Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
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)
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 you're not being negative enough
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.
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.
Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be "analyzing" the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be "inflation"
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
I have thought about this guy every day since I saw this post
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.
Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.
A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) "if you think that's bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱".
Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)
2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling
- Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously
- Development of "Schrödinger's Ledger" prototype, allowing superposition of financial states
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
I told one of my college professors I'd been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said "can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it" and without thinking I said "why would I use chat-gpt? It's rubbish" and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.
This was after he'd said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.
One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.
Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.
This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.
found a quality sneer in the wild https://mander.xyz/post/17910623
Turns out purging your ranks of wokes and furries is more fun than, you know, actually developing a working Linux distro: Nix 2.24+ is vulnerable to (remote) privilege escalation.
(linking to the lobste.rs discussion because I feel it does a decent job curating related links around disclosure timelines etc.)
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
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)
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)
Taylor Swift is on the side of humans* in the battle against the AIs (instagram).
Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.
I'm sure everyone remembers what this is referring to, y'know with the rest of the US election being so low-key and boring, but just in case here's an article with screenshots (Guardian).
Anyway I'm not here to talk politics. SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift) thinks Taylor Swift will be a "cultural linchpin" against deepfakes.
As I've said before, Taylor Swift may be the cultural lynchpin for addressing abusive AI imitation and I think this was her personal opening salvo. Taylor Swift was previously driven to political advocacy partly by right-wing memes of her aping Hilter on genetic purity. I think she takes INCREDIBLE personal exception to herself being used as a puppet and this directly aligns with it. Directly addressed to political leaders.
Indeed that Donald Trump post isn't the first time she's been targeted. There was Deepfake Swift Porn in January that prompted Microsoft to add more safeguards**. A scam involving fake Le Creuset cookware (nytimes), and on a lighter note: fake Taylor Swift teaching Math on TikTok (Petapixel, whatever the heck a petapixel is).
The January incident prompted some legislatures to introduce the No AI Fraud Act, though looking at it it looks like it hasn't made it far through congress.
* Maybe not on the side of humans against climate change. With the private jet and all. God the US needs trains then at least all the celebrities could ride in luxurious rail cars like the olden days.
** Not sure about Microsoft but these safeguards aren't effective in general, I found a subreddit of people sharing AI image generator prompt tips to get around filters and it was pretty disturbing. But that's another story.
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.
Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.
The most black mirror part for me is where he's selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future "AI", represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn't a parody, they're literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.
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?
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
Why are you saying that LLMs are useless when they're useless only most of the time
I'm sorry but I've been circling my room for an hour now seeing this and I need to share it with people lest I go insane.
Habsburgs are good, actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497419
Basilisks commuting
https://xcancel.com/equine__dentist/status/1832568341740851266
saw this ridiculous shit on the side of a jag on the highway a little bit ago
best guess is rental-contract jag by a hustler, but the half-hearted AI non-mention is why I thought to post it here. we're rapidly evolving in the grift cycle!
I don't think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at what's 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 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
A new substack about AI: Ludd. "Citizen Journalism on AI, Publishing, and the new Tech Landscape". First post is about Repeater Books, Israel and AI: second is about AI and climate change.
