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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)
New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at ‘America’s Most Powerful’
The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the “Iraqi Most Wanted” playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the “art” decks do - the “merch” decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.
Comrade Workwear did the same: https://www.shadowbannedmagazine.com/ceosmostwanted/
Even without home/office addresses, NYPD seized the cards: https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=41adb4be5bcdf57e710e21504&id=24bc152009
New piece from Tante: These are not the same, arguing that the infrastrucure left after AI bubble’s burst will leave infrastructure which will be actively damaging to a democratic society.
Its not the first piece I’ve seen about the bubble’s potential aftermath (that goes to MAIHT3K), but it does give another perspective on it.
I mean, what has crypto left over? All of that is only useful for sanctions busting and money laundering
Donald Trump, so yeah
And Bukele, two best buds and their gilded fascism
I can see tante’s point. Besides AI datacenters being used for surveillance tech, I can also see LLM tech itself used nefariously post-bubble. Maybe maintaining an up-to-date LLM as a product is not viable, but a custom-trained model to snipe public online discourse around a crucial election could remain affordable for a wealthy fascist.
On the bright side, I am hoping for a brief period of powerful yet affordable gaming PCs thanks to retrofitted, slightly singed Blackwells.
New piece from Ed Zitron - a 44-minute read about OpenAI’s threat to the entire tech industry
Link to vote Ed for eternal podcast president:
eek
If OpenAI’s funding round with Softbank goes as planned, it’ll raise the equivalent of the entire GDP of Estonia — a fairly wealthy country itself, and one that’s also a member of Nato and the European Union. That alone should give you a sense of the truly insane scale of this.
so not only saltman is capable of burning enough power to be comparable to middle-sized euro country, he can also burn small euro country gdp
they are not serious people. damn if i only started grifting instead of getting socially useful skillset
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
that “immersion” line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)
nice to see it hasn’t at least gotten worse
it’s gotten worse
I got a spam message with a phishing link… Via Github? Seriously? Are we really doing this?
Not a completely unusual comment… From the URL it was very obvious that this was a phishing link though. Curiosity got the better of me. The site shows you a “cloudflare” captcha. OK, let’s click the checkbox. The usual loading animation starts, then this is shown:
Yeah ok, right…
I’m actually a bit impressed with this, these captchas are so common, I didn’t even really think about checking the box. But of course, that interaction means the browser will allow the site to add something to your clipboard.
But like… Why distribute it via Github? I cannot think of a worse audience to try and con into “paste something random into your windows console”. Am I just being naive here? Is this something common I somehow never experienced before?
Github only catches strays, it’s much more widely deployed
Yeah, that this happens elsewhere I have no doubt, I just never noticed on GH before.
Yeah that copy paste commands that give control over your pc shit is pretty nasty. Also over a year old at least. So it isnt specifically an attack at vibe coders. Not sure what the initial targets were but these usually try to target people not that knowledgeable in computer matters so lol that this now includes vibe coders.
Ah, I had been wondering if this is new, or I had just never noticed it. So it’s the latter, good to know.
It’s kind of genius as well… A single comment will get the attention of potentially dozens of people, sent to a valid email address without having to guess/buy lists, and there’s an air of “trust” around the (completely legit) mail you then get from github, containing the link.
I don’t know how new it is, but it first dropped on my radar about a year ago due to listening to the Risky Business cybersecurity podcast, not to be confused with the recent (and baffingly named (*)) podcast called ‘Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova’ (**) by dweeb Nate Silver. So I don’t know how long it was going on the wild, and im talking about the windows button + r attack method and not the github comments, no idea how long they used comments as a vector. And yes that part is also good, like the addition of trust of github + quite an effective attack is clever. Shouldn’t work on Real Nerds however.
*: The name means that at least one of they didn’t [know|care|google] about the decades old cybersecurity podcast before naming their podcast that is true. Any of those is odd.
**: addition to above, the tagline of the podcast is ‘a weekly podcast about making better decisions’ Look inwards Nate, look inwards.
Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.
Oh god
Although… Do you think VideCodersTM read github issues?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
LessWronger puts in the work and determines that LLMs can’t spacially vizualize for shit, comments are like “well you’re prompting it wrong” (paraphrased) as well as “why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
The article itself is worth reading for some insights in the challenges of using current “AI” (LLMs) to work in the real world.
“why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it’s called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot
e: ok at least op is a machinist
Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn’t correlate with real world usefulness.
benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!
My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.
with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these
The fact this commenter doesn’t mention the absolute fuckton of machining videos on Youtube tells me they’re just talking out of their ass.
(not that forcing those into LLM slop would help but a hypothetical AGI would learn a lot)
Also
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone “in the same boat.”
Dario is delusional. We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
@gerikson I’d like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn’t get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who’s scared of robots.
@cstross @gerikson This doesn’t sound promising: “A growing body of evidence is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/
In each case, existing social and communication-oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.
That’s legitimately chilling. I guess just like quality of art and writing is too hard to quantify against “efficiency” and “productivity” so is quality of care. The slow AIs are literally optimizing humans out of the economy before our eyes and the people who were most afraid of being turned into paperclips are the ones leading the goddamn charge.
amazement at chatbots comes from demographic that did not binge watch how it’s made in middle school
I feel like there was time when nerds who hung out on blogs didn’t automatically believe everything a CEO said.
take us back!
We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
at 1.5 totally-not-drivers per car, we don’t have them there eithe
I’ve got to acknowledge the sheer guts it takes to look at arguably the most predictable consequence of the cyberpunk dystopia you’re building and say “nah that won’t happen because reasons.”
Clearly self-driving teslas just need to mill their path through pedestrians
With the collapse of the US empire and hegemony in progress wonder if they actually did something with this or if it is all another thought experiment.
E: wow that users posts history is something. Drops that article 3 years ago. Silence till some weird comment (directly addressing yud claiming they had some big breakthrough, about the mind state of the zizians of course. And it is all speculation and way too verbose).
I got it from a comment here, apparently some pie in the sky charity needs more money
Ah a food related charity that is important wonder what they did with the millions, ah release papers. That is …
Planning for securing food in a nuclear winter? What a great wheeze. If your advice isn’t any good, nobody can tell until there’s a nuclear winter, and if there is a nuclear winter they won’t exactly be able to ask for their money back because they’ll be too busy dying of radiation sickness.
Remember the apocalypse slop buckets the rightwing grifto sphere kept trying to sell?
I do indeed. A bucket always seemed like pretty poor.protection from the end of the world, even if it was full of purified water and high protein MREs and whatever else. I suppose you could put it on your head and make like Ned Kelly
hey “way too verbose” is a free space
Yes you are right and it wasnt even that bad, the footnote was only half the length of a ‘who build this old roman wall?’ footnote.
you will never guess which company hired oswald mosely’s grandson
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/palantir-boss-interview-keir-starmer-gets-ai
Ok that is it, im changing my mind. All the rationalist genetics stuff is real and true as there is a fascism gene.
If Palantir represents a veritable unknown for the public, so too could its UK chief, the grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of former F1 president Max Mosley.
Ah, yes, noted grandfather and nothing else, Oswald Mosley. Definitely not the founder of British Union of Fascists, please don’t look into that. His son was in the racecar business, isn’t that lovely?
And Max Mosley definitely didn’t share his father’s views
YIL there was a right-wing antisemitic US general called Moseley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Van_Horn_Moseley
Nominative determinism?
JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don’t wanna bypass their paywall
Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […]
This shit os going to drive so many amateur pedo/etc hunters (who already are not the people who are good at being normal) into absolute crazy conspiracy theory land. Esp when they cant get the fake pimps (yeah pimps really, these cops seem to be like the military dude in the intro of ideocracy) arrested or banned.
E: on that note, saw somebody explain that their previous slightly hysterical, ‘facebook is claiming searching for the concentration camps is a search for csam’ was made in error as it was the word ‘mega’ (and another word) which seemed to trigger the warning. And below that people were still making up some crazy palantir is going to get everyone jailed for clicking a csam link conspiracy bullshit. I worry for the sanity of a lot of online people. People are so afraid they are blueanoning themselves
Noted sex pest Andrew Cuomo wants to run for Mayor in New York, and he might actually have a chance given the incumbent Democratic candidate is corruption magnet Eric Adams. Housing is a big issue in New York, so what’s Cuomo’s plan? Well, his plan is to use chat gpt to write his plan.
Angry New York Democrats were using the slogan DREAM meaning Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor. It was then amended to Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor, and amended again to Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.
Update: another acronym.
eric adams should change his platform to “I’m not cuomo”
I dunno, how’s the “I’m not Donald Trump” platform been working out so far?
Well. I don’t want adams to win
I encourage NYC neighbors to spread the idea of deranking. It worked in Portland. We had an exceptionally shitty candidate:
Once touted as the law and order candidate, Gonzalez was the only mayoral candidate cited for breaking the law during the 2024 election cycle.
We pushed to derank him. And the result:
… Gonzalez was the subject of an effort to convince voters not to rank him regardless of the voter’s other preferred candidates. Gonzalez earned 20% of first ranked choices but ultimately finished the election in third place …
Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. You’re doing fine don’t even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: ‘Why are high fertility people always so weird?’ A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
Word of advice to the press: Stop 👏 giving 👏 natalists 👏 free 👏 platforms 👏
Every 3 months! Every 3 months fucking hell. (I know because last time they came in the news I opened a tab with them in it, and their faces was the last I saw before my monitor exploded, like literally suddenly I sat in darkness.
All I’ve learned from the most recent round of publicity is that herself has a new hat. It looks stupid
A new hat let me check almost clicks wait a minute, I can’t afford a new monitor, you are trying to trick me!
Just close your eyes and imagine a mediaeval yokel who has accused her sister’s girlfriend of being a witch so she can take over her turnip patch. No need for a new monitor
don’t want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
It’s a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can’t imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.
I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.
My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.
Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).
Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!
Solidarity from TN
Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don’t forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can’t shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn’t make things worse mentally btw.
It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a “simple” plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.
Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.
I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.
Infamous Dr Who “big name fan” Ian Levine is using generative AI to recreate lost episodes of the show. This got some mainstream press coverage and fans seem miffed.
christ. can’t he go back to disco, he was good at that
I think Ian Levine loves Doctor Who more than he loves disco. That’s the only explanation for Doctor In Distress.
