Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
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)
via mastodon
::: spoiler image description a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:
lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :
are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.
but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.
but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.
maybe you're not being negative enough :::
I was reading David and Amy's stuff on energy costs of AI and ended up skimming the MSFT "environment sustainability report" and... god
Like I don't even know how to satirise this. Help me sneer pros, for I am too depressed to make fun of this.
Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.
Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.
Anyway it's not that great but here's my attempt at the sneer you asked for:
"Additionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions."
Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN
Like a century of science: yeah we’re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. There’s no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.
MSFT: hold my beer
Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be "analyzing" the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be "inflation"
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
It's remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He's worked on that, but it's clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn't very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I'm thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.
But you can't convince me that you're really the world's best technical interviewer if you're also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you're suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who's financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they're concerned about where he might end up otherwise?
The only thing I've seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.
Lex hasn't optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee's and the (implicitly) listener's ego.
Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what they're saying. I gather that it's easy to empathize with and doesn't require listeners to actually learn much since they're essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.
I don't think it's very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new "AI" major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that "computation" is more important than electrical engineering.
Someone's been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).
The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.
Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasn't really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.
It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it's a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it's a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it's so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don't the people we keep electing to fix it just... do that?
Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn't started using it and outcompeting everyone?
There's only 2 answers to that:
Answer 2 is obvious if you're a fascist.
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.
Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.
I'm familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they can't print money and the populace doesn't trust them to print money - so every year it's more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.
So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.
The locals might get ornery about this, and I'd be willing to make the trip to help.
There are some steam turbine power plants (like coal-fired) (on smaller side) with power output like that
I have thought about this guy every day since I saw this post
https://awful.systems/comment/4600476
Every day? I dont think I have read that post at all. (This is both a joke and not a joke, as I had not read it, I did now and I was amused, so thanks).
If only all my snark could elicit such absurd perfection.
I immediatelly knew who and what you were talking about without even clicking.
May the fact that he also lives inside my head rent-free be some solace to you.
OpenAI manages to do an entire introduction of a new model without using the word "hallucination" even once.
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its 'reasoning' when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, it's not really clear.
Can't wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don't exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.
Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:
bless you Melanie.
Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you
Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesn't understand the rules of chess
^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)
Dog tax
Would there ever be a way to tell that they didn't just feed the answers into the training data?
One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.
Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.
This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.
I told one of my college professors I'd been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said "can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it" and without thinking I said "why would I use chat-gpt? It's rubbish" and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.
This was after he'd said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.
Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.
A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) "if you think that's bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱".
Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isn’t doing it:
e: you’ll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steve’s other posts are about
I wonder if he got standard ML and LLM confused. (I did hear there was some usage of LLM/ML to help with some documentation stuff I think on a riskybusiness podcast, but I would have to relisten for the details. It could also just have been promotional stuff, while they are not actually using it).
Poor DeiSteve, it always sucks when you have a decades old username which suddenly takes up political meaning.
"created: 51 days ago"
Oh no.
Standard ML the programming language or standard as in conventional and ML as in machine learning?
Machine learning.
E: Turns out the DEI guy might have been right btw. https://www.rapid7.com/about/press-releases/rapid7s-ai-engine-supercharges-security-operations-with-generative-ai/ if by generative AI they mean a LLM.
And from their blog: https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2023/11/29/rapid7-takes-next-step-in-ai-innovation-with-new-ai-powered-threat-detections/ so there could be a chance the 'I used to work there' person didn't know everything going on in Rapid7. "Rapid7 Has Been an AI Innovator for Decades"
a new source of anxiety has formed
in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I don’t think Lemmy’s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but it’s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed
awful’s probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and they’re one of the bigger operations around
pro-tip: do not learn things about how TLDs work (and I mean the bit beyond dns architecture), it is cursed knowledge you can’t unlearn
and with that warning delivered, y’all may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late it’s a gateway drug
regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. AP’s identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/
(e: good lord I was out of it when I wrote this post)
the original post is fucking amazing
here in the future, nothing fucking works
.mobi? They became the admins of the file format? And they paid for it? Good luck with that. ;)
E: me after reading the article. Ow god nothing fucking works indeed, that is dire. I actually checked the date to see if this wasn't some old post. Nope 9/11 2024. Buffer overflow + lapsed domains.
I liked this comment on the HN post:
Fuck it, we're going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.
you have no idea how much I’ve been tempted to do UUCP
new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about "ontologically, is 'superhuman prediction' the same class as superintelligence?"
why? oh, y'know, just things:
I've clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn't just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You'd prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I'm fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!
You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.
BRB training an LLM to be a super-goalpost-mover
Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.
I'll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.
As zero cannot exist as a chance, there is a chance this will happen.
That's why I vote 3rd party in presidential elections.
how to spot the US angst:
I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.
Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?
How did you go from "predict the future", an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??
obvies they're just 30% better at predicting the future than you
I'll cut you with a Y axis I swear on me mum
azimu(s)th
'This tool can do X at a superhuman level' is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
ah good, we're still on schedule for that I guess
I have to admit that I wasn't expecting LinkedIn to become a wretched hive of "quantum" bullshit, but hey, here we are.
Tangentially: Schrödinger is a one-man argument for not naming ideas after people.
Somebody played cookie clicker.
you left the best one:
not only they know about "temporal arbitrage experiments" but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment
Frankly, it just didn't stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.
Turns out purging your ranks of wokes and furries is more fun than, you know, actually developing a working Linux distro: Nix 2.24+ is vulnerable to (remote) privilege escalation.
(linking to the lobste.rs discussion because I feel it does a decent job curating related links around disclosure timelines etc.)
how's the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?
we have some dedicated Nix threads on FreeAsm, our community for open source stuff that might give you a good recap of the latest stuff. where I’m sitting as a former Nix contributor and advocate is — nothing is fixed, all this obvious fash shit worked so well it’s being tried in other open source communities, and I really would like a nice alternative to NixOS so I can finally release a lot of the Nix stuff I’ve been sitting on (and also because nixpkgs keeps breaking — so many maintainers left that some of the further corners of the package set I use are already showing a lot of rot)
Lix fixed it last month of course
found a quality sneer in the wild https://mander.xyz/post/17910623
From the reactions:
“With enough garbage the model will become sentient”
"I mean thats how humans are raised tho"
AAAAAAAAAAAA
(There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).
As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. "Holy shit, I think therefore I am!"
AKA tell on themselves
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2024/09/14.html
the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading
Late response but cool song recommendation :)
haha yeah it’s quite fun
This person is as correct as they are committed to the vibes. Great sneer.
My villain arc is going to be turning into Thanos and collecting them stones just to enforce GDPR forever into cosmic law with a snap of my fingers.
this isn’t surprising, but now it’s confirmed: in addition to the environmental damage generative AI does by operating, and in spite of all attempts to greenwash it and present it as somehow a solution to climate change, of course Microsoft’s been pushing very hard for the oil and gas industry to use generative AI to maximize resource exploitation and production (via Timnit Gebru)
tbh i don't see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works it's gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesn't care, because they're selling shovels so it doesn't matter if their shit doesn't work as long as someone's buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where there's already some money
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
https://xcancel.com/SmokeAwayyy/status/1834641370486915417
Pay no attention to the three LLMs stacked together behind the curtain!
Please, no sneers till a few weeks have passed, we are still in the gratitude for magical intelligence from the sky period.
felon: the most divorced man to ever live
sammy: the most swirly-short edgelord to ever walk
that tweet is as unhinged as felon tweets tho
You just might be a techbro if you're worth billions and still can't resist mouthing off on Xhitter.
Mouthing off in a way that makes me go 'ow god it IS all a scam and he knows it!' all hype and showmanship. I wonder if he practices this type of writing like this stance was also so obviously practiced.
(When it all implodes and the final step of the grift is the drama movies about it, I'm at least happy that Rick Gomez will make a passable Sam Altman (No idea why that blog didn't use a normal picture of Sam, but they decided to put Sam and Rick in the teleporter))
Defector: Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars
My heuristic is basically: until we can easily control the environment of earth, terraforming will not be on the horizon. Given that we are hell-bent on driving off of as many cliffs as we can, I’m pretty happy to continue thinking that we’ll never get off this rock proper within the ol’ lifespan
this is a fun read
another I ran into earlier (via an outfit from these parts) is this piece from The Conversation. I wish I could get as irked about linear extrapolation as I usually do, but in lieu of guardrails arresting (and clawing back!) all that shit from all these ghouls...
You could build a whole library of articles like this: here's one from early last year
(Edit: I based parts of this post on misremembered/misinterpreted tweet from musk, so reader beware, I'm being wrong about Musks stated plans here, see my later reply in the thread. Not sure if I should leave the post up, edit it (eurgh effort), or just delete)
Made a decision for the don't waste time common good.
@Soyweiser You're assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it can't and it won't. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Mars—extended duration in space, remember—in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you don't need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)
remember all the fucking rubes saying Proton’s LLM wasn’t a problem cause only business and visionary accounts had access to it? well, only one month later of fucking course they went back on that and now it’s included with duo and family accounts, and my soon to be cancelled unlimited account just popped an ad for it on the compose window trying to get me to opt into the free trial for the fucking thing (and also the button’s purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)
Why do I get the feeling we're gonna see a colossal tech crash
is this the bad place?
Yes.
@self I wonder what "popular demand" and "overwhelming number of requests". Are there actually a lot of people asking for this? Are there more than there are people begging them not to? Maybe I just live in an anti-AI bubble, because I sure don't encounter a lot of pro-AI views.
it’s not just you — I can dig up the posts if you’re curious, but Proton wrote their last user survey so it was impossible to say no to this LLM crap directly, and they still got caught massively fudging the numbers to make this needless bullshit look popular. I can promise you it’s just the same people doing that again, except this time there’s no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over
@self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Proton's users to be exactly the type of person who's against this. But of course it's easy to fudge with numbers.
that’s very true! unfortunately, we’ve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Proton’s board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too — that’s why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)
we’re not sure if something changed that suddenly made them go all in on their bad ideas, but the initial communication around Scribe was how much Proton’s business users wanted it — and the survey was very much crafted to get what looked like a pro-LLM response from that demographic. Proton has essentially admitted that they’re doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; it’s a shame they’re willing to burn their business down for that kind of short-term gain. I can only imagine them enabling the LLM for all their paid accounts this quickly is either a desperation move because the feature didn’t do the numbers they hoped for, or it’s a sign that Proton’s otherwise compromised.
@self It’s probably the same folks who wanted the Bitcoin wallet.
@self @zogwarg
Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.
Who isn't huffing this nonsense?
from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that aren't, although there's not really anyone with feature match on some of proton's features afaik
@froztbyte
I forgot I'm using their VPN too, and they accept bitcoin (not a big deal, but useful). I was aware of Tuta and fastmail when I chose Proton.
For now I'll prioritize moving to a self managed domain to make swapping provider easier in future.
I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and they’ve promised (for what that’s worth) they don’t have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I can’t truly recommend it — as always, I have to point out that Tuta is still a single point of failure like Proton, and one day I hope we’re able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isn’t gpg or anything like it — imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming they’re not the same person) to use that kind of thing)
Its worse for me - I've got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, I'm not using them for anything particularly important.
@self @zogwarg highly recommend migrating to posteo
wtf is a posteo
@weirdwriter @froztbyte it’s posteo.net
Posteo is from Germany and they’re reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so it’s not as batteries included as what Proton offered.
I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.
Another option like that is mailbox.org. They’re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.
That's significantly less comforting than Proton's Switzerland. It's in 14 Eyes after all.
Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but it's still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. It's also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So I'm not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond "marketing".
holy fuck awful.systems works on servo
so for posting it's definitely less than ideal (not pictured: the 15 second delay before typing and the comment text being filled in), but it actually renders lemmy with shockingly few issues
::: spoiler image descriptions screenshots of awful.systems rendering in Servo. it looks both janky and weirdly normal. for some reason, servo seems to be running inside of the emacs text editor. :::
Taylor Swift is on the side of humans* in the battle against the AIs (instagram).
I'm sure everyone remembers what this is referring to, y'know with the rest of the US election being so low-key and boring, but just in case here's an article with screenshots (Guardian).
Anyway I'm not here to talk politics. SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift) thinks Taylor Swift will be a "cultural linchpin" against deepfakes.
Indeed that Donald Trump post isn't the first time she's been targeted. There was Deepfake Swift Porn in January that prompted Microsoft to add more safeguards**. A scam involving fake Le Creuset cookware (nytimes), and on a lighter note: fake Taylor Swift teaching Math on TikTok (Petapixel, whatever the heck a petapixel is).
The January incident prompted some legislatures to introduce the No AI Fraud Act, though looking at it it looks like it hasn't made it far through congress.
* Maybe not on the side of humans against climate change. With the private jet and all. God the US needs trains then at least all the celebrities could ride in luxurious rail cars like the olden days.
** Not sure about Microsoft but these safeguards aren't effective in general, I found a subreddit of people sharing AI image generator prompt tips to get around filters and it was pretty disturbing. But that's another story.
Tennessee has a new law against making LLM clones of performers without permission. It would be great to see our bullshit strike a blow for the side of righteousness, for once!
Yes, it is called the ELVIS Act. I'm sorry.
https://www.tn.gov/governor/news/2024/3/21/photos--gov--lee-signs-elvis-act-into-law.html
it's some US infosec guy working at a corp, identity was figured out a couple years ago
no, it's Taylor Swift
this is like claiming dril was identified. no he wasn't. that's not true.
I find swiftonsec a tedious poster at best, so /shrug from me on this
Yeah I was being a bit tongue in cheek there. I follow them and a bunch of accounts on ActivityPub because it's the only way to keep the feed from drying up when running my own instance.
Wait, why would he be Taylor Swift?
I always thought it's swift as in fast, there's nothing about his posts that would attempt a satirical impersonation even.
the original gag was that it was Taylor Swift moonlighting as an infosec advisor
Yeah, that. From the era of horse_ebooks, Riker Googling, etc
they used to run the account with a Swift avi for the first while, then switched to Cortana (iirc?) for a bit (can’t remember if this coincided with twitter having its “impersonating accounts” panic), and dunno after that because I stopped seeing it
It is still real to me damnit!
A story I heard, one of the problems with private jets (and private jet trackers) is that often private jets cannot be stored at normal airports. So after delivering the rich people to the airport it needs to take off again, and go to a smaller airport to stay there. This drives up the environmental costs to insane levels (now each trip is 3 takeoffs), but this also causes weirdness with the people tracking the planes of celebs, as they now overinflate the actual flights they are in, which annoys weird pedants (like me). I wonder if the celebs taking these flights are even aware of it. Anyway, remember this if you hear a story of 'celeb X took their private plane to skip traffic' stories, there is a chance they were not actually in this plane. (So put down those surface to air launchers you lunatics).
Not that the usage of private planes isn't insane and should be banned/heavily regulated.
Why are you saying that LLMs are useless when they're useless only most of the time
I'm sorry but I've been circling my room for an hour now seeing this and I need to share it with people lest I go insane.
I find the polygraph to be a fascinating artifact. most on account of how it doesn't work. it's not that it kinda works, that it more or less works, or that if we just iron out a few kinks the next model will do what polygraphs claims to do. the assumptions behind the technology are wrong. lying is not physiological; a polygraph cannot and will never work. you might as well hire me to read the tarot of the suspects, my rate of success would be as high or higher.
yet the establishment pretends that it works, that it means something. because the State desperately wants to believe that there is a path to absolute surveillance, a way to make even one's deepest subjectivity legible to the State, amenable to central planning (cp. the inefficacy of torture). they want to believe it so much, they want this technology to exist so much, that they throw reality out of the window, ignore not just every researcher ever but the evidence of their own eyes and minds, and pretend very hard, pretend deliberately, willfully, desperately, that the technology does what it cannot do and will never do. just the other day some guy way condemned to use a polygraph in every statement for the rest of his life. again, this is no better than flipping a coin to decide if he's saying the truth, but here's the entire System, the courts the judge the State itself, solemnly condemning the man to the whims of imaginary oracles.
I think this is how "AI" works, but on a larger scale.
see also voice stress analysis, another thing that doesn't work but is sold as working with AI
that dude advocates LLM code autocomplete and he's a cryptographer
like that code's gotta be a bug bounty bonanza
dear fuck:
I don’t like go but I rely on go programs for security-critical stuff, so their crypto guy’s bluesky posts being purely overconfident “you can’t prove I’m using LLMs to introduce subtle bugs into my code” horseshit is fucking terrible news to me too
but wait, mkcert and age? is that where I know the name from? mkcert’s a huge piece of shit nobody should use that solves a problem browsers created for no real reason, but I fucking use age in all my deployments! this is the guy I’m trusting? the one who’s currently trolling bluesky cause a fraction of its posters don’t like the unreliable plagiarization machine enough? that’s not fucking good!
maybe I shouldn’t be taking this so hard — realistically, this is a Google kid who’s partially funded by a blockchain company; this is someone who loves boot leather so much that most of their posts might just be them reflexively licking. they might just be doing contrarian trolling for a technology they don’t use in their crypto work (because it’s fucking worthless for it) and maybe what we’re seeing is the cognitive dissonance getting to them.
but boy fuck does my anxiety not like this being the personality behind some of the code I rely on
Oh shit, that's where I recognize his name from. Very disappointing he's full on the LLM train.
cryptographers: need strict guarantees on code ordering and timing because even compiler optimizations can introduce exploitable flaws into code that looks secure
the go cryptographer: there’s no reason not to completely trust a system that pastes plagiarized code together so loosely it introduces ordering-based exploits into ordinary C code and has absolutely no concept of a timing attack (but will confidently assert it does)
yeah. Been following valsorda for a while because reasons, but there’s a certain type of thing they frequently go for. “It’s popular and thus worth it, who cares about the side effects” isn’t something they seem to concern themselves with in respect to the gallery of shit
I know that rage exists, but haven’t really tried to make serious use of it yet. Probably worth checking out
oh I make serious use of rage all the time in my work
not the program, but that looks cool too
samesies
Criticizing others for not being perfectly exacting with their language and then jumping in front of the LLM headlights all at once, truly the human mind has no limits.
Valsorda was on mastodon for a bit (in ‘22 maybe?) and was quite keen on it , but left after a bunch of people got really pissy at him over one of his projects. I can’t actually recall what it even was, but his argument was that people posted stuff publicly on mastodon, so he should be able to do what he liked with those posts even if they asked him not to. I can see why he might not have a problem with LLMs.
Anyone remember what he was actually doing? Text search or network tracing or something else?
(e: apologies, this turned into more of a wall-of-text sneer than I meant to, but I'll leave it for flavour and detail)
as someone from (and living in) the global south (fairly familiar with but not myself at worse end of the resources spectrum), I cannot tell you how fucking ridiculous it sounds each time I see some North American Fuckwit post shit like that. whether it was the coiners going "banking the unbanked!!!!!" or the llm trash "can help you write professional!!!!!", it's always some Extremely Resourced thinking that just does. not. apply. this side of the world
I probably should make this a long detailed post sometime somewhere, demonstrating just how utterly fucking wrong some of these presumptions are, because oh god they're many:
the amount of data it takes to communicate with this trash (in a number of markets, you get people buying data bundles in 10/50/100MB increments in day or hour units because that's what they can afford at that point (there is another rant here to be had about exploitative behaviour on the part of telcos but separate rant))
just reaching the servers for this shit requires a good network connection, nevermind the interaction latency (higher base latencies = much longer cumulative = much slower "experience"... and this shit was already slow from US networks)
hell, just having the hardware that's capable is sometimes a big blocker - so-called "feature phones" are somewhat common (how much depends on where you are). sideline mention: locally in some areas they're called "trililis", after the way they ring, which I fucking love. and even when you have users with smartphones, the devices are not necessarily good. sometimes it's low resourced (because cost), sometimes it's buggy as fuck (vendors, cost), sometimes it's just plain fucked (because hard knocks life)
and don't even get me goddamn started on the language. the phenomenon of nigerian english being Too Florid For USA has already featured here previously, but it goes so much beyond that. show me one of these fucking prompts working even half-well in Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsongo, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. and those are just the other national (spoken/textual) languages here (in ZA). one single border away there's 25+ more that I know of
and that's to just look at the resource/technical/implementation side of it, and saying nothing about the Northern Saviour dynamic - so many of these fucking people advertise working for a non-profit, wearing it like a badge. wandering around DC a few years back, running into many of these, with so-called focuses on places in africa I've been to and worked in.. it was surreal how wide the gap was between reality and what they had in their heads
oh! was he the guy doing a search engine archiving as much of the fediverse as possible, over the objections of the people being indexed?
yeah that tracks
So many techbros have decided to scrape the fediverse that they all blur together now... I was able to dig up this:
"I hear I’m supposed to experiment with tech not people, and must not use data for unintended purposes without explicit consent. That all sounds great. But what does it mean?" He whined.
yeah, that's the fucker. as a large language model, he does not have a data type for consent
I always wondered why he was at google for so long, and cut a teeny bit of hypothetical slack in light of "hmm maybe it gave a significantly better life than what he could in italy" (which honestly I can understand as a drive, if not necessarily agree with)
that slack's gone now
Some ok anti-AI voices in that thread. But mostly a torrent of shit
Cohost going readonly at the end of this month, and shutting down at the end of the year: https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down
Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.
To be clear: Cohost did take funding from an anonymous angel, and as a result will not be sharing their source code; quoting from your link:
Somebody paid a very small amount of money to get a cleanroom implementation of Tumblr and did not mind that they would have to build a community and then burn it to the ground in the process. It turns out that angels are not better people than VCs.
Looking at both cohost and tumblr, I don’t think the funder has an asset that’s worth very much.
Yeah, having the source to a site (even if it includes stuff like day to day ops, backups etc) isn't worth much if you don't have a community. It's a bit like "open source" LLMs, sure you can run a mudball of python on your computer but the real worth is in ingesting and classifying.
i used (and use, until the shutdown) cohost as my primary social media site. i'm not surprised, but i can't say it hasn't been disappointing. for all the issues it has (and it did have a lot) it was pretty much the only site that felt somewhat cozy to use for me. stings quite a bit
I'm not shocked.
these are the exact finances of a startup that failed to start
A small Lemmy or Mastodon that's run by some guy and takes donations for hosting has a better grasp of funding than Cohost did
(smashes imaginary intercom button) "Who is this 'some guy'? Find him and find out what he knows!!"
I never used Cohost, but I know a couple people who do and fuuuuuuuck this sucks. 'Least Newgrounds is still going, though that's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.
https://www.lex.tec.br/
The most black mirror part for me is where he's selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future "AI", represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn't a parody, they're literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.
Another fine AI lawmaker for our collection.
Lex: https://www.lex.tec.br/
AI Steve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vtKT9RrrI
Virtual Integrated Citizen: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/tech/openai-shuts-down-ai-mayor/index.html
Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)
AI party (performance art, unclear how much of this was actually serious): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/
AI Mayor / AI Party: https://www.ai-mayor.com/, https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党 (their(?) earlier iteration also had a lady robot because AI Mayor AIn't sexist yo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KomiEpEik-Q)
Habsburgs are good, actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497419
The sentences these people post, man.
Anyway, it's great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist to show how open minded he is. Damn, you respect Habsburg, Orban and Zizek, let me guess how you feel about Putin.
oh thank fuck I’m not the only one who knows about Zizek. there’s still so many people whose first introduction to leftist thought was The Pervert’s Guide to Film on Netflix or whatever who never went back to check if Zizek was maybe a fucking asshole
I'm still blissfully clueless as to who zizek is
although saying that here now might cause an accidental crash course
I mean, my awareness extends as far as "pure sniff ideology" and basically no context. Definitely heard some extremely bad takes on Ukraine though, which has quickly turned into my number one red flag for "actually pretty okay with Nazis when you get down to it"
EDIT: special thanks to skillissuer below for the correction re: Ukraine takes. Please trust his actual sources over my half-remembered reddit nonsense.
wait wdym as extremely bad takes on ukraine, because some of these i've been able to find before going to darknet (second page of startpage search results) seem rather sane
https://www.instagram.com/slavojzizeks/p/C8g0yYRvLFL/
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/08/ukraine-must-go-to-war-with-itself
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/21/pacificsm-is-the-wrong-response-to-the-war-in-ukraine
...huh. Your sources are certainly more credible than my half-remembered reddit posts. I think I was probably mistaken on this one.
my bias against self-described hegelians is reinforced, bonus points for lacanism. every single one i've heard of in some detail (not that i'm looking for them) turns out to be a crank in some capacity. n=3
Basing my opinions on who seems nice or not. I'm visualizing a very angry Taleb shouting about how these assholes learned nothing from him.
oh boy, some of the comments there
how to instantly identify someone with a social circle barely stretching past their own nose. and I’d bet there’s some “work = moral” thinking held there, too
followed up by a real winner of a comment:
"dont be surprised that rhetoric is toxic"
mr pot, I have a call for you from mr kettle
Missed this spirited defense of landlords: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41536119
generally my rule is "don't read the comments" and super double triple-mega-bonus so for the orange site, so I only glance-scan through some when I do happen to open comment threads (such as from here)
Maybe it's because I've started reading a book about Germany and Austro-Hungary in WW1 (Ring of Steel) but I've suddenly started pattern-matching a bunch of pro A-H comments in HN. "It was a peaceful multi-national nation" well yeah until they pointlessly insisted on invading Serbia (and fucking that up twice before being bailed out by Germany) thus setting of the wider war. And when refugees from Galicia had to flee the Russians they were not happily accepted by the rest of the Empire.
Anyway, A-H was teetering on the edge before WW1 and signed their own death warrant willingly.
As always in HN you can find links to new horrifying examples of fascism: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/06/17/the-foundationalist-manifesto-the-politics-of-future-past/
I guess if we're doing the rise of fascism again it's inevitable that we're doing fucking austro-hungarian empire discourse again. somehow the 1940s returned
Jesus Christ that was the most on-the-nose distillation of tech fascism that I've ever seen. Can't wait for the book to get published and see Elon et al endorsing it.
We need a high-quality Guards! Guards! movie so that monarchists can be given the Clockwork Orange treatment with it.
The New Yorker gamely tries to find some merit, any at all in the writings of Dimes Square darling Honor Levy. For example:
I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. "So profound, very wow"? "You mean it's all shit? —Always has been."
Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!
So, it's bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?
someone tell me it isn't just me who always parses this person's name as "honour tax" and has a doubletake first thinking "..yeah, accurate" before remember it's actually their name-name not and not a byname
This is exactly why these people always feel so weird. Like, have you considered not hanging out with assholes?
Yeah, just give it to the feller who reviewed Guy Fieri's restaurant. It's better to just rip the bandaid off.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html
Sadly, he's left the game just the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html
alas!
Edit: Also, very much in our wheelhouse!
other-other-other-other scott tweeted again. apologies, it's slightly US-pol
it's a doozy:
::: spoiler spoiler of the image too, just in case :::
::: spoiler transcript of insane scott adams, creator of dilbert, tweet I'm revising my debate scoring. My first impression was a tie, which I called a Harris victory.
But the only thing I recall about the debate today is "They're eating the dogs."
Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked immigration risk.
It's the strongest play of the election.
Trump won the debate.
I gotta stop underestimating his game. Trump had no base hits in the debate but his long ball is still rising. Incredible. 6:32 :::
as a reminder, this is the same guy that's so keen on thinking the llm can hypnotize him into orgasm
Hillary is going to assassinate him for sure this time for revealing the hidden dog lore.
Saw this gem of a plaintive plea from a promptfan:
I call it HonestGPT, and will accept my billions in VC money now.
Basilisks commuting
https://xcancel.com/equine__dentist/status/1832568341740851266
That is just the average The Sims/Rimworld player.
saw this ridiculous shit on the side of a jag on the highway a little bit ago
best guess is rental-contract jag by a hustler, but the half-hearted AI non-mention is why I thought to post it here. we're rapidly evolving in the grift cycle!
It looks like a media prop making a soft parody of buzzword laced sites that don't actually say anything. 'we provide business solutions and services' lol
And of course, due to my browser being slightly locked down (or the whole site being broken) the whole 'check it out' button does nothing.
The animated button that looks like it might direct you to a chat option (but actually just scrolls you back up to the start of the page for some unknown reason) is also great. (This is isn't really their fault btw, it is that wordpress themes one (if you image search on the people being happy with the services provided you will find a few other sites with the same theme, and same stock image).
Hello world!
quantum finance
This reminded me of a gag from Pyramids (discworld novel) where quantum accounting is invented to manage a reality-warping pyramid building business. So I was trying to get a quote...
...only to discover that Quantum Accounting is an actual grifting term in recent use. Please marvel at this LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
yeah, the whole site’s a journey
I was hoping it’d have some content along with the buzzword headings, alas
Hot drama in promptfondler land today!!! [1] [2] [3]
Anyone know what's going on here?
I extremely briefly looked into it earlier when I saw the headline drift by on lobsters or something, and found a venturebeat presser
so it seems we're at that stage of the LLM grift cycle
OK Venturebeat have hastily beaten a venture-retreat and are decrying fraud complete with an AI generated header image that really screams "promptfondler caught red-handed fondling".
Contains such choice quotes are “fraud in the AI research community”, which are very reminiscent of Capt. Renault's reaction in the casino in Casablanca.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-leader-reflection-70bs-performance-questioned-accused-of-fraud/
“eagerly waiting for them to upload their weights to Hugging Face” really is the same vibe as “eagerly waiting for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange to give me my coins back”
I should be trying to sleep, given I need to be on the road by 0630 tomorrow (it is 22h22), but this rapid fire set of events has greatly improved how happy I’ll feel about shit sleep by morning
now do chatgpt4ahegao, cowards
just turned it into today's post lol
“Hey if the R1 could do it with a shipped physical product, why couldn’t one just do it with software alone?” - genius bayfucker, 2024
A new substack about AI: Ludd. "Citizen Journalism on AI, Publishing, and the new Tech Landscape". First post is about Repeater Books, Israel and AI: second is about AI and climate change.
I don't think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at what's happening in them. in plain english, you have a cop and his band of good apples + adorably bad apples saving the ass of a dictator again and again, because sometimes you just need a clever steady hand in charge. Pratchett was informed by liberal humanist values, and there's plenty of great stuff about tolerance in there. but the foundation of any vimes novel is an institutionalist urge to bootlicking. it just has to be the right boot
It sucks to have to decolonise your darlings. It sucks that a lot of our most enjoyable stories are copaganda. Even the most redeemable stories about cops have probably inspired people to become cops.
@sc_griffith
I think Pratchett understood that, despite people romanticizing revolution, revolutions often end up opening the door to something as bad or worse. Especially in a place like Discworld.
@sc_griffith
In Night Watch:
“Vimes/Keel tells Ned Coates not to put his trust in revolutions "They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes" This is a common theme in Pratchett regarding authority figures”
That said Vimes does participate in a revolution of sorts in that book, as “John Keel”, in the past.
yeah that's the conservative spirit right there
Books would be really boring if the protagonists were all just the author speaking as themself but using various funny voices.
there's not a lot of ambiguity in what the novels are getting at, so no offense but this line of argument is not worth engaging directly. but I will point out that I didn't say what pratchett's views were. part of why people don't look askance at these books is that his other work is at odds with the realpolitik message I'm pointing out. I can't and I don't draw conclusions about his 'real' views based on the vimes novels
@sc_griffith
The novels may be trying to say something, but how it plays out still needs to make sense in the world of the novel and be coherent with the characters as depicted.
Vimes is basically a stereotypical jaded and cynical old-timer who has ideas about how things could be better, but has seen enough to know that the powerful would never allow it.
Incremental improvements are made but larger changes are difficult except sometimes in places that are even worse than Ankh-Morpork.
@sc_griffith
It's kind of like all the people who are aware of what's likely needed to prevent climate change disaster, but are also aware that they don't have the power to make it happen and that the forces of inertia and corruption are powerful enough to block or roll back anything remotely significant.