Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025
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)
snrk
https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676
I'm dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy
Um, actually it’s called a
typestate.I wanted to see how much lactose was in Monterey Jack, and this was the very first result on bing for:
https://thekitchencommunity.org/the-nutritional-profile-of-monterey-jack-cheese/
It's absolutely over. This is why every other search I make has "site:reddit.com" attached to it.
And no, the site didn't tell me how much lactose there was per gram
I can’t decide if calimisinit is better pronounced in a surfer bro or British accent, so my brain combined the two and I hate it
it's actually a function call,
calimisInit()simple as
i think it might be latin
"My name is Scroder Cher. I take care of the place while the Master is away."
StrokeSimulatorGPT
Just got the best sneer of the week so far:
A medium nation's worth of electricity!
Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.
@blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I don't understand the point of contributing if you don't think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.
There are the weirdest people who make 'content' out there. For example, I saw a 'how to start the game' joke guide on steam, so I went to their page to block them (to see if this also blocks the guides from popping up, doesn't seem so) and they had made hundreds of these guides, all just copy pasted shit. And there were more people doing the exact same thing. Bizarre shit. (Prob related to the thing where you can give people stickers, gamification was a mistake).
@blakestacey
I am disappoint.
"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."
psst it's to search and destroy
no one has seen this coming, no one
@blakestacey heroes
from this post (archive)
aww, does the widdle app's business model collapse completely once it can't harvest data? how sad
this reinforces a suspicion that I've had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it's an all or nothing choice and they don't know the full impact (because it's intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs
@froztbyte @blakestacey
There are so many features of modern applications and platforms that I have to wonder why anybody would have thought it was a good idea, this is just one of them. Sharing your contacts shouldn't even be an option. As somebody else in this thread put it, it's not your data.
@froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.
I doubt it, unfortunately.
sickos yes energy if true, sigh
@froztbyte @blakestacey
Let me play world's saddest song...
@froztbyte @blakestacey they fat-finger it and regret it later
wut
@froztbyte @blakestacey I really need to get on the apple ecosystem
I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:
“GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”
Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.
No no no it's fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.
As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.
This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.
This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.
I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesn't Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?
There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were "corrupting the discourse" way back in 1991.
To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.
I'm thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.
I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it's the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.
The funniest thing I got was ads for Maybelline in a podcast about WW2. Know your audience!
The YouTube version doesn't have the ads
Because they think you live in a real country, not the USA.
I wonder for how many people this is a reactionary impulse, wanting back to the 'old internet' they didn't actually participate in. At least in modern days the flamewar posts are quite limited in length, in the old days they could reach novel sizes. Anyway sure we should go back to the old internet, where suddenly your whole university had no internet because there was a dos attack on the network to force a netsplit on an a random irc channel.
Today in "Promptfondler fucks around and finds out."
So I'm guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn't end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn't actually understand what it's doing or when to stop, especially when it's being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Emphasis added.
just instruct it "be sentient" and you're good, why don't these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?
so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:
wow, so efficient! I'm so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection
these fucking people
there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)
if it were me, I'd be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers don't seem to have that awareness
Thanks for sharing this lol
it’s a classic
similarly, Mickens talks. if you haven’t ever seen ‘em, that’s your next todo
But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!
I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:
OMG. This is borderline unhinged behaviour. Yeah, let's just give root permission to an LLM and let it go nuts in prod. What could possibly go wrong?
ah, sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension:
(This would've been more shocking to me in 2023, but after over a year in this bubble I have stopped expecting anything resembling basic human decency from those who work in AI)
Not a lawyer, but wouldn't that be something her estate could kick up some legal dust about? That's two dozen kind of fucked up.
Metal music festival Shell Shock II loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest
Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: "Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with"
the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band
organisers: "We have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology." yeah you have a great show guys
By "liberal mob" he means "people who asked for their money back and aren't coming anymore"
I wish them a merry cable grounding fault and happy earth buzz to all
My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.
See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320
I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.
They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.
Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).
I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.
This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.
That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.
Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username
I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I don’t know if I have the “press” clout to warrant a response (I know I don’t)
I got a downvote for some reason…
Some people just want to watch the world burn
It seems they undid it. Maybe Ecosia are on to me
a user called "crypto-bitcoin" raises an issue with the World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility List
::: spoiler Image description Image shows user joined two weeks ago. ::: .
Yikes. Could be a troll (I hope it's a troll)
a lost not very computer literate dude who just got scammed i guess
So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with "We’re living through a technological paradigm shift."... and right there I didn't bother reading the rest of it because I don't want to expose my brain to it further.
But what I found funny is that also today, there's this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support
So Hololens is discontinued... you know... AR... the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.
Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.
Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!
(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)
It's interesting that someone thought "smoothing life's complexities" is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.
Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life's complexities without smoothing out people's complexities, but it's not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that's if it actually worked, which it doesn't).
I've felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it's hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it's a shame we couldn't as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).
Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.
call me when I can actually tange them
@V0ldek @sailor_sega_saturn sorry, these are Non-Tangible Tokens
Load bearing words!
I don’t think there’s an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.
‘Life’s complexities’ sounds like an adam curtis bit.
re: how can a chatbot help with life?
This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.
A lot less, 'Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email' and more 'Copilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor'.
I think that 'giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf' is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!
E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants
I think it's also a case of thinking about form before function. It's not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but there's still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).
I am neutral on MSFT - to me it's a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it's not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it's really impressive how they've gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple's 1984 ad, via the "Halloween Papers" era where they were every Linux weenie's biggest boogeyman, to today's bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they're not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot's Recall feature also know they're the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and they're only separate so OpenAI's reputation doesn't stain MS.
Despite the industry's deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.
I can't help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to "coding for non-programmers" akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there's a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.
Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they're actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)
Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromium's case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).
You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but let's not kid ourselves. They wouldn't need to openwash if most of their stuff weren't still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.
sorta, but it’s a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)
one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains
The Aristocrats!
Musk looks like his own Madame Tussaud's waxwork
the loser energy radiating off musk at all times is incredible
I need an early-2000's style web video where a cutout of that Musk picture moves up and down to a sproingy-sproingy sound.
via friend:
Needs an Esso petrol station in Milan as the background.
Holy shit that's too good!
I'm thoroughly convinced Musk is an AI generated person and his life's goal is simply to find the AI that generated him.
The world is a simulation and Musk has a green jewel above his head.
Former Google CEO says the quiet part out loud (youtube link):
gotta love how the screenshot makes him look like a vampire
Aren’t you supposed to try to hide your psychopathic instincts? I wonder if he’s knowingly bullshitting or if he’s truly gotten high on his own supply.
You know, when Samuel L Jackson decided that the best approach to climate change was to kill billions of poor people rather than ask the rich to give up any privileges in Kingsman it was more blatantly evil but appreciably less dumb than this. Very similar wavelength though.
as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla
"if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?
this tracks analogously to something I've been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of "the internet", in the stead of "all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else"
Thanks I hate it.
Content is a scarce resource y'know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm's two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be
terribleactually quite nice.WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.
this aged like fine milk (granted it's from 2019)
It is your moral obligation to use Firefox
the predominant fork (afaik) is called LibreWolf
some indications that it is not atm entirely resilient to the upstream bullshit, but I’m curiously eyeballing whether that changes
personally, I’m hoping on servo
This particular bit of news has me so down. :(
I get ya.
❤️
If the stars come right, there may not be a Google to beg for money
Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don't know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).
amazing work they've achieved so far though
yes, that's the complete change set for the fork
oh and a Godot discord moderator turned out to be extremely into dropping n-words in chat
This is fucking hilarious. GIT is my favorite blockchain
I have no idea what set the drama off btw, I have not really looked into it (could it be that this mod you are talking about was the unofficial mod the godot communication was talking about? Or is that a different mod? And did the redot (wait, re.? please tell me it isn't a reference to the reeeee thing) people really pick the side of the n-word mod?)
I did see that the guy who started redot basically only forked it and then went 'any devs wanna take over this fork?' Very I started the wiki, without even starting a wiki.
they're already sniping at each other
GUYS GUYS THE LOGO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT
The bikeshed should be RED!
Lol Edit (emp mine): "We need to remove the Godot branding from everything to differentiate this from Godot. For starters we can change the default IDE theme. I think a dark theme with red accents would make sense. Godot is associated with cooler colors, so warmer colors seem good."
Of course black with red. The engine for edgy 17 year olds. (I wanted to make a joke about Razer gaming peripherals here, but looks like they switched mostly to rainbows and greens, damn wokes!)
Apologies for crappy nitpicking on my part, but 4chan millennials really gotta learn to let go of impact font.
Oh HELL no that's the same editor theme I'm using. How do I cast a spell to banish these people
It was some Adobe-style theme I downloaded a long time ago but I guess I'm using the anti-woke theme now
I want to pull quotes from that thread but it’s so satisfying in context to see the most toxic parts of a gaming community turn on each other
and dear god are those some ugly fucking logos. my favorite is the one that’s just Redot Engine with a ridiculously overbearing letter R (not gonna repost them here for obvious trademark reasons — I’ve got the feeling these fellas might not have that part figured out)
I was too busy poking fun at them and posted them here
apparently godot posted something about supporting LGBT in games? can't find the original. then Grummz posted ragebait about it and the chuds flooded their github and discord with fuckwittery
this is from like 5 min following links after reading your post
Looked at Grummz twitter, and looks like Notch is also getting involved. With friends like that.
Amazing how this new crop of outrage merchants who touched some game code in the past make Derek Smart look measured and well balanced.
Christ, it's like Gamergate never ended
yes, that's correct
found it: https://bsky.app/profile/gamingonlinux.com/post/3l5ca3blqgn2y
The idiots claimed using game engines was le wokisme and Godot took the piss, and Grummz ran with it
wait, the “pre-built” engine these little shits are trying to bully a developer for using is fucking Unreal Engine 5?
all wokes want is to use a notoriously advanced and difficult game engine owned by a right-wing asshole and that’s how they’re gonna destroy gaming. with the engine that gigantic studios use because writing an engine from scratch is a fucking money pit that never ends and you have to have a good fucking reason to do it
also I’ve been trying to force my hands to not start a Bevy project ever since Tiny Glade (a beautiful, cozy 3D sandbox builder running on the Bevy engine) launched and Bevy is manual as hell (but fun to work with), so this is a good reminder that Godot is cool and I should finally learn it too
A common pattern of the angry anti-'woke' gamers is that they don't know how games are made on any level, and they are kept, I think intentionally, in the dark by the people who are stirring the anti-'woke' craziness who should know better. And it is about every level, npc ai, engines, financial, external organization structures, community management, how prerelease footage is work in progress, etc etc. It is almost impressive how blind people are towards how their hobby creation works.
also, holy fuck the reply guys are a plague on that post. is bluesky normally like that, or is it the blast radius from the gamers deciding they have a problem?
dunno if i have an unusual amount of blocked posters, but the ones i can see are fine? bsky is largely le home of le wokisme
that’s probably it — logged out mastodon is probably just as bad. also the most aggressive reply guy’s take is “accounts for public projects should never block anyone and they should be required to debate the people yelling at them” which is, holy fuck, the most blockable thing I’ve ever seen
Godot is really fun to use and to develop in. They basically gamified documentation writing: they show you tooltips for your custom elements just like the classes provided by the engine with their excellent documentation. The engine has hot code reloading too. I have a puzzle game project that I'm working on now.
that sounds awesome! godot in general seems to be a very practical game engine, and at this point I definitely want to do my next little experimental game project in Godot (with Rust, if the tooling for that is at all ready for production) so I have experience with at least one normal object-oriented game engine that isn’t an old unreal engine or idtech under my belt
like I mentioned, I really like how Bevy works, but in its current state it isn’t really ready for rapid development. a bare Bevy project is literally just the ECS and system scheduler but with no runloop. the defaults get you a lot of basics like a runloop, good renderer, input handling, audio, and such, but from there you still have to decide how everything works in terms of game logic — even with third-party plugins for stuff like physics for example, you still have to write logic for what a collision means to each entity involved. I also don’t think bevy has a unified editor or live code reloading at all yet? so for each game you have to write an editor (which the engine helps with a little bit) and potentially a live reload implementation (which sounds like hell)
Wait, what? Can I get some info or even just the right search terms to force Google to give me useful info? I know he's done the eye-roll-worthy "no politics in my artform" bullshit but if there's more I've missed, I'm keen to know.
most of it’s on Twitter and therefore inaccessible to me, but Sweeney has a habit of falling all over himself to defend musk in nonsensical ways, and musk continuously returns the favor. the two of them boosting each other politically is something that keeps happening — a search for
tim sweeney muskor similar should surface more recent examples without flooding you with “no politics in art” results (though that’s a dogwhistle too, so…)Sweeney has a wider track record of saying slimy fash shit on Twitter — it’s why he’s a meme on mastodon — but like I said, none of that’s accessible to me anymore. it fucking sucks that both of the programmers I idolized as a naive kid turned out to be huge fucking assholes though
Carmack has always struck me as the kind of cishet white GenX dude that gets more and more pissed that everything's "political", I just wanna code, man, why is everyone mad at me that he more or less inevitably falls into fascism. Sure games can be coded as "countercultural" but the genres that Doom and Quake represent are quasi-fascist already.
Ugh. Thanks, yeah that's good enough for me without even opening xcancel. My search for "Tim Sweeney conservative" only dredged up his land conservation purchases and the "stop being so divisive" / "no politics in art" dogwhistles which had previously made me suspicious, but I had mostly forgotten about. I quit Twitter many years ago so I missed that whole knobslobbering saga and didn't think to include
Muskafter skimming today's shitty Google "search" results.Ah fuck, and Carmack too? Goddamn it. Twist the knife a little harder.
Fucking tech bros, always ruining tech.
Holy shit that is amazing. The thinnest skins. All of this over the promise by God not to flood the world again.
There's a new fork of Godot!
It's called Lolidot, because of course it is
it's going great too
Of course it could get worse.
Lol at them just removing the godot donation links/list of donors and just replacing it with their own. What a grift.
god these people are fucking losers
from the godot discord:
go woke, go 1400 EUR ahead and lose a pile of shitheads you never wanted
the chuds have done their usual thing of throwing themselves on the ground and acting extremely injured by being blocked for violating the CoC of an open source project (via Liam at GamingOnLinux):
what’s fucked is this is the exact same playbook as NixOS and Python, though this time Godot doesn’t seem to be taking any shit and that seems to be preventing those tactics from working. weird how easy it is to weather shit like this when you have a fucking spine and aren’t trying to retain fascist assholes
::: spoiler image description Twitter posts by Rémi Verschelde (@Akien): I see misunderstanding around Godot blocking some users on its GitHub organization.
—
Blocking users doesn't even prevent them from reading issues and PRs, just interacting with them. You can read and download anything from a GitHub repository as an anonymous (not logged in) user. *git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot.. works for anyone with an Internet connection.
—
Just adding as some asked - if you want to quote this to people who still believe we're mass blocking people on GitHub and cutting them off their tech stack, feel free to grab a screenshot. I locked my account while the heat dies down, so you can't easily link those tweets. :::
ahahaha that’s amazing
it also pushed me to start learning Godot since its community seems awesome, and that’s definitely showing through on the docs so far — they go into so much depth on why Godot’s designed like it is, and what specifically it’s good for
I’ve only just started, but it’s reminding me very positively of what Unreal Engine was for a brief period of time: a runtime for a powerful domain-specific scripting language that could be extended by native code when needed, targeting indie devs
unfortunately Tim Sweeney kind of sucks at designing languages (though he used to do it a lot) so UnrealScript was a real fucking mess, and UE never really captured the indie market (cause you had to pay a fuckload for the privilege of writing native code) so UnrealScript got excised and the engine became “free” (as in free timeshare) and entirely refocused on developers pumping out AAA garbage and other whales (and, more charitably, anyone who needs an engine that can do state of the art graphics)
Godot, so far, to me feels kind of like an Unreal Engine that didn’t fuck up with the indie market and also isn’t closed source greedware
also apparently there’s a new Unreal scripting language? it’s got the Haskell guy behind it and it’s functional which is cool, but it’s also already bathed in horseshit:
so I guess Fortnite modders can weigh in on how good Haskell for Gaming is
e: also, imagine if any of these pro gamers knew Godot is the Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad engine
from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:
nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects
oh, what's that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then
a debt in the special non-financial sense
the miracle of VC is learning to write like ChatGPT
ah, the special non-financial sense, you mean blood debts? I think many of us will be happy to hold tan et co to account for blood debts
a land acknowledgement for the open source they're trampling on and will keep trampling on
They're getting paid in "exposure"
it’s time for our weekly what in the fuck is wrong with you Proton
the various full-tilt levels of corporate insanity from the last 10y or so are going to make remarkable case studies in the coming years
I've definitely seen this kind of meme format, to be fair. But generally speaking I think we should make a rule that in order to be considered satire or joking something should need to actually be funny.
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says in-depth Marxist economic analysis? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster breaks down historical context of Game of Thrones? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says the same VPN marketing schpiel as every other podcaster? Not. Funny.
(Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)
"Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764":
Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:
This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that "AI training" has become synonymous with "art theft/copyright infringement" in the public consciousness.
Between AI bros publicly scraping against people's wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs' datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn't blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.
That's not what research means, you embossed carbuncle.
It's fucking James Somerton with extra steps!
Back in my day, you had to create your own kooky "evidence" for conspiracies.
The horror. Replacing the joy of looking into something and making your findings available in your own style to others replaced by autogenerated slop. And soon this will be all over the place, we will look back on the past period of low effort clickbait with nostalgia.
“curated”
it shouldn’t surprise me that the dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language” doesn’t understand the meaning of words, but grrrrr
(and I say that as an armchair linguist who understands that language is as people use it (fuck prescriptivism))
"In the what now?", he said, voice trembling with a mixture of horror and excitement
proudly displayed on his blog timeline
Wait, did OpenAI claim somewhere they will "solve language"?
no, that’s a personal extrapolation/framing characterising some of the shit I’ve seen from these morons
(they engaged with very few linguists in the making of their beloved Large Language Models, instead believing they can just data-bruteforce it; this plan gone as well as has been observed)
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1841848120897912967#m
jfc
Edit: replaced screenshot of tweet + description with link to tweet
jesus christ, as if "podcasts" consisting of random idiots regurgitating wikipedia weren't bad enough as it is
aaaaaaaah
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
it's like he's purposefully trying to think as little as possible
thinking needs many strawberry reasoning tokens! maybe these grifters just aren't as rich as they portray
…..pwahahahaha
“if only you know” in the purest form I’ve seen all week
can't tell if serious
https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!
I was thinking this
Aw man, now that's a blast from the past!
with all the arch and OS fuckery, I've been starting to ponder what it'll take to run games in coming years
and all the shit locked in on steam....
r/SubredditDrama's watching shit go down in r/EffectiveAltruism, and there's a lotta sneers going on
Man, that hits close to home. It's a hard sell to sneer at people ostensibly doing their best to do good. Any kind of altruism, particularly one ostensibly focused on at least trying to be effective, feels like a such a rare treat that I feel like the worst kind of buzzkill letting newcomers know what cynical doomer ass death obsessed sex cult (and not even in a kinkily cool way*) a big chunk of EA and other TESCRL are. I can relate to them in so many ways, especially remembering what my teenage self was like, but at the same time it's weirdly hard to articulate how immature those opinions (some of which) I used to, and they continue to hold, are**.
Anyway, charity is a symptom of the failure of society. Luxury is a human right. Profit is exploitation. Nobody gets a billion dollars without mass homicide.
* but unfortunately often in an uncool, very rapey way
** not all of them, there are levels of cringe I managed to avoid even in my teenage years
It is worth mentioning that this is the question that catalysed the SRD post:
This exchange on HN, from the Wordpress meltdown, is going to make an amazing exhibit in the upcoming trial:
https://fixupx.com/CultureCrave/status/1840858182840877084
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Elon musk voice: 'So euhmmm euuhhh ummm you are ummm euhh saying it has umm some value?'
E: But wait there is more
Tweet from Paul Graham: "Renaming Twitter X doesn't seem to have damaged it. But it doesn't seem to have helped it either. So it was a waste of time and a domain name."
And more
Reply tweet from Elon Musk: "You know nothing"
(And as is tradition when Musk replies to a famous person, the famous person doesn't even react).
The tragedy of being Elon Musk: he has thousands and thousands of cryptocurrency bros and fascists that worship the ground he walks on, but what he really want is for Stephen King to reply to one of his tweets.
Stephen King is busy working him in as a villain in a new novel.
What if a social media site turned evil!
that's his one move
I read Cell so reluctantly
At this point the real plot twist would be if a social media site turned out good.
always wondered about those "Awful Systems" fuckers
I’m gonna change my name to photoselfie and become, allegedly, the fucking worst
This gonna end in a gofundme
hatreon
New piece from Ars Technica: Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds:
Putting my off-the-cuff thoughts on this:
Right off the bat, I'm pretty confident AR/smart glasses will end up dead on arrival - I'm no expert in marketing/PR, but I'm pretty sure "our product helped someone dox innocent people" is the kind of Dasani-level disaster which pretty much guarantees your product will crash and burn.
I suspect we're gonna see video of someone getting punched for wearing smart glasses - this story's given the public a first impression of smart glasses that boils down to "this person's a creep", and its a lot easier to physically assault someone wearing smart glasses than some random LLM
This is a gut feeling I've had since Baldur talked about AI's public image nearly three months ago, but this gives me further reason to expect the public are gonna be outright hostile to the tech industry once the AI bubble pops.
100%. This criti-hype is going to blow up in their faces. "They" being, in order:
In addition to your analysis, I'd like to point out that this reads just like the Rabbit R1, but for stalkers who also have a deep craving to look like an insufferable dork. This whole thing could be, and already is, an app -- if someone needs this kind of evil bullshit, clearview.ai been around forever.
I also now wonder how illegal this could be in various jurisdictions. I know that aiming security cams at public roads is a bit frowned upon here in .nl for example
Thank you for the Dasani video, fucking amazing.
What the hell does "spunk" mean in the US??
I’m not USAian but I’d bet both “jizz” and “gusto”, depending on context
so, I've always thought that blind's "we'll verify your presence by sending you shit on your corp mail" (which, y'know, mail logs etc....) is kinda a fucking awful idea. but!
this is remarkably fucking unhinged:
In the endless genAI shit that the bird site pushes on me, this caught my eye because it seems like a dream tool for a non-tech suit to generate blame examples for engineers https://xcancel.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1840941643223945561
i .... have no idea whatsoever what the use case is here ... you make the chatbot generate the code instead of cloning the repo? or it's like generating an API that doesn't work or something?
Think it is an attempt to make it easier to feed somebodies work into a LLM. So you know, stealing.
Yeah it just collates everything in the repo into a single text file so you can upload that to the shit machine
fucking… that’s all? some shit you can do moments after learning about the GitHub API for the first time? and I shouldn’t be surprised, but this is the code that people were fellating in the Twitter comments and/or using to advertise their own shitware?
fucker, how are you like this?
....... and then what..................
Ok I found a similar tool in the tweets replies and here's what it suggests prompting the chatbot with
These people use chatbots daily yet still seem to be under the impression that LLMs are competent. I don't even know what to say.
This is why I say I can only imagine the non-tech suits using it to be assholes to the dev team
Yeah, I can at least understand why people would ask a chatbot about bits of codes, but feeding it an entire codebase in one go and expecting something coherent out of it is mind boggling. Awful awful.
@Amoeba_Girl this is irretrievably cursed
Astounding, they've made noSQL for filesystems!
@fasterandworse @blakestacey seems cursed
I didn't realize I was still signed up to emails from NanoWrimo (I tried to do the challenge a few years ago) and received this "we're sorry" email from them today. I can't really bring myself to read and sneer at the whole thing, but I'm pasting the full text below because I'm not sure if this is public anywhere else.
::: spoiler spoiler Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of this organization. One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size.
National Novel Writing Month To Our NaNoWriMo Community:
There is no way to begin this letter other than to apologize for the harm and confusion we caused last month with our comments about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We failed to contextualize our reasons for making this statement, we chose poor wording to explain some of our thinking, and we failed to acknowledge the harm done to some writers by bad actors in the generative AI space. Our goal at the time was not to broadcast a comprehensive statement that reflected our full sentiments about AI, and we didn’t anticipate that our post would be treated as such. Earlier posts about AI in our FAQs from more than a year ago spoke similarly to our neutrality and garnered little attention.
We don’t want to use this space to repeat the content of the full apology we posted in the wake of our original statements. But we do want to raise why this position is critical to the spirit—and to the future—of NaNoWriMo.
Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of what we do. Our stated mission is “to provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page”. Our comments last month were prompted by intense harassment and bullying we were seeing on our social media channels, which specifically involved AI. When our spaces become overwhelmed with issues that don’t relate to our core offering, and that are venomous in tone, our ability to cheer on writers is seriously derailed.
One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size. A year ago, we were attempting to do too much, and we were doing some of it poorly. Though we admire the many writers’ advocacy groups that function as guilds and that take on industry issues, that isn’t part of our mission. Reshaping our core programs in ways that are safe for all community members, that are operationally sound, that are legally compliant, and that are mission-aligned, is our focus.
So, what have we done this year to draw boundaries around our scope, promote community safety, and return to our core purpose?
We ended our practice of hosting unrestricted, all-ages spaces on NaNoWriMo.org and made major website changes. Such safety measures to protect young Wrimos were long overdue.
We stopped the practice of allowing anyone to self-identify as an educator on our YWP website and contracted an outside vendor to certify educators. We placed controls on social features for young writers and we’re on the brink of relaunch.
We redesigned our volunteer program and brought it into legal compliance. Previously, none of our ~800 global volunteers had undergone identity verification, background checks, or training that meets nonprofit standards and that complies with California law. We are gradually reinstating volunteers.
We admitted there are spaces that we can’t moderate. We ended our policy of endorsing Discord servers and local Facebook groups that our staff had no purview over. We paused the NaNoWriMo forums pending serious overhaul. We redesigned our training to better-prepare returning moderators to support our community standards.
We revised our Codes of Conduct to clarify our guidelines and to improve our culture. This was in direct response to a November 2023 board investigation of moderation complaints.
We proactively made staffing changes. We took seriously last year’s allegations of child endangerment and other complaints and inspected the conditions that allowed such breaches to occur. No employee who played a role in the staff misconduct the Board investigated remains with the organization.
Beyond this, we’re planning more broadly for NaNoWriMo’s future. Since 2022, the Board has been in conversation about our 25th Anniversary (which we kick off this year) and what that should mean. The joy, magic, and community that NaNoWriMo has created over the years is nothing short of miraculous. And yet, we are not delivering the website experience and tools that most writers need and expect; we’ve had much work to do around safety and compliance; and the organization has operated at a budget deficit for four of the past six years.
What we want you to know is that we’re fighting hard for the organization, and that providing a safer environment, with a better user interface, that delivers on our mission and lives up to our values is our goal. We also want you to know that we are a small, imperfect team that is doing our best to communicate well and proactively. Since last November, we’ve issued twelve official communications and created 40+ FAQs. A visit to that page will underscore that we don’t harvest your data, that no member of our Board of Directors said we did, and that there are plenty of ways to participate, even if your region is still without an ML.
With all that said, we’re one month away! Thousands of Wrimos have already officially registered and you can, too! Our team is heads-down, updating resources for this year’s challenge and getting a lot of exciting programming staged and ready. If you’re writing this season, we’re here for you and are dedicated, as ever, to helping you meet your creative goals!
In community,
The NaNoWriMo Team :::
I was not prepared for how many words the spoiler unlocked
I was not prepared for how many words would land in my inbox 💀
I don't have the broader context to comment on the changes they discussed regarding child endangerment and community standards apart from "Wait... oh my God you weren't already doing that???"
But it's such a huge pull back to go from "hating AI is ableist and basically Hilter" to "uhhhh guys we've had our plates full cleaning up the mess and the most we'll say about AI is to stop being assholes about it on our forums." Clearly there's still a lot of cleaning up to do at some level.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted
“Wait… oh my God you weren’t already doing that???”
I'm not at all surprised given it wasn't exactly started in the present form by people with money to hire consultants who would know to do those things.
For the first mumble years there probably wasn't much involvement by kids at all so it would never have occurred to them. Or there were some kids but not the forums or other potential settings for adult misconduct.
all the context one could need https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ae33g5/writing_discords_forums_and_a_decades_worth_of/
God that's exhausting. Wasn't Nanowrimo supposed to be a fun thing at some point? Is there anyone in the world who thinks this sort of scummy PR language is attractive?
@maol Bloody hell, they really dropped the ball.
I wasn't aware of any of this as I haven't been involved for over 10 years.
It's a shame that they lost sight of the basics.
CEO of cloudflare says he’ll donate the bandwidth for Wordpress dot org to shut mullenweg up https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663
Cloudflare is such a weird company in various ways. Saying loudly that they can't judge groups when people ask them not to support the neo-nazis, harassers and worse (they have moved on this under pressure, but it takes a lot of pressure). But then they do this.
Wasn't the first time he shut down 8chan (or was it Kiwifarms? Something along the lines), he immediately came out to say "It's really bad that I have the power to take down a website of shitheads." Just seemed like everything about his ideology is confused.
Nobody told him to make his CDN so dominant in the market. He kinda chose to have this power. If you think Cloudflare's services are some kind of a universal inalienable right, make them free, you pussy. Be a philantropist, share that sweet bandwidth with the poor. Gimme a /24, coward. Why are you taking money for a basic necessity, you monster?
Y'all can thank me for taking down 8ch and KF, because I also do not run hosting infrastructure for either of them. Same goes to all of you who do not run a CDN that welcomes nazi websites. Thank you for your service.
There’s nothing confused about his ideology. Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought, but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence in Ireland (which was the final act of kiwi farms, from recollection. Presumably even the ceo couldn’t defend them at that point, though I bet he tried).
Dude doesn’t give a shit about free speech, or lament the power he’s ended up with. He just really loves fascism.
can't say why but I can say this is not completely/100% true; however
yup
please don't get me wrong, I'm not going to bat for cloudflare. the company is detestable and problematic in extremely many dimensions
in this particular case and wrt the dude himself, it indeed appears to be much about the power. in the case of the commentary FredFig references, I suspect that came through a lens of "it is bad that I can do this [where "this" is "acquiesce to societal pressure to silence people I don't wish to silence"]". didn't see the comment at the time though, so I have no idea if it was dogwhistled or what at the time
I guess I should be clear this is not an endorsement of cloudflare, just fun to see dickheads being dickheads to each other
I didn't take it as such, I just was again a bit confused by the actions cloudflare takes. Assume it is some weird technolibertarian thing.
And probably also an opportunity to dunk on Mullenweg for free PR
also it gives them even more network control and data, something entirely beneficial to them
I have only just noticed that this is dated a year in the future
acausal sneers from our superpredictors
blake is rather more advanced in physics than we had anticipated
Voted sneerer most likely to build a fully-functional time machine!
what's the over/under on the spruce pine thing causing promptfondlers and their ilk to suddenly not be able to get chips, and then hit a(n even more concrete) ceiling?
(I know there may be some of the stuff in stockpiles awaiting fabrication, but still, can't be enough to withstand that shock)
If we're lucky, it'll cut off promptfondlers' supply of silicon and help bring this entire bubble crashing down.
It'll probably also cause major shockwaves for the tech industry at large, but by this point I hold nothing but unfiltered hate for everyone and everything in Silicon Valley, so fuck them.
Building 5-7 5GW facilities full of GPUs is going to be an extremely large amount of silicon. Not to mention the 25-35 nuclear power plants they apparently want to build to power them.
So on the list of things not happening...
that would be 25-35 reactors, as long as cooling is available you can just put them in one place. 5GW is around size of largest european nuclear powerplants (Zaporozhian, 5.7GW; Gravelines, 5.4GW; six blocks each) or around energy consumption of decently-sized euro country like Ireland, Hungary or Bulgaria. 25GW is electricity consumption of Poland, 30GW UK, 35GW Spain
this is not happening hardest because by the time they'd get permits for NPP they'll get bankrupt because bubble will be over
Gonna build enough clean energy to power a medium sized industrialized nation just to waste it all on videos of babies dressed up as shrimp jesus.
The theoretical Three Mile Island datacentre is probably the end-point of all of this. I think that what they build there (should it actually happen) has to be AGI. Like, unambiguously AGI. Where even the most hardline AI skeptics will react with "Holy shit they actually did it."
Anything less and it'll be nearly impossible to justify building 5 nuclear reactors to just power one of these datacentres.
So even if it is happening, it's still not happening.
i don't think TMI even has space for 5 blocks
I don't think they're planning to build the 5GW datacentres on TMI, though.
i don't think they're planning to build anything, but it'd be very funny if they ended up doing that anyway bleeding MS out of money
I might be wrong but this sounds like a quick way to make the web worse by putting a huge computational load on your machine for the purpose of privacy inside customer service chat bots that nobody wants. Please correct me if I’m wrong
https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm
I read this twice as LLM interference engine and was hoping for something like SETI or Folding@Home except my computer could interfere with ChatGPT somehow.
I do believe that’s the chrome-only horseshit that Proton uses for their local LLM, and reputedly it’s very slow and fairly unreliable
The whole concept of responsive really died in the arse with the onset of the full stack web developer.
the web platform is great!
Did you ever see that A16z funded startup that was making a web browser that streamed the web for an intermediary server? It was fucken wild
Edit, I guess it was yc funded? https://jacobhrussell.com/blog/mighty
oh it’s the web operating system again! things that make a web browser an operating system:
One other thing, also correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a giant key logger as well?
…huh, that is true! so another bullet point and this one’s shared by more than one “web operating system”:
in this case it’s pretty bad, cause it’s got the same issue as all hosted VMs in that if the host or hypervisor is compromised so are all the VMs, but also effectively anyone on Mighty’s side with access to the event stream would have enough data to compromise your entire existence
Haha no way! Turns out the founder pivoted to AI 5 months after that article was published https://xcancel.com/suhail/status/1591813110230568963
basilisk save us from breathless idiocy by rubes
ah yes the four-fold path of investing, the true religion
“I cannot look at this and analyse the power structure, and thus I am very confused as to how this happened”
“must surely”? call the builders, we’ve found a new ultra-strong load bearing phrase
Comparing it to Tesla certainly is a choice. I'm amazed at how many ways the cybertruck has found to die on people for example. More varied ways to crash and burn than nethack.
(also h/t to @self who I just realized was the one that retooted the thing where I saw this)
New post from Ed Zitron just dropped which goes into a lotta detail on OpenAI's finances around the time the deal was closing.
I've already cracked one Kendrick reference, so fuck it:
psst I see dead people
Given the proliferation of libertarians in SV, Ed probably wouldn't even need to change the "A-minor" line is all I'm saying.
Most everything from Cool Zone Media is going to be pretty decent. Haven't listened to the whole catalogue, but Ed Zitron of Better Offline is an established nonmember (as far as I know) friend of the sneer and Behind the Bastards is truly excellent.
Maintenance Phase is an excellent examination of diet and health grifters, and Mike's others (You're Wrong About and If Books Could Kill) are also pretty excellent.
I also want to spotlight Wittenburg to Westphalia, a history podcast ostensibly about the wars of the reformation and the social and economic chamges of the early modern period. But in order to really give a sense of how dramatic those changes are, he has so far provided only an incredibly thorough examination of medieval European society from the politics to economics and social structures. He has an episode about unfree labor that I found particularly interesting.
Second on Maintenance Phase! I marathonned it on a road trip a couple of days ago, and not only is it a well-researched and a fun listen, you'll discover that so much of the stuff Aubrey and Michael discuss is directly congruent to our typical subjects. Can't recommend it enough.
They've inspired me to work on an effort post for MoreWrite, tentatively titled, "A Unified Theory of Bullshitter-Driven Social Diseases."
Which isn't going to be as pompous as it sounds, I promise!
Sounds great! Looking forward to reading it
The Wittenburg podcast sounds like right up my alley, thanks for the tip!
I tend to like "Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff" more than "Behind the Bastards". Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.
My daily podcast is "It Could Happen Here", but some other mainstays in the educational side include:
Behind the Bastards is very easy to listen to and usually focuses on documenting the bad shit that various reactionary and fascist figures have done (in a humorous manner — the host was a writer for Cracked during its peak). a couple of the most recent episodes have covered some of the same topics we talk about in SneerClub and TechTakes, and they’re well worth a listen even if you know the subject matter well. I haven’t checked it out yet, but I think It Could Happen Here is a spin-off with the same main host that’s also broadly anti-fascist.
e: also, and I had to look this up cause I keep switching podcast apps: I Don’t Speak German is also good, and my co-admin David was on it (episode 82? I swear it was more recent than that… David were you on more than once?)
i was! ep 82 and 85
IDSG has slowed down a lot cos Daniel's got shit going on right now, but they try to do one when they can
These aren’t exactly educational but the two pods I bring up in this joint are “If Books Could Kill” and “Scam Goddess”. Again, they aren’t exactly educational but you’ll learn from them!
Some others that might work for you, mixture of informative and entertaining hosts
If you want interesting historical deep dives, I always enjoy Dig - the history podcast. Well researched by actual scholars, which goes hand in hand with the episodes not dropping that often.
Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052
For your delectation, here are the HN comments
Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.
There's not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.
Here's the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk
oh i dunno, there was
I think the one thing LLMs have shown us is that coherent English is less complicated than we previously believed. I don't think we learned anything about actual cognition.
The best way to unearth sneers is to state "there are no sneers here"
David took it as a personal challenge
given it was first comment when i looked, it was Find Dumb Bro Shit On HN mode
before you further impugne my sneer-hunting the quote I posted was literally the first one on top in the thread. I thought it was gonna be easy pickings before I realized a lot of people were making sense and I got bored.
This remark is actually part of a long fight between CS and CS people. And it is really frustrating in various ways, as CS always thinks they did better than CS while being blind of the actual accomplishments of CS they don't know and just how complex the subject matter is. It is an annoying failure to communicate between both disciplines. (A lot of people don't fall victim to this btw, but it can be really annoying to encounter a 'Our CS is good, and theirs is bad because strawman', who often don't even realize that various words have different meanings in the different fields).
For the record, I think the Counter-Strike people are correct on this one, mainly because heuristically Confederate States advocates are wrong by default.
Exactly the problem im talking about. What about all the good things the confederate state ... no wait.
Well that's quite the confused comment chain given that neither Go nor chess are solved. "Remember that thing everyone said wouldn't happen? Well it still hasn't happened! 🫨"
Confusing 'solved' with 'a computer can win playing vs high level human players a high % of the times' because they don't know that 'solved' actually has a specific meaning.
Tech reporting has massively fucked up this as well over the years btw, so I'm not that annoyed random HN people also don't get it. But there is a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game
The best thing about the lobste.rs thread is to identify prompt fondlers among the brethren.
Here's something I've never heard of before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
Apparently he had GPT back then!
Anyway is this anything anyone takes seriously? Steven Pinker makes an appearance in the wiki page, which is a bit of a red flag.
So to throw my totally-amateur two cents in, it seems like it's definitely part of the discussion in actual AI circles based on the for-public-consumption reading and viewing I've done over the years, though I've never heard it mentioned by name. I think a bigger part of the explanation has less to do with human cognition (it's probably fallacious to assume that AI of any method effectively reproduces those processes) and more to do with the more abstract cognitive tests and games being much more formally defined. Our perception and model of a game of Chess or Go may not be complete enough to solve the game, but it is bounded by the explicitly-defined rules of the game. If your opponent tries to work outside of those bounds by, say, flipping the board over and storming off, the game itself can treat that as a simple forfeit-by-cheating. But our understanding of the real world is not similarly bounded. Things that were thought to be impossible happen with impressive frequency, and our brain is clearly able to handle this somehow. That lack of boundedness requires different capabilities than just being able to operate within expected parameters like existing English GenAI or image generators, I suspect relating to handling uncertainty or lacking information. The assumption that what AI is doing is a mirror to the living mind is wholly unproven.
Moravec's Paradox is actually more interesting than it appears. You don't have take his reasoning or Pinker's seriously but the observation is salient. Also the paradox gets stated in other ways by other scientists, it's a common theme.
One way I often think about it: in order for your to survive, the intelligence of moving in unknown spaces and managing numerous fuzzy energy systems is way more important to prioritize and master than like, the abstract conceptual spaces that are both not full of calories and are also cheaper to externalize anyways.
It's part of why I don't think there is a globally coherent heirarchy of intelligence, or potentially even general intelligence at all. Just, the distances and spaces that a thing occupies, and the competencies that define being in that space.
Yeah, it's a real thing that happens when programming robots. Kinematics is more difficult than route planning, for example.
I don’t think AI will ever be able to get me to lick my own elbow (while my body is undamaged). Boom AGI will never happen. Logic’ed
nasb, fedi is for losers
been feeling this for a while too and wondering how to put it into words. especially in light of all the techfash, pressing climate and general market problems, etc
one of the things I've been holding onto (hoping in?) is my estimation/belief that I don't think the current state of all the deeply-fucked systems is inherently stable, or viable. as I've said here before, that very instability is part of why so many of them are engaged in trying to set things up to protect those self-same systems, as they know the swingback is coming and they want to make it as hard as possible to claw things back from them
but how long until it breaks, and with how much splash damage, are things I haven't really been able to estimate
My computer crashed as I was writing a response. In short:
I think fedi existing and having the userbase it has is “victory” enough. Capitalism and fascism push us to think “winning” and “success” are the greatest thing to aspire to. To “win” over capitalism and fascism will require an unlearning and disavowal of those aspirations.
oh yeah, I agree quite strongly with that sentiment too (and that's why I didn't re-use the words of the post I linked)
the fedi has some pretty dire threats (shit like threads etc) that I do think it needs to deal with by way of more teeth (consider it self-protective boundary setting), but in general I think a lot of the current state of it satisfying people just for being happy to be themselves is perfectly fine and good
side note: part of my problem is that my thinking on matters is a bit waterlogged due to shortage of knowledge/references, and backfilling that is ... well, hard to find the right resources for reading, and perpetual spoon shortage. I've been working my way through some Graeber and some other stuff, but very slowly and need more things. also doesn't help that ZA is, functionally, a desert island
I feel this. A constant, nagging feeling of "I should read theory," but man, I hate reading theory.
This is absolutely an important idea, but in the context of anti-capitalism I think there's a kind of catch-22 at play. The alternative systems that operate under a capitalist paradigm have serious externalities that come back to bite us whether we engage or not with them. My wife and I have spent some late nights over the last week trying to help family and friends in North Carolina keep track of which roads are usable, who is or isn't confirmed to be alive yet, etc. Maybe I'm a little extra feisty about climate change today, but it seems like while the alternative doesn't have to "win" in the same way that capitalists want to we do still need them to lose. Existing independently in parallel isn't a sustainable end goal, though I do agree that parallel structures are an important part of the solution.
Oh also what does nasb mean
"not a sneer, but"
I can't recall who proposed it (the original phrase)
You know that famous Keynes quote, right. To paraphrase: "the tech sector can remain irrational for longer than the planet can remain habitable".
Im reminded of the "Rationalism is systematized winning". Post for some reason. This post and the recent musk chess post just makes me wonder about "what does winning" even mean. But in the spirit of wargames, i have not thought about it much more than that.
musk.. chess.. post.. ?
actually, forget I asked. I've had an eventful enough week of bullshit, and am going to close my friday off with some careless daydrinking and relaxation
(e: I would add: good god "musk chess post" must be one of the craziest strings of words I've seen in a while)
The only one I'm aware of is the ages old "chess is too simple" and I feel like that one was stupidity distilled in such a high concentration I don't ever need to hear any of his other opinions on chess, or games in general to be honest.
Between that and his Elden Ring build I think games were one of the earliest identified fields where Elon is actively dumb. Later extended to automotive design and literally everything.
This article (regrettably substack) really explores all the nooks and crannies of cringe hiding in the musk chess post: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-elon-musks-favorite-game-tells
Folks, I need some expert advice. Thanks in advance!
Our NSF grant reviews came in (on Saturday), and two of the four reviews (an Excellent AND a Fair, lol) have confabulations and [insert text here brackets like this] that indicate that they are LLM generated by lazy people. Just absolutely gutted. It's like an alien reviewed a version of our grant application from an parallel dimension.
Who do I need to contact to get eyes on the situation, other than the program director? We get to simmer all day today since it was released on the weekend, so at least I have an excuse to slow down and be thoughtful.
I haven't had to report malfeasance like that, but if that happened to me, I would be livid. I'd start by contacting the program officer; I'd also contact the division director above them and the NSF Office of Inspector General. I mean, that level of laziness can't just have affected one review! And, for good measure, I'd send a tip to 404media, as they have covered this sort of thing. That might well go nowhere, but it can't hurt to be in their contact list.
Total amateur here, but from quickly reviewing the process it looks like the program officer would be your primary point of contact within NSF to address this kind of thing? But then I would assume they read the reviews themselves before passing them back to you so I would hope they would notice? The bit of my brain that's watched too much TV would like to see them answer some questions from an AI skeptic journalist, but that's not exactly a great avenue for addressing your specific problem.
Mostly commenting to make it easier to keep track of the thread tbh. Thats some kinda nonsense you're dealing with here.
I got this AMAZING OPPORTUNITY in my inbox, because once your email appears on a single published paper you're forever doomed to garbage like this (transcript at the end):
Highlights:
I'm not sure which would be worse, this being a scam, or them legit thinking this brings value to the world and believing they're helping anyone.
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Scopus is just a citation database. So, yeah, about as "AI" as Excel.
I'm sorry, a peer reviewed credit gets you a special sort of doctorate now
A redditor has a pinned post on /r/technology. They claim to be at a conference with Very Important Promptfondlers in Berlin. The OP feels like low-effort guerilla marketing, tbh; the US will dominate the EU due to an overwhelming superiority in AI, long live the new flesh, Emmanuel Macron is on board so this is SUPER SERIOUS, etc.
PS: the original poster, /u/WillSen, self-identifies as CEO of a bootcamp/school called "codesmith," and has lots of ideas about how to retrain people to survive in the longed-for post-AI hellscape. So yeah, it's an ad.
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fufbfm/im_a_tech_ceo_at_the_berlin_global_dialogue_w/
The central problem of 21st century democracy will be finding a way to inoculate humanity against confident bullshitters. That and nature trying to kill us. Oh, and capitalism in general, but I repeat myself.
that thread’s so dense with marketing patterns and critihype, it’s fucking shameless. whenever anyone brings up why generative AI sucks, the OP “yes and”s it into more hype — like when someone brings up how LLMs shit themselves fast if they train on LLM-generated text, the fucker parries it to a “oh the ARM guy said he’s investing in low-hallucination LLMs and that’ll solve it”. like… what? no it fucking will not, those are two different problems (and throwing money at LLMs sure as fuck doesn’t seem to be fixing hallucinations so far either way)
the worst part is this basic shit seems to work if the space is saturated with enough promptfondlers. it’s the same tactic as with crypto, and it’s why these weird fucks always want you on their discord, and why they always try to take up as much space as possible in discussions outside of that. it’s the soft power of being able to shout down dissenting voices.
The Bookseller tried to hawk AI to its readerbase and they are not having it - they're getting ratioed hard:
ah
Bonus: Tech cultist and disgraced sex pest Robert Scobie jumped in on this, and got sneered pretty hard by Ed-Newton Rex and Gary Marcus:
If I hate something Robert Scoble likes, I automatically know I am on the right track.
So the ongoing discourse about AI energy requirements and their impact on the world reminded me about the situation in Texas. It set me thinking about what happens when the bubble pops. In the telecom bubble of the 90s or the British rail bubble of the 1840s, there was a lot of actual physical infrastructure created that outlived the unprofitable and unsustainable companies that had built them. After the bubble this surplus infrastructure helped make the associated goods and services cheaper and more accessible as the market corrected. Investors (and there were a lot of investors) lost their shirts, but ultimately there was some actual value created once we were out of the bezzle.
Obviously the crypto bubble will have no such benefits. It's not like energy demand was particularly constrained outside of crypto, so any surplus electrical infrastructure will probably be shut back down (and good riddance to dirty energy). The mining hardware itself is all purpose-built ASICs that can't actually do anything apart from mining, so it's basically turning directly into scrap as far as I can tell.
But the high-performance GPUs that these AI operations rely on are more general-purpose even if they're optimized for AI workloads. The bubble is still active enough that there doesn't appear to be much talk about it, but what kind of use might we see some of these chips and datacenters put to as the bubble burns down?
If those GPUs end up being used for Glaze and Nightshade, I'd laugh like a hyena.