4w ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025

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.)

148 comments

An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it's much worse:
https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/
Do not post Insults, including those about [...] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
You can see the full diff from last version if you click "Jan 8, 2025" and yeah it's a doozy.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn't really concentrate on work. It's hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn't dunking on them for it.
On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.
or indeed simply having a gender and I'm not sure fascists know how to use words right.
- Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.
  same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.
  
  as usual, Nina said it more coherently than I did
- I've been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and "making fun" of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don't remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.
  It was always "we don't censor speech but don't be an asshole" with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don't think I've ever seen even the worst places say, "we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead".
  Holy fucking shitballs.
- It is very disturbing and scary.
  They're explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?
  Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.
- See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day it's gonna be like 5 hours tops.
- I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.
  
  The backlash already happened - it's been a few years of far right protests against drag shows and prides. Not that it can't get worse!

Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this ~~manifesto found after the shooting~~ oped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.
- That reads like some bullshit you'd find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.
  Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.
- jesus christ
- the amount of doublethink and newspeak this is attempting to push is remarkable
  also afaik thiel isn't one to regularly demean himself to writing tidbits such as this, is he? I don't recall seeing nearly as many words from mr likes-it-private as I have from andreesen et al
  
  Dindt he write a book on how democracy is over? Or incompatible with the modern world or something.
- for someone that runs a surveillance company he sure as fuck can't help yapping about his plans
  
  they're all just so fucking ...... smug
  it appears they don't think anything can possibly go wrong
- Sir, this is a Wendy's, also
  There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.
  did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot who's on the reactionary side?
  
  Depends on your perspective I guess, like if you imagine there are really 'we should destroy the internet and go back to the imaginary golden age before the internet' people those would be reactionary on that subject. I have never seen anybody honestly like that however.
  On his reactionary side: I don't get how his allies, he can stand them. I mean he must know they will come after him next. We know what they think of lgbt people.
- i hope thiel keeps writing these, because every minute he does he doesn't spend on horrible shit like implementing them
- i don't know how much experience thiel has in actual politics, but chances are that he'll be given dead in the water projects that will just keep him busy and distracted enough to not do anything, should trump admin choose so, like this https://youtu.be/xxVsS9ZNUOU?t=193 (start from beginning for nuclear grade sneer on musk)

[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty
When the very first thing you say about a character is that they "have money in crypto", you may already be doing it wrong
- wow i hate this so much
  it's neat how the cartooning gets lazier and lazier as it goes though
  
  holy shit you really weren’t kidding about how lazy it gets. there’s a bunch of frames that are just text I’m not gonna read on a black background???
- The FDA thing gave me whiplash what the fuck, what did I miss
  
  evil regulators prevent sv megaminds from unrestricted access to adderall probably
  idk what specifically, there has been a thing with anti-cavity bacteria that didn't work or maybe that's about some transhumanist bs
  
  2017 article on this topic https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/31/14364090/peter-thiel-fda-trump-silicon-valley-oneill-gulfo-srinivasan-gottlieb
- Eurgh. I'm now feeling angry at the thought of someone who is doing a degree in global health but gets persuaded that AI safety is more important.

"The Publisher of the Journal "Nature" Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work", by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:
Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated "Media Kits" to summarize and promote their research.
In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will "maximize the impact" of their research, saying the $49 package will return "high-quality" outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher's sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.
- ah yeah exactly what i needed: a button that burns a square km of rainforest with every press, that might generate an abstract (that i've already wrote) but wrong, or fake press release that goes nowhere and also is wrong, while at the same time sending what might be restricted data fuck knows where with pinky promise that they won't blend it and force feed their imagined machine god
  Earlier this week, for instance, the massive publishing body announced in a press release that it would be deploying a "new AI-driven tool" crafted to automate "editorial quality checks" and notify editors to "potentially unsuitable manuscripts". The announcement adds that manuscripts may be held back from peer review if the AI tool deems them editorially unfit.
  watch this to be used as a bludgeon against ESL authors. oh noes poor country people, go somewhere else because Computer Says No. then they decrease acceptance rate on their website
  A Guy in India (specialist) approach to detection of slop will still work, but it's not resistant to office politics of complaining that it's not web scale and such. i can't wait for collapse of this bubble

Just want to share this great term & definition "hyperkludge" coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2023/01/hyperkludge-n.html
- Examples off the top of my head:
  Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
  NETCONF
  YAML
  Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
  Alcohol
  Chiclet keyboards
  Unicode Han unification
  Layer 2 SDN
  Kubernetes
  JavaScript
  Disk partitioning
  UEFI
  Public transit fares
  Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn't have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).
  
  MS-DOS and Windows, of course…
  but, and this will get some boos, Unix as a workstation OS compared with every other non-windows workstation OS
- ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.
  
  Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.
- Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it's an accepted standard. The web couldn't function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.
  The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn't a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.
- I'm surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing
  
  yeah that is an interesting example. I immediately applied the term to commercial products. Like Notion for example - funny because I always say Notion takes wikis which are well established in their usefulness and just slaps them into saas product with other things like docs and spreadsheets (also well established in their usefulness) - but he calls wikis themselves a hyperkludge but what superior thing did wikis kill by network effects?
- this rules <3
- oh that's pretty great
- After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good ol' Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of
  this tool^[1] is just a proof of concept/prototype
  it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
  our infrastructure is now the tool
  had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application^[2]. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.
  I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3
  1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.
  \ 2: Noting that, while "it's not the tool, it's the application" is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between "this is the wrong tool for the job" and "this tool will hurt people".

we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it
no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you're probably guessing low
- [The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.
  end_me_now.jpg
  
  SEOs match quality websites to those users trying to find them. As much as Google and Bing like to pretend that they're perfect there are very real indexing issues that crop up and need experts to debug, mitigate, and prevent; so in a very real way the SEOs do make the web better for users.
  comment continues below the ad
  For example let's say there was a user who wanted to read a website full of LLM written articles and ads but they keep stumbling across low quality websites with poor SEO practices like Wikipedia instead, why that would be terrible. In order to prevent this terrible possiblity it is the noble duty of SEOs to buy well respected high ranking domain names so that users get a brand they can trust. Like Forbes. Or Radioshack.
  comment continues below the ad
  Sincerely, the myseonewsnow "staff".
  
  You could hook Cthulhu with bait that big.
  
  the sheer amount and rapidity of times it goes from "fucking wot m8" to moments where you can just see him cackling to himself, "hee heeeeee..... that'll teach 'em!", just constant whiplash
  my neck hurts and I should've stretched
- To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
  The passive-aggressive language and the pettyness is such a combination.

My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:
You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you're selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ
(From the comments for "The average rationalist IQ is about 122".)
- <insert rant about lizardman constant here again>
  , and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!
  E: ow god the first comments are 'actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ'
  E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.
- I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?
  
  Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.

Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets
Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won't work for some reason.
- With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?

Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI
- I just want to harp on this one:
  “Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”
  Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? "Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users". "Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients". "Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users".
  The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it's TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, "ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don't is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do".
  It's YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. "Oh but it's very technical" YOU'RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR????
  
  The worst bit is, the devs who aren’t like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because they’re too slow.
  This is so fucking infuriating. I don’t want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because it’s good fucking work ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything it’s apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.
  I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I can’t I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.
  
  A great example of 'we are bad at our jobs and if you rely on us everybody will die'
- Thanks, that was infuriating to read.
  Whenever techbros use the word "storytelling", some disaster follows...

Zuck wants to get back to his roots
It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here's what we're going to do: [...] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.
- Ah i recall somebody got mad when I mentioned traditionally capitalists will team up with fascists.
  
  Maybe I was naive, but I didn't expect all this to go that fast and that blatant...
- Is that a comedy account? The announcement surely reads as if it was…
  To add an insult to the injury meta renames pride themed skins in chat https://labyrinth.zone/objects/e129982d-997e-489b-985a-3ef547b66bf3
  
  It's not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!
  
  Fascist virtue signalling aside, candy floss should not exist. That's like the exact opposite of dental care.
  Edit: I have been made aware that Candy Floss is another name for cotton candy, which is delicious. Though my point kind of still stands.
- Isn't this just an economic move dressed up as an ideological one?
  If only all those sneaker companies had thought to say they had to move their factories from America to Chinese sweatshops because American workers were too woke.
  
  Trick question; it's both an economic move and an ideological move.

Does anyone else get tired of "read documentation and edit this text file to configure your app" Unix shit? I have no problem with the underlying configuration being a text-file (makes for a straightforward API), but do I really need to navigate to https://mpv.io/manual/master/#configuration-files and go through the rigamarole of figuring out which options I need to edit/include^[0] because I misplaced (read: sudo rm -rf /) my config file?
[0]: And there is always so much implicit bullshit. "By default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable summon_octopus_guy is unset." It's a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?
- Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire... the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?
  As for losing configs, I've started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.
- Surely it's better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren't present. Having worked in support I can vouch for the amount of suffering that could be avoided if more systems actually failed if some important configuration isn't in place.
  
  Surely it’s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren’t present.
  Completely agree. I think this may just be an extension of the "you gotta know what you're doing to code correctly in C" old school bullshit.
- Personally I think it's fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like /etc/someapp.conf with all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in ~/.config/someapp/someapp.conf where you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.
  
  I personally disagree. I think in the era of "a megabyte is big," this made sense, but in my opinion after parsing a config file with missing config data, we should print something indicating they are missing then error out. The existence of a reference config file with all options included would definitely help, but I think it's no coincidence that there is no such config for mpv --- why bother creating and maintaining one if the program will use the default value anyway?
  tl;dr explicit is better than implicit

LessWrongers find cool reception for translated HPMOR copies sent to Russia's highest IQ youth
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onyiPaxnmiDdHn7SR/no-one-has-the-ball-on-1500-russian-olympiad-winners-who-ve
- I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people.
  Zoom and enhance!
  alignment-pill
  The inability to hear what their own words sound like is terminal. At this stage, we can only provide palliative care, i.e., shoving into lockers.
  
  Man, now I'm bummed that I don't have a cult trying to distribute translations of my Daria fic in which Jane becomes Hell Priest of the Cenobites.
- big sending bibles to north korea energy
- Lmaou. "We need to alignment pill the Russian youth." Fast forward to the year 20XX and the haunted alignment pilled adults are now 'aligning' their bots to the world's top nuclear armed despot.
  tony_soprano_how_could_this_happen.jpg (for some reason awful systems won't let me upload pictures anymore (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ)
  Holy Moses in heaven, iirc both Sam and Dario have said that their urge to build the torment nexus came from being inspired by online RAT forums. Maybe alignment 'pilling' youths is counterproductive to human flourishing? As the LWers say, "update your priors fuckheads"
- people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.
  i.e. working for Putin, running from Putin, or dying for Putin

the worst Nix project has finally been announced: behold crypto NixOS
I’m starting a paradigm shifting, open and new human / computer interface system that is global, multi device and privacy focused.
[…]
DISCLAIMER: You are not my exit liquidity, I have the best performing long term spot crypto portfolio in the world - I’m a early adopter with 100% hit rate on geniuses. So, I don’t have to work, I’m not building this to become rich. I want to build something paradigm changing - truly mind-blowing, because now we have the tech and I’m annoyed how computer work. It is a lot of work, but it will reward us all.
my “this isn’t a grift and I’m not a grifter” disclaimer is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer. but speaking of prompting, what goes with crypto?
ChatGPT-1o thinks, after some reinforced asking, that the MC of such a coin can reach 300-1000M; I think it could easily go higher - it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was. Or dump phone to smart phone. It will just span devices and span users while keeping the data under control and of companies.
of course. after some reinforced asking, gpt told me you’re all haters if you don’t think I’m as important as Xerox PARC!
there’s lots more in the OP to sneer at, but here’s the worst part of the thread:
Mod note: I’m glad to see doubt and scepticism about crypto-based claims. However, that point has now been made; please avoid any further posts in that vein to avoid a pile-on dunkfest, and leave the thread for any potential on-topic discussion.
thanks for nothing as usual NixOS discourse!
e: via mastodon, archive
- i forced chatgpt to say that my idea will make you a billion dollars but i think it can go higher
- Must be rich indeed, the disclaimer is pure gold.
- after some reinforced asking
  Shit chatgpt is self aware, it did the 'if I agree with you will you shut the fuck up' thing.
  E: while I shouldn't speak on that subject, weird typos.

Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”
Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1
Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.
WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp
It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.
(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)
- Bryan Lunduke
  Holy shit, the Linux Action Show guy? I remember listening to that podcast occasionally fifteen years ago and found it quite entertaining.
  I had no idea he was even still around, let alone going techfash.
- Thanks for the heads-up. I couldn't finish reading through all postings in that forum thread, it's all just making me so tired... always the same shit.

OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.
- At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.
  I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.
  
  That seems reasonable.

25475 O Jan 08 Duke University ( 42K) Help Us Evaluate New Personalized AI Learning Tool
groan
- put an article in mdpi and you'll get 70 of these per month

For a fun 20 minutes or so, I recommend going through the recent enron “revival”. (It’s all satire)

Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.
- yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.
- Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.
  
  Ah, here's the post I was thinking of; I missed it somehow.

please excuse me while I infinitely recursively scream into the void
Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications
(this shit has been getting airtime at a couple of different networking conferences, and it's all as ridiculous and pointless as you'd blindly guess)
- It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title "Large Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!"
  Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol
  
  Here's a start:
  Given their enormous environmental cost and their foundation upon exploited labor, justifying the use of Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications is an uphill task. Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit, climbing that hill has no merit.
  
  here have incomprehensible meme
  
  inb4
- i know it's not a competition, but consider https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/generative-ai-virtual-cell/681246/
  
  eyelid twitching
  sure, we barely understand all applicable bio systems, let's have some shitty model dream up answers on how things work! it'll go great
  Much as a chatbot can discern style and perhaps even meaning from huge volumes of written language,
  going to have to add this author to the List, aren't I

Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing "AI" is so tiring. Not suprising, but still... ugh. Claims of AI in everything.
My favourite so far: USB controller with "AI enhancements" because... uuh... if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that's why "AI" is in the marketing for the USB controller...?

The New Antitrust is so goddamn meta, deep writing from the 2025 authors

Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers
- su;dr
  (saw URL; didn't read)
- The comments are something else alright:
  The part about kids is wrong. Per Aella's survey, many people report having masturbated well before puberty. Breeding and pregnancy were actually one of my earliest kinks when I was 7.

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