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.)

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      47 months ago

      I didn’t think today was gonna be a day where I’d read about sounding then breaking glass rods but here we are.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        27 months ago

        it’s an unhinged story he keeps telling on the orange site too, and I don’t think he’s ever answered some of the obvious questions:

        • why is this a story your family tells their kids in apparent graphic detail?
        • you’re still fighting the soviets? you don’t have any more up to date bad guys to point at when people ask you why you’re making murder drones and knife missiles?
        • are you completely sure this happened instead of something normal, like your communist great grandfather making up a story and sticking with it cause he was terrified of the House Unamerican Activities Committee? maybe this one is just me

        maybe this is a cautionary tale about telling your kids cautionary tales

  • David GerardM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    197 months ago

    just delivered a commission on why bitcoin is very like hawk tuah

    this season’s word is: kleptokakistocracy

    • Mii
      link
      fedilink
      English
      57 months ago

      Jfc, when I saw the headline I thought this would be a case of the city being too cheap to hire an actual artist and instead use autoplag, but no. And the guy they commissioned isn’t even some tech-brain LARP’ing as an artist, he has 20+ years of experience and a pretty huge portfolio, which somehow makes this worse on so many levels.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    7
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    EDIT: this probably isn’t him, but I’ll leave it up. the real account appears to be /u/mister_cactus

    Unsure where to put this or if it’s even slightly relevant, but I’ve had some fun looking up the UH shooter guy.

    I think I’ve found both his Reddit account and YouTube channel (it’s been renamed a couple times). Kinda just wanted to see how much I could dig up for the hell of it. Big surprise that he’s completely nuts

    He got raked over the coals for this: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/126vycx/why_scientists_cant_be_trusted/

    https://api.pullpush.io/reddit/search/comment/?author=burntbabylon

    edit: reasoning and more details

    here’s my chain of reasoning to get to the youtube channel:

    • his goodreads review quotes a reddit comment
    • the reddit comment is in a small thread where the OP deleted their account
    • since the thread is small, the OP has probably seen most of the comments
    • the wayback machine shows the author as burntbabylon
    • that user linked to and defended a video from a very small youtube channel and everyone else on /r/collapse thought it was crazy
    • some of the ted kaczynski analysis videos came out right before his goodreads review

    his early channel had some thumbnails made for him by ‘bastizopilled’, an ironic/unironic “bastizo futurist” whose does interviews in a black mask with a gun on him. he leads right into a bunch of other groypers and the guy in the screenshot I posted below. kind of wonder if that ‘black mask with a gun’ aesthetic influenced the clothes he brought to the shooting.

    the channel names he used in 2023:

    • @NickAkritas, Nick Akritas (January)
    • @NicksEssays, Nick’s Essays (January ~20th)
    • @AntiTechCabin, Anti-Tech Cabin (early March)
    • @Cabin_Club, AntiTechCabin
    • @Cabin_Club, Cabin Club (March ~18th)
    • @CabinProductions_, Cabin Productions (June)
    • @Laconian_, Laconian (September)
    • @NicholasLaconian, Laconian (November)

    here’s a big pile of crazy tags he wrote on one of those videos (were people still writing tags in their video descriptions in 2023?):

    unabomber, kaczynski, ted kaczynski, unabomber cabin, kasinski, kazinski, industrial society and and its future, unabomber manifesto, the industrial revolution and its consequences, transhumanism, futurism, anprim, anarchoprimitivism, anarchism, leftism, liberalism, chad haag, nick akritas, gerbert johnson, hamza, anti tech collective, what did ted kaczynski believe, john doyle, hasanabi, self improvement, politics, jreg, philosophy, funny tiktok, kaczynski edit, ted kaczynski edit, zoomer, doomer, A.I. art, artifical intelligence, elon musk, AI art, return to tradition, embrace masculinity, reject modernity, reject modernity embrace masculinity, reject modernity embrace tradition, jReg, Greg Guevara, sam hyde, oversocialized, oversocialization, blackpilled, modernity, the industrial revolution, self improvement


    edit again: holy shit these people all suck. assuming the youtube channel is the shooter, he’s a friend-of-a-friend of this guy:

    and if that’s true, he’d be a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of nick fuentes

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
      link
      fedilink
      English
      8
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Friends don’t let friends OSINT. That said… people have found his twitter (still up), goodreads (deleted), github (still up, already full of troll github issues), linkedin (I guess deleted), an interview about has school games club (deleted), his game development studio which published one iphone game (facebook profile deleted).

      His twitter account links to his linktree, but that only contains some inscrutable emoji rather than any links so hasn’t really been reported:

      💻🤓 - 🥷🏃‍♂️🧘‍♂️🏋️ - 📚🤓 - 🦍🧠 - 🍄🧠 - 🐄👨‍⚖️ - ☯️

      (I’m sure his inevitable groupies will be puzzling over the meaning of cow judge for years to come)

      The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.

      NYTimes also reports a steam account, facebook account, and instagram account (couldn’t find any of these).

      https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/nyregion/uhc-suspect-video-games.html

      Other NYTimes articles are now investigating his health issues (back surgery, etc)

      Edit: Look on reddit.com/r/spinalfusion where they discuss his spinal fusion x-ray and mention his (suspended) reddit account’s name.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        8
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        Friends don’t let friends OSINT

        i can stop any time I want I swear

        The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.

        apparently there was an imposter youtube channel too I missed

        https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/brian-thompson-unitedhealthcare-death-investigation-12-9-24#cm4hp9zyk000m3b6nobdudr15

        not sure what his official instagram is, but I saw a mention of the instagram account @nickakritas_ around the beginning of his channel (assuming it’s his). didn’t appear in the internet archive though.

        also saw these twitter & telegram links to promote his channel, the twitter one was deleted or nuked (I use telegram to talk with friends who have it but the lack of content removal + terrible encryption means I don’t touch unknown telegram links with a 10ft pole, so I have no idea what’s in there):

        I missed a couple videos which survived on the internet archive but I couldn’t make it through 5 seconds of any of them. one of them (“How Humans Are Becoming Dumber”) cites that tech priest guy Gwern Branwen and “Anti-Tech” was gone from the channel name by then. he changed the channel name a lot so maybe he veered away from it being an anti-tech channel?

        edit: channel names were a little wrong, I put them in the parent comment

        • Sailor Sega Saturn
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          Speaking of imposters, there’s a screenshot of a fake manifesto substack post (since deleted) which has been linked a couple times on reddit.

          The only problem is it was first published to substack over four hours after the arrest was reported according to the post’s own json-ld metadata. People be trying to stir things up.

          Amatuers. Can’t even publish the post early and edit it later for that extra bit of plausible deniability.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            97 months ago

            I swear, kids today have no respect for the dedication and craft that go into a proper disinformation campaign. Back in my day half this metadata wasn’t nearly as easy to access without viewing page source and we still put in the effort to try and confuse the four guys who knew where to look.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            7
            edit-2
            7 months ago

            Yeah I really really hate the fanfic manifesto and people getting deep feels about it. Such a neat little narrative that conveniently references every authentic detail people have already dug up. It’s in such bad taste ugh.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        87 months ago

        🌏💧✋🕋🗡🚀🏜☀️🌡🌶💯🚱⏳🌅🌑😡💉😱😈💀💥🌛🌙🐭💥🚶🏻〰🐛️⌛️👳🙏💥😴🛌😳💥🐛💥👊⚔👑

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    6
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    found a new movie plot threat https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158

    funded by open philanthropy, but not only and also got some other biologists onboard. 10 out of 39 authors had open philanthropy funding in the last 5 years so they’re likely EAs. highly speculative as of now and not anywhere close to being made, as in we’ll be dead from global warming before this gets anywhere close from my understanding. also starting materials would be hideously expensive because all of this has to be synthetic and enantiopure, and every technique has to be remade from scratch in unnatural enantiomer form. it even has LW thread by now hxxps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87pTGnHAvqk3FC7Zk/the-dangers-of-mirrored-life

    it hit news https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/a-second-tree-of-life-could-wreak-havoc-scientists-warn.html https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/12/unprecedented-risk-to-life-on-earth-scientists-call-for-halt-on-mirror-life-microbe-research

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
      link
      fedilink
      English
      57 months ago

      Mirror bacteria? Boring! I want an evil twin from the negaverse who looks exactly like me except right hande-- oh heck. What if I’m the mirror twin?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      I read the headline yesterday and thought, “This is 100% fundraising bullshit.”

      This strikes me as being exact same class of thing OpenAI does when they pronounce that their product will murder us all.

      What do we call this? Marketerrorism?

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          1
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          CRITIHYPE, thank you! I couldn’t find the word!

          If I had to guess a motive, it would be to bring mirror biology out of the obscurity of pure research (who funds that anymore?) and to instead plant it firmly into the popular zeitgeist as a “scary thing” that needs to be defended against. This can lead to it becoming a trendy topic, and therefore fundable by grant-awarding agencies.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            17 months ago

            as in, funding for writing ratty screeds? because they specifically want to cut funding to d-proteins and such. this also works for fundraising

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      47 months ago

      I’m definitely out of my depth here, but how exactly does a lefty organism bypass immune responses and still interact with the body? Seems like if it has a way to mess up healthy cells then it should have something that antibodies can connect to, mirrored or not. Not that I’m arguing we shouldn’t be careful about creating novel pathogens, but other than being a more flashy sci-fi premise I’m not really seeing how it’s more dangerous than the right-handed version.

      Also I think this opens up a beautiful world of new scientific naming conventions:

      • Southpaw Paramecium
      • Lefty Naegleria
      • Sinister Influenza
      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        6
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        they way i understand it, because immune system is basically constantly fuzzing all potentially new things, what is important is how antigen looks like on the surface. what it is made from matters less, and whether aminoacids there are l- (natural) or d- (not) it shouldn’t matter that much, antibodies are generated for nonnatural achiral things all the time including things like PEG and chloronitrobenzene. then complement system puts holes in bacterial membrane and that’s it, it’s not survivable for bacterium and does not depend on anything chiral. normally all components are promptly shredded, it’s a good question if that would happen too but, like - this might not matter too hard - there’s a way for immune system to smite this thing

        the potential problem is that peptides made from d-aminoacids are harder to cut via hydrolases and it’s a part of some more involved immune response idk details. there’s plenty of stuff that’s achiral like glycerol, glycine, beta-alanine, TCA components, fatty acids that mirrored bacteria can feed on without problems. some normal bacteria also use d-aminoacids so normal l-aminoacids should be usable for d-protein bacteria. there’s also transaminase that takes d-aminoacids and along with other enzymes it can turn these into l-aminoacids. but even more importantly we’re perhaps 30 years away from making this anywhere close to feasible, it’s all highly speculative. there’s a report if you want to read it https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:cv716pj4036/Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria Feasibility and Risks.pdf

        also look up cost of these things. unnatural aminoacids, especially these with wrong conformation but otherwise normal are expensive. l-tert-leucine is unnatural but can be made in biotechnological process, so it’s cheaper. for example on sigma-aldrich, d-glutamine costs 100x more than l-glutamine, and for sugars it’s even worse because these have more chiral centers

        besides, it’s not really worth it probably? it will take decades and cost more than ftx wiped out. other than making it work just to make it work, all the worthwhile components can be made synthetically, maybe there’s some utility in d-proteins, more likely d-peptides, tiny amounts of these can be made by SPPS (for screening) and larger in normal chemical synthesis (for use). these might be slightly useful if slowed down degradation of peptides could be exploited in some kind of pharmaceutical, but do you know how we can make it work in other way? don’t put amide bonds there in the first place and just make a small molecule pharmaceutical like we can do (as in, organic chemists)

        another part of the concern is that these things could transform organic carbon in form unusable to other organisms. but nature finds a way, and outside of fires etc, there are bacteria that feed on nylon and PET, so i think this situation won’t last long

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    11
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Adam Christopher comments on a story in Publishers Weekly.

    Says the CEO of HarperCollins on AI:

    “One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author.”

    Please, just make it stop, somebody.

    Robert Evans adds,

    there’s a pretty good short story idea in some publisher offering an AI facsimile of Harlan Ellison that then tortures its readers to death

    Kevin Kruse observes,

    I guess this means that HarperCollins is getting out of the business of publishing actual books by actual people, because no one worth a damn is ever going to sign a contract to publish with an outfit with this much fucking contempt for its authors.

  • flavia
    link
    fedilink
    English
    11
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Someone made a… thing where you run all your mastodon toots through a prompt before posting them and thought it would be a great idea to let us lemmy users know. Comes with ugly autoplag image on the github. The names of the “bots” are hilarious: “ennui” for low-effort posts; I don’t think that word means what they think it means. “Legion” for automatic spam posts. Cause that’s not a dogwhistle or anything.

    • flavia
      link
      fedilink
      English
      97 months ago

      So the code doesn’t make use of any LLM, it’s just incredibly basic shit like string.toUpper(). It’s curious how much the author wants to make it seem like it does. Even one guy on lemmy asks

      Is it so that you don’t have to read replies?

      It will be added

      Aargh, what’s the point??

      • db0
        link
        fedilink
        English
        77 months ago

        Yeah, I’m struggling to understand the fucking purpose here o.O. It feels like someone desperately trying to make anything for their portfolio or smt

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      97 months ago

      “Legion” for automatic spam posts. Cause that’s not a dogwhistle or anything.

      Their name is Legion, for there are too fucking many.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    147 months ago

    reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it

    miscounting "r"s in "strawberry"

    • David GerardM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      24
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      The whole internet loves CEO Murderer, a handsome murderer that targets CEOs! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the murderer is into AI

  • @[email protected]OP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    8
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Baldur Bjarnason just put out his interim notes on tech

    Reading through his notes, I get the feeling my off-the-cuff predictions from two months ago are very likely to come true - much more likely than I had anticipated. I’m gonna focus on Predictions 2 and 3:

    1. A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates

    Whether or not tech crashes like I expect, AI’s likely did some serious damage to the notion of “tech/STEM = high-paying job” as it sent the job industry into turmoil (with junior positions being particularly affected).

    1. Tech/STEM’s Public Image Changes - For The Worse

    Whilst my original post focused on AI turning the public against the tech industry, one thing I didn’t account for was the tech industry directly aligning itself with Trump. As such, tech/STEM’s public image is now firmly intertwined with Trump’s public image - with predictable results.