagiarized videos, and incapable of coherently tracking state (believe it or not, LSD: Dream Emulator does have a gameplay and progression loop… game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick)
game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick
This has been a thing with games leaning heavily on procedural generated content as well. Takes a lot of effort to make those more interesting in the longer term. The ai is the future of gaming people are sure to rediscover this fact again. Sadly compared ro pgc people they will waste a lot more energy and money.
I think it’s fine to have little art games that are only interesting to play for a few minutes. They can still have an impact that stays with you forever. Catacombs of Solaris for instance is one I love and think about all the time.
These AI guys though, god it must be so sad working on this stuff. They can’t be proud of what they’re making if the goal is to trick people into thinking you can have a real Minecraft game in there. The game is not even relevant, as far as I can tell they’re only using it to draw attention to their stupid and doomed ASIC business.
goddammit! you have no idea how many variations of “first person walking simulator projected image texture trippy visuals” i slapped into every search engine!
but yes, that was the one i was thinking of
Ah awesome! I didn’t think it was because you can’t upload pictures, but maybe you can in the “Revisited” version!
i went and bought it, and yup, the revisited version is the one i was thinking of. time to walk around inside a picture of Sam Altman so i can absorb his raw intellect and business acumen
Pgc can be a useful tool in the toolbox however. Just look at dwarf fortress for example. But games need more than just that. And with LLMs there could also ve some use (generation of voices I think for example, or some low level of conversational chatter). The problem is the data usage, the anti worker stuff (no voice actor wants their voice stolen for example), and like in this case, the people just promoting their other crap. Like how crypto games are just a shell to promote their crypto bs.
LLMs could have some minor use but with the backlash due to techbros going their usual vc style techbro ways, and steam requiring disclosure I doubt it will be of much use the risk is too great. Which considering the power costs is great.
We also have stuff like DLSS, which is pretty cool and I imagine ends up being more efficient in energy usage. The key thing I believe is it’s built as a specific tool for a specific purpose, instead of general purpose slop machines eating humongous databases to excrete absolutely nothing useful for anyone.
Showed this to my wife.
You know what the worst part is? We’re spending all this computing power to generate this bad acid trip, but if I just took a bunch of LSD you know what I’d still have? The things in my pockets. I’d have a better time just having a bunch of LSD and walking down to the 7-11
I’ve seen this floating about quite a bit, and everyone I know is dunking on it - the most frequent comparison I’ve seen is calling it “Minecraft with dementia”.
It also shows why those DOOM demos were only 2-3 seconds long, because that’s how long it can keep cohesion for.
Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that creates it, just someone who is reviewing it.
See, there’s the mistake. You can’t let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.
maybe i’m a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren’t armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming… if you look at this “game” as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging
it reminds me of other “games” like Marian Kleineberg’s Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft’s Yedoma Globula. there’s one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don’t recall the name
I do like it also, but notice how they try to hide most of these strange effects in their demo video. They’re trying to pass it off as a playable minecraft. Anything interesting about the technology is a defect to these people.
They also claim this is “the first playable AI-generated game” when the exact same sort of thing already existed in 2022 (and it looked a lot more efficient and haunted): https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/ Maybe it doesn’t count if you call it “Neural network” instead of “AI”.
yeah, that “most of the internet will be Al-generated” nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
It’s dream logic.
That article gave me a whiplash. First part: pretty cool. Second part: deeply questionable.
For example these two paragraphs from sections ‘problem with code’ and ‘magic of data’:
“Modular and interpretable code” sounds great until you are staring at 100 modules with 100,000 lines of code each and someone is asking you to interpret it.
Regardless of how complicated your program’s behavior is, if you write it as a neural network, the program remains interpretable. To know what your neural network actually does, just read the dataset
Well, “just read the dataset bro” sound great sounds great until you are staring at a dataset with 100 000 examples and someone is asking you to interpret it.
What the hell is this even arguing for? Is one module with ten million lines somehow better than 100 modules à 100k lines?
Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.
I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for
git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output offormat-patchinto the web client but, first, I am lazy and don’t wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so thatgit amdoesn’t eat it without cleanup.Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.
huh, I just switched to Tuta and that’s a very good point — there isn’t even a command line mail client, much less an IMAP bridge. the official word from a couple years ago is “write it yourself but we don’t support automated email” which is several kinds of wrong
so far I’m not hating Tuta but it’s definitely much jankier than Proton. I’m kinda surprised I’ve heard good things about Tuta’a UI compared with Proton — it’s faster, but functionality so far varies from somewhat barebones to mildly broken
no regrets on the switch on my end so far though, but this might come to bite me at some point. I wonder if a dedicated transactional mail provider could alleviate some of the pain? I can DM you a recommendation for a good one if that seems like it’d be handy
Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it’d be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.
But honestly, I feel like there just isn’t a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton’s bridge was a pain to get running properly with
send-emailbecause for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn’t even private. It’s mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I’m starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.
that’s absolutely valid, and I’ve come to effectively the same conclusion: good encrypted email is effectively a different protocol (one which, as of now, is proton-to-proton and tuta-to-tuta only) and should be treated as one. daily unencrypted email is a legacy protocol that can effectively be handled client-side as a different account.
encrypted mail should be federated, possibly with something like activitypub (though I don’t have a good solution for attachments), but every time I float this I get a lot of very angry feedback about how I shouldn’t propose a new email standard without solving spam first, whatever solving spam means. some of the people giving feedback then float solutions that are basically warmed-over hashcash and then I stop listening.
the difference between modern webmail and what activitypub already does is very thin — a lot of it is intent, UI (email’s focused on long messages and potentially long threads), and features like attachments going from best-effort priority to crucial. there’s absolutely room in the world for better email — I just believe that internally, it’ll look closer to e2e ActivityPub with something like Soatok’s federated keyserver concept on top, rather than the shitty half baked shit we do now to make PGP work with email
The orange site is an easy target, but the lack of solidarity in the comments about the NYT Tech Guild strike fills me with dread.
A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.
Said it before, I’ll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out
We live in a world where you can watch billionaires publicly humiliate themselves on the daily and never suffer consequences for it. What’s a little temporary embarrassment compared to that?
I know this shouldn’t be surprising, but I still cannot believe people really bounce questions off LLMs like they’re talking to a real person. https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/47183/are-llms-unlikely-to-be-useful-to-generate-any-scientific-discovery
I have just read this paper: Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli, “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”, submitted on 22 Jan 2024.
It says there is a ground truth ideal function that gives every possible true output/fact to any given input/question, and no matter how you train your model, there is always space for misapproximations coming from missing data to formulate, and the more complex the data, the larger the space for the model to hallucinate.
Then he immediately follows up with:
Then I started to discuss with o1. [ . . . ] It says yes.
Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which o1 says yes [ . . . ]. Then it says [ . . . ].
Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which it says yes too.
I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.
I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.
When I was a lab demonstrator in university, one of the lab exercises was somewhat hard to get right, and our team noticed a huge raft of plagiarism. Not only were multiple students using the exact same code, but it was code that didn’t even work! The course had a policy of instant failure with evidence of plagiarism, which was made clear at the start of the course, and yet this just kept happening. To top it all off, the lab exercises didn’t change from year to year, so the same code kept showing up! This plus a number of other incidents broke me and made me realise I didn’t have it in me to be this kind of educator.
It would be great if this was all a big psyop by big tech to gaslight educators into ending their careers for some kind of mass brainwashing conspiracy, because at least there would be some intention behind it. Instead, we’re poisoning collective consciousness with cyberslop because we think one day the virtual dumbass will reach enlightenment. We don’t actually have a way for that to happen, so we’re just going to metaphorically bash our own heads against rocks in hopes we glitch ourselves into the singularity.
So yeah in short my head would explode too.
Lawns are functional though, they aren’t just a status symbol.
I grew up with a mossy front yard, and I have clover and ferns in my current yards to compete with grasses; there are better options, my dude.
I was going to call them friendless losers who never had company over to play cornhole, have a bonfire, or lounge around on a hot summer day getting doused by a sprinkler while drinking beers because they are repugnant socially awkward cave trolls who are bitter and jealous of people who use their picturesque lawns.
But I would never do that because that is neither civil nor polite.
dang hates this one weird trick you can use to be an asshole in spite of the orange site’s civility rules
also what is that list of activities? did ChatGPT generate this? grass is required to play beep boop normal human games like cornhole now? you’re “having a bonfire” on grass and not in something normal like a firepit that’s safer on rocks or concrete? you’re just laying down on the grass, where the dog shits, slowly getting drunk and incredibly itchy from the grass as a sprinkler douses you?
picturesque lawns
oh maybe that’s it, the only people I’ve ever met with picturesque lawns are wealthy and wealthy people ain’t fucking normal
Or you could just not water it, not fertilize it, not pesticide it and simply run the mower over it whenever the assorted vegetation (which will be mostly grass) exceeds a certain height.
It won’t look “nice neighborhood” nice but it’ll still be fine.
i love when my yard is a giant mud patch rimmed by yellow with an occasional glimmer of green when the crabgrass blooms
the orange site is absolutely populated by the type of shithead who’s proud to be on their HOA’s board
having a lawn is so easy first just hire a gardener to come every week, second live in a place where tap water’s inexpensive
motherfuckers
We’re anti-grass lawns now? Fuck yes. I knew this place had potential.
I’m no landscaper so don’t quiz me on the options, but grass is in the lowest tier option for things to fill outdoor space with.
lawns in addition to other things are fine, but also all the stuff self said applies pretty hard
we’re lucky in ZA that we’re pretty good with getting a lot of this stuff out, which I’m often pretty happy about, but that’s an incident of geography (and personal location)
They can be, but they can also be a social and recreational space.
Your mum’s a social and recreational space, but I don’t see you going to bat for her despite being more useful
My hope is that either more progressive third party options become more viable OR the dems finally understand that being essentially republican is a bad strategy and actually become progressive. I know the reality is that the dems will learn nothing from this as they have clearly learned nothing from 2016.
I’ll bet quite a lot that they’ll learn the exact wrong thing from this and decide that they just weren’t republican enough.
Hope is a mistake 2028!!!
and for 2032:
Overton window, more like overton viewfinder. Point it wherever you like and the median voter will agree everything to its left is radical extremism.
Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.
I’m about to pass out from the cognitive dissonance I’m feeling from seeing andressen and musk talking about privilege
Unfortunately there aren’t enough mind altering, ego-killing drugs out there for either of these dicks to understand and internalise the (common usage of the) words they posted.
Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:
- The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
- I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
- it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.
Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
NB: am not a US voter.
The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the “hope” that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks he’ll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.
I think “any idiot that got lucky under capitalism” is a pretty good description of Musk and his type, to be fair.
The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
such a metal album name
Their grindcore coverband is called Earthcofffin Hopecrusher. Their 2 minute long album with 14 songs was pretty good.
Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in “metal album title or emo album title?”
I feel like it’s slightly more emo for sheer length, “The Earth is Our Coffin” and “Hope is a Mistake” are both awesome metal albums in their own right, but the combination can only be from the genre that brought you “A Detailed and Poetic Physical Threat to the Person who Intentionally Vandalized My 1994 Dodge Intrepid Behind Kate’s Apartment”
Brb mailing this to myself
The thing that really grinds my gears about the escape to Mars plan is that Earth is already habitable (for now) and Mars is not. If we can make an uninhabitable planet habitable, we could just make the already habitable planet stay habitable. There is no scenario where terraforming Mars is easier than, uh, “terraforming” the Earth.
This is like 30-90% of why I’m a mars hater. Not only should we rehabilitate earth first, the fact is we are dehabilitating it instead and are not making any meaningful effort in the other direction.
Seeing a worrying trend of people wanting to cosplay as La Resistance, going dark, hiding from the cops. “Fun” fact, the Gestapo was extremely good at finding, torturing and killing people in the resistance. If people only know you via encrypted messaging, who is gonna raise a ruckus when you’re sent to a camp?
For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn’t a great rolemodel.
(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on ‘traditional rationality’)).
Feynman reminds me of the brujo (one specific man, not brujería in general) from Pirsig’s Lila. Feynman’s safecracking and unorthodox approaches are like the brujo’s routine flaunting of social norms; through routinely doing things the wrong way (sacred clowning), new possible behaviors and modes of social existence are explored. Also, Feynman’s attitudes towards women remind me of that brujo’s tendency to spy on women by looking through their windows into their homes while they were not necessarily dressed, which the brujo’s society did not tolerate.
Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women bitches thing. Miss me with that PUA shit
Considering the history of PUA stuff on lesswrong, Im going to assume this was a pro not a con for them even.
Atlantic writer: “better dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuh”
Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobs’ widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot “GW Bush Did Nothing Wrong” Cohen.
My radicalisation just continues and deepens.
What deplatforming actually happened that this writer is referring to? “We didn’t deplatform anyone. Therefore deplatforming bad” ???
“we’ve tried nothing, and nothing is working!” this is going to be such a common refrain
God and thinking about it even a little bit:
Of course deplatforming works, you fuckface! Why did Elon buy twitter if not to secure a platform? It is surprising you managed to write anything at all, you stupid goblin.
In fact it was quite the blow for them, it cost him at least 44 billion, and massive amounts of attention. (Not as much as diablo 4 however).
Counterpoint: I have never seen anyone that invested into Diablo who wasn’t deeply depressed and hiding from it. The attempt to turn into whatever kind of influencer he is now must have also cost him functional coping mechanisms in addition to the money, reputation, and good will.
Exactly!
what in the absolute fuck
“you shouldn’t do anything that works to resist fascism” is going to be the neoliberal siren call for 4+ years, isn’t it
Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
imagine writing something like this and considering yourself to be the adult in the room. just a big ol politics understander, writing and writing and none of it means a fucking thing. you get up every morning and somehow the dread doesn’t make you collapse back into bed.
I feel like we could solve a lot of the left’s problems in the US by building a time machine and giving 13 year old Aaron Sorkin about 10 lbs of 2024 weed.
It doesn’t even fit with the axioms of market logic! If the platform in question has terrible content moderation, primarily generates revenue from profoundly repulsive people, and was intentionally bought out to be used as the central propaganda organ for a destructive political movement… why wouldn’t you leave?! Dude just doesn’t want to admit he’s too lazy to redo his follows elsewhere
It makes sense if you consider that Twitter’s users are essentially creating the product that is sold to advertisers rather than actually buying a product. Leaving Twitter en masse to try and force a policy change isn’t a boycott, it’s a strike. And we know how neoliberalism feels about organized labor.
Always has been.
Liberals: vote for us, we are diet fascism, we are the lesser evil! We reduce harm!
It’s been the siren call for the last 400 years.
Mass media try not to cozy up to fascists challenge: impossible!
Story from .nl, after Wilders “won” (he got the biggest share of the votes, and quite a lot more than before) the election last year, instantly the amount of horrible posts towards visible muslim people massively intensified (other groups, women, leftwingers and lgbt people (and the various intersections) also got worse replies (which on Dutch twitter always was bad already)). So this advice is so dumb, yes expose your people to more risk and potential burnout. And guess what, as we are a year in and most of Dutch twitter is still on twitter. It doesnt help. (And I cant tell, as switching to bsky has made me realize just how much of a breath of fresh air it is, but to me it feels twitter has gotten worse, but that is more likely explained by me getting better).
E: there is also the ‘they need us more than we need them’ factor. I have not seen rightwing Dutch trolls on bksy yet, Catturd however made the jump (and was promptly banned by everybody).
Fuck it, off-the-cuff prediction: I expect resistance to Silicon Valley is gonna turn violent during Trump’s term.
i see you remain an optimist https://gizmodo.com/the-worst-people-in-the-world-are-making-a-ton-of-money-after-trumps-victory-2000521095
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MOD NOTE: we ask people not to post detailed discussions of how one might conduct terrorism on awful.systems
Ok but how detailed can we get then
Insufficiently!
Recently read Brian Merchant’s latest piece on the upcoming election, and I felt like making a quick-and-dirty prediction:
If Harris wins, I expect there will be some pretty harsh regulation against Silicon Valley. Putting aside everything but simple political pragmatism:
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Elon Musk’s election antics and Trump’s support from tech billoinaires have shown SV holds a significant amount of power over politics - power which will almost certainly prove a constant thorn in Harris’ side. As such, it’d be in her self interest to kneecap the Valley ASAP.
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Public opinion of Silicon Valley has taken a pounding over the years for a variety of reasons, with the AI slop-nami just the latest and most serious grievance the public has against them. Any tech regulation a Harris presidency makes (especially against AI) is gonna enjoy significant public support from day one.
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