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)
I don’t think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at what’s happening in those books. 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 there’s 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
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:
“Vimes/Keel tells Ned Coates not to put his trust in revolutions “They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes” This is a common theme in Pratchett regarding authority figures”That said Vimes does participate in a revolution of sorts in that book, as “John Keel”, in the past.
yeah that’s 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.
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.
other-other-other-other scott tweeted again. apologies, it’s slightly US-pol
it’s a doozy:
spoiler of the image too, just in case
transcript of insane scott adams, creator of dilbert, tweet
I’m 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 “They’re eating the dogs.”
Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked immigration risk.
It’s 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 that’s 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.
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
The terms, concerningly, don’t give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be “unable to fully delete or de-identify” user data due to “technical” or “other operational reasons.”
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.
This person is as correct as they are committed to the vibes. Great sneer.
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
Saw this gem of a plaintive plea from a promptfan:
can’t you just train a LLM to only output “sorry, I can’t answer your question”?
I read that differently.
I parsed it as having the bot only output “sorry, I can’t answer your question”. Ever.
sleep( math.rand(15,20)); print(“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that question.”);
I call it HonestGPT, and will accept my billions in VC money now.
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 “Little Lock,” which portrays the emotional toll of having to always make these calculations, the narrator introduces herself as a “brat” and confesses that she can’t resist spilling her secrets, which she defines as “my most shameful thoughts,” and also as “sacred and special.”
I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. “So profound, very wow”? “You mean it’s all shit? —Always has been.”
She mixes provocation with needy propitiation
Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!
But the narrator’s shameful thoughts, which are supposed to set her apart, feel painfully ordinary. The story, like many of Levy’s stories, is too hermetically sealed in its own self-absorption to understand when it is expressing a universal experience. Elsewhere, the book’s solipsism renders it unintelligible, overly delighted by the music of its own style—the drama of its own specialness—and unable to provide needed context.
So, it’s bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?
“They would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just won’t know where they stand until they’ve figured out where you do.”
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 Fieri’s restaurant. It’s better to just rip the bandaid off.
Sadly, he’s left the game just the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html
alas!
Honor Levy
someone tell me it isn’t just me who always parses this person’s name as “honour tax” and has a doubletake first thinking “…yeah, accurate” before remember it’s actually their name-name not and not a byname
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 you’re worth billions and still can’t resist mouthing off on Xhitter.
Mouthing off in a way that makes me go ‘ow god it IS all a scam and he knows it!’ 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, I’m at least happy that Rick Gomez will make a passable Sam Altman (No idea why that blog didn’t 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).
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 he’s a great person with a nice soul.
The sentences these people post, man.
Anyway, it’s 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. I’m visualizing a very angry Taleb shouting about how these assholes learned nothing from him.
Anyway, it’s great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist
oh thank fuck I’m not the only one who knows about Zizek. there’s still so many people whose first introduction to leftist thought was The Pervert’s Guide to Film on Netflix or whatever who never went back to check if Zizek was maybe a fucking asshole
I’m 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 “pure sniff ideology” and basically no context. Definitely heard some extremely bad takes on Ukraine though, which has quickly turned into my number one red flag for “actually pretty okay with Nazis when you get down to it”
wait wdym as extremely bad takes on ukraine, because some of these i’ve 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 – peace at any price – is a mask for the worst ethnic egotism and ignorance of the other’s 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 “save his face” means. It means accepting not a minor territorial compromise in Donbas but Putin’s imperial ambition.
What is absolutely unacceptable for a true leftist today is not only to support Russia but also to make a more “modest” 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 shouldn’t affect the left’s global struggle against global capitalism.
…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 i’ve heard of in some detail (not that i’m looking for them) turns out to be a crank in some capacity. n=4, no counterexamples
Maybe it’s because I’ve started reading a book about Germany and Austro-Hungary in WW1 (Ring of Steel) but I’ve suddenly started pattern-matching a bunch of pro A-H comments in HN. “It was a peaceful multi-national nation” 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 we’re doing the rise of fascism again it’s inevitable that we’re 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 I’ve ever seen. Can’t 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 I’d bet there’s some “work = moral” thinking held there, too
followed up by a real winner of a comment:
If you’re in the breadline, hobbies and other idle time activities cost money in comparison to twitter that is “free”. Don’t be surprised the rhetoric is toxic like 4chan and its hordes of basement dwelling NEETs.
“dont be surprised that rhetoric is toxic”
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 “don’t read the comments” 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)
remember all the fucking rubes saying Proton’s LLM wasn’t 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 it’s 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 button’s purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)
@self I wonder what “popular demand” and “overwhelming number of requests”. 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 don’t encounter a lot of pro-AI views.
it’s not just you — I can dig up the posts if you’re 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 it’s just the same people doing that again, except this time there’s no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over
@self It’s probably the same folks who wanted the Bitcoin wallet.
@self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Proton’s users to be exactly the type of person who’s against this. But of course it’s easy to fudge with numbers.
I would expect most of Proton’s users to be exactly the type of person who’s against this
that’s very true! unfortunately, we’ve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Proton’s board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too — that’s why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)
we’re 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 Proton’s business users wanted it — and the survey was very much crafted to get what looked like a pro-LLM response from that demographic. Proton has essentially admitted that they’re doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; it’s a shame they’re 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 didn’t do the numbers they hoped for, or it’s a sign that Proton’s otherwise compromised.
Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.
Its worse for me - I’ve got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, I’m not using them for anything particularly important.
from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that aren’t, although there’s not really anyone with feature match on some of proton’s features afaik
I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and they’ve promised (for what that’s worth) they don’t have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I can’t truly recommend it — as always, I have to point out that Tuta is still a single point of failure like Proton, and one day I hope we’re able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isn’t gpg or anything like it — imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming they’re not the same person) to use that kind of thing)
@froztbyte
I forgot I’m 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 I’ll 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
Posteo is from Germany and they’re 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 it’s 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. They’re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.
Posteo is from Germany
That’s significantly less comforting than Proton’s Switzerland. It’s in 14 Eyes after all.
Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but it’s still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. It’s also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So I’m not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond “marketing”.
Why do I get the feeling we’re gonna see a colossal tech crash
is this the bad place?
Yes.
this isn’t surprising, but now it’s 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 Microsoft’s 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 don’t see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works it’s gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesn’t care, because they’re selling shovels so it doesn’t matter if their shit doesn’t work as long as someone’s buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where there’s already some money
I was reading David and Amy’s stuff on energy costs of AI and ended up skimming the MSFT “environment sustainability report” and… god
Like I don’t even know how to satirise this. Help me sneer pros, for I am too depressed to make fun of this.
Like a century of science: yeah we’re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. There’s 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
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 it’s not that great but here’s my attempt at the sneer you asked for:
“Additionally, 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.”
Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its ‘reasoning’ 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, it’s not really clear.
Can’t wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don’t 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 doesn’t 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 didn’t just feed the answers into the training data?
When [musk’s new] supercomputer gets to full capacity, the local utility says it’s going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes per year.
The locals might get ornery about this, and I’d 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
Cohost going readonly at the end of this month, and shutting down at the end of the year: https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down
Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.
Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.
I never used Cohost, but I know a couple people who do and fuuuuuuuck this sucks. 'Least Newgrounds is still going, though that’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
To be clear: Cohost did take funding from an anonymous angel, and as a result will not be sharing their source code; quoting from your link:
Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.
We are unable to make cohost open source. the source code for cohost was the collateral used for the loan from our funder.
Somebody paid a very small amount of money to get a cleanroom implementation of Tumblr and did not mind that they would have to build a community and then burn it to the ground in the process. It turns out that angels are not better people than VCs.
Looking at both cohost and tumblr, I don’t think the funder has an asset that’s worth very much.
Yeah, having the source to a site (even if it includes stuff like day to day ops, backups etc) isn’t worth much if you don’t have a community. It’s a bit like “open source” LLMs, sure you can run a mudball of python on your computer but the real worth is in ingesting and classifying.
i used (and use, until the shutdown) as my primary social media site. i’m not surprised, but i can’t say it hasn’t been disappointing. for all the issues it has (and it did have a lot) it was pretty much the only site that felt somewhat cozy to use for me. stings quite a bit
I’m not shocked.
these are the exact finances of a startup that failed to start
A small Lemmy or Mastodon that’s run by some guy and takes donations for hosting has a better grasp of funding than Cohost did
(smashes imaginary intercom button) “Who is this ‘some guy’? Find him and find out what he knows!!”
new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about “ontologically, is ‘superhuman prediction’ the same class as superintelligence?”
why? oh, y’know, just things:
I’ve clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn’t just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You’d prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I’m fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!
Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.
I’ll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.
As zero cannot exist as a chance, there is a chance this will happen.
That’s why I vote 3rd party in presidential elections.
how to spot the US angst:
BRB training an LLM to be a super-goalpost-mover
You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.
‘This tool can do X at a superhuman level’ is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.
I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.
Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?
How did you go from “predict the future”, an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??
obvies they’re just 30% better at predicting the future than you
I’ll cut you with a Y axis I swear on me mum
azimu(s)th
