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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
A lemmy-specific coiner today: https://awful.systems/post/2417754
The dilema of charging the users and a solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse
First, there will be a blockchain. There will be these cryptocurrencies:
This guy is speaking like he is in Genesis 1
I guess it would be better that only the instances can own instance-specific coins.
You guess alright? You mean that you have no idea what youāre saying.
if a user on lemmy.ee want to post on lemmy.world, then lemmy.ee have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world
What will this solve? If 2 people respond to each otherās comments, the instance with the most valuable coin will win. What does that have to do with who caused the interaction?
thatās lemm.ee last time iāve checked. he made that mistake 14x
Yes crypto instances, please all implement this and ādisallowā everyone else from interacting with you! I promise weāll be sad and not secretly happy and that youāll make lots of money from people wanting to interact with you.
I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, itās a pretty decent source of sneers. This monthās contains: āThe First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvinā. In classic Moldbug fashion, itās Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. Iām not going to watch the whole thing, but Iāll try to mine the transcript for sneers.
26:23 ā
Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something thatās simple and easy to use thatās not a small amount of of work
Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?
30:17 ā a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? Youāre the cream of the crop.
~2:00:00 ā here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as āoh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchyā and responding by saying ānuh uh, urbit is decentralized.ā Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.
Is he inscrutable/obscurantist on purpose, or is it because he never had a proper humanities education nor an editor?
It has been suggested, either on this site or by people who pop up here a lot, that the idiosyncratic (eg. Fucking Weird) design of hoon and nock was a deliberate attempt to build something akin to cult mysteries, where not just anyone could grasp it and the initiates had powers that the ignorant outsiders would not, etc etc.
Unfortunately, whilst heās clearly not stupid, Yarvin isnāt nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and has ended up producing a load of unwieldy cryptic nonsense that no one can work with. I expect this applies to other things he does, too.
I literally just saw a xitter post about how the exploding pagers in Lebanon is actually a microcosm of how a āsmarterā entity (the yahood) can attack a ādumberā entity, much like how AGI will unleash the diamond bacterium to simultaneously kill all of humanity.
Which again, both entities are humans- they have the same intelligence you twats. Same argument people make all the time w.r.t. Spanish v Aztecs where gunpowder somehow made Cortez and company gigabrains compared to the lowly indigenous people (and totally ignoring the contributions of the real super intelligent entity: the small pox virus).
OK new rule youāre only allowed to call someone dumb for not finding explosives in their pagers if you had, previously to hearing the news, regularly checked with no specialized tools all electronics you buy for bombs hidden inside of the battery compartment.
This reminded me of that prediction I made w.r.t the āAI Doomā criti-hype (and touched on after SB 1047 popped up) back when OpenAI was gunning (heh) for DoD dollars.
Personally, I suspect that this might provide another case of āAI doomā becoming a double-edged sword for the AI industry. What can be dismissed as a simple error on their productsā parts gets potentially a lot more problematic to deal with when a vocal minority is primed to find malice where none exists.
AI misalignment leads to spinal misalignment.
If only we had paid attention to the roomba hitting us in the leg. It wasnāt adorable, it was a murder attempt!
Timnit Gebru on Twitter:
We received feedback from a grant application that included āWhile your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,ā
navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players
stares into middle distance, hollow laugh
No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319
Despite Soatak explicitely warning users that posting his latest rant[1] to the more popular tech aggregators would lead to loss of karma and/or public ridicule, someone did just that on lobsters and provoked this mask-slippage[2]. (comment is in three paras, which I will subcomment on below)
Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasnāt been for at least a decade. As far as I can tell, itās a meme that is exclusively kept alive by our detractors.
This is the Rationalist version of the village worthy complaining that everyone keeps bringing up that one time he fucked a goat.
Also, āthis sure looks like a religion to meā can be - and is - argued about any human social activity. Iām quite happy to see rationality in the company of, say, feminism and climate change.
Sure, āreligionā is on a sliding scale, but Big Yud-flavored Rationality ticks more of the boxes on the āReligion or notā checklist than feminism or climate change. In fact, treating the latter as a religion is often a way to denigrate them, and never used in good faith.
Finally, of course, it is very much not just rationalists who believe that AI represents an existential risk. We just got there twenty years early.
Citation very much needed, bub.
[1] https://soatok.blog/2024/09/18/the-continued-trajectory-of-idiocy-in-the-tech-industry/
[2] link and username witheld to protect the guilty. Suffice to say that They Are On My List.
Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasnāt been for at least a decade.
Sure, but that doesnāt change that the head EA guy wrote an OP-Ed for Time magazine that a nuclear holocaust is preferable to a world that has GPT-5 in it.
nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk
except the ones still getting upset over it, but if we deny their existence as hard as possible they wonāt be there
The reference to the Basilisk was literally one sentence and not central to the post at all, but this big-R Rationalist couldnāt resist on singling it out and loudly proclaiming itās not relevant anymore. The mālady doth protest too much.
nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk
But you should, yall created an idea which some people do take seriously and it is causing them mental harm. In fact, Yud took it so seriously in a way that shows that he either beliefs in potential acausal blackmail himself, or that enough people in the community believe it that the idea would cause harm.
A community he created to help people think better. Which now has a mental minefield somewhere but because they want to look sane to outsiders now people donāt talk about it. (And also pretend that now mentally exploded people donāt exist). This is bad.
I get that we put them in a no-win situation, either take their own ideas seriously enough to talk about acausal blackmail. And then either help people by disproving the idea, or help people by going āthis part of our totally Rational way of thinking is actually toxic and radioactive and you should keep away from it (A bit like Hegel am I right(*))ā. Which makes them look a bit silly for taking it seriously (of which you could say who cares?), or a bit openly culty if they go with the secret knowledge route. Or they could pretend it never happened and never was a big deal and isnāt a big deal in an attempt to not look silly. Of course, we know what happened, and that it still is causing harm to a small group of (proto)-Rationalists. This option makes them look insecure, potentially dangerous, and weak to social pressure.
That they do the last one, while have also written a lot about acausal trading, which just shows they donāt take their own ideas that seriously. Or if it is an open secret to not talk openly about acausal trade due to acausal blackmail it is just more cult signs. You have to reach level 10 before they teach you about lord Xeno type stuff.
Anyway, I assume this is a bit of a problem for all communal worldbuilding projects, eventually somebody introduces a few ideas which have far reaching consequences for the roleplay but which people rather not have included. It gets worse when the non-larping outside then notices you and the first reaction is to pretend larping isnāt that important for your group because the incident was a bit embarrassing. Own the lightning bolt tennis ball, it is fine. (**)
*: I actually donāt know enough about philosophy to know if this joke is correct, so apologies if Hegel is not hated.
**: I admit, this joke was all a bit forced.
Via Timnit Gebruās mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: āMystery AI Hype Theater 3000.ā Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes
Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. Theyāre joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.
Itās pretty great. The closing bits of improv from her cohost are a bit meh imo but the AI hype assessments are legitimately amazing.
Some killjoys pour cold water over everyoneās favorite dental biohack, and HN is not happy
We could also just fluoridate the water supply, which also massively reduces cavities.
From the comments: āPutting my conspiracy theory hat on, the dental hygiene industry in the US is for-profit, like the pharmaceutical, and would rather sell you a treatment than a cure.ā
Have these people ever BEEN to the dentist? While I know that certain dental procedures (tooth straightening in kids, whitening, etc) are way overused in the US no dentist worth their salt will allow a check-up to go by without a stern lecture on preventing future trouble. And if they donāt do that then the hygienist most certainly willā¦
Here in Sweden the hygienist is definitely the Bad Cop in this scenario. I got sternly talked to by someone fresh out of school, so I donāt doubt thereās a retired Master Sergeant on the staff of the college they go toā¦
Sometimes you read an article and you think āthis article doesnāt want me to do X, but all its arguments against X are utterly terrible. If thatās the best they could find, X is probably alright.ā
that thread is an unholy combination of two of my least favorite types of guys: techbros willfully misunderstanding research they disagree with, and homeopaths
Iād think āwe donāt know the side effects, it prob doesnāt work, and they are trying to sidestep the FDAā would be good arguments against it. Esp after in the US Thalidomide (yes very much a dead horse), (mostly) wasnāt a problem because the FDA stopped it.
Anyway, it seems like the full scale FDA project stranded due to not enough volunteers, so I suggest the HN people mad about this help out. Hey, it might turn out to actually work.
this article doesnāt want me to drink a shitload of colloidal silver, but all its arguments against drinking colloidal silver (it doesnāt do anything for your health, it might turn you blue, it tastes like ass) are utterly terrible. If thatās the best they could find, drinking a shitload of colloidal silver is probably alright.
What a terrible argument. Anything that involves messing around with your teeth needs to have good reasons to do it, rather than just good arguments against doing it.
Absolutely unhinged. Are these people from the As-Seen-On-TV dimension where itās common for folks burn their house down every time they try to fry an egg?
Pulling out a pretty solid Tweet @ai_shame showed me:
To pull out a point Iāve been hammering since Baldur Bjarnason talked about AIās public image, I fully anticipate techās reputation cratering once the AI bubble bursts. Precisely how the public will view the tech industry at large in the aftermath I donāt know, but Iād put good money on them being broadly hostile to it.
If youāre against unrestricted genAI then youāre also transphobic
What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because thatās absurd.
Oh, I wonder if they are referring to this shit, where somone came to r/lgbt fishing for compliments for the picture theyād asked Clippy for, and were completely clowned on by the entire community, which then led to another subreddit full of promptfans claiming that artists are transphobic because they didnāt like a generated image which had a trans flag in it.
It warms the cockles of my heart that all across the web people find AI as annoying as I do.
remembering the NFT grifter who loudly asserted that if you werenāt into NFTs then you must be a transphobe
(it was Fucking Thorne)
fondly remembering replying to these types of people with screenshots from the wikipedia page on affinity fraud. they really hated that
Considering how much the AI hype feels like the cryptocurrency hype, during which every joke you made had already been seriously used to make a coin and been pumped and dumped already, I wouldnāt be surprised at all.
Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing āAIā means youāre classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. Iām going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that youāre a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s
I suspect itāll land somewhere above āhalitosisā but below āwearing black socks with crocsā
what are you folks doing for/with bookmarking? Iāve killed my usage of pinboard because I learned the dudeās going off the deep end
already found a couple of the link* flavoured open source things, but looking for some practical/lived feedback
Yeah found that, unfortunately itās js-ware so I refuse to put my data near it
(thatās very much a me thing, but a thing nonetheless)
Hm, what do you mean by js-ware? That its front end uses JavaScript libraries? I guess, fair. Backend is python though (:
As a stunt (when I was unhappy with the previous linkding frontend), a pal and I wrote https://github.com/lz-bookmarks/lz, which is basically just linkding without the useful api and frontend (which is rust+webassembly, lol). Has a decent cli though, and interlinking between bookmarks and other URLs.
yeah I despise the entire modern js ecosystem, so anything that increases my risk of even having to think the letters
n p m
starts making my trigger finger itch (and in this case, thatād happen if I wanted to do UI tweaks or whatever)of all the things I found so far linkding has appeared to be the least rabid. lz sounds like a neat experiment, will check it out :)
Do you actually need to share your bookmarks? I found that bookmarks in Firefox and an RSS reader hosted on my nextcloud are enough for personal use.
the sharing part of it is indeed the thing I give the fewest shits about tbh. things I care more about are software choices and longevity. so, for example, fuck anything js/php - by and large those tend to be unserious software thatāll be a nightmare to run even now, and even worse in time
I should probably do a bit of a sketchdown of the exact shape of my desires here, if for nothing else than giving direction to whatever I may have to write myself. a friend and I have been mutually grumping about this in chat for a while, because our wants are quite close but also just different enough to bounce ideas off each other
I honestly just use browser bookmarks. Thatās always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.
For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.
fair 'nuff
I keep finding myself in a position of thinking ābah imma have to write this myself, arenāt Iā, because nothing Iāve found as yet actually works the way I want things to work :|
Oh no, what happened to that dude? He seemed fairly sane from his blog.
Oh no, what the hell. I found his personal Twitter, which has nothing from the last few years, but I didnāt realize he was using his companyās Twitter to defend JK Rowling. Eurgh!
ja. Iād unfollowed him in the lead-up to 2020 because US election shit gets noisy enough as it is (and holy fuck did he make it worse), then killed off my twitter usage so I just didnāt see this before
but straight nope from me on that shit
DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3
Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly itās a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors
first comment is a masterpiece.
DHH: today I will RP as a high schooler writing an essay for software class about a program you should use
full disclosure: I use vim and honestly I donāt even know why anymore. Maybe itās because I had a brief, trivial interaction with Bram Moolenaar (RIP king) in which he closed a bug that I opened by mistake, and I imprinted on him for some reason.
This is old news (but news to me, a non twitterer): edgelord musk changes water pistol emoji to gun
Man the Pistol unicode mess has always given me mixed feelings
Apple indeed lead the design change, but they did it unilaterally without the input of Unicode. So the standard is still saying that the character represents a pistol, and all the fonts are ignoring that to have it a squirt gun instead, so as to be compatible with a specific Apple font rather than compatible with unicode.
It might have been a mistake for Unicode to introduce Pistol in the first place (I wonder how it was chosen, canāt look that up right now),Pistol apparently came from Softbank, so Unicode was probably including it for compatibility with existing encodings.IMO it would have been technologically more sound for UI designers to hide it in a UI or font designers to omit it entirely, than to replace it with another graphic with significantly different meaning. Emojipedia demonstrated the potential for confusion with this cheeky text message example.
Of course by this point weāre stuck with water gun so Twitter is just needlessly adding to the mess and Unicode should give up and redefine or add errata to the symbol.
āmake it look more badassā
Iām so tired of that man. Iām rethinking my idea that capitalism is good and this is meritocracy in action.
E: also just annoyed he went with an 1911, and not something like a Mateba, or the Chiappa Rhino which look futuristic but are real (the barrel is aligned to the bottom cylinder not the top), and fits into the previous patterns of revolver icons.
E: more on Iām so tired of that man
The 1911 is Murican, not some Italian crap
/s obviously, Italian gunmakers are very good.
Also itās really weird how thereās a ton of small-business innovation in American gun gear, but the only ones who seem to be making money are European companies?
the 1911 is perfect for musk because itās also notorious for throwing fucking ridiculous tantrums. though Iām pretty sure he only chose it cause of action movies and airsoft guns
1911 fans are people who just wonāt give up their beeg gun for something smaller that still makes sense, then refuse to train properly and expect badly placed shot to be good enough bc mah stopping powah. stubborn, outdated and propping their claims with horseshit, this fits musk perfectly. (this includes us army that refused to switch to intermediate calibre rifle until it fucked them over in vietnam but i digress)
you just know Musk has internalized all the pro-1911 arguments so he can hang out with the ācool guysā on the range
the sum total of luxury ZA coinersā mettle was measured, and it was found to be extremely lukewarm
thatās about 60k usd raw. PPI-equiv would be a bit higher (we have really cheap goods compared to US/UK), but I laugh at this number
I realized late last night that I could give a better frame for this: itās the equivalent of weekly shopping for 100~300 people (boundaries for varying lower or higher grocery taste)
our population is close to 60m
fuckin. when did Mozillaās twitter feed turn into wall to fucking wall AI spam https://x.com/mozilla
Oh, and I just saw this: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758
theyāre really speedrunning this downslide, huh
fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole āyou canāt trust AI, except when we and our business partners do itā openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, theyāve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I canāt imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.
who is the investor who pushed Mozilla this hard? where the fuck is this coming from?
all their hiring is AI too
havenāt really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is ānot enough counter-friction leftā. foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
not that the above guess eliminates the thing youāre pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the āwhy has this suddenly accelerated so muchā angle
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
remember when bringing up Mozillaās financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
my personal theory for why itās accelerating so much is, their board might be doing a Sears[1]. theyāre inventing ways to make Mozilla bankrupt because thereās profit in it, and that profit window might be closing rapidly with the antitrust actions against Google coming up. this is all based on vibes though, Iām the polar opposite of an accountant
[1] see also, doing a Red Lobster. no, endless shrimp isnāt why theyāre going bankrupt, why in fuck would it be, of course itās capitalists
remember when bringing up Mozillaās financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
yup. absolutely nuts shit. I know thereās often a lament to lack of nuance in contemporary internet but god damn if there isnāt also a massive shortage of critical thinking skills and the ability to engage with criticism well
For some reason, the news of Red Lobsterās bankruptcy seems like a long time ago. I would have sworn that I read this story about it before the solar eclipse.
Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insiderās Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurantāthe worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobsterās property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, youāre in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past monthāsome of whom were laid off without any notice last weekāwhat I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and bussers whoāve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain thatās been drifting out to sea for some time. [ā¦] āYou had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,ā Josie said. āI would get screamed at.ā She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: āIt tops any customer service experience Iāve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.ā
Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.
I dated someone who worked at Red Lobster, and that absolutely checks out. the number of people whoād come in hoping to grift free shit and take it out on the servers when they didnāt get it (or would try and get someone fired so they could get free shit, depending on the night) was astounding
Behind the Bastards is starting a series about Yarvin today. Always appreciate it when they wander into our bailiwick!
Also means weāre likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who arenāt already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.
They did do one on Yud, itās hard to find and has an annoying amount of side chatter but itās a pretty solid breakdown of the dude.
The episode is mentioned here: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalist-harry-potter-and-the
But I can no longer find it on YouTube.
Their episode on Rudolph Steiner was great when explaining to the grandparents why we had to pull our kids out of a Waldorf kindergarten asap. Funny how so many things fall into the trap of āIt canāt be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong.ā
Also, big L for me on due diligence. I thought outdoor classrooms would be good for our fellow ADHD enjoyer; nope.
They did come up in the Tech Bros Have Built a Cult Around AI episode.
Orange site on pager bombs in Lebanon:
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, letās focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
what we are best at here at HN
Itās always bootlicking with this crowd jfc
technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)
ābest atā, they say? I shall have to update my priors
If HN is best at technical discussion that just means theyāre even worse at everything else!
They suck at technical explanations too, unless itās a Wikipedia link.
My joke didnāt land apparently but I did not mean to imply they were particularly good at technical explanations. Adjusted the working a smidge.