Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
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.)
CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). It's a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called "LLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQL"
I didn't have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy
(Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)
Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.
I'd also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate "DATABASES AND ML" session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.
PSA: the domain shown in a google search result is not necessarily the domain it will actually link you to.
Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea before. What an absolutely horrible decision from google to allow this. What are they thinking?? This is great for phishing and malware, but I don't know what else. (Yeah ok, the reason has probably something to do with "line must go up".)
I recall seeing something of this sort happening on goog for about 12~18mo - every so often a researcher post does the rounds where someone finds Yet Another way goog is fucking it up
the advertising dept has completely captured all mindshare and it is (demonstrably) the only part that goog-the-business cares about
Polish commentary on Hitlergruß: https://bsky.app/profile/smutnehistorie.bsky.social/post/3lgaoyezhgc2c
Translation:
From the "flipping through LessWrong for entertainment" department:
You'd think the AI safety chuds would have more reservations about using GPT, which they believe has sapience, to learn things. They have the concept of an AI being a good convincer, which, hey, idiots, how have none of you thought the great convincing has started? Also, how have none of you realised that maybe you should be a little harder to convince in general???
It is a long-established truth that it's significantly easier to con someone who thinks they're smarter than you. Also as I think about it a little bit there seems to be a reasonable corollary of their approach towards Bayesian thinking that you not question anything that matches your expectations, which is exactly how you get taken advantage of by the kind of grifter they're attached to. Like, they've been thinking about the singularity for long enough that the Sams (bankman-fried, Altman, etc) have a well-developed script for what they expect the first stages to look like and it is, as demonstrated, very easy to fake that.
i think it was posted somewhere in techtakes https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
yeah, I posted in previous stubsack I think
Reposting this for the new week thread since it truly is a record of how untrustworthy sammy and co are. Remember how OAI claimed that O3 had displayed superhuman levels on the mega hard Frontier Math exam written by Fields Medalist? Funny/totally not fishy story haha. Turns out OAI had exclusive access to that test for months and funded its creation and refused to let the creators of test publicly acknowledge this until after OAI did their big stupid magic trick.
From Subbarao Kambhampati via linkedIn:
"𝐎𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐨𝐟 “𝑩𝒖𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝑮𝑰 𝑴𝒐𝒂𝒕 𝒃𝒚 𝑪𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑩𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒉𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒌 𝑪𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒔” hashtag#SundayHarangue. One of the big reasons for the increased volume of “𝐀𝐆𝐈 𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰” hype has been o3’s performance on the “frontier math” benchmark–something that other models basically had no handle on.
We are now being told (https://lnkd.in/gUaGKuAE) that this benchmark data may have been exclusively available (https://lnkd.in/g5E3tcse) to OpenAI since before o1–and that the benchmark creators were not allowed to disclose this *until after o3 *.
That o3 does well on frontier math held-out set is impressive, no doubt, but the mental picture of “𝒐1/𝒐3 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒃𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒅 𝒐𝒏 𝒔𝒊𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒉, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒃𝒐𝒐𝒕𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒗𝒆𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒆𝒓 𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒉”–that the AGI tomorrow crowd seem to have–that 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘈𝘐 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵–is shattered by this. (I have, in fact, been grumbling to my students since o3 announcement that I don’t completely believe that OpenAI didn’t have access to the Olympiad/Frontier Math data before hand… )
I do think o1/o3 are impressive technical achievements (see https://lnkd.in/gvVqmTG9 )
𝑫𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒘𝒆𝒍𝒍 𝒐𝒏 𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒃𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒉𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒌𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒑𝒓𝒊𝒐𝒓 𝒂𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒊𝒔 𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒊𝒎𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒗𝒆–𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔𝒏’𝒕 𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒎 “𝑨𝑮𝑰 𝑻𝒐𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒐𝒘.”
We all know that data contamination is an issue with LLMs and LRMs. We also know that reasoning claims need more careful vetting than “𝘸𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘥𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨” (see “In vs. Out of Distribution analyses are not that useful for understanding LLM reasoning capabilities” https://lnkd.in/gZ2wBM_F ).
At the very least, this episode further argues for increased vigilance/skepticism on the part of AI research community in how they parse the benchmark claims put out commercial entities."
Big stupid snake oil strikes again.
Every time they go 'this wasnt in the data' it turns out it was. A while back they did the same with translating rareish languages. Turns out it was trained on it. Fucked up. But also, wtf how are they expecting this to stay secret and there being no backlash? This world needs a better class of criminals.
The conspiracy theorist who lives in my brain wants to say its intentional to make us more open to blatant cheating as something that's just a "cost of doing business." (I swear I saw this phrase a half dozen times in the orange site thread about this)
The earnest part of me tells me no, these guys are just clowns, but I dunno, they can't all be this dumb right?
holy shit, that’s the excuse they’re going for? they cheated on a benchmark so hard the results are totally meaningless, sold their most expensive new models yet on the back of that cheated benchmark, further eroded the scientific process both with their cheating and by selling those models as better for scientific research… and these weird fucks want that to be fine and normal? fuck them
they can't even sell o3 really - in o3 high mode, needed to do this level of query, it's about $1000 per query lol
do you figure it’s $1000/query because the algorithms they wrote with their insider knowledge to cheat the benchmark are very expensive to run, or is it $1000/query because they’re grifters and all high mode does is use the model trained on frontiermath and allocate more resources to the query? and like any good grifter, they’re targeting whales and institutional marks who are so invested that throwing away $1000 on horseshit feels like a bargain
so, for an extremely unscientific demonstration, here (warning: AWS may try hard to get you to engage with Explainer[0]) is an instance of an aws pricing estimate for big handwave "some gpu compute"
and when I say "extremely unscientific", I mean "I largely pulled the numbers out of my ass". even so, they're not entirely baseless, nor just picking absolute maxvals and laughing
parametersassumptions made:(and before we get any fucking ruleslawyering dumb motherfuckers rolling in here about accuracy or whatever: get fucked kthx. this is just a very loosely demonstrative example)
so you'd have a variable buffer of 50..150 instances, featuring 3.2..9.6TiB of RAM for working set size, 800..2400 vCPU, 50..150 nvidia t4 cores, and 800..2400GiB gpu vram
let's presume a perfectly spherical ops team of uniform capability[3] and imagine that we have some lovely and capable active instance prewarming and correct host caching and whatnot. y'know, things to reduce user latency. let's pretend we're fully dynamic[4]
so, by the numbers, then
1y times 4h daily gives us 1460h (in seconds, that's 5256000). this extremely inaccurate full-of-presumptions number gives us "service-capable life time". the times your concierge is at the desk, the times you can get pizza delivered.
x3 to get to lifetime matching our spot commit, x50..x150 to get to "total possible instance hours". which is the top end of our sunshine and rainbows pretend compute budget. which, of course, we still have exactly no idea how to spend. because we don't know the real cost of servicing a query!
but let's work backwards from some made-up shit, using numbers The Poor Public gets (vs numbers Free Microsoft Credits will imbue unto you), and see where we end up!
so that means our baseline:
>=200k/yper ops/whatever person we have3y of 4h-daily at 50 instances = 788400000 seconds. at 150 instances, 2365200000 seconds.
so we can say that, for our deeply Whiffs Ever So Slightly values, a second's compute on the low instance-count end is $0.01722755 and $0.00574252 at the higher instance-count end! which gives us a bit of a handle!
this, of course, entirely ignores parallelism, n-instance job/load/whatever distribution, database lookups, network traffic, allllllll kinds of shit. which we can't really have good information on without some insider infrastructure leaks anyway. if we pretend to look at the compute alone.
so what does $1000/query mean, in the sense of our very ridiculous and fantastical numbers? since the units are now The Same, we can simply divide things!
at the 50 instance mark, we'd need to hypothetically spend 174139.68 instance-seconds. that's 2.0154 days of linear compute!
at the 150 instance mark, 522419.05 instance-seconds! 6.070 days of linear compute!
so! what have we learned? well, we've learned that we couldn't deliver responses to prompts in Reasonable Time at these hardware presumptions! which, again, are linear presumptions. and there's gonna be a fair chunk of parallelism and other parts involved here. but even so, turns out it'd be a bit of a sizable chunk of compute allocated. to even a single prompt response.
[0] - a product/service whose very existence I find hilarious; the entire suite of aws products is designed to extract as much money from every possible function whatsoever, leading to complexity, which they then respond to by..... producing a chatbot to "guide users"
[1] - yes yes I know, the world is not uniform and the fucking promptfans come from everywhere. I'm presuming amerocentric design thinking (which imo is probably not wrong)
[2] - let's pretend that the calculators' presumption of 4h persistent peak load and our presumption of short-duration load approaching 4h cumulative are the same
[3] - oh, who am I kidding, you know it's gonna be some dumb motherfuckers with ansible and k8s and terraform and chucklefuckery
when digging around I happened to find this thread which has some benchmarks for a diff model
it's apples to square fenceposts, of course, since one llm is not another. but it gives something to presume from. if g4dn.2xl gave them 214 tok/s, and if we make the extremely generous presumption that tok==word (which, well, no; cf.
strawberry), then any Use Deserving Of o3 (let's say 515k words) would mean you need a tok-rate of 10003000 tok/s for a "reasonable" response latency ("5-ish seconds")so you'd need something like 5x g4dn.2xl just to shit out 5000 words with dolphin-llama3 in "quick" time. which, again, isn't even whatever the fuck people are doing with openai's garbage.
utter, complete, comprehensive clownery. era-redefining clownery.
but some dumb motherfucker in a bar will keep telling me it's the future. and I get to not boop 'em on the nose. le sigh.
Yeah we would like to stop lying and cheating, but the number you see.
They understand that all of the major model providers is doing it, but since the major model providers are richer than they are, they can't possibly ask OpenAI and friends to stop, so in their heads, it is what it is and therefore must be allowed to continue.
Or at least, that's my face value read of it, I certainly hope I'm simplifying things too much.
also they are rationalists and hence the most gullible mfs on any of this stuff
No, they bet on it not mattering and they've been completely right thus far.
it's enough if it ends up not mattering long enough for them to cash out, then they don't care
Ah right yes.
https://xcancel.com/kailentit/status/1881476039454699630
"We did not have superintelligent relations with that…"
some of those replies, oof
(especially that last one, which hits me with the same vibe as many of the coiner-era non-understanding hype-amplifiers did)
This is a thought I've been entertaining for some time, but this week's discussion about Ars Technica's article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.
A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly haven't cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network won't dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? It's gassed. The idea that "it might be ME up there one day!" persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining don't have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.
For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what I've seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systems... which, if it's not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.
Everybody's looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?
This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.
Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.
Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I don't fucking think so.
We're unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldn't you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after you're gone? If you can't spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then that's a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.
And I don't think there's a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.
Its really about the ultimate white flight.
Agree with space travel being retro-futurist fluff. It's very rich men badly remembering mediocre science fiction.
The US could lead the world in innovation in green technology but that's now tainted by wokeness.
Hmm, any sort of vision for generating public support for development of a technology has to have either ideological backing or a profit incentive. I don’t say this to mean that the future must be profitable, rather, I say this to mean that you don’t get the space race if western powers aren’t afraid of communism appearing as a viable alternative to capitalism, on both ideological and commercial fronts.
Unfortunately, a vision of that kind is necessarily technofascist. Rather than look for a tech-forward vision of the future, we need deprogram ourselves and unlearn the unspoken narratives that prop up capitalism and liberal democracy as the only viable forms of society. We need to dismantle the systems and structures that require the complex political buy-in for projects that are clearly good for society at large.
Uh, I guess I’ve kind of gone completely orthogonal to your point of discussion. I’m kind of saying the collapse of the US is inevitable.
On another somewhat orthogonal point, I suspect AI has likely soured the public on any kinda tech-forward vision for the foreseeable future.
Both directly and indirectly, the AI slop-nami has caused a lot of bad shit for the general public - from plagiarism to misinformation, from shit-tier AI art to screwing human artists, the public has come to view AI as an active blight on society, and use of AI as a virtual "Kick Me" sign.
I've been struggling with what the appropriate level of engagement for all the tech shit is.
I can stick to making fun of the AI crap and whatever else the tech people shit out because it's tangible for me, and I can more or less be an effective gatekeeper for my community, but the problems go beyond just a bunch of rich tech weirdos floating bad ideas, it's what they're trying to paper over. The fact that they're incompetent at it is very funny, but I've been laughing with gritted teeth for too long.
I just want it all to stop.
For the US to avoid collapse, the Democrats would have to sweep the board in multiple successive elections and be more unified and committed to deep reform than they ever have been.
I will pause for the laughter to fade.
Snark answer: for the US to avoid collapse, the democrats will have to do literally anything, so yeah collapse is inevitable.
Optimistic answer: a third, actually leftist, anti-liberal party suddenly gains popularity and power and reforms the US entirely.
Realistic answer: trump and the republicans will fully construct a fascist chokehold over the US probably by the end of this year at the earliest. Anyone who has any hope in non-violent action is deluding themselves.
A necessary precondition for the Democrats to do anything is Democrats regaining the Senate, which pretty much requires winning a Senate seat in North Carolina, where the state supreme court is taking the attitude that no Democratic win is legitimate. So, yeah: There's basically no institutional way for this country to come back from where it has gone.
In completely related news I'm strongly considering getting my affairs in order and moving
anywhere in the entire world besides the united statessomewhere in Europe; as it's apparently no longer safe for trans peopleor C++ developers*in the US. So if anyone has any advice (or job leads) please do share.* This is a memory safety joke
from what I’ve been told, a digital nomad visa and EU citizenship by descent are a couple of routes worth looking into. I have frustratingly little detail on the expectations around the visa though, and citizenship by descent laws vary by country.
Estonia has an immigration thing for tech workers I believe!
Sorry but Rust knowledge is now a hard requirement for visas so you better hit the book
might be relevant https://lemmy.world/post/21995141
what? space race was thinly disguised ICBM development program
ah, am conflating the cold war and the space race. Though, why the nations wanted to develop ICBMs is entirely relevant.
No actually, I think what you have to say is in line with my broader point. As the top source of global consumer demand, America is primarily held together by its supply chains at this point. To be crude about it, the best reasons to be an American in the 21st century are the swag and the cheap gas. When the MAGA and Fox News crowd are pointing fingers and ranting about Marxism, they're actively trying to obscure materialism and keep people from thinking about material conditions. Having a material program, that at least has elements that can be built from the bottom up, is at least as crucial as having an electoral program. I know the Four Thieves people got rightfully shredded here a few weeks back, and that kind of technical pushback on amateur dreams is necessary, so it's a tough needle to thread. But for instance, consider Gavin Newsom's plan to have California operate its own insulin production, within existing systems and regulations: https://calmatters.org/health/2025/01/insulin-production-gavin-newsom/ This is a Newsom policy I actually think is a fantastic idea, and a big credit to him if it happens! But it's bogged down in the production-line validation stage, because we already know how to synthesize insulin and that it's effective. And the production may not even be in California when it happens! There's plenty of room for improvement here.
Space and centralized, rent-seeking "AI" are not material programs that improve conditions for the broader population. The original space program was successful because a more tightly controlled media environment gave the opportunity to use it to cover for the missile development that was the enduring practical outcome. Positive consumer outcomes from all that have always felt, to me, like something that was bolted onto the history later. We wouldn't have Tang and transistors if not for Apollo! Well, one is kind of shitty and useless, the other is so overwhelmingly advantageous that it surely would have happened anyway.
And to your last point, I somewhat sadly feel like a lot of doomer shit I was reading ~15 years ago actually prepared me to at least be unsurprised about the situation we're in. A lot of those writers (James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer for instance) have either softly capitulated, or else happily slotted themselves into the middle of the red-brown alliance. I think that's a big part of why we're at where we're at: a lot of people who were actually willing to consider the idea of American collapse were perfectly fine with letting it happen.
PhysicsForums was apparently deliberately corrupted with LLM content in old posts.
AGI is coming, we're already at the "dumb guy who doesn't understand math but thinks he's smart" level
Jim Propp once wrote,
I’ve said it before a few times: this shit is a tunguska-level event on society today
that there’s now even retroactive contamination fallout is sickening :|
Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.
brb, saving copies of physics and math books before they go offline
I don’t even have an optical drive anymore jesus.
Encarta 96 btw
Yeah production of consumer writeable CDs / DVDs / BDs has basically stopped already. The end is in sight.
Also I'm not sure how much of a problem this is for newer CD drives, but older ones tend to give out sooner or later.
My Sega Saturn*'s drive still works, but I also installed a Satiator** drive emulator in case that changes.
* ^My^ ^username^ ^is^ ^serious^ ^business^ ^after^ ^all^
** ^Had^ ^to^ ^go^ ^with^ ^this^ ^option^ ^since^ ^it's^ ^the^ ^only^ ^non-destructive^ ^one^
expensive archival write-once BDs
There's always overpriced audiophile gear...
Whats your fav saturn game?
Nights into Dreams. I'd have dreams about that game as a kid.
This seems like an apt point to share Maxwell Neely-Cohen's "Century-Scale Storage".
I knew there was a reason I couldnt part with my CD tower.
I'm the weirdo who installs blu-ray drives in all my computers. I'm also the weirdo who has multiple computers. There are currently three or four (I've lost count) blu-ray drives in my house.
It's great being able to buy and own movies without dealing with the horrors of streaming. Unfortunately discs are becoming less and less popular commercially, so a lot of stuff nowadays is streaming only.
Also my car can play MP3 CDs so of course I need to be able to create those from a computer ^disregard^ ^the^ ^fact^ ^that^ ^my^ ^car^ ^also^ ^supports^ ^USB^ ^which^ ^I^ ^neglect^ ^since^ ^it's^ ^less^ ^retro^^.^
My father-in-law is a hoarder of both physical and digital things. His house is filled with hard drives where he has like stored copies of every movie ever made as mp4s and then he sends the drives to us because he has no physical space for them since he has junk from like 30 years ago piling up in the living room. So now my house is filled with random ass hard drives of (definitely not pirated) movies.
Yeah, wanted to get the new seasons of Futurama on bluray as a gift, turns out that they only are on streaming. Of course.
tunguska incident only wiped out local squirrel population and its fallout was inert. this is more like leaded gasoline: introduced for profit, polluting for decades, makes people dumber during entire duration of it, entrenches techbros and makes them responsible for development of infrastructure going forward
That one hurts :(
til that there's not one millionaire with family business in south african mining in current american oligarchy, but at least two. (thiel's father was an exec at mine in what is today Namibia). (they mined uranium). (it went towards RSA nuclear program). (that's easily most ghoulish thing i've learned today, but i'm up only for 2h)
there's probably a fair couple more. tracing anything de beers or a good couple of other industries will probably indicate a couple more
(my hypothesis is: the kinds of people that flourished under apartheid, the effect that had on local-developed industry, and then the "wider world" of
opportunitiesprey they got to sink their teeth into after apartheid went away; doubly so because staying ZA-only is extremely limiting for ghouls of their sort - it's a fixed-size pool, and the still-standing apartheid-vintage capital controls are Limiting for the kinds of bullshit they want to pull)there are more it seems https://www.ft.com/content/cfbfa1e8-d8f8-42b9-b74c-dae6cc6185a0
that list undercounts far more than I expected it to
there's gotta be way more, but frankly idk even where to begin to look
Good news, everyone: critihype is canceled until the next tweet.
https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470#m
Hmm, surely there is no downside to doing all of one's marketing, both personal* and professional, through the false certainty and low signal of short-form social media. The leopard has only licked Sam's face, it will never bite and begin chewing!
*You and I may find the concept of a "personal brand" to be horrifying, but these guys clearly want to become brands more fervently than Bruce Wayne wanted to become a bat
Hat tip to this reply showcasing a beautiful example of image gen. Very éthiccal(athiccal?) technology.
Amazing how that all looks like one of those sites from the geocities era, with sparkles/stars butterflies and unicorns and dolphins all over it. All it needs now is a under construction sign.
it must be ethiccal, it has two dolphins
And a Quarian who went to business school
Imagine going on the Pilgrimage and all you bring back is an MBA and some motivational quotes, instant exile
"Zero", so true
5ERO, even!
Rationalist death count keeps climbing https://xcancel.com/jessi_cata/status/1882182975804363141#m
What the fuck?
....... What the fuck?
Jesus wept, it's so frustratingly obvious that anytime some flavor of cop kills someone, the news media reporting (if any) will be this weird Yoda grammar pidgin.
The femoidically gendered female shot with its gun by very personally pulling the trigger, with this viscerally physical action performed by the said femalian in most pointedly concrete terms amounting to it (the femaloidistical entity, a specimen of the species known as females) firing lethal gunshots at the border patrol with the female's own two hands.
Subsequently return fire manifested itself from somewhere and came into contact with the female suspect female. The Justice Enforcement Officers involved in the situation were made a part of a bilateral exchange of gunfire between the shooting female and the officers situated in the scenario in which shooting was, to some extent, quite possibly performed from their side as well.
The zizian angle makes this so weird. Like, on top of probably being stopped for driving while trans, they might have instigated the shootout to prove to the basilisk that their parallel universe selves/simulated iterations/eternal souls can't be acausally blackmailed.
Ziz is a boogeyman figure to them at this point. I think its deliberate to deflect from the sex abuse stuff (ziz was a part of that whole controversy).
Yeah there is so much untold in the reporting and I'm not going to trust either tpots or border cops. I have no idea whatsoever what to make of this.
Maybe someone will finally write that article…
Does anyone know who or what is Ziz in this context? Google says jewish mythological beast.
edit: found this:
https://zizians.info/
it's like looking from outside at minor splinter groups within scientology, and the purported voice of reason says that the right way to deal with these transgressors is to return to scientologist orthodoxy. it even includes seasteading
It's another one of those things that the further you read the worse it gets, isn't it?
yep.
I was reading something David wrote about it at one point, but it seemed like lore too cursed even for the rationalist milieu
Rationalism is a cult, but it's also a cult franchise that generates smaller cults. Also a lot of the people were not entirely balanced to start with and rationalism made them worse. Anyway, Ziz.
that blog in question comes with its own private glossary and is just as dense and long as you can expect. i spent half an hour trying to figure it out and noped when noticed scroll bar position
tfw when you recognize it's Quality Rationalist Content
it's workday, i'm too sober for this
hackernews: We're going to build utopia on Mars, reinvent money, and construct god.
also hackernews: moving off facebook is too hard :( :( :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42779776
they will take facebook there with them. none of their space escapism will solve their problrms because they take them along. these mfers will do anything but go to therapy
Banner start to the next US presidency, with Wiener Von Wrong tossing a Nazi salute and the ADL papering that one over as an "awkward gesture". 2025 is going to be great for my country.
Incidentally is "Wiener Von Wrong" or "Wernher Von Brownnose" better?
Perhaps "Wanker von Clown"?
Ooo, I like that.
in that spirit: Loserus Inamericus
(I don't know if that scans, I have no latin skills and I don't feel like breaking out information to check)
I hope everyone is ready for the constant overlap between politics and AI / Silicon Valley; because I'm not.
Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders (Source Bluesky Thread).
I'm not 100% sure I buy that the EOs were written by AI rather than people who simply don't care about or don't know the details; but it certainly looks possible. Especially that example about the Gulf of Mexico. Either way I am heartened that this is the conclusion people jump to.
Aside: I also like how much media is starting to cite bluesky (and activitypub to a lesser extent). I assume a bunch of journalists moved off of twitter or went multi-platform.
Isn’t this one of the things that LW was spooked by? Giving the reins to an AI? Won’t someone think of the wrongers???
yeah bsky is where journalists post now so it's where they scrape stories from
Thanks, I hate it.
Especially because Trump's legal teams have historically been more than incompetent enough to produce this kind of work on their own.
In a way that they have been historically awful and thwarted by the courts is a thing that worries me. I'd expect that somebody the past 8 years went 'this time we will not be bogged down in that'. But considering they went 100% in on repression from day 1 I'm slightly less worried about that.
For context, going all in on day 1 is actually bad for them, when the nazis took over The Netherlands/Belgium they methods there differed. In .nl they worked slowly and with gov already there, in .be they went full pogroms a lot faster. This meant that in .be a lot of people saw the threat sooner (WW1 and Belgium prob also didn't help) and acted and took better care of the vulnerable. The amount of Dutch Jewish people who survived ww2 vs Belgian Jewish people is very tragic. (and a very dark part of our history which we don't really talk about like this as mentioning that parts of your own country also are to blame for the holocaust is not a thing a lot of people want to talk about). At least I hope that stuff like going all crazy on the bishop will turn out to be big wakeup for random Americans and a strategic mistake on their part, they certainly didn't seem to have learned from the nazis (at least not this lesson, which fits with how fascism is blind for their own mistakes).
I don't know if this is good news for the underlying risk of how willing the nuts and bolts of society are to resist unlawful or monstrous policies. IDK, on the subject of complicity I think the fact that we eventually joined the war has caused a deep cultural amnesia about how much influence the Reich had on the states and vice versa. Charles Lindbergh, Madison Square Garden, etc. We didn't really acknowledge how much our cultural and political structures are open to authoritarianism, much less addressing those issues.
so I ran into this fucking garbage earlier, which goes so hard on the constituent parts of "the spam is the point", an ouroborosian self-reinforcing loop of Just More Media Bro Just One More Video Bro You'll See Bro It'll Be The Best Listicle Bro Just Watch Bro, and the insufferably cancerous "the medium is the message" videos-made-for-youtube-because-youtube that if it were a voltron it'd probably have its own unique Special Moment sequence instead of being one of the canned assembly shots
That sure is a specifc selection of topics.
The only one missing is dating, but that prob is extremely toxic if trained on online data.
we already know how would it end
Apparently the whole thing was a prank?
huh i had no idea, but considering how that crowd looked like, it would happen if it were real
I was thinking more about Grok explain people how to 'neg'. But that is also a horrible horror.
I wish YouTube would ban this shit wholesale, but it’s Google and of course they won’t.
Aside: I’ve been hammering “Don’t recommend this channel” on every video that remotely smells like AI slop for a while and so far that seems to keep the feed fairly clean.
if/when I use youtube, I use it entirely statelessly (and thus also without account)
it's a remarkably good way to see some utter lunacy, but it also precludes that option of dealing with shit
Yeah. I ran without an account for the longest time (and used alternative frontends like Freetube, Invidious, yt-dlp, etc.) but I caved and made one just so I could curate my feed.
it's this bullshit again isnt it https://www.404media.co/inside-the-world-of-tiktok-spammers-and-the-ai-tools-that-enable-them/
Among other things, probably
re the youtube phenomenon, ran into this as an interesting post recently, although fuck if I can remember where I saw it
also cc @dgerard (for pivot maybe)
You may have heard that Catturd doesn't have any fiber in his diet and was hospitalized for bowel blockage. (Best sneer I've seen so far: "can't turd.") Along similar lines, Srid isn't taking his statins for high cholesterol caused by a carnivore diet.
Meta: I'm kind of pissed that Catturd is WP notable but laughing my ass off at the page for carnivore diets. Life takes and gives.
My favorite part of the carnivore diet is that apparently scurvy can become enough of a problem that you'll see references to "not wanting to start the vitamin C debate" in forums.
I'm pretty sure it's not just a me thing, but I thought we all knew that sailors kept citrus on board specifically to prevent scurvy by providing vitamin C and that we all learned about this as kids when either a teacher tried to make the colonial era interesting or we got vaguely curious about pirates at some point.
scurvy? what year do we have? maybe they need to include mice in their diet since rodents can make their own vitamin C (iirc)
if they start eating rat, does that technically define them as cannibals? given how much of their ilk become diet target...
I learnt about it because I was so damn interested in sauerkraut.
@o7___o7 @Amoeba_Girl also delicious
So that's how to translate "Yo, this diet is for chumps" into Wikipedian.
you could say that being full of shit finally caught up to him *rimshot*
Here's a bonus high fiber diet pro-tip: Metamucil tastes like old socks and individual capsules have hardly any fiber anyway, I eat triscuits and Oroweat Double-Fiber bread instead because they're both much much better tasting. Also chili is the food of the gods.
what, are statins woke now?
edit wtf 'sneak did this too? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42800452
Refusal of statins was one of the most prominent anti-medical trends I remember observing among right-wing acquaintences, even well before such people got on the anti-vax bandwagon. To be sure, some people experience bad side-effects (including my mom, at least for a while), but it definitely seemed like a few bits of anecdata in the early 2010s built into a broad narrative of "doctor's tryin' ta kill ya"
I love how srid deflects by claiming no one has reported bad outcomes from the "meat and butter" diet... I found an endless stream of anecdotes from Google, like this.
can you imagine sneak, of all people, telling you you're crazy and probably being right?
Is this why they want to cancel Wikipedia? Because they hate their bowel blockage being reported on?
following on from this comment, it is possible to get it turned off for a Workspace Suite Account
?button from admin view)Workspace Support(otherwise you'll get some made-up bullshit from a person trying to buy time or Case Success or whatever, simply because they don't have the privileges to do what you're asking)hopefully you spend less time on this than the 40-something minutes I had to (a lot of which was spent watching some poor support bastard start-stop typing for minutes at a time because they didn't know how to respond to my request)
Thanks. I simply switched to Fastmail over this bullshit. (“Simply” mileage may vary)
so the new feature in the next macos release 15.3 is "fuck you, apple intelligence is on by default now"
https://archive.ph/4pSIw
oh boy: https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/113868769104056845 iOS devices send the contents of Signal chats to Apple Intelligence by default
e: this fortunately doesn’t seem to be accurate; excuse my haste. here’s the word from the signal forums
looks that post has been updated and it might not be quite as dire
will still be better when apple finally documents shit and people test to see what really happens
IDK how helpful this is, but Apple intelligence appears to not get downloaded if you set your ipad language and your siri language to be different. I have it set to english (australia) and english (united states). Guess I’ll have to live without “gaol” support, but that just shows how much I’m willing to sacrifice.
also, my inbox earlier:
Somehow, Ross Ulbricht returned
You gotta love how in the announcement the guy is so blatantly "hey they said and did such nice things for me that I just got a throw them a bone, and if releasing the leader of a notorious drug bazaar who tried to put out a hit on one of his employees is what they want then they can have it!"
Sidenote: AFAIK, even with this pardon, Ulbricht still ended up spending more time in prison than if he took a plea deal he was reportedly offered:
Gotta say, this whole situation's reminding me of SBF - both of them thought they could outsmart the Feds, and both received much harsher sentences than rich white collar criminals usually get as a result.
Wonder when his pardon clears.
Not really sure if he thought he was smart or got bad legal advice from coiners who figured he could get off scot-free because "crypto" and "harm reduction"
Probably both tbh. It really is like SBF round 1, but because it's drugs instead of financial crimes they didn't need to hire Margot Robbie to explain why it's illegal and destructive to everyone from her bath.
Ulbricht also had really bad lawyers. The FBI evidence on the server in Iceland was tainted in fairly obvious ways and he coulda got much of the case thrown out, then just ... didn't? I can't find it, but Nicholas Weaver wrote some stuff on this.
Ah yes that will be good for international relations and the morale of law enforcement and anti cybercrime people. Lol it is all so stupid.
This and the releasing of the jan 6 people who assaulted cops (one cop who testified against them got a shitton of messages they got early release) is going to do wonders. Not that it will shake the belief of a lot of people that the repubs are the party of back the blue and law and order.
Buckle up humans; because humanity's last exam just dropped: https://lastexam.ai/ (Hacker News discussion). May the odds be ever in your favor.
Edit: Per NyTimes, whom I hate, they were apparently trying to avoid an over-dramatic name. Amazing:
i only want to notice that the example chemistry question has two steps out of three that are very similar to last image in wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocyclic_reaction (question explicitly mentions that it is electrocyclic reaction and mentions the same class of natural product)
e: the exact reaction scheme that is answer to that question is in article linked just above that image. taking last image from wiki article and one of schemes from cited article gives the exact same compound as in question, and provides answer. considering how these spicy autocomplete rainforest incinerators work, this sounds like some serious ratfucking, right? you don't even have to know how this all works to get that and it's an isolated and a bit obscure subsubfield
You think people would secretly submit easy questions just for the reward money, and that since the question database is so big and inscrutable no one bothered to verify one way or another? No, that could never happen.
well, it's not the most obvious thing but not because it's easy, it's because it's almost a trivia, a sort of thing you can see once in textbook and then never use it ever for anything and that doesn't really connects readily to anything else, most of the time. i haven't done electrocyclic reaction once in my entire phd programme, and last time i've seen them was in second year ochem course. these kinds of reactions are not very controllable or clean, synthesis of precursors looks like a major PITA, precursors would probably have to be kept in freezer under argon for maybe days before they decompose, and introduction of any modifications requires you to redo multistep synthesis, and then it might fail to work. i also suspect that this exact example might be in some undergrad textbook verbatim, and it will be in scihub pdfs at any rate. it's also kinda old stuff with research starting in 60s
Oh yeah I meant "easy" in the sense of "maybe it can get it right from sheer chance by pattern matching training data from the interwebs"
i'd say it was made easy for machines in that wisdom woodchipper would "randomly" stumble upon correct answer while scraping everything related to more general topic, while it's made harder for humans because it's rather obscure
that question was sorta related to research done previously by that uploader (not anonymous; how many noahs b. are professors at stanford?) and there's 15 of them, which makes me suspect that he might have just loaded some exam questions for undergrads there
oh cool, the logo’s just a barely modified sparkle emoji so you know it’s horseshit, and it’s directly funded by Scale AI and a Rationalist thinktank so the chances the models weren’t directly trained on the problem set are vanishingly thin. this is just the FrontierMath grift with new, more dramatic, paint.
e: also, slightly different targeting — FrontierMath was looking to grift institutional dollars, I feel. this one’s designed to look good in a breathless thinkpiece about how, I dunno…
yeah, whatever the fuck they think this means. this one’s designed to be talked about, to be brought up behind closed doors as a reason why your pay’s being cut. this is vile shit.
... Oh so it's a training dataset, got you.
just mark C for every answer if you don't get it, that's what the State of California taught me in elementary school
Humanity's last exam or AI grifters first bankrupcy.
I know a lot of people are looking for alternatives for programs as stuff is ennshitfying, rot economying, slurping up your data, going all in on llms etc https://european-alternatives.eu/ might help. Have not looked into it myself btw.
Always down for the european alternative if you know what I mean.
Xcancel is giving me issues so gimme a sec. That said: another killing. https://x.com/st_rev/status/1882852779582239053?s=46
Is there any rundown on this backstory for people who missed it happening live over the last few years that doesn't get sidetracked into theological disputes with the murder cult?
I would appreciate this too, frankly. The rabbit hole is deep, and full of wankers.
I don’t know if I could do it.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69573795/5/1/united-states-v-youngblut/
More details. The feds were watching them.
rat death squads are a thing now? this wasn't on my 2025 bingo
Related to the other killing by the border patrol people, Chad Loder noticed the reports on the shooting have some strange wording which might imply the cop shot was hit by another cop. (Assuming this is the same shooting).
Had not considered the meth angle. Would explain a lot.
Wasn’t much ammo either.
I'm just sitting here with a bit of European culture shock.
it seems like common commercial box size for this caliber is 50, and some were likely already used for practice. soviet pistol ammo for army used to come in cans ("spam cans"), 1200+ per
Sometimes I forget these things.
Same thing with trucks I imagine.
would be easy to figure out during autopsy as cops had 9mm and zizians had .380 and .40
aw man first he gets attacked during a perfectly polite threat of eviction, now this?
rest in peace little angel.
god st rev you're such a dumb bitch
d'ya think this post on awful.systems, the lemmy instance (which is known as awful.systems), is the location of this awful.systems thread? let me hear your thoughts, awful.systems
you get even more awful.systems on remote instances
#branding
next thread needs to be Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems - awful.systems
Michael Keaton bursts out of a grave It's sneer time!
It's like Huntington's, but with style
gonna start referring to awful.systems like how a twitch streamer refers to chat
(what in the everloving fuck did lemmy do now)
trump just dumped half trillion dollars into openai-softbank-oracle thing https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/trump-stargate-ai-openai-oracle-softbank/77861568007/
you'd think it's a perfect bait for saudi sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps it is
for comparison, assuming current levels of spending, this will be something around 1/10 of defense spending in the same timeframe. which goes to, among other things, payrolls of millions of people and maintenance, procurement and development of rather pricey weapons like stealth planes (B-21 is $700M each) and nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines ($3.5B per Ohio-class, with $31M missiles, up to 24). this all to burn medium-sized country worth of energy to get more "impressive" c-suite fooling machine
The fact that the first thing a new fascist regime does is promise Larry Ellison a bunch of dollaridoos answers a lot of questions asked by my "ORACLE = NAZIS" tshirt
Let them fight.gif
One word: Foxconn
Ed Zitron:
(Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)
Karl Bode comments:
it's better than that, he didn't dump a penny in
the deal is:
It's term time again and I'm back in college. One professor has laid out his AI policy: you should not use an AI (presumably Chat GPT) to write your assignment, but you can use an AI to proofread your assignment. This must be mentioned in the acknowledgements. He said in class that in his experience AI does not produce good results and that when asked to write about his particular field it produces work with a lot of mistakes.
Me, I'm just wondering how you can tell the difference between material generated by AI then edited by a human, and material written by a human then edited by an AI.
Here is what I wrote in the instructions for the term-paper project that I will be assigning my quantum-physics students this coming semester:
I was talking to someone recently and he mentioned that he has used AI for programming. It worked out fine, but the one thing he mentioned that really stuck with me was that when it was all done, he still didn't know how to do the task.
You can get things done, but you don't learn how to do them.
wat
I know!
we have this year's greatest pride anthem already and it's only january
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SIEOYOuX4s
my habits lead to such curious discoveries:
I am extremely enamoured with how much effort was spent on the writing, ito cadence and placement. it's glorious :D
(also, I wonder if the virtual riot video is why I've heard that riser pattern in so much stuff lately)
this post from the guy who writes explainers about consumer financial structures hits different if you know he met and is exchanging tweets with noted race scientist Jordan Lasker (cremieux)
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/chicago-casino-investment-offering/
maybe it's me but i'm hearing ultrasonic frequencies
probably nothing, right?
Every pasty-white blogger is inching towards becoming a March violet.
Oof yeah, that's rough. The AI generated header image isn't helping his credibility, either. Didn't he happily trot along to one of the rat conventions in Berkeley, and everyone was wondering why?
The Bally's story is its own source of hilarity - not only are they scrambling to fund this Chicago thing, they're also making promises about a Las Vegas resort that will host the ex-Oakland A's in what would be the smallest major league baseball stadium; with equally ??? funding gaps that their client press is all too happy to ignore.
Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero
I couldn't locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various "tasks" to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.
Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera "device" to record ones every waking moment.
It took me a year of hell to hire a new teammate. But it took a few weeks to implement AI all over the company.
Employers Would Rather Hire AI Than Gen Z Graduates: Report
We have gaps of needs all over the department and a massive pool of applicants. Sorry unemployed folks.
lol that's really cool, congrats! :D
what's the name of the company?
did the stubsack end up in all somehow
Terminal puddin brain