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)
PC Gamer put out a pro-AI piece recently - unsurprisingly, Twitter tore it apart pretty publicly:
I could only find one positive response in the replies, and that one is getting torn to shreds as well:
I did also find a quote-tweet calling the current AI bubble an “anti-art period of time”, which has been doing pretty damn well:
Against my better judgment, I’m whipping out another sidenote:
With the general flood of AI slop on the Internet (a slop-nami as I’ve taken to calling it), and the quasi-realistic style most of it takes, I expect we’re gonna see photorealistic art/visuals take a major decline in popularity/cultural cachet, with an attendant boom in abstract/surreal/stylised visuals
On the popularity front, any artist producing something photorealistic will struggle to avoid blending in with the slop-nami, whilst more overtly stylised pieces stand out all the more starkly.
On the “cultural cachet” front, I can see photorealistic visuals becoming seen as a form of “techno-kitsch” - a form of “anti-art” which suggests a lack of artistic vision/direction on its creators’ part, if not a total lack of artistic merit.
Why is it always bioshock girl 😭
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?
Training my militia of revolutionary freedom fighters to attack homeless shelters, soup kitchens, nature preserves, libraries, and children’s playgrounds.
conservative who supports homeless shelters, soup kitchens, nature preserves, libraries, and children’s playgrounds for accelerationist reasons
The average orange site hacktivist libertarian. They are just mad about the hypocrisy you see.
(This post was sponsored by the hn guy who was mad at the tech guy who stopped doing startups as he had not given back all the money. Btw the actual communications of sn_blackmeta seem quite weird, talking about the global zionists the devil and having a certain ‘im 16 and this is deep and edgy quality’. For ex see this).
Maybe one day self-righteous computer crackers will get over the V for Vendetta, apocalypse cult, latin chanting, hooded robes, “we are anonymoos we are a legionella we do not frogger” aesthetic and I can stop cringing about it.
Fucking goofy ahh KKK shit.
You can say ass here
Yes but I like the “ahh”, it makes me imagine people doing a random little moan in the middle of the sentence.
I feel like the Internet Archive is a prime target for techfashy groups. Both for the amount of culture you can destroy, and because backed up webpages often make people with an ego the size of the sun look stupid.
Also, I can’t remember but didn’t Yudkowsky or someone else pretty plainly admit to taking a bunch of money during the FTX scandal? I swear he let slip that the funds were mostly dried up. I don’t think it was ever deleted, but that’s the sort of thing you might want to delete and could get really angry about being backed up in the Internet Archive. I think Siskind has edited a couple articles until all the fashy points were rounded off and that could fall in a similar boat. Maybe not him specifically, but there’s content like that that people would rather not be remembered and the Internet Archive falling apart would be good news to them.
Also (again), it scares me a little that their servers are on public tours. Like it’d take one crazy person to do serious damage to it. I don’t know but I’m hoping their >100PB of storage is including backups, even if it’s not 3-2-1. I’m only mildly paranoid about it lol.
it scares me a little that their servers are on public tours
frankly, the entire design of IA is more than a bit fucking stupid for the purpose it serves. “oh hey here’s the whole IA, right in this building over here” is just galaxybrained derpery
physical goods I can understand central-point (or some centralisation) in archive management, but ffs we’re multiple decades into knowing how to build things differently
(stance contextualisation: while I’m glad that the IA exists, I’m not an unreserved stan of it. there are a couple other notable concerns with it, alongside the thing I just mentioned)
@BlueMonday1984 whoever this dipshit is needs to fucking stop
Any mild pushback to the claims of LLM companies sure bring out the promptfondlers on lobste.rs
https://lobste.rs/s/qcppwf/llms_don_t_do_formal_reasoning_is_huge
Plenty of agreement, but also a lot of “what is reasoning, really” and “humans are dumb too, so it’s not so surprisingly GenAIs are too!”. This is sure a solid foundation for multi-billion startups, yes sirree.
it’s kind of comforting that the current attitude towards generative AI in some tech spaces is “of course it can’t do cognition and it isn’t really good for anything, who said it was” which is of course rich from the exact same posters who were breathlessly advertising for the tech as revolutionary both online and at work as recently as a couple of weeks ago (and a lot of them still hedge it with “but it might be useful in the near future”). the comfort is it feels like that attitude comes from deep embarrassment, like how the orange site started claiming it is and always was skeptical of crypto once the technology got irrevocably associated with scams and gambling and a lot of the easy money left
I was watching a h0ffman stream the other day when someone happened to bring up autoplag in some context. didn’t see the asking context, but h0ffman’s answer warmed my heart. paraphrased: “what would you want to use that for? you wouldn’t steal a mod, why would you want to use a prompt? that stole from artists. fuck that shit.”
(h0ffman’s one of the names in the demoscene, often plays sets at compos, does some of his own demos, etc)
yeah, there’s a stench of desperation from the defenders
of course, as with crypto, there are uses (in the case of crypto , nothing legitimate). And it will be going to be a fallback for fondlers to point them out (for example, I believe that auto-generated audiobooks are viable, if they’re generated from actual books)
these chuds lack self awareness and they never realise that by moving the goalposts on brain stuff they are admitting their own idiocy.
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.
In other news, an AI booster got publicly humilitated after prompting complete garbage and mistaking it for 8-bit animation:
And now, another sidenote, because I really like them apparently:
This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.
Beyond the slop-nami flooding the Internet with soulless shit whose creation was directly because of tech companies like OpenAI, its also given us shit like:
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Google’s unholy ‘Dear Sydney’ ad, and the nuclear backlash it got.
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Apple crushing human creativity for personal gain and being forced to apologise for it
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Mira Murati openly shitting on artists as gen-AI steals their artwork and destroys their livelihoods
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Gen-AI boosters producing complete shit and calling it gold (with Proper Prompter and Luma Labs providing excellent examples)
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And so much goddamn more, most of which I’ve likely forgotten
This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.
As a programmer who likes to see himself more adjacent to artists (and not only because I only draw stuff — badly — and write stuff — terribly — as a hobby, but also because I hold the belief that creating something with code can be seen as artistic too) this whole attitude which has been plaguing the tech industry for — let’s be real here — the last 15 years at least but probably much longer makes me irrationally angry. Even the parts of the industry where creativity and artistry should play a larger role, like game dev, have been completely fucked over by this idea that everything is about efficiency and productivity. You wanna be successful? You need to be productive all the time, 24/7, and now there’s tools that help you with that, and these tools are now fucking AI-powered! Because everything is a tool for out lord and savior productivity.
(I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I’ve been meaning to do for a year now,)
(I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I’ve been meaning to do for a year now,)
Go for it, Mii - I’d be happy to read it.
Just ignore the inconsistent theming, blurry cars, people phasing in and out of existence, nonsense traffic signals, unnatural leaf rustling, the car driving on the wrong(?) side of the road and about to plow into a tree, the weirdly oversized tree, the tree missing a trunk, the nonsense traffic paint, the shoddy textures, and the fact that the scene is entirely derivative and no one feels any joy from watching it.
Phew
If you ignore all that it could be the end of animators!!
Why the fuck is there a gigantic 1000-year-old oak blocking the entire pavement. Also why is that one in autumn colors.
I was focusing more on the fact Justine failed to recognise Minimax had failed at its only job (giving her…whatever that anim is…instead of something actually 8-bit), but yeah all that sucks too
This response from her. Lol. Lmao.
can you and all your anti-ai bots just block me? we get it, you hate ai art
What a misunderstood wee lil smol bean, waah
anti-ai bots
there’s nothing I hate more than when people who hate chatbots flood me with chatbots
e: please stop sending soldiers from your anti-war militia to fight me
actually that sounds like a metal gear plot point I’d overexplain while intoxicated
Honestly I would love to hear someone try to explain the Metal Gear story while drunk.
…No no no you see the Patriots are actually the AI reconstitutions of Plasma Snake’s old boy scout troop from the like the 80s, Shadow Moses, and they really liked (hic) Gundam and then…
…But see, they actually didn’t even like all the wars and stuff even though they were making all kinds of money and explosions, so Raiden - oh and he’s a robot now but it’s cool he gets a dog - has to figure out what’s going on but then it’s all “The good old days after 9/11” ha ha ha…
“games explained badly, the podcast” sounds like it has phenomenal potential for pissing off just about the entire gamersphere
I’m down
I’m so down for this I might unbury my good microphone
“and then Dick Cheney appears and that’s the final boss and he beats your ass. no, not a character based off of Dick Cheney…”
Even in the still image that dog’s legs look like a first draft Minecraft centipede.
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neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI’s legal issues:
And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:
With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry’s Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.
Precisely how, I’m not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.
To my mind, the cover of “researchers” using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.
Hey ChatGPT, write a novel titled OpenAI Gets Pounded In the Ass by Pterodactyl Lawyers, in the style of Chuck Tingle.
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.
AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit)
Jobs people want to do, but which also take a lot of effort to learn to do well. I think there exists a certain envy of people who have put in the time and effort to learn something, which motivates the AI hype.
Visual arts, writing, translation, music, video production, programming, sex. The common thread is that these are things most people wish they could be good at, and they’re also the most popular uses for generative AI.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Now in 404media.
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.
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
There is always another Scott.
you know, one of the most abusive shitty people I’ve ever personally known was also a Scott
Montgomery Scott clearly statistical anomaly
Ah, but he’s not really a Scott so much as a Scot, and a Monty to boot.
oh you did better than I did
5 internet cookies to you
check out this jumpscare suckerpunch mashup
some of the details are so on point I’m almost left pointing and mouthing “art”
First-ever criminal charges against financial services firms for market manipulation and “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry
Cryptocurrency is a 15-year old industry built mostly on market manipulation and wash trading and now we’re seeing the first charges for it? Man, back in the day they told me doing crime was illegal.
Deflationary
With every transaction supply shrinks by burning a percentage of reflections to the burn wallet
Turns out libertarians actually love taxes, but only if instead of spending the tax money on anything, it’s burned to waste.
Further proof that at least some of these people don’t have a problem with losing money, they have a problem with other people receiving it.
Fraudster: “the “objective on the secondary markets” is to find “other buyers from the community, people you don’t know about or don’t care about” because “we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit.””
Is this supposed to be a parody or something? If so, why is this being done at the direction of the FBI? Or is that also part of the parody? If so I didn’t know you could use the FBI logo for that purpose.
linked post details it, but tldr sting setup
Oh look! Human horrors
beyondregrettably within my comprehensionhttps://x.com/haveibeenpwned/status/1843780415175438817
Tweet description
New sensitive breach: “AI girlfriend” site Muah[.]ai had 1.9M email addresses breached last month. Data included AI prompts describing desired images, many sexual in nature and many describing child exploitation. 24% were already in @haveibeenpwned . More: https://404media.co/hacked-ai-girlfriend-data-shows-prompts-describing-child-sexual-abuse-2/
Google finally did it, they made Chrome completely unusable
@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?
This week’s Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 really hit home. It’s about a startup trying to sell “The AI Scientist.” It even does reviews!
Can “AI” do your science for you? Should it be your co-author? Or, as one company asks, boldly and breathlessly, “Can we automate the entire process of research itself?”
Major scientific journals have banned the use of tools like ChatGPT in the writing of research papers. But people keep trying to make “AI Scientists” a thing. Just ask your chatbot for some research questions, or have it synthesize some human subjects to save you time on surveys.
Alex and Emily explain why so-called “fully automated, open-ended scientific discovery” can’t live up to the grandiose promises of tech companies. Plus, an update on their forthcoming book!
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/s1Eyp5R4cdSZVm3y2q58xq
25071 + Oct 12 GitHub ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon
lol
guess how soon?
3 days.
oooh how I’m looking forward to frog-boiler api adjustment pricing season, there’s going to be so much cope
Today’s entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.
We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.
A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.
More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427
maybe also link in the wp/mullenweg thread
Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!
Has wordpress matt had a stroke or what? This is off-the-wall.
