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)
New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.
And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this oneās thankfully unrelated to the articleās main point):
The idea that ā[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitabletmā (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.
That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valleyās failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.
Update: My previous statement was wrong, turns out @ai_shame is still around
Like Vitalik Buterin creating eth because he was mad his op WoW char got nerfed, we now have more gamers lore. J D Vance played a Yawgmothās Bargain deck.
the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over
We cannot allow a dark ritual gap.
āO Cent O Pence (R)ā is an anagram for āNecropotenceā
Trump is clearly campaigning on the critically overlooked black draw engine platform, possibly to spite blue voters.
Edit: āOne Percent Co.ā was right there! Itās all coming together now!
Bob Dylan has responded to a Bitcoin Groyper account
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, itās even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didnāt help.
Very serious people at HN at it again:
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someoneās 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 āsexual harassment is not a real crimeā or āwe shouldnāt give our employees raises because otherwise theyāll soon demand infinite payā or āthereās no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isnāt going to damage the reputation of the organization I leadā youāre 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 someoneās personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
What do these people think leadership is?
No, obviously opinions like
- āif my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epsteinās teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consentedā,
- āstealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most itās supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fineā,
- āI donāt believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? Itās conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.1 What if you lie about who is dying?ā,
- āOvertly sexualizing āparodyā 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 isā,
- āItās 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 itās basically proprietary, right?ā,
- ā
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>ā,
are in the same category as āI think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgustingā when it comes to evaluating someoneās 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 donāt 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 Iād be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.
1: Itās 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 itās 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.).
(Rationally) āIf thereās grass on the field play ballā
Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this
lol fandom could have been even worse
data moat
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 āmoatā is that it comes from the word āmotteā. 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 castleās 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 MoatFactsā¢ļø. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*
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 āopenā 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 itās 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 itās 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!
In this context, āmoatā is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo
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
Muskās 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 thatās 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.
And besides, we all know that mathematics videos peaked with the Angle Dance.
oh, cool, they also claim to be a twitter engineer. thatās probably telling too (if true)
i see your twitter engineer and i raise you elite promptfondler
jesus christ
Oh. He retweets Cremieux.
the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because youāve 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 isnāt a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
given how oddly specific āapplication auth protocolā is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone elseās OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when theyāre 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, itās 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 kacheās live reloading is just
nodemon. the server part looks like itās barely modified from a code example. the renderer is just three.js grabbed from a CDN.itās so weird they didnāt 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)
the absolute worst type of coworker from my cubicle days: heard about a technology at a conference, decided they invented it
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 didnāt not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script
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.
twitter gonā have nothinā left but the cranks
Just guys like that and guys like this
our good buddy Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux aka TP0 gives a talk to Stanford libertarians
i havenāt watched this but i am confident it is the most cursed fuckin thing
one hour thirty frickin eight
Somebody on the twitter is doing an expose on TP0 (This is part 2, part 1 also linked).
Eigen āTurn the Homeless into Soylentā robot strikes again
arggghhh no one can make me feel blind rage like this smarmy nazi piece of shit can
You know, I canāt tell if this is supposed to be āI know youāre saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but itās more complicated than thatā or āI know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and Iām honestly okay with thatā.
Gonna guess the latter given where itās coming from and the fact that the actual āmore complicatedā is a salad of non sequiturs.
eigen is squarely in the tpot crew
itās definitely not coming from a good place
Molly White reports on Kamala Harrisās recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.
VP Harrisās 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
[ā¦]
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.
āregulationā 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 donāt live in a sensible world.
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.
who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto
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 weāll see
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 āproof ofā were crypto?
Worldcoin has been around for longer than OpenAI. Sama is the OG pivot-from-crypto-to-AI.
A quick update: @ai_shame is quitting Twitter, and Musk using posts for AI training is the reason why:
fig. 1: how awful.systems works
[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684?s=46](Roko gets dunked on.)
He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.
Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?
Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesnāt seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.
Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))
Okay but āElon is not smarter than meā is a universally true statement in the exact same way as ādumb as a rockā is a universally applicable idiom.
Indeed, it isnāt that Roko is smart, it is the bar is so low.
If heās so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?
That launch happened Feb 2018. By that time, I was already solidified as a musk sceptic and didnāt pay attention to the hubbub. Thinking back on it:
- Why was this a thing?
- per wikipedia:
Musk explained he wanted to inspire the public about the āpossibility of something new happening in spaceā as part of his larger vision for spreading humanity to other planets.ā
What I like about the phrasing āpossibility of something newā is that nothing new really happened with that launch. Weāve already sent all kinds of junk into space in configurations varying in impressiveness.
- Naming the mannequin Starman falls apart since the eponymous starman is an extra terrestrial. Just goes to show that Musk is not a Real NerdTM and just makes surface level references to look cool.
Why was this a thing?
Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.
ššš
Hope Muskās existence and influence today was worth it, nerds from 2018!
I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but Iāll admit I did get a kick out of the ādonāt panicā dashboard.
But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):
I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: whatās the meaning of life? Thatās the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.
Itās backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensicalāincompatibleāquestion! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you canāt afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!
Surely his reading comprehension isnāt actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!
As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.
