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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up
Pretty good sneer there:
BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states heās tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family
what fascinating timing, whatās it been, a month or so since he got outed as a Russian agent?
Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.
Mostly VAT fraud.
News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard
But your honor, weāre a crypto mining company; we donāt add any value!
Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.
In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.
literally the exact crowd shitting on the mere rumor of a Lix NixOS fork are clapping for this like trained seals. and I donāt think this getting announced right after those rumors is an accident ā it gets Jon the most attention for his low-effort bullshit and might even let him hurt another fork by way of community fragmentation
something Iām confused about is, is Ringer even effectively banned anymore? I stopped monitoring when someone with mod privileges unbanned him from a bunch of Nix community spaces. is he back to banned, or is this just a continuing tantrum from Jon having Release Manager stripped from him and given to someone who could do that incredibly thoroughly automated job without stirring up a fucking hate mob?
there is one silver lining: for once, I donāt have the cognitive load of another Nix fork to carefully consider switching to. thereās no way in fuck Iām using Ringerās fork under any circumstances, and my brain already filed it away under āweird name, starts with an E, donāt remember the restā seconds after I closed the tab
Youāre right, Borkfan is too easy to remember, my not-ban fork is now called Frabnok.
> FRABNOK LANTERN Your lantern explodes into a rant about the wokes, killing you instantly. *** You have died *** Your score is 0 out of a possible 10 points, in 1 move. This gives you the rank of Release Manager.
The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff
Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear āin imprint pages across our marketsā. The new wording states: āNo part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systemsā, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isnāt gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. itās time to give Big AI a wedgie.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isnāt gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. itās time to give Big AI a wedgie.
Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.
At some point, something is going to reveal that all the money in AI has gone into power costs for datacenters and NVidia chips and that the AI companies themselves arenāt doing so hot. I hope itās the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.
Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe
lmao incredible
Then thereās BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had ācreated a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease.ā Howās the machine brain doing these days? Well, the companyās lead program failed in the clinic last year, and in April announced major layoffs.
just who buys this shit? this reads like refined crypto nonsense
People who donāt get much tech/overdose on hype and heard of alphafold. Imagine how much worse things could be now after the Nobel.
i mean how many these people are out there that also have money of this kind, other than softbank i mean
Given the past several decades of trickle-up economics, I think we havenāt seen anything close to the bottom of the well of basically-idle capital seeking unrealistic returns.
Iād go so far as to say that the current crop of bubbles possibly represents the greatest downards wealth transfer (albeit from billionaires to millionaires rather than, yāknow, working people) since the second world war, but I havenāt done anything near the amount of research necessary for that to be more than exciting rhetoric.
has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? letās hope so
Considering Glaze and Nightshade have been around for a while, and I talked about sabotaging scrapers back in July, arguably, it already has.
Hell, I ran across a much smaller scale case of this a couple days ago:
Not sure how effective it is, but if Elonās stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.
Update on LLM reviewer situation:
PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:
- a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
- intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
- intro to semiotics for the same
- show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why āautomated AI detectionā is also bullshit).
- show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
- Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didnāt use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)
Weāll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because itās a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. Iām also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the āIt canāt be that stupidā trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!
Wish us luck, heh!
good luck! it sounds like youāre coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless theyāre gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PMās better than that), youāre at least likely to make an impact
Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose
between this and all the SEO on OpenAIās marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, itās exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, Iāve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAIās promises didnāt pan out. Iām hoping you can find what you need ā our back archives might have a few links if you havenāt searched through here yet.
Kinda nervous about it, not gonna lie. Really appreciate the positive vibes!
Edit: And thanks so much for keeping this community alive!
hah of course!
The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/
Edit: TIL about the US copyright office websiteās ai generation info on works. Thatās a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.
who does this? I love audiobooks, but Iāve put them down when the narrator didnāt work for me. Who wants everything to sound like itās being read by a serial killer?
It looks like an AI-powered fiction version of this scam. On one hand being fiction means that itās less likely to actively risk killing people with phony medical advice. But being AI powered means that the grifters can now cut the underpaid gig workers out of the loop entirely, which is probably the most concrete example of AI displacing human workers Iāve yet seen.
A friend of mine keeps suggesting Cursor to me. God damn I am sick of autoplag.
I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but thereās some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs
fresh install:
- at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that itās going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
- figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myselfā¦)
while Iām certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think itās fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you donāt even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s
christ Iām gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time
tangentially, I think about this thread every so often too. this just made me think of it again.
guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again
Update: The QRTs are mainly sneering, but this oneās particularly good
EDIT: Against my better judgment, Iām letting another sidenote come out:
If you wanna encourage people to drop the master/slave naming scheme, this guy probably gave you a good bit of ammo. Changing a random naming scheme is a pretty low-priority task under most circumstances, but it gets a lot more tempting when it lets you distance yourself from people like this
I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more āmaster copyā or āmaster recordingā than āmaster of a slaveā. This isnāt IDE. Who names their VCS branch āslaveā?
Well, I guess that guy does.
the thing is that the git branch naming was only one of the places among many where this was changed, and in many databases (and often other server-subsystem architectures) master/slave terminology was quite present. iirc there are still some that stick by it today (mostly out of direct choice by project maintainers)
itās the same thing as whitelist/blacklist, vs allowlist/denylist (or others) - when thereās bad shit linked in baggage, and the cost of changing it (by habit and choice) isnāt all that much, thereās not really any reason to hold by the the old loaded shit
harm reduction comes in many forms
Yeah. I remember when the company I used to work for switched our style guide to allowlist/denylist and apart from That One Guy the overall reaction was a big āeh? sure, whateverā. Nobody is out here pretending that this kind of change is going to completely end racism or even that itās going to have a major impact, but past a certain point continuing to casually throw the memory of chattel slavery around is just cringe.
