chef’s kiss, no notes

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and also speaking of Godot — does anyone doing game dev right now have a good source for placeholder assets? I just finished all the introductory tutorials for the engine and now I want to flex what I’ve learned a bit

They’re reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo

It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities … but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control

😩

This work getting the physics nobel for “using physics” is reeeeeeal fuckin tangential

TIL Roblox is listed on the fucking stock market.

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

the purestrain corporate non-apology that is “we should have communicated our vision effectively” when your entire community is telling you in no uncertain terms to give up on that vision because it’s a terrible idea nobody wants

How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.

How do we ensure that traffic safety is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? A big part of the answer is drunk driving.

Welcome to the club. They say a shared suffering is only half the suffering.

This was discussed in last week’s Stubsack, but I don’t think we mind talking about talking the same thing twice. I, for one, do not look forward to browsing Wikipedia exclusively through pre-2024 archived versions, so I hope (with some pessimism) their disapponintingly milquetoast stance works out.

Reading a bit of the old Reddit sneerclub can help understand some of the Awful vernacular, but otherwise it’s as much of a lurkmoar as any other online circlejerk. The old guard keep referencing cringe techbros and TESCREALs I’ve never heard of while I still can’t remember which Scott A we’re talking about in which thread.

The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

Wikipedia’s mod team definitely haven’t realised it yet, but this part is pretty much a de facto ban on using AI. AI is incapable of producing output that would be acceptable for a Wikipedia article - in basically every instance, its getting nuked.

Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed)

first impression: your post is entirely on topic, welcome to the stubsack

techtakes is a sister sub to sneerclub (also on this instance, previously on reddit) and that one has a bit of an explanation. generally any (classy) sneerful critique of bullshit and wankery goes, modulo making space for chuds/nazis/debatelords/etc (those get shown the exit)

Now in 404media.

you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).

we’re pretty receptive to requests for explanations of terms here, just fyi! I imagine if it begins to overwhelm commenting, a guide will be created. Unfortunately there is something of an arms race between industry buzzword generation and good sense, and we are on the side of good sense.

Why is it always bioshock girl 😭

Earlier today, the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack, which has now been claimed by the BlackMeta hacktivist group, who says they will be conducting additional attacks.

Hacktivist group? The fuck can you claim to be an activist for if your target is the Internet Archive?

I feel like the Internet Archive is a prime target for techfashy groups. Both for the amount of culture you can destroy, and because backed up webpages often make people with an ego the size of the sun look stupid.

Also, I can’t remember but didn’t Yudkowsky or someone else pretty plainly admit to taking a bunch of money during the FTX scandal? I swear he let slip that the funds were mostly dried up. I don’t think it was ever deleted, but that’s the sort of thing you might want to delete and could get really angry about being backed up in the Internet Archive. I think Siskind has edited a couple articles until all the fashy points were rounded off and that could fall in a similar boat. Maybe not him specifically, but there’s content like that that people would rather not be remembered and the Internet Archive falling apart would be good news to them.

Also (again), it scares me a little that their servers are on public tours. Like it’d take one crazy person to do serious damage to it. I don’t know but I’m hoping their >100PB of storage is including backups, even if it’s not 3-2-1. I’m only mildly paranoid about it lol.

@BlueMonday1984 whoever this dipshit is needs to fucking stop

Reduce your time-to-insight

I do not think that word means what they think it means.

Emily Bender devoted a whole episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 to this.

I have nothing to add, save the screaming.

Synthetic Users uses the power of LLMs to generate users that have very high Synthetic Organic Parity. We start by generating a personality profile for each user, very much like a reptilian brain around which we reconstruct its personality. It’s a reconstruction because we are relying on the billions of parameters that LLMs have at their disposal.

They could’ve worded this so many other ways

But I suppose creepyness is a selling point these days

the only positive is that their carousel pitch is at least honest about the desire

and that list of companies who’ve supposedly used it is telling, I guess

the rest of this….oh dear god

they put bullshit inside my bullshit industry for generating bullshit??? the investors are delighted!

I did not expect to be tricked into reading about the nighttime erections of the man with the most severe midlife crisis in the world.

he has 80% fewer gray hairs, representing a “31-year age reversal”

According to Wikipedia this guy is 47. Sorry about your hair as a teenager I guess? I hope the early graying didn’t lead to any long term self-esteem issues.

The Network School offers Johnson’s healthy food and a fitness program called the Blueprint Protocol. He claims that after three years of following his blueprint the duration of his night-time erections totals 179 minutes, “better than the average 18-year-old”

Yeah, this is a very normal diet that’s advertising itself in very normal ways.

When I was adjusting to a high fiber diet for medical reasons I couldn’t figure out why I was so incredibly hungry despite eating enough.

Then I realized “huh, I haven’t had any fat at all for the past week” and went and made myself four slices of buttery toast and they were so tasty.

I want a menu!

What do you think is the venn diagram of “people who go to The Network School” and “men who believe in the meat-only diet”? I imagine there’s a lot of crossover

@gerikson

Now if it was Brian Johnson from AC/DC, I bet it’d be awesome.

I think a couple of people noted it at the start, but this is truly a paradigm shift.

We’ve had so many science fiction stories, works, derivatives, musing about AI in so many ways, what if it were malevolent, what if it rebelled, what if it took all jobs… But I don’t think our collective consciousness was aware of the “what if it was just utterly stupid and incompetent” possibility.

I’d really rather not become a character in this story

Good luck. In my experience you can’t speak up about stuff like this without putting yourself out there to some degree. Stay strong.

Regarding the email bounceback, could you perhaps try sending an email from another address (with a different host) to the same destination to confirm it’s not just your “sending” server?

The bounceback should have info in it on the cause, and DKIM issues should result in a complaint response from the denying recipient server.

Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to “optimize your workout with every rep” or some such nonsense.

I tried to remember the name of it by googling “AI exercise equipment” and despite the slick branding (it’s called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think it’s awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days I’m imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone else’s in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.

yet another way to write shitty python

I really think that Naomi Klein pointing out the brand being the product created a wave of tech entrepreneurs who reacted by making the user experience the product and now we’re seeing how bad they are at the most basic brand maintenance.

The logical conclusion of normalizing “Social Media Manager” as a role in companies is that as they get better at their jobs and become more believable, the average corporate communication will trend towards 13-year old edgy shitposter. God I feel old.