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 Blood In The Machine: The “AI jobs apocalypse” is for the bosses
I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:
It doesn’t even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isn’t plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldn’t do.
Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/
Some quality sneers in Extropic’s latest presentation about their thermodynamics hardware. My favorite part was the Founder’s mission slide “e/acc maximizes the watts per civilization while Extropic maximizes intelligence per watt”.
I’m not going to watch more than a few seconds but I enjoyed how awkward Beff Jezos is coming across.
is Extropic now claiming to have actually done anything?
Apparently they are going to ship their development kits sometime later this year. He still sounds confusing AF to me and my BS indicator is going off all the time. He also makes incorrect statements (around 9 minutes in) such as
Neural nets came from energy-based models
which makes 0 sense historically. According to Wikipedia, EBMs were first introduced in 2003.
Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.
Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.
Opening up the sack with your new favourite uwu news influencer giving a quick shout-out to our old pals, the NRx. Hoped that we wouldn’t get here, but here we are, regardless.
I had so hoped that the rise of Trump (and his fall due to Biden) on the back of the more numerous and popular seeming Alt-Right had been the end of all this. Showing that NRx was a sort of weaker evolutionary dead end so to speak. But sadly no.
I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing. Kind of a clash between style and topic there, but hey whatever gets the word out.
I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing.
It’s probably a thing where if you start thinking about it, it’s always been around, but we’ve just never had the right vocabulary to describe it.
I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing.
Same, and also I’m still trying to process that “uwu” breached out of furry spaces and became a widely understood term. (Although I’m not entirely sure what way it took, it’s also possible that it breached out of anime-related communities. Maybe some day cyber-archeologists can figure this out.)
I hate I’m so terminally online I found out about the rumor that Musk and Stephen Miller’s wife are bumping uglies through a horrorfic parody account
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/114593332907413196
Midnight Pals is pretty great.
Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:
- The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
- AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search
New artcle from Brian Merchant: An ‘always on’ OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen
Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Devicetm, I think Merchant’s correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Devicetm and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.
headlines of Devicetm wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brian’s noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Devicetm as an open show of contempt for others, and between AI’s public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valley’s reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Devicetm wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.
Part of me wonders if this is even supposed to be a profitable hardware product or if they’re sufficiently hard-up for training data that “put always-on microphones in as many pockets as possible” seems like a good strategy.
It’s not, both because it’s kinda evil and because it’s definitely stupid, but I can see it being used to solve the data problem more quickly than I can see anyone think this is actually a good or useful product to create.
When I get a minute, I intend to do a back of the napkin calc to figure out how many words 100 million of these things would hear on an average day.
100 million sounds like a target that was naively pooped out by some other requirement, like “How much training data do we need to scale to GPT-5 before the money runs out, assuming the dumbest interpolation imaginable?”
What does solving the data problem supposed to look like exactly? A somewhat higher score in their already incredibly suspect benchmarks?
The data part of the whole hyperscaling thing seems predicated on the belief that the map will magically become the territory if only you map hard enough.
I fully agree, but as data availability is one of the primary limits that hyperscaling is running up against I can see the true believers looking for additional sources, particularly sources that aren’t available to their competitors. Getting a new device in people’s pockets with a microphone and an internet link would be one such advantage, and (assuming you believe the hyperscaling bullshit) would let OpenAI rebuild some kind of moat to keep themselves ahead of the competition.
I don’t know, though. Especially after the failure of at least 2 extant versions of the AI companion product I just can’t imagine anyone honestly believing there’s enough of a market for this to justify even the most ludicrously optimistic estimate of the cost of bringing it to market. It’s either a data thing or a straight-up con to try and retake the front page for another few news cycles. Even the AI bros can’t be dumb enough for it to be a legit effort.
New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:
What’s missing from the now ubiquitous “LLMs are good for code” is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code that’s realistically possible
LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev
Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:
Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear he’s a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feed’s just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.
@BlueMonday1984 lol @ “I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way”
Also why do you even put a React Dev on that task 🤡:(
“I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way
You could show me this without any context whatsoever and my first thought would’ve been “did a React dev say that”
It’s not healthy for me to have my biases confirmed like this.
But it lets you adjust your priors so pleasantly!
It also means you can update your priors about your own
biasespredictive instincts being good, allowing you to be more confident in literally everything you’ve ever believed or thought about for half a second. Superpredictors unite!
Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.
this one is a joke, i think. he is definitely on the fashy bullshit though
Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:
New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them
Reminds me something F.D. Signifier said on a music podcast.
Progressives are losing the cultural war in a lot of ways, but they’ll always need us because we’re the ones pushing the boundaries on art, and it turns out, no matter how ghoulish people want to act, everyone has genuine love of fucking awesome art. The true loss condition is being captured by the tools of the master.
this is ridiculously good
In a world that chases status, be prestigious
I’ll keep that in mind…
Rekindled a desire to maybe try my own blog ^^.
I think beyond “Keeping up appearances” it’s also the stereotype of fascists—and by extension LLM lovers—having trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.
Im sure this is fine https://infosec.exchange/@paco/114509218709929701
"Paco Hope #resist @[email protected]
OMG. #Microsoft #Copilot bypasses #Sharepoint #security so you don’t have to!
“CoPilot gets privileged access to SharePoint so it can index documents, but unlike the regular search feature, it doesn’t know about or respect any of the access controls you might have set up. You can get CoPilot to just dump out the contents of sensitive documents that it can see, with the bonus feature* that your access won’t show up in audit logs.”
The S in CoPilot stands for Security! https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/remembering-f00fs-of-old/"
OT: Welp. Think interview went well. Just waiting for them to check references (oh god) and I should know whats what by Monday.
Good luck! I’m rooting for you.
