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)
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
The terms, concerningly, donāt give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be āunable to fully delete or de-identifyā user data due to ātechnicalā or āother operational reasons.ā
My villain arc is going to be turning into Thanos and collecting them stones just to enforce GDPR forever into cosmic law with a snap of my fingers.
the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading
This person is as correct as they are committed to the vibes. Great sneer.
other-other-other-other scott tweeted again. apologies, itās slightly US-pol
itās a doozy:
spoiler of the image too, just in case
transcript of insane scott adams, creator of dilbert, tweet
Iām revising my debate scoring. My first impression was a tie, which I called a Harris victory.
But the only thing I recall about the debate today is āTheyāre eating the dogs.ā
Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked immigration risk.
Itās the strongest play of the election.
Trump won the debate.
I gotta stop underestimating his game. Trump had no base hits in the debate but his long ball is still rising. Incredible. 6:32 :::
as a reminder, this is the same guy thatās so keen on thinking the llm can hypnotize him into orgasm
Hillary is going to assassinate him for sure this time for revealing the hidden dog lore.
I donāt think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at whatās happening in them. in plain english, you have a cop and his band of good apples + adorably bad apples saving the ass of a dictator again and again, because sometimes you just need a clever steady hand in charge. Pratchett was informed by liberal humanist values, and thereās plenty of great stuff about tolerance in there. but the foundation of any vimes novel is an institutionalist urge to bootlicking. it just has to be the right boot
It sucks to have to decolonise your darlings. It sucks that a lot of our most enjoyable stories are copaganda. Even the most redeemable stories about cops have probably inspired people to become cops.
I think Pratchett understood that, despite people romanticizing revolution, revolutions often end up opening the door to something as bad or worse. Especially in a place like Discworld.
In Night Watch:
āVimes/Keel tells Ned Coates not to put his trust in revolutions āThey always come around again. Thatās why theyāre called revolutions. People die, and nothing changesā This is a common theme in Pratchett regarding authority figuresāThat said Vimes does participate in a revolution of sorts in that book, as āJohn Keelā, in the past.
yeah thatās the conservative spirit right there
Books would be really boring if the protagonists were all just the author speaking as themself but using various funny voices.
thereās not a lot of ambiguity in what the novels are getting at, so no offense but this line of argument is not worth engaging directly. but I will point out that I didnāt say what pratchettās views were. part of why people donāt look askance at these books is that his other work is at odds with the realpolitik message Iām pointing out. I canāt and I donāt draw conclusions about his ārealā views based on the vimes novels
Saw this gem of a plaintive plea from a promptfan:
canāt you just train a LLM to only output āsorry, I canāt answer your questionā?
- sleep( math.rand(15,20));
- print(āIām sorry. Iām afraid I donāt know the answer to that question.ā);
I call it HonestGPT, and will accept my billions in VC money now.
deleted by creator
The New Yorker gamely tries to find some merit, any at all in the writings of Dimes Square darling Honor Levy. For example:
In the story āLittle Lock,ā which portrays the emotional toll of having to always make these calculations, the narrator introduces herself as a ābratā and confesses that she canāt resist spilling her secrets, which she defines as āmy most shameful thoughts,ā and also as āsacred and special.ā
Iām really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. āSo profound, very wowā? āYou mean itās all shit? āAlways has been.ā
She mixes provocation with needy propitiation
Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!
But the narratorās shameful thoughts, which are supposed to set her apart, feel painfully ordinary. The story, like many of Levyās stories, is too hermetically sealed in its own self-absorption to understand when it is expressing a universal experience. Elsewhere, the bookās solipsism renders it unintelligible, overly delighted by the music of its own styleāthe drama of its own specialnessāand unable to provide needed context.
So, itās bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?
Honor Levy
someone tell me it isnāt just me who always parses this personās name as āhonour taxā and has a doubletake first thinking āā¦yeah, accurateā before remember itās actually their name-name not and not a byname
āThey would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just wonāt know where they stand until theyāve figured out where you do.ā
This is exactly why these people always feel so weird. Like, have you considered not hanging out with assholes?
Yeah, just give it to the feller who reviewed Guy Fieriās restaurant. Itās better to just rip the bandaid off.
Sadly, heās left the game just the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html
alas!
Edit: Also, very much in our wheelhouse!
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
Pay no attention to the three LLMs stacked together behind the curtain!
Please, no sneers till a few weeks have passed, we are still in the gratitude for magical intelligence from the sky period.
felon: the most divorced man to ever live
sammy: the most swirly-short edgelord to ever walk
that tweet is as unhinged as felon tweets tho
You just might be a techbro if youāre worth billions and still canāt resist mouthing off on Xhitter.
Mouthing off in a way that makes me go āow god it IS all a scam and he knows it!ā all hype and showmanship. I wonder if he practices this type of writing like this stance was also so obviously practiced.
(When it all implodes and the final step of the grift is the drama movies about it, Iām at least happy that Rick Gomez will make a passable Sam Altman (No idea why that blog didnāt use a normal picture of Sam, but they decided to put Sam and Rick in the teleporter))
I have thought about this guy every day since I saw this post
I immediatelly knew who and what you were talking about without even clicking.
May the fact that he also lives inside my head rent-free be some solace to you.
If only all my snark could elicit such absurd perfection.
Every day? I dont think I have read that post at all. (This is both a joke and not a joke, as I had not read it, I did now and I was amused, so thanks).
I was reading David and Amyās stuff on energy costs of AI and ended up skimming the MSFT āenvironment sustainability reportā andā¦ god
Like I donāt even know how to satirise this. Help me sneer pros, for I am too depressed to make fun of this.
Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.
Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.
Anyway itās not that great but hereās my attempt at the sneer you asked for:
āAdditionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions.ā
Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN
Like a century of science: yeah weāre pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. Thereās no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.
MSFT: hold my beer
this isnāt surprising, but now itās confirmed: in addition to the environmental damage generative AI does by operating, and in spite of all attempts to greenwash it and present it as somehow a solution to climate change, of course Microsoftās been pushing very hard for the oil and gas industry to use generative AI to maximize resource exploitation and production (via Timnit Gebru)
tbh i donāt see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works itās gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesnāt care, because theyāre selling shovels so it doesnāt matter if their shit doesnāt work as long as someoneās buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where thereās already some money
remember all the fucking rubes saying Protonās LLM wasnāt a problem cause only business and visionary accounts had access to it? well, only one month later of fucking course they went back on that and now itās included with duo and family accounts, and my soon to be cancelled unlimited account just popped an ad for it on the compose window trying to get me to opt into the free trial for the fucking thing (and also the buttonās purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)
Why do I get the feeling weāre gonna see a colossal tech crash
@self I wonder what āpopular demandā and āoverwhelming number of requestsā. Are there actually a lot of people asking for this? Are there more than there are people begging them not to? Maybe I just live in an anti-AI bubble, because I sure donāt encounter a lot of pro-AI views.
itās not just you ā I can dig up the posts if youāre curious, but Proton wrote their last user survey so it was impossible to say no to this LLM crap directly, and they still got caught massively fudging the numbers to make this needless bullshit look popular. I can promise you itās just the same people doing that again, except this time thereās no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over
@self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Protonās users to be exactly the type of person whoās against this. But of course itās easy to fudge with numbers.
I would expect most of Protonās users to be exactly the type of person whoās against this
thatās very true! unfortunately, weāve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Protonās board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too ā thatās why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)
weāre not sure if something changed that suddenly made them go all in on their bad ideas, but the initial communication around Scribe was how much Protonās business users wanted it ā and the survey was very much crafted to get what looked like a pro-LLM response from that demographic. Proton has essentially admitted that theyāre doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; itās a shame theyāre willing to burn their business down for that kind of short-term gain. I can only imagine them enabling the LLM for all their paid accounts this quickly is either a desperation move because the feature didnāt do the numbers they hoped for, or itās a sign that Protonās otherwise compromised.
@self Itās probably the same folks who wanted the Bitcoin wallet.
is this the bad place?
Yes.
Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.
Its worse for me - Iāve got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, Iām not using them for anything particularly important.
from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that arenāt, although thereās not really anyone with feature match on some of protonās features afaik
I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and theyāve promised (for what thatās worth) they donāt have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I canāt truly recommend it ā as always, I have to point out that Tuta is still a single point of failure like Proton, and one day I hope weāre able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isnāt gpg or anything like it ā imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming theyāre not the same person) to use that kind of thing)
@froztbyte
I forgot Iām using their VPN too, and they accept bitcoin (not a big deal, but useful). I was aware of Tuta and fastmail when I chose Proton.For now Iāll prioritize moving to a self managed domain to make swapping provider easier in future.
wtf is a posteo
Possibly this https://mail.post.io/ @froztbyte @ivy
@weirdwriter @froztbyte itās posteo.net
Posteo is from Germany and theyāre reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so itās not as batteries included as what Proton offered.
I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.
Another option like that is mailbox.org. Theyāre presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.
Posteo is from Germany
Thatās significantly less comforting than Protonās Switzerland. Itās in 14 Eyes after all.
Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but itās still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. Itās also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So Iām not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond āmarketingā.
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its āreasoningā when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, itās not really clear.
Canāt wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that donāt exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.
Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:
bless you Melanie.
Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you
Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesnāt understand the rules of chess
^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)
Dog tax
Would there ever be a way to tell that they didnāt just feed the answers into the training data?
Habsburgs are good, actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497419
I think Zizek is a super nice guy, despite disagreeing with 90% of what he says. I still think heās a great person with a nice soul.
The sentences these people post, man.
Anyway, itās great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist to show how open minded he is. Damn, you respect Habsburg, Orban and Zizek, let me guess how you feel about Putin.
Basing my opinions on who seems nice or not. Iām visualizing a very angry Taleb shouting about how these assholes learned nothing from him.
Anyway, itās great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist
oh thank fuck Iām not the only one who knows about Zizek. thereās still so many people whose first introduction to leftist thought was The Pervertās Guide to Film on Netflix or whatever who never went back to check if Zizek was maybe a fucking asshole
Iām still blissfully clueless as to who zizek is
although saying that here now might cause an accidental crash course
I mean, my awareness extends as far as āpure sniff ideologyā and basically no context. Definitely heard some extremely bad takes on Ukraine though, which has quickly turned into my number one red flag for āactually pretty okay with Nazis when you get down to itā
EDIT: special thanks to skillissuer below for the correction re: Ukraine takes. Please trust his actual sources over my half-remembered reddit nonsense.
wait wdym as extremely bad takes on ukraine, because some of these iāve been able to find before going to darknet (second page of startpage search results) seem rather sane
If we pressure Ukraine now, demanding peace, it will mean creating space for Russian expansion.
https://www.instagram.com/slavojzizeks/p/C8g0yYRvLFL/
The paradox of this combination is that what presents itself as a principled stance ā peace at any price ā is a mask for the worst ethnic egotism and ignorance of the otherās suffering: are we aware that, although Ukraine has defended its independence, it has already lost up to a third of its population through emigration, kidnapping and death?
It is not just with respect to the oligarchs and the cultural conservatives that Ukraine must go to war with itself.
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/08/ukraine-must-go-to-war-with-itself
We now know what the call to allow Putin to āsave his faceā means. It means accepting not a minor territorial compromise in Donbas but Putinās imperial ambition.
What is absolutely unacceptable for a true leftist today is not only to support Russia but also to make a more āmodestā neutral claim that the left is divided between pacifists and supporters of Ukraine, and that one should treat this division as a minor fact which shouldnāt affect the leftās global struggle against global capitalism.
ā¦huh. Your sources are certainly more credible than my half-remembered reddit posts. I think I was probably mistaken on this one.
my bias against self-described hegelians is reinforced, bonus points for lacanism. every single one iāve heard of in some detail (not that iām looking for them) turns out to be a crank in some capacity. n=3
Maybe itās because Iāve started reading a book about Germany and Austro-Hungary in WW1 (Ring of Steel) but Iāve suddenly started pattern-matching a bunch of pro A-H comments in HN. āIt was a peaceful multi-national nationā well yeah until they pointlessly insisted on invading Serbia (and fucking that up twice before being bailed out by Germany) thus setting of the wider war. And when refugees from Galicia had to flee the Russians they were not happily accepted by the rest of the Empire.
Anyway, A-H was teetering on the edge before WW1 and signed their own death warrant willingly.
As always in HN you can find links to new horrifying examples of fascism: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/06/17/the-foundationalist-manifesto-the-politics-of-future-past/
I guess if weāre doing the rise of fascism again itās inevitable that weāre doing fucking austro-hungarian empire discourse again. somehow the 1940s returned
Jesus Christ that was the most on-the-nose distillation of tech fascism that Iāve ever seen. Canāt wait for the book to get published and see Elon et al endorsing it.
We need a high-quality Guards! Guards! movie so that monarchists can be given the Clockwork Orange treatment with it.
oh boy, some of the comments there
I think that the people in the breadline would have better things to do than be rude on twitter. Or maybe not, it is a fun way to pass the time for some.
how to instantly identify someone with a social circle barely stretching past their own nose. and Iād bet thereās some āwork = moralā thinking held there, too
followed up by a real winner of a comment:
If youāre in the breadline, hobbies and other idle time activities cost money in comparison to twitter that is āfreeā. Donāt be surprised the rhetoric is toxic like 4chan and its hordes of basement dwelling NEETs.
ādont be surprised that rhetoric is toxicā
mr pot, I have a call for you from mr kettle
Missed this spirited defense of landlords: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41536119
generally my rule is ādonāt read the commentsā and super double triple-mega-bonus so for the orange site, so I only glance-scan through some when I do happen to open comment threads (such as from here)
When [muskās new] supercomputer gets to full capacity, the local utility says itās going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity ā enough to power 100,000 homes per year.
The locals might get ornery about this, and Iād be willing to make the trip to help.
There are some steam turbine power plants (like coal-fired) (on smaller side) with power output like that
via mastodon
image description
a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:
lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :
are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.
but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.
but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.
maybe youāre not being negative enough
