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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Presented without comment: this utter crankery about hacking the Matrix (HN)

    Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity [37-39] research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric paths such as:, meditation [40], psychedelics (DMT [41-43], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD) [44, 45], dreams [46], magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide [47], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel [48], or religion.

    Among the things they’ve already tried are torture, touching grass, and declining all cookies:

    Unethical behavior, such as torture, doesn’t cause suffering reducing interventions from the simulators.

    Breaking out of your routine, such as by suddenly traveling to a new location [199], doesn’t result in unexpected observations.

    Saying “I no longer consent to being in a simulation” [200].

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      There’s a great sneer-novel about simulationists called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin.

      The villains of the story are a group of TESCREAL stand-ins who style themselves as the “Simmurai.” They have the goal of breaking the “simulation” just the same as the authors of the (hilarious) paper you’ve shared. They have a very similar tone, which to my ears sounds like a serial killer winding themselves up to do the deed. The big twist is that the Simmurai have been unwittingly suborned by a Lovecraftian horror that has bent their plan to its own ends. The only thing standing in their way is a small group of working class millenials from Ohio, who get tangled up in the story because they once shot up some space drugs in a Denny’s parking lot and can therefore see the true nature of the universe (maybe).

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      In another episode of “anyone can upload a PDF and call it a paper mate, they don’t even check”…

      What the hell is “Seeds of Science”? Is that some weird arxiv thingy that also gives you a logo at the top?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Of course one of the first things they try is torture, because “maybe the simulationists aren’t as big of bastards as we are” is a reasonable hypothesis to test and not a reason to be locked up.

      Also since we’re messing with absurd thought experiments, I’d like to propose that when they declined consent the simulationists could actually just disable the part of that agent with a subjective personal experience, making them a P-zombie in the David Chalmers tradition. As such, they were no longer part of the simulation without adversely affecting any other aspect of it.

      Is this stupid? Obviously, but let’s be honest: it’s probably less stupid than at least half of the actual paper.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Saying “I no longer consent to being in a simulation”

      Time to create a big mindfuck for the Rationalists. First have an active account on EA/LW and actively participate. Post this research as a talking point. Then leave one message ‘lol just to be sure: I no longer consent to being in a simulation’. And then never touch that account + any related accounts ever again.

    • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      It’s been 3 days, my hope that this is real is fading :(

      Musk will always own that hilariously disturbing baby roleplay Twitter alt though

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it’s already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy

      also musk’s downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          The upshot of this is that if acausalrobotgod ever gives us a time machine, you just need to plant one tree on your way to killing hitler, and you solve so many problems.

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            Maybe there’s an easy way to prevent apartheid in South Africa entirely? That alone led to so many waste-of-oxygen white dudes, we could nip Musk in the bud and much more

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      For as much as they like to talk about building things and solving problems the software industry doesn’t seem to put a lot of effort into building things well or solving their own problems.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      that’s just “poors don’t deserve healthcare” what else

      otoh aren’t they going against their benefactors (old rich ghouls)?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:

      Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.

      “Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”

      • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I’d never heard of him. His latest tweet is complaining about the left wing slant on his thread and he says that you can’t “get away from the culture war I guess”. Yet every fifth post below is a rage post about libs and lefties.

        • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          It’s like how all topics are either the cishet white standard quo or “political.” Raging about libs and lefties is standard quo and telling a dimwit they are a dimwit is “culture war.”

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they’re lazier and lazier written each time.

      Second, what’s the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?

      Also

      1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses

      Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I thought it meant “thread poster zero” because I never really understood the order in which one reads tweets and replies, so when I saw “TP0”, three frames later I already deduced an entire vocabulary of terms to designate each persona in a twitter screenshot

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          from the top down with either dfs or bfs depending on how you found the thread to spread, or from the inside out (by clicking through QTs until you get to the root). because twitter totally made browsing this shit easy.

          what’s hard.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        TP0 is the OSI connection-mode transport layer protocol’s transport protocol class 0 duh.

        Transport Protocol Class 0 (TP0), the simplest OSI transport protocol, performs segmentation and reassembly functions. TP0 requires connection-oriented network service.

        (source)

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Cremieux used to post to Reddit as user Tr***yPornO (with the slur instead of the asterisks). Nobody here wanted to call him that, so it was rapidly abbreviated TPO or TP0. He posted the same breathtaking racist shit with low quality cites that didn’t check out as he has since. He also told all manner of inconsistent lies about who he was.

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          At least he wears his kink proudly, not many rightwing weirdoes would just admit they’re really into that.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            I wouldn’t be too quick to conclude it’s that - I’ve seen a number of these creeps wear/handle-pick slurs as a trying-to-be-funny pejorative

            • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              Oh I’m sure he’s trying to be edgy, but in that case there’s nothing that would trigger him more than what I’ve said :>

        • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Speaking of breathtaking racism with low quality cites, does anyone remember ebola chan? He was my favorite because he was a reactionary with 4chan temperament, so he’d mald when pushed instead of spewing out word salad.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      christ and it’s always the fucking bad-faith bullshit arguments. I bet if you pulled another dimension to the same fucking numbers there you’d instantly find some Rather Interesting correlations with income brackets, and if you pulled a dimension for care/spend class you’d find Another interesting correlation

      I wish these people just fucking wouldn’t, gah

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Leukemia patients are always over-represented in their data because the it’s soooooo much easier to use the calipers on people with no hair.

    • cornflake@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      She’s listened to anecdotes “about kids who are like my kids” (👀👀👀), and that’s quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I don’t think she’s actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school won’t magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and there’s a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If we’re going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, I’m not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individual’s odds of losing, y’know?

      Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere I’m probably being incredibly charitable and she’s actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.

      • cornflake@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I don’t know about “magically immediately” (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you don’t have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Don’t get me wrong, I think ending the de facto segregation we’ve ended up with needs to be a primary policy goal and that dealing with people not like themselves is going to do good for any kid all on its own. And the numbers parents use to figure out which schools are “better” are cooked to all hell, making trying to accurately judge school quality incredibly difficult. But that doesn’t change the fact that some schools do have better outcomes or more problems than others, and while the broader systemic factors that create those problems need to be solved, expecting parents not to try and take care of their own kids first isn’t a viable way to make that happen.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Here’s a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, to make long running threads easier to follow. I’m posting it in the stubsack because it’s the thread I had in mind when writing it.

    Pasting it in the browser’s console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I’ve cross tested it any… Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won’t steal your crypto, or mine any new.

    In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.

    (()=>{
    function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
        const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
        return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
    }

    const nodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
        .map(x => {
            return {
                Node: x,
                Date: Date.parse(
                    x.dataset.tippyContent
                        .split('\n').at(-1)
                        .replace(/Modified |at /g, ""))
            };
        });

    const dates = nodes.map(x => x.Date).filter(x => !isNaN(x) && x != null);
    dates.sort();

    const minDate = dates[0];
    const maxDate = dates.at(-1);

    nodes
        .filter(x => x.Node.closest('.ms-2') != null)
        .forEach(x => x.Node.closest('.ms-2').style.backgroundColor = getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, x.Date))
})()
    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      other handy thing you can do: make a bookmark that has the URL be javascript:(function() { function bits go here} )();, and stick it in your bookmark bar

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yes, do this if your browser allows it, it’s way better. Just paste the code in the OP prepended by “javascript:” without quotes in place of the url and as far as i can tell it works.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          I only now saw how badly the syntax on my post is fucked, that’s what I get for trying to snip things in a dodgy textentry rather than a real editor 😅

          leaving it up for posterity tho.

    • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      This is really cool!

      I was just thinking it would be cool to have something like RES’s ‘Previously Read’ feature that only shows the new comments, and everything else is darkened or collapsed. This does a similar thing though and it’s great for these weekly threads

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      In the spirit of “worse is better”, here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:

      ! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)
    • mlen@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can’t they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that’s JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat

      one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn’t wrote a thing about ai earlier

      then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i’d expect even from him

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          anything newer than 2022? won’t be on scihub, because scihub got in a court case in india, that they hope they can win and secure reasonably stable place where they can operate from

          tho it seems to me that the entire article is that three screens of text

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn’t it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that “regular” Republican politicians wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there’s many an NPR-loving granny googling “what is a yarvin” and getting wound up about it in her group chats.

    We’ve all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” I therefore propose a new thing, the “Yarvin Window,” which we can define as “the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents.”

    This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      What amazes me, as a sort of US politics watcher from the outside, just how badly the various republicans weirdos are reacting to this. Esp Vance, posting his dolphin fucker stuff in the middle of the jokestorm about him being into furniture. But not just him, the GOP going ‘don’t be racist about Harris’ and then all the racists doubling down on their racism, etc etc. The weird lashouts re weirdness. “how dare you call me weird! Grabs calipers I can see from your skull shape that you are …”

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      the ad alone should be a thread it’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in years

      the yt comments are brutal btw definitely check them out

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      “It’s real! Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.

      […]

      “People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing,” Schiffmann said.

      there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once

      The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”

      presented without comment

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Rumor, but lol if true “A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets” Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.