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)
In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it’s even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn’t help.
Very serious people at HN at it again:
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like “sexual harassment is not a real crime” or “we shouldn’t give our employees raises because otherwise they’ll soon demand infinite pay” or “there’s no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn’t going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead” you’re a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.
Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
What do these people think leadership is?
No, obviously opinions like
- “if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein’s teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented”,
- “stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it’s supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine”,
- “I don’t believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.1 What if you lie about who is dying?”,
- “Overtly sexualizing ‘parody’ ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is”,
- “It’s fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it’s basically proprietary, right?”,
- “
You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>”,
are in the same category as “I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting” when it comes to evaluating someone’s aptitude as a leader.
I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I’d be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.
1: It’s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it’s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).
Especially leadership of a political organization that’s basically just there to turn his opinions into code and publish his essays.
Something to which they, and people like them, are entitled
I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn’t know how much of a fool RMS was. : “RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.” (It gets worse btw).
Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this
Ted_Danson_choosing_between_clam_chowder_fountain_and_bees_with_teeth.webm
Top level comment at time of posting:
“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”
???
No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.
the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.
of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein’s victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn’t underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around
I don’t think anything in the report is new, is it? Isn’t this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.
Nice to have it all in one place though.
There’s a little bit of new stuff in there, but it’s all just corroborating the old or relatively minor. Still, it’s a lot in one place.
(Rationally) “If there’s grass on the field play ball”
that person’s inability to spell millennia makes me irrationally angry, and the rest of it is even fucking worse
okay, I’ve changed my mind, I’m in favour of spacex now. so that we can cheaply airlock these fucking pieces of shit.
🎶 Tryna strike a chord and its probably A minorrrrrrrrrrr
(seriously, what the fuck HN)
Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.
fig. 1: how awful.systems works
lol fandom could have been even worse
data moat
That’s just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.
ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:
- The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
- Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
- Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle
Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.
Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*
In this context, “moat” is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo
idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to “open” castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs
that said it’s not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it’s not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv
I will internalise this for the next time data moats come up!
iirc they had tools to import data from other wikis into theirs, but not tools to export.
they have the MediaWiki database dumps, which are XML so you can do anything with them!! *
* the actual page text is a single field
imagine how they could have monetized it
Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game
As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.
Musk’s twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer
Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that’s not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.
Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.
(MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)
I almost want to go Twitter diving to see if kache has the requisite unhinged rant about how universities are only making quantum physics hard to get money/because of woke or whatever
e: holy shit I already regret this
yeah, 3b1b animations can take you through all of undergrad math in probably a month if it all existed and you used anki
We could bottle this arrogance and sell it as an emetic.
as one of many people here who has undergone undergrad math, i reckon a month of youtube and anki might not be enough for even intro to linear algebra. I’m even saying this as someone who skipped all lectures and crammed before all the tests.
Oh. He retweets Cremieux.
yeah don’t do it to yourself. I forget how I originally noticed this weirdo, it may have been through amolitor99’s continuous anthropology safari of TPOT freaks. Speaking of which, somebody needs to get that guy over here
i have tried occasionally but will try again
dammit now I’m going to have to look at twitter
tpot fresh on my mind, too. just yesterday i was telling someone about how one of the people semi in that cluster had me going 🤨 and then had to explain a little about some of the highlights of tpot
oh, cool, they also claim to be a twitter engineer. that’s probably telling too (if true)
i see your twitter engineer and i raise you elite promptfondler
there’s more
or you could use something like qrencode that already is a thing and pipe it to image viewer of your choice
yeah which might it be
he’s also lying box understander
(idk why these screenshots get stretched to entire width available sometimes and sometimes they don’t)
there’s a lot of this
we had these since manhattan project. sit tf down
i think we have different standards on being coherent
- I don’t know Matt Mullenweg, but I’m afraid to ask
- I love the nonsensical misleading QR code onliner, conflictingly using both
echo "<URL>" |and mac-onlygetoutput("pbpaste")(yuck). - It is famously easy to maintain a job and mental well-being when you have no stable home and few sets of clothes! Famously you don’t need a registered address to open a bank account, and you don’t need a bank account to get a registered address!
- I guess you could run the GPU for 1000 years.
- One needs to learn that interpolation = confabulation = useless bullshit.
or you could use something like qrencode that already is a thing and pipe it to image viewer of your choice
(my bad, I actually just looked at the images earlier, missed that you said that)
finding and looking up information you need effectively is a skill that is both very useful and i don’t think it’s taught explicitly, it’s a byproduct of being taught how to do research more generally. slapping a lying box in its place is not a substitute
but what if the lying box smiled at me and made me feel good about myself, surely that means it’s trustworthy right?
(wipes away a single tear)
Beautiful, man, just beautiful
i stared into abyss again and he can’t grasp why flywheels for energy storage don’t work while trying to make happen a startup that sells hardware
“qm and fluid dynamics are easy” lol
jesus christ
whoa…on second thought, maybe this dude is having a manic episode or something? yeesh!
twitter gon’ have nothin’ left but the cranks
Just guys like that and guys like this
This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.
the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends
have implemented jwt (used the library, first in the company)
so uh, they keep self-fellating on Twitter about how they invented their own CAD program over the objections of the haters
here it is, it’s an extremely thin wrapper around the typescript version of manifold with live reloading on changes. note that not only is manifold already a CAD library, they already have a web-based editor that reloads the model on code changes, and kache’s live reloading is just
nodemon. the server part looks like it’s barely modified from a code example. the renderer is just three.js grabbed from a CDN.it’s so weird they didn’t take the necessary 2 weeks to learn how to write the CAD parts of the CAD system they made!
hackers and builders (both in the a16z definition of) are some of the fucking worst things out there today
builder (derogatory)
founder mode (derogatory)
founder mode derogatory? [flagged]
Marc the Builder employs many elite code ninjas who are experts at prompting ChatGPT for npm commands
chatgpt: for people who don’t want to be gaslit only by bad cli tools
the absolute worst type of coworker from my cubicle days: heard about a technology at a conference, decided they invented it
kache miss
and hitting all the Ls
Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn’t not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script
I need to look up what auth protocols this guy has worked on so I can stay away from them.
conversely, it might be a rich vein of toctou
Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!
Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop… blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs… noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these “AI” generators can’t leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don’t know for sure, and maybe I’m doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff…
Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with “art things made by actual humans”, but I guess that certainty is outdated now.
This sucks so much. I don’t want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know… How can trust be restored?
I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.
It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.
Sadly I think the only way to trust you are not getting a lot of AI art is by starting to follow a lot of artists you like on social media. Just going to a site which sells things seems a bit risky atm.
Molly White reports on Kamala Harris’s recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.
VP Harris’s press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.
Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected
[…]
Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.
More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.
Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.
“regulation” here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don’t live in a sensible world.
who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto
Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.
Me, a nuclear engineer reading about “Google restarting six nuclear power plants”
lol, lmao even
Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”
this is one hell of a hat trick
only needs a quantum chapter somewhere in there for bonus scoring round…
God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.
This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.
the upside of it listing a pile of author names: one can go look up their published works, and add them to crank trackers if necessary (seems likely)
the ToC is some fantastical fucking nonsense
Zitron’s given commentary on PC Gamer’s publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:
He’s also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley’s worst excesses. I don’t have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.
He also put ‘everything you post is now training data for ais’ in his tos apparently. So nightshade poison those images and start building a following on other sites artists. (And as a non artist, reminder to self to like and repost more artists I like).
E: quick source
This is a license for stalkers & abusers ! No surprise from someone like Elon I suppose
I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.
my bet: tweets that came to felon’s attention which he couldn’t view because the poster had block felon
I’m really really not happy about this. There is one person I’ve been trying to keep out for the last few years and now they can come crawl all my fucking posts?? And report my account!?
Edit: apparently being protected should offer me some protection still.
apparently those qualcomm NPUs (the “AI assist” chips in the copilot(?) laptops) aren’t very good
The what in the what now?
What a terrible day to tech.
(yes this post is a creative attempt at generating alt text for my image).
wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?
non processing units
inference-tasks focused coprocessor
cope rocessor
hang on I have another.
NPU? More like, N-Pee-eeeww!!
Thus leading to this sneer on HN. I’m quoting it in entirety; click through for Poe’s Law responses.
I was telling someone this and they gave me link to a laptop with higher battery life and better performance than my own, but I kept explaining to them that the feature I cared most about was die size. They couldn’t understand it so I just had to leave them alone. Non-technical people don’t get it. Die size is what I care about. It’s a critical feature and so many mainstream companies are missing out on my money because they won’t optimize die size. Disgusting.
gonna have to ship this person a 20d100 kit. maybe custom woodgrain? show some thought, y’know
it just clicked for me but idk if it makes sense: openai nonprofit status could be used later (inevitably in court) to make research clause of fair use work. they had it when training their models and that might have been a factor why they retained it, on top of trying to attract actual skilled people and not just hypemen and money
There’s no way this works, right? It’s like a 5y.o.'s idea of a gotcha.
This would be like starting a tax-exempt charity to gather up a large amount in donations and then switching to a for-profit before spending it on any charitable work and running away with the money.
i’m not a lawyer and i’ve typed it up after 4h of sleep, trying to make sense of what tf were they thinking. they’re not bagging up money, they’re stealing all data they can, so it’s less direct and it’d depend on how that data (unstructured, public) will be valued at. then, what a coincidence, their proprietary thing made something useful commercially, or so were they thinking. sbf went to court with less
There’s no way this works, right?
the US legal system has this remarkable “little” failure mode where it is easily repurposed to be not an engine of justice, but instead of engine of enforcing whatever story you can convince someone of
(the extremely weird interaction(s) of “everything allowed except what is denied”, case precedent, and the abovementioned interaction mode, result in some really fucking bad outcomes)
sammy boi is giving up on the pretense that any of this was about enriching lives, and is now only focusing on the eyegrab (archive)
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we’ll see
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we’ll see
I suspect we’ll see a fair amount. Giving some specifics:
-
I suspect we’ll see Sammy accused of endangering all of humanity for a quick buck - taking Altman at his word, OpenAI is attempting to create something which they themselves believe could wipe out humanity if they screw things up.
-
I expect calls to regulate the AI industry will louden in response to this - what Sammy’s doing here is giving the true believers more ammo to argue Silicon Valley may potentially trigger the robot apocalypse that Silicon Valley themselves have claimed AI is capable of unleashing.
perhaps saltman will have enough audacity to promote this as a way to ensure that some account is owned by a human, after flooding every corner of internet with ai slop and fake accounts
that’s almost certainly the plan — I remember there was some horrific “proof of humanity” shit tied in with this, supposedly so that you could tell if you’re interacting with a human rather than a chatbot. there’s so many problems with that technically of course, not least of which is the chatbot guy also owning the proof of not-bot, but there’s deeper horrifying implications: this is the technology conservatives have been begging for to block access to “adult sites” (see: LGBTQ+ spaces and associates) and “protect voting” (see: purge voter registries). that the technology is fucking stupid and doesn’t work doesn’t matter to them — as always with technofascism, that’s a feature.
-
Kinda surprised World(Coin) was still ongoing, thought saltman would have quietly buried the project now he’s busy shilling ChatGPT
The 0.000001% chance that this thing morphs into the new global reserve currency is enough for a proper rationalist to keep it trundling along, don’t you think?
Also don’t underestimate the value of having someplace to park useful cronies you don’t currently have any other job for
Create the problem and sell the solution.
Did Sam anticipate the easily foreseeable avalanche of AI slop, decide that proof of humanity was a worthwhile investment, and only then notice that all the suggested search completions for “proof of” were crypto?
Worldcoin has been around for longer than OpenAI. Sama is the OG pivot-from-crypto-to-AI.
this demented take on using GenAI to create documentation for open source projects
https://lobste.rs/s/rmbos5/large_language_models_reduce_public#c_j8boat
Good sneer from “Internet_Janitor” a few comments up the page:
LLMs inherently shit where they eat.
The top comment’s also pretty good, especially the final paragraph:
I guess these companies decided that strip-mining the commons was an acceptable deal because they’d soon be generating their own facts via AGI, but that hasn’t come to pass yet. Instead they’ve pissed off many of the people they were relying on to continue feeding facts and creativity into the maws of their GPUs, as well as possibly fatally crippling the concept of fair use if future court cases go against them.
oh hey that would be my comment 😁
It was a pretty good comment, and pointed out one of the possible risks this AI bubble can unleash.
I’ve already touched on this topic, but it seems possible (if not likely) that copyright law will be tightened in response to the large-scale theft performed by OpenAI et al. to feed their LLMs, with both of us suspecting fair use will likely take a pounding. As you pointed out, the exploitation of fair use’s research exception makes it especially vulnerable to its repeal.
On a different note, I suspect FOSS licenses (Creative Commons, GPL, etcetera) will suffer a major decline in popularity thanks to the large-scale code theft this AI bubble brought - after two-ish years of the AI industry (if not tech in general) treating anything publicly available as theirs to steal (whether implicitly or explicitly), I’d expect people are gonna be a lot stingier about providing source code or contributing to FOSS.
Yeah, I’m no longer worried that LLMs will take my job (nor ofc that AGI will kill us all) Instead the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available. It’s a bit like draining the Aral Sea, a vibrant ecosystem will be permanently destroyed in the short-sighted pursuit of “development”.
the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available.
I personally anticipate this will be the lasting legacy of AI as a whole - everything that you mentioned was caused in the alleged pursuit of AGI/Superintelligencetm, and gen-AI has been more-or-less the “face” of AI throughout this whole bubble.
I’ve also got an inkling (which I turned into a lengthy post) that the AI bubble will destroy artificial intelligence as a concept - a lasting legacy of “crud and untruth” as you put it could easily birth a widespread view of AI as inherently incapable of distinguishing truth from lies.
