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)
New piece from Brian Merchant: Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.
Pulling out a specific paragraph here (bolding mine):
I was glad to see some in the press recognizing this, which shows something of a sea change is underfoot; outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and even Inc. Magazine all published pieces sympathizing with the longshoremen besieged by automation—and advised workers worried about AI to pay attention. “Dockworkers are waging a battle against automation,” the CNN headline noted, “The rest of us may want to take notes.” That feeling that many more jobs might be vulnerable to automation by AI is perhaps opening up new pathways to solidarity, new alliances.
To add my thoughts, those feelings likely aren’t just that many more jobs are at risk than people thought, but that AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit), and leaving the dangerous/boring jobs mostly untouched - effectively the exact opposite of the future the general public wants AI to bring them.
@BlueMonday1984 Yeah, I don’t get it. If you want to be a “hacktivist”, why not go after one of the MILLIONS of organizations making the planet a worse place?
Not a sneer, but I saw an article that was basically an extremely goddamn long list of forum recommendations and it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
That’s awesome. Lemmy is great, but old-school forums are just something else.
For a burst of nostalgia for at least some of you nerds (lovingly), let me add forums.spacebattles.com to the list
If you mention SpaceBattles we also need to add Sufficient Velocity for completeness’s sake.
There’s another one that focuses mostly on erotic fiction but since that’s not really my bag I’ve forgotten what it’s called. And I think it’s not as big as SB and SV anyway since that user base is mostly on AO3 these days.
@BlueMonday1984 whoever this dipshit is needs to fucking stop
Earlier today, the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack, which has now been claimed by the BlackMeta hacktivist group, who says they will be conducting additional attacks.
Hacktivist group? The fuck can you claim to be an activist for if your target is the Internet Archive?
Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).
Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:
The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.
I just… don’t have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we’ll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text “work” for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).
I hope some people watch this closely, I’m sure there’s going to be some gold in this mess.
you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).
we’re pretty receptive to requests for explanations of terms here, just fyi! I imagine if it begins to overwhelm commenting, a guide will be created. Unfortunately there is something of an arms race between industry buzzword generation and good sense, and we are on the side of good sense.
Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed)
first impression: your post is entirely on topic, welcome to the stubsack
techtakes is a sister sub to sneerclub (also on this instance, previously on reddit) and that one has a bit of an explanation. generally any (classy) sneerful critique of bullshit and wankery goes, modulo making space for chuds/nazis/debatelords/etc (those get shown the exit)
The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.
Wikipedia’s mod team definitely haven’t realised it yet, but this part is pretty much a de facto ban on using AI. AI is incapable of producing output that would be acceptable for a Wikipedia article - in basically every instance, its getting nuked.
lol i assure you that fidelitously translates to “kill it with fire”
Yeah, that sounds like text which somebody quickly typed up for the sake of having something.
it is impossible for a Wikipedia editor to write a sentence on Wikipedia procedure without completely tracing the fractal space of caveats.
I’d like to believe some of them have, but it’s easier or more productive to keep giving the benefit of the doubt (or at at least pretend to) than argue the point.
Welcome to the club. They say a shared suffering is only half the suffering.
This was discussed in last week’s Stubsack, but I don’t think we mind talking about talking the same thing twice. I, for one, do not look forward to browsing Wikipedia exclusively through pre-2024 archived versions, so I hope (with some pessimism) their disapponintingly milquetoast stance works out.
Reading a bit of the old Reddit sneerclub can help understand some of the Awful vernacular, but otherwise it’s as much of a lurkmoar as any other online circlejerk. The old guard keep referencing cringe techbros and TESCREALs I’ve never heard of while I still can’t remember which Scott A we’re talking about in which thread.
oh you did better than I did
5 internet cookies to you
Scott Computers is married and a father but still writes like an incel and fundamentally can’t believe that anyone interested in computer science or physics might think in a different way than he does. Dilbert Scott is an incredibly divorced man. Scott Adderall is the leader of the beige tribe.
Scott Adderall
You Give Adderall A Bad Name
shit wasn’t there another one
Now in 404media.
Online art school Schoolism publicly sneers at AI art, gets standing ovation
And now, a quick sidenote:
This is gut instinct, but I’m starting to get the feeling this AI bubble’s gonna destroy the concept of artificial intelligence as we know it.
Mainly because of the slop-nami and the AI industry’s repeated failures to solve hallucinations - both of those, I feel, have built an image of AI as inherently incapable of humanlike intelligence/creativity (let alone Superintelligencetm), no matter how many server farms you build or oceans of water you boil.
Additionally, I suspect that working on/with AI, or supporting it in any capacity, is becoming increasingly viewed as a major red flag - a “tech asshole signifier” to quote Baldur Bjarnason for the bajillionth time.
For a specific example, the major controversy that swirled around “Scooby Doo, Where Are You? In… SPRINGTRAPPED!” over its use of AI voices would be my pick.
Eagan Tilghman, the man behind the
slaughteranimation, may have been a random indie animator, who made Springtrapped on a shoestring budget and with zero intention of making even a cent off it, but all those mitigating circumstances didn’t save the poor bastard from getting raked over the coals anyway. If that isn’t a bad sign for the future of AI as a concept, I don’t know what is.I think a couple of people noted it at the start, but this is truly a paradigm shift.
We’ve had so many science fiction stories, works, derivatives, musing about AI in so many ways, what if it were malevolent, what if it rebelled, what if it took all jobs… But I don’t think our collective consciousness was aware of the “what if it was just utterly stupid and incompetent” possibility.
Alan Moore wrote a comic book story about AI about 10 years ago that parodied rationalist ideas about AI and it still holds up pretty well. Sadly the whole thing isn’t behind that link - I saw it on Twitter and can’t find it now.
I don’t think our collective consciousness was aware of the “what if it was just utterly stupid and incompetent” possibility.
Its a possibility which doesn’t make for good sci-fi (unless you’re writing an outright dystopia (e.g. Paranoia)), so sci-fi writers were unlikely to touch it.
The tech industry had enjoyed a lengthy period of unvarnished success and conformist press up to this point, so Joe Public probably wasn’t gonna entertain the idea that this shiny new tech could drop the ball until they saw something like the glue pizza sprawl.
And the tech press isn’t gonna push back against AI, for obvious reasons.
So, I’m not shocked this revelation completely blindsided the public.
I think a couple of people noted it at the start, but this is truly a paradigm shift.
Yeah, this is very much a paradigm shift - I don’t know how wide-ranging the consequences will be, but I expect we’re in for one hell of a ride.
Paranoia is the only one I can think of that’s actually pretty well on the money because the dystopian elements come from the fact that the wildly incompetent friend computer has been given total power despite everyone on some level knowing that fact, even if they can’t admit it (anymore) without being terminated. The secret societies all think they can work the situation to their advantage and it provides a convenient scapegoat for terrible things they probably want to do anyways.
Many thanks to @blakestacey and @YourNetworkIsHaunted for your guidance with the NSF grant situation. I’ve sent an analysis of the two weird reviews to our project manager and we have a list of personnel to escalate with if we can’t get any traction at that level. Fingers crossed that we can be the pebble that gets an avalanche rolling. I’d really rather not become a character in this story (it’s much more fun to hurl rotten fruit with the rest of the groundlings), but what else can we do when the bullshit comes and finds us in real life, eh?
It WAS fun to reference Emily Bender and On Bullshit in the references of a serious work document, though.
Edit: So…the email server says that all the messages are bouncing back. DKIM failure?
Edit2: Yep, you’re right, our company email provider coincidentally fell over. When it rains, it pours (lol).
I’d really rather not become a character in this story
Good luck. In my experience you can’t speak up about stuff like this without putting yourself out there to some degree. Stay strong.
Regarding the email bounceback, could you perhaps try sending an email from another address (with a different host) to the same destination to confirm it’s not just your “sending” server?
The bounceback should have info in it on the cause, and DKIM issues should result in a complaint response from the denying recipient server.
Just something I found in the wild (r/machine learning): Please point me in the right direction for further exploring my line of thinking in AI alignment
I’m not a researcher or working in AI or anything, but …
you don’t say
Alignment? Well, of course it depends on your organization’s style guide but if you’re using TensorFlow or PyTorch in Python, I recommend following PEP-8, which specifies four spaces per indent level and…
Wait, you’re not working in AI the what are you even asking for?
the mozilla PR campaign to convince everyone that advertising is the lifeblood of commerce and that this is perfectly fine and good (and that everyone should just accept their viewpoint) continues
We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it
try, you say? and what’s your plan for when you fail, but you’ve lost all your values in service of the attempt?
For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.
are you fucking kidding me? “we can only be who we are if we maybe sorta listen to you while we keep doing what we wanted to do”? seriously?
How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.
How do we ensure that traffic safety is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? A big part of the answer is drunk driving.
What a pisstake. Shit I don’t want to use palemoon, are there any other browsers???
How do we prevent huge segments of the world from being priced out of access through paywalls?
Based Mozilla. Abolish landlords. Obliterate the commodity form. Full luxury gay communism now.
the purestrain corporate non-apology that is “we should have communicated our vision effectively” when your entire community is telling you in no uncertain terms to give up on that vision because it’s a terrible idea nobody wants
“it’s a failure in our messaging that we didn’t tell you about the thing you’d hate in advance. if we were any good we would’ve gotten out ahead of it (and made you think it’s something else)”
and the thing is, that’s probably exactly the lesson they’re going to be learning from this :|
from this article
Amazon asked Chun to dismiss the case in December, saying the FTC had raised no evidence of harm to consumers.
ah yes, the company that’s massively monopolized nearly all markets, destroyed choice, constantly ships bad products (whose existence is incentivised by programs of its own devising), and that has directly invested in enhanced price exploitation technologies? that one? yeah, totes no harm to consumers there
Nobody likes Bryan Johnson’s breakfast at the Network School
A cafe run by immortality-obsessed multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson is reportedly struggling to attract customers with students at the crypto-funded Network School in Singapore preferring the hotel’s breakfast buffet over “bunny food.”
I want a menu!
What do you think is the venn diagram of “people who go to The Network School” and “men who believe in the meat-only diet”? I imagine there’s a lot of crossover
I did not expect to be tricked into reading about the nighttime erections of the man with the most severe midlife crisis in the world.
he has 80% fewer gray hairs, representing a “31-year age reversal”
According to Wikipedia this guy is 47. Sorry about your hair as a teenager I guess? I hope the early graying didn’t lead to any long term self-esteem issues.
Alternatively, he only had 5 gray hairs to begin with I guess? I’m more concerned about the fact that he’s apparently taking time to set a timer whenever he gets hard at night. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but I’m pretty sure you’re doing it wrong if you’re taking time out of the experience to collect those metrics.
If he collects enough metrics, he could make a horrendously cursed blogpost out of it like Aella
The Network School offers Johnson’s healthy food and a fitness program called the Blueprint Protocol. He claims that after three years of following his blueprint the duration of his night-time erections totals 179 minutes, “better than the average 18-year-old”
Yeah, this is a very normal diet that’s advertising itself in very normal ways.
what is the utility of 179 minutes of night-time erections
as a warning to others
my first thought reading this was that you meant it could be a deterrent to burglars. then I imagined a pair of increasingly nervous burglars timing his erections and freaking out as it hit 179 minutes. “we gotta bail man, that’s longer than the average 18 year old”
I’m trying to imagine the kind of wacky gross VR body tracking setup you’d need to measure that metric while asleep and all I’m coming up with is mutilated Powerglove
that’s because you’re discounting
quantified dating, and the scorecard he gives partners to fill out
When I was adjusting to a high fiber diet for medical reasons I couldn’t figure out why I was so incredibly hungry despite eating enough.
Then I realized “huh, I haven’t had any fat at all for the past week” and went and made myself four slices of buttery toast and they were so tasty.
Someone shared this website with me at work and now I am sharing the horror with you all: https://www.syntheticusers.com/
Synthetic Users uses the power of LLMs to generate users that have very high Synthetic Organic Parity. We start by generating a personality profile for each user, very much like a reptilian brain around which we reconstruct its personality. It’s a reconstruction because we are relying on the billions of parameters that LLMs have at their disposal.
They could’ve worded this so many other ways
But I suppose creepyness is a selling point these days
they put bullshit inside my bullshit industry for generating bullshit??? the investors are delighted!
Reduce your time-to-insight
I do not think that word means what they think it means.
the only positive is that their carousel pitch is at least honest about the desire
and that list of companies who’ve supposedly used it is telling, I guess
the rest of this….oh dear god
In other news, Hindenburg Research just put out a truly damning report on Roblox, aptly titled “Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids”, and the markets have responded.
TIL Roblox is listed on the fucking stock market.
And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?
Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to “optimize your workout with every rep” or some such nonsense.
I tried to remember the name of it by googling “AI exercise equipment” and despite the slick branding (it’s called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think it’s awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days I’m imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone else’s in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.
(it’s called Tonal btw)
Oh no this will make Luke-Jr so mad.
Context, Luke-Jr is an early Bitcoin adopter, literal Florida man, and all-around kook. His wikipedia user page used to be a work of art with an ordered list of his obsessions[1], starting with sedevacantism and including Tonal, an early attempt to promote hexadecimal. Here’s a long page on the old Bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tonal_Bitcoin. Sadly it never caught on, people don’t want to say “bong bitcoin” apparently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Luke-Jr&oldid=593942679
including Tonal, an early attempt to promote hexadecimal
I am so happy I’ve seen this, it’s so bad.
I will now forever pronounce $2^{16}$ as bong.
I’m vaguely remembering this and not sure where to look for confirmation, but wasn’t Luke-Jr the bitcoin maintainer who put his foot down and blocked a design change that would’ve made bitcoin much more efficient because it would have made it inconvenient for him to run a full node on a slow Florida residential cable internet connection?
people don’t want to say “bong bitcoin” apparently.
that’s weird, I’ve known so many guys whose whole personality is bong bitcoin
he also got verry angy when bitcoin ordinals were a thing for like two months
he used to distribute a Bitcoin client that censored addresses belonging to an early gambling service, people were mad
he’s fractally weird
the lack of self-awareness is definitely something
Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj
translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong
