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.)
Semi-OT: Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:
This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut’n’pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don’t get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else’s summary, “just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets”.
“Philosophy & Music” are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.
Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
If Penrose followed his trajectory from 30 years ago, he is now a radical anti AGI person but because he thinks human minds work on quantum effects.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
He is busy being 93 fucking years old, lol
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
They probably couldn’t get Bernie.
Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.
Corbyn is, like, famously bad at recognising bad faith fascist signalling, so it doesn’t not make sense.
The only one I’ve met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don’t travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven’t heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that’s worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the “a gig’s a gig” principle.
I did read one of Carlo’s pop sci books back in the day, was a nice read. Iirc he’s like one of the dudes all in on loop quantum gravity. Bet you’d know more about this than I do 😅
Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.
Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:
- No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
- The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.
I opened the site for it and browsed a bit, my first thought being something like “christ, the worst of glamper festivals”, shortly after followed by “god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED”
then, bottom of the “music & performances” page:
Europe’s answer to TED
gnnnnnnngh
god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED
Burning man portrayed famously by Anna Gunn
Cursed bizzaro bonaroo
‘nightmare blunt roration’ as people say. See the greyzone is also present.
as in the tankies? i don’t see blumenthal in there
ah okay, it’s been a while since they were relevant
grayzone, the: low quality disinformation source constantly praising putin and assad while downplaying their warcrimes and amplifying conspiracy theories favourable to these two. not to be confused with greyzone, a wagner group associated telegram channel
Ah my bad, i always mess the spelling of gray/grey up.
weirder thing is that blumenthal (american) uses british spelling, and russians (where british english was taught more commonly when it was relevant for them? i think?) used american spelling
I’m glad that messing it up is at least common.
Search engines also must wonder why I’m so interested in couches and coaches because I know which word I mean, I don’t always know how it is spelled. There prob is a nice mnemonic involving Vance and Waltz I could think off that would help me with that problem however.
OT: made it to Tallinn, now I gotta watch for those delivery robot things!
(found here:) O’Reilly is going to publish a book “Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming”
In the past, they have published some of my favourite computer/programming books… but right now, my respect for them is in free fall.
Early release. Raw and unedited.
Vibe publishing.
gotta make sure to catch that wave before the air goes outta the balloon
I picked up a modern Fortran book from Manning out of curiosity, and hoo boy are they even worse in terms of trend-riding. Not only can you find all the AI content you can handle, there’s a nice fat back catalog full of blockchain integration, smart-contract coding… I guess they can afford that if they expect the majority of their sales to be ebooks.
Alright, I looked up the author and now I want to forget about him immediately.
I saw in passing a claim that investors (or rather gamblers) are fleeing the dollar for safer assets such as “gold and Bitcoin”.
Gold might be true, the ancient relic is up against the dollar, but Bitcoin!? Someone tell me that isn’t true and it’s just coinfondlers trying to hype it, in order to steer stupid capital their way.
deleted by creator
Quick check suggests that Bitcoin is indeed up over the last couple of days, but at time of posting is down YTD. Any dumb money going into Bitcoin to hedge against USD chicanery is replacing the money that came out of it in response to the overall economic disaster still in progress, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a “flight to safety” as much as a “morons returning their still-on-fire hands to the hot stove”
Ed: also all the usual disclaimers about liquidity, stable coins, manipulation, etc. apply just as strongly as they do for any other discussion of the Bitcoin spot price.
Isnt the money in volume in bitcoin quite low reportedly? I figure the exchanges can track that, but not sure if they release that data, which should show if this is real at all
@David Gerard could probably throw the actual numbers and sources at us to back it up. I don’t really have the background to put the numbers in context and have largely trusted his and others’ reporting on the subject, but my understanding is that especially if you consider the volume of actual USD liquidity rather than trusting Tether and other stablecoins to actually be backed then it’s truly dire. Even if you take the numbers at face value, however, I don’t think there’s nearly enough depth in the order book to absorb a meaningful amount of sell pressure at current prices.
when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop
@yellowcake @mountainriver, the cause of the money machine? Are you sure about that?
@yellowcake @mountainriver All it needs is a bigger fool.
“Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’”
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3lne5zqaxyc2c
the associated “date” video is so multi-dimensionally cringe it had me reaching for numpy
I’m sure whoever put money into that venture will see dramatically amazing returns, now there’s a founder that will not take the money and run.
There’s an article about it at 404 media now. A few quotes from the founder guy:
“[…] I think it would be foolish to think that there is a future where ChatGPT doesn’t come in your glasses.”
“We want to make everybody use AI. We are true AI maximalists.”
“Entire school systems will be gone. The entire K-12 education. […]"
And he gets millions of investment… just deranged late-stage bubble stuff. It’s sad to think how much good $5.3 million could do, e.g. for actual education, and instead it’s blasted away for creating such garbage.
yet again, you can bypass LLM “prompt security” with a fanfiction attack
https://hiddenlayer.com/innovation-hub/novel-universal-bypass-for-all-major-llms/
not Pivoting cos (1) the fanfic attack is implicit in building an uncensored compressed text repo, then trying to filter output after the fact (2) it’s an ad for them claiming they can protect against fanfic attacks, and I don’t believe them
I think unrelated to the attack above, but more about prompt hack security, so while back I heard people in tech mention that the solution to all these prompt hack attacks is have a secondary LLM look at the output of the first and prevent bad output that way. Which is another LLM under the trench coat (drink!), but also doesn’t feel like it would secure a thing, it would just require more complex nested prompthacks. I wonder if somebody is just going to eventually generalize how to nest various prompt hacks and just generate a ‘prompthack for a LLM protected by N layers of security LLMs’. Just found the ‘well protect it with another AI layer’ to sound a bit naive, and I was a bit disappointed in the people saying this, who used to be more genAI skeptical (but money).
Now I’m wondering if an infinite sequence of nested LLMs could achieve AGI. Probably not.
Now I wonder if your creation ever halts. Might be a problem.
(thinks)
(thinks)
I get it!
Days since last “novel” prompt injection attack that I first saw on social media months and months ago: zero
Show HN: AI Paying with Bitcoin and Lightning – A Working Demo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770953
@o7___o7 @BlueMonday1984 hey cool they made something that absolutely nobody wants or will ever use
A service that gives a bullshit engine unsupervised access to the irreversible-transaction machine? What could possibly go wrong?
Otoh, this does open up the potential for a headline like ‘Chatgpt sanctioned for using stolen cryptocurrency assets.’
ChatGPT finally achieved profitability due to unintended money laundering at unprecedented scale.
Via Tante on bsky:
"“Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs”
People would rather buy older processors that aren’t that much less powerful but way cheaper. The “AI” benefits obviously aren’t worth paying for.
https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-admits-what-we-all-knew-no-one-is-buying-ai-pcs/"
My 2022 iPhone SE has the “neural engine" core. But isn’t supported for Apple Intelligence.
And that’s a phone and OS and CPU produced by the same company.
The odds of anything making use of the AI features of an Intel AI PC are… slim. Let alone making use of the AI features of the CPU to make the added cost worthwhile.
haha I was just about to post this after seeing it too
must be a great feather to add into the cap along with all the recent silicon issues
You know what they say. Great minds repost Tante.
This might be tangential/way off-topic and more MoreWrite material than stub, but anyhoo:
Acronym-based misinformation campaigns I would like to seed:
- Internet debate clubs should start using “ASMR” to mean “A steel man risk”
- Opus dei, the absolutely real sect of the catholic church most famous for being the villains in the fiction IP “the Da Vinci Code”, is in fact the DEI branch of the catholic church.
- The company KFC has been commissioned by the Chinese Government to use FLG in its marketing, standing for “finger licking good” to drop Fa Lun Gong in search rankings for FLG.
If I think of more I’ll post them.
LMFAO, best known for “Party Rock Anthem”, is actually a failed leftist yodaist sect, standing for the warning “Leopards, my face, ate off”
took me 3 tries to read “yodaist” correctly (brain kept going s/d/g/ which, well…)
I thought of the old sneerclub/ssc poster (def not a regular on the former, while a former regular on the latter) yodatsracist
Personally id not use disinformation as a tool. It is what got us into this mess, and you are also helping the actual goal of the flooding the zone with misinformation tactic. People stop believing in things.
Ok, that’s fair enough. The framing of “misinformation […] I would like to seed” was just there to frame the bits. I don’t really want these bits to take off.
@swlabr @Soyweiser too late
Allright, let me put my ‘warnings for young demonologists’ guidebook to the side. ;).
for the betterment of muddled waters, I suggest a secondary meaning for
opus dei- a WIP codec that the xiph group hasn’t really released yet, because they’re not sure it fully enough mutes maga voices
New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)
The piece falls back into the standard “AI Is Inevitable™” at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.
It bums me out with cryptocurrency/blockchain and now “AI” that people are afraid to commit to calling it bullshit. They always end with “but it could evolve and become revolutionary!” I assume from deep seated FOMO. Journalists especially need more backbone but that’s asking too much from WSJ I know
I think everyone has a deep-seated fear of both slander lawsuits and more importantly of being the guy who called the Internet a passing fad in 1989 or whenever it was. Which seems like a strange attitude to take on to me. Isn’t being quoted for generations some element of the point? If you make a strong claim and are correct then you might be a genius and spare people a lot of harm. If you’re wrong maybe some people miss out on an opportunity but you become a legend.
New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:
I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on “are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”
For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It’s the monkey orgasm button, and they’re just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.
Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.
Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life
“are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”
Somehow more stupid than “If you’re a cop and I ask you if you’re a cop, you gotta tell me!”
"How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”
Its a silicon-based insult to life, it can’t be conscious
Jimmy Concepts casually acknowledges being a useful idiot (or useful not-quite-an-idiot?) for the absolute worst people out there
I don’t recognize this person, know of a good background primer?
I’d also like a primer! That being said, I decided to take 1 minute of psychic DOT and looked at his profile. His Bio:
Perennial outsider. Cancelled by both sides. Pro-America. Anti-Communist. Anti-Fascist. Based af. Liberty First! 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
Chud shit. At best, he’s a Pinker-esque centrist (and therefore a cryptofascist). At worst, a Nazi. My bet is Nazi.
Scrolling through some of the tweets, it’s clear that:
- He is a Zionist, and therefore a fascist
- He is currently in a twitter feud with Cernovich
- He believes in some kind of “Woke Right” that will apparently destroy the GOP if left unchecked (read: un-killed)
- Yarvin wants to adopt him
Not a great guy, it seems!
E: at the very surface of his tweets, he takes every opportunity to denounce fascism. What he is really opposed to is authoritarianism, or more specifically, dictatorships. Normal chud shit.
For more of a primer, see my reaction to op. He has been a long term far right weirdo. One of those people that if you seriously listen to them you will get dumber as a result, he has jumped on all the far right culture war bandwagons so far, he is their ‘scientific/academic social justice explainer’ and he is just full of shit. Wanted to see if some breadtuber had done a video on him (This is the only one I found before I gave up scrolling past all the rightwing bullshit, sorry it is a bit corny) but jesus christ he himself put a lot of stupid vids out there. The problem of the cost of producing bullshit vs debunking it. Did find out he is a ‘new atheist’ who found religion. So 10 for 10 on those people being shit lol.
E: eurgh sometimes I don’t like how much I know about all these weird dorks.
His claim to fame is this bs note how he eventually got too shitty that even some of the people who joined him on this disavowed him. Before his turn to zionism he dropped a lot of antisemitic dogwhistles. (Forgive me for quoting this guy but here is a (source). He also was too crazy for dr phil (source), a guy who shouts ‘ok groomer’ at lgbt people a lot, a proud manspreader (yeah, I hope you get the point he is wierd, like mega weird, but this gets weirded, he had some proud (I think now deleted) manspreader picutre you twitter with one of those sex cult women, NXIVM iirc), a sword guy. A white genocide guy, And this is only what I can recall on the top of my head. The guy is made for the ‘weird’ label, and any disavowal he makes should be reacted at like this
Hot damn it’s like he just kept reaching for the chud high score
Puts the “Oh, the nazis used me!” wankpost tweet in a whole other light
Yep, he’s been operating in obvious bad faith since the conceptual penis days, at least.
Yeah the guy sucks incredibly. Always found it a bit glaring that there was no rationalwiki page on him specifically. But I have long ago decided that I will not start to help maintain a wiki on all these people (I already have an unhealthy focus on this stuff, that would just cross the line), or I would have helped out.
Ugh, what a piece of shit.
even some of the people who joined him on this disavowed him
Normal fascist shit.
Before his turn to zionism he dropped a lot of antisemitic dogwhistles.
For a Christian nationalist, zionism is an antisemitic dogwhistle
He also was too crazy for dr phil (source)
He’s probably malding over the fact that he doesn’t have Ben Shapiro’s career.
Yeah you are right on the zionism stuff, see also ‘judeo-christian values’ and how a lot of Jewish people hate it when people say that. I meant it more as a ‘before the whole gaza invasion/genocide’ thing. To show this anti-Semitic shit (in which I include his zionism) is a pattern, im not saying he had a ‘come to Jesus moment’ and suddenly repented his shit ways.
Normal fascist shit.
Indeed. He just went too mask off. Ironically in a way as he basically is doing that now re the (imaginary) people he says are further right than him.
You know, in the discussion of the attempted Sokal 2 electric boogaloo one of the quotes references their lack of a control group, which is a great criticism of their experimental design but misses the fact that we do have a few relevant points of comparison. Jan Hendrick Schoen, for example, nearly made it all the way to a Nobel Prize by faking data about superconductors.
Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the “residential proxy” services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.
Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I’m dropping it here:
I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.
Semi-OT: A coalition of record corps is trying to sue the Internet Archive out of existence
