Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!
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.
This fucking thread on HN right now.
OP is an enlightened freelance webdeveloper who is very scared about ghosts from their computer.
“I find myself in a unique position here, as my diverse background and experiences have given me a perspective that allows me to see the potential impact of AI more clearly than large parts of the society I’m living in”
Another poster is also very scared about ghosts from the computer and converted their entire net-worth into NVidia shares. Now that they are heavily invested in a company deeply entangled with ghosts from the computer the apocalypse basically has to happen. After all it couldn’t be that they overreacted.
Computer ghost phobia:
spooked by AI 🤝 Falling for jump scare flash games
How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
This is an antinomy so, problem solved I guess?
This is the proof by induction method for the people who don’t know btw.
I wonder if we can start requiring history of science, philosophy, and literary & artistic theory classes in secondary school (or at least before giving out doctorates), just to limit incredibly annoying adults who think they’re geniuses. I also thought I invented brain-in-a-vat thought experiments when I was ten, but I don’t opine on them reinvented from first principles.
Proof that pasta doesn’t exist:
- An atom isn’t pasta.
- Adding an atom to something that isn’t pasta doesn’t make it pasta.
- Therefore nothing is pasta.
omg, I’m not real.
Didn’t we discuss this fallacy the other day?
maybe you’re referring to when i brought it up in last week’s thread? and yeah, this is basically the same
can’t wait for AI bros to invent the trolley problem
twice as fast trolleys, with ChatGPT driving
new thing for the next little while: anytime a promptfondler claims a prompt has intelligence, “oh yeah so why do you have to ask it things? why isn’t it here having a beer with us?” for the 3 minutes of entertainment it may provide
making that subscript was not intentional, but rofl. gj lemmy
Lawrence Lessig falls victim to the siren song of the blarney engines. Also, lol cnn
Many people refer to concerns about the technology as a question of “AI safety.” That’s a terrible term to describe the risks that many people in the field are deeply concerned about. Some of the leading AI researchers, including Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio and Sir Geoffrey Hinton, the computer expert and neuroscientist sometimes referred to as “the godfather of AI,” fear the possibility of runaway systems creating not just “safety risks,” but catastrophic harm.
And while the average person can’t imagine how anyone could lose control of a computer (“just unplug the damn thing!”), we should also recognize that we don’t actually understand the systems that these experts fear.
Companies operating in the field of AGI — artificial general intelligence, which broadly speaking refers to the theoretical AI research attempting to create software with human-like intelligence, including the ability to perform tasks that it is not trained or developed for — are among the least regulated, inherently dangerous companies in America today. There is no agency that has legal authority to monitor how the companies develop their technology or the precautions they are taking.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/opinions/artificial-intelligence-risks-chat-gpt-lessig/index.html
Rare moment of clarity on EA forum: the fuck are we giving $100k to a video game for
lol at the “delved” there. Wonder if it’s some intentional contrarian
The response of the grant evaluator is even worse. Just excuses, no admission that they fucked up. Barely even a consideration that this is the sort of thing people have done with flash games, and created in literal weekends at game jams
Obviously the most effective of altruisms is whatever is most likely to create more paperclip believers. The EA games (it’s in the game!) philanthropic singularity will allow us to reach the next stage of human evolution: all economic output devoted to mosquito nets and button press simulators.
The EA games (it’s in the game!)
I actually heard this in my brain, you monster. well done.
challenge everything
violence.gif
Nah man we had so much fucking dosh flowing in we had no idea what to even do with it! I mean, how could I possibly resist not allocating some of it to my friends?
But wait, the game developer wrote a story called Singularity 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20240302011145/https://singularity1999.tv/
I’m not sure I’m brave / bored enough to read.
The sim city clone looks like it could have been neat with some more love, it has a bit of a Streets of SimCity / SimCopter vibe to the aesthetics which was my jam back in the day. Though from the reviews it looks like it made the decision of shying away from low level management aspects or angry headlines yelling at you for your dumb city building choices (so I wouldn’t have played it for that reason, is it even sim city without being told “you’re going to regret this”??)
Someone else played simcopter?
I enjoyed it for what it was (helicopter crimes simulator), but lemme tell you the real fun to be had was in Streets of SimCity.
From the level editor, to the soundtrack (I considered it to be edgy at the time), to the bugs (if you don’t create launchers by self-intersecting bridges in SCURK then what are you even doing?), to the ridiculous campaigns and the ability to blow up a nuclear reactor. I didn’t even mind that the graphics looked like sawdust.
Come to think of it I always liked blowing up the nukes as a kid, so I also considered Recoil (the tank game) to be the peak of entertainment.
wait, we have a SimCopter & Streets of Sim City subthread now? fuck yes. I’m here to attach missile launchers to cars my dad fondly remembers, jankily load my simcity2000 game into the level editor and play the resulting broken mess, and crash (both my car and the game engine)
Just gonna leave these songs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPkFmwT7MZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiyXwJWbUoY
Everything Maxis did is remake worthy.
https://zhukeepa.substack.com/p/ai-alignment-and-the-distributed
This came across the dash and well…
I couldn’t remember who Chris Langan was, and mobile search gave me “Chris Langham”:
Christopher Langham (born 14 April 1949) is an English writer, actor, and comedian.
No mention of philosophy, but this turned up
On 2 August 2007, Langham was found guilty of 15 charges of downloading and possessing level 5 child sexual abuse images and videos.
OK so maybe the correct person?
No it turns out Langan is the person with “the world’s highest IQ”.
From the podcast transcript
… if people look up Chris Langan on Wikipedia, under his views section, they’ll be like, ah, these are some far right views. The CTMU is obviously not about that, but… anything you want to just fill in for people that might be curious about that part of it?
[…]
When people bring up his political views, I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn’t mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright. I don’t think Chris is remotely a Nazi. In my personal interaction with him, he’s been a wonderful person. He’s been kind and generous with me, and I respect him personally.
No doubt Himmler’s friends and family thought he was a great guy too.
From a brief glance at the CTMU it fits into:
- not even wrong
- not that deep
- cloaked in really unecessary jargon
It’s fascinating to see people re-invent the same bad eschatology, it’s like there’s crazed compulsive shaped hole in the heart of man or something.
Wikipedia tells me that Langan says that he can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics … I feel like there’s gonna be some bad Bayes in there somewhere.
@carlitoscohones @techtakes See also Frank Tipler, “The Physics of Immortality” (or: Astrophysicist goes cray-cray, tries to prove TESCREAL bullshit only takes a left turn into evangelical Christianity by way of the fine structure constant)
From what I recall from the halcyon days of science-blogging, it was more bad Gödel than bad Bayes, but a dose of the latter would be unsurprising.
previously featured here, too
I had missed that post, no idea Ben had fallen that far. (Like I knew the psi stuff, not the fanboying of the person people need to ‘well not all nazis were bad’ things about).
Yeah I realized that as soon as I found the correct result.
So many high-IQ fascists, I get memory buffer overruns.
He’s been kind and generous with me
Reminds me of this comic, xcancel
I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn’t mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright
Very true. It should instead be dismissed because it is the exact sort of reactionary nonsense a craven nazi would try to pass off as philosophical inquiry.
oh boy
bonus Leverage
Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and “just asking questions”. As if I didn’t hate this clown enough.
(For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They’re praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They’re so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament’s far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There’s no leeway. They’re literal card-carrying national socialists.)
Notice that he, of course, does not list any of those “policies” that he’s “read”.
(for mastodon users who don’t get the image: it’s Andrew Lawrence’s “you know the ones” tweet)
@mii @blakestacey I cannot and will not argue about your points, they’re absolutely valid. The words you’re using however are not correct. Nazis are fascists, as are these right wing monsters. They are antisocialist, not socialists. They are against socialism and against democracy and only for their own brand of autocracy.
“National socialism” is the term the Nazis invented to describe themselves. “Nazi” is the abbreviation of the term “national socialism”. Could be good to know.
@mountainriver Are you really shocked that the name is a lie?
no, nobody here is particularly shocked that fascists would lie about being socialists
don’t be the annoying pedant; we’re fully capable of understanding that the “national socialist german worker’s party” was not a socialist party (and that a “nazi” is a pejorative and was from the start), that the phrase “marxist-leninist” is generally used to mean “left-authoritarian but want to pretend it isn’t”, that the “communist party of the soviet union” was actually presiding over a project of building an authoritarian state capitalism, and that the “republican” party in the united states is trying to make the united states a theocratic dictatorship.
@mawhrin I’m sorry if you were annoyed, but words matter.
Congratulations on missing the entire point of everything explained to you at considerable length and on coming back with a vintage not-pology.
The egress is that-a-way.
also good to point out for someone just finding out about this:
(1) The name is a lie in the same way “the democratic people’s republic of north korea” is. So Peckham is absolutely correct that the Nazis hated socialists and were not socialists, as evidenced by the fact that they tried to kill all of them.
(2) The modern version of this lie is pretending the Nazis were socialists, and it’s a very common tactic in the far right. So Peckham is correct that we should not call them socialists, it’s just that using the term “national socialist” doesn’t actually imply you think they are socialists.
(3) They did spring originally from the fusing of former socialist idealogues with the far right. So as with many massively successful lies there is a distant evolutionary relationship to something true.
rare that we get to recurse the stubsack that rapidly
They want to ban kosher food and circumcision, but love the Israeli government and the war on Gaza, which says… so many things, about so many people.
Maybe I’m missing something.
translation: thinking about this too much, or at all really, would be disastrous for my political ideology and ego, so someone else please waste their time and energy typing up a reply i won’t read, so i can continue having the image of an intellectual engaged in vigorous debate without actually having to do anything
I suspect Elon’s pretty comfortable with his political ideology and ego, tbh. But I agree with the second part.
Counterpoint, his entire “tweeting through it” public show he’s been putting out is emblematic of a deeply insecure person.
ehh, probably
Imho that is just plausible deniability, just asking questions style shit. So news papers can keep writing ‘his politics are so vague, we don’t know’ while he keeps unbanning fascists on twitter.
he’s been openly a nazi propagandist pretty much since he took over twitter. they are hiding black crime stats from you.png, “this is the actual truth,” etc. without saying “I am literally a Nazi” or “we should do holocaust” I genuinely don’t know how much more open he can be about it
The Henry Ford of our generation.
oh huh. I didn’t actually know about that bit. TIL!
christ every little bit of history I read which had some power-hungry rich fucker going “mmmm maybe we should hear them out”, and then watching what’s happening in popular media coverage and shit. le sigh.
@mii
I really didn’t think the second part of “Those who don’t learn history” was going to be so literal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40631663
Orange site post with a bunch of people saying burnout is a learning experience and that its okay to be perpetually depressed because it makes you more disruptive.
I don’t have anything clever to say about this.
Can you gaslight people into thinking burnout is good, actually? HN gives it the ol’ college try
I mean, it is a “learning experience” in the same way a car crash is technically both an experience and something you probably didn’t know first hand before.
NullBulge
oh you know it was some furries
edit: their website (now down, but up on the wayback machine) uses ai-generated furry art, which few self-respecting furries (much less hacktivist ones) would touch with a ten-foot pole. or at least, the ones in the furry circles i keep. so it could very well just be opportunists
re your edit, well furry art could be traced back to the creator of the art/or the person who commissioned it, so using AI shit for opsec isn’t totally strange.
that’s one possible reason, yeah. just seems like a really odd choice – much like the fact that they dislike “crypto promotion” but still accept payment for secrets in crypto. doesn’t feel like it would be that hard to find a sympathetic furry artist willing to draw in a nondistinct style or keep work under wraps. idk
the only reason it seems odd to me is that the overwhelming majority of furries either actively dislike or hate “ai art”. maybe they’re the odd ones out, or they just don’t care for a throwaway group
Yeah it is weird still. They could also have easily picked a historical piece of furry art, or use some Disney furry images.
but the NULLGE
bit of a combo-sneer this morning
CNBC put out an article uncritically repeating yet another round of lieboy pulling the exact same shit. I don’t recognize the authors immediately, not sure if they’re typical bootlickers or not
openai is going in hard, hiring ex-NSA person that was appointed by the walking talk racist mop (via dan gillmor). for the … safety role! ah yes, I’m sure we’ll all be so very surprised by this attempt consolidation of power.
to their credit, they did manage to get past the editor:
This is all far-out stuff even for Musk, who is notorious for making ambitious promises to investors and customers that don’t pan out — from developing software that can turn an existing Tesla into a self-driving vehicle with an upload, to EV battery swapping stations.
yeah, fair call on that. I just live in hope that we can get to a point where “lying fucker with history of failures and grandiose statements has made another ridiculous grandiose statement probably composed of lies” can be the actual type of headline, instead of this constant simping bullshit
Or just, you know, not write a headline on that in the first place? Who the fuck is in a dire need to know the last stupid thing a pathological liar said?
publishers who demand clicks
Update: this guy is an influential (apparently) right wing poster who got doxxed.
Where are these people coming from?
immediately know which represents pragmatism vs esoteric theory
What neither of them are doing ‘The Stare’, Moore can do it, Crowley could do it, Rasputin can do it. Get these low budget farces out of here, and give me a proper Stare.
Moldbug tries, but he mostly just looks in a way that makes you think ‘he just farted and is trying to figure out if I noticed’.
man will wheaton really turned to the dark side, didn’t he?
got told to shut up one too many times. See what happens when you censor people libs?
He did???
"The smile. The optimism. Versus the steely 1000 yard stare.
Ideology preformed in the instant of conception
Physiognomy, simply, does not lie."
Ah yes, pragmatists, well known for their constantly sunny and optimistic outlook on the future, consequences be damned (?)
(Well, this goes some way to explaining “AI” “art”)
I also hate movies where I can see the actual action going on and it isn’t all shaky cam and cuts cuts cuts.
I bet that guy watches anime on 2x speed and skips parts without dialog to feel more “productive”.
Anime has dialog? Nani?
ANTA BAKA?!*
*translator’s note: baka means “plan”
according to modern film scholars, this cultural shift was brought about by the lasting audience impact of that scene in Speed (1994) where the bus fucking noclips across a gap while pretending there’s a ramp it’s using to jump (or Keanu made it pop a wheelie?)
“Are you telling me I can jump a bus across a 50 foot gap at 67 miles per hour?”
“No Neo, I’m telling you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”
Wasn’t 1994 right about when they stopped making movies in black and white?
This has got to be some sort of sucker filter, like it’s not that he particularly means it, it’s that he is after the exact type of rube who is unfazed by naked contrarianism and the categorically preposterous so long as it’s said with a straight face,.
Maybe there’s something to the whole pick up artistry but for nailing VCs thing.
It really is as simple as that. The dude got a fair bit of attention from his LSTM blog post and got addicted. Turns out, you can’t churn out awesome blog posts that often so you gotta switch to the harder stuff.
Who? Is that some indie movie director?
Andrej Karpathy is a former director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI
So just a rando with a stupid opinion. Go back to your totally-not-naive AGI vision board.
New AdamSomething about tech bros reinventing the train but worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5M7Oq1PCz4
At last, a compelling reason to use Chat-GPT: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1801360053045497942
ChatGPT is dying Use Apple to make it die faster
Tim cook is an absolute hustler
I kinda want to go read the old Singularity fic and enjoy any Zeerust that pops up.
iterm2 update, moving the shit out of the core application (like it probably should’ve been in the first place):
3.5.1 This release adds some safety valves to eliminate the risk of private information leaving the terminal via the AI endpoints. While an API key and explicit user action were always needed to use AI features, some users asked for an impenetrable firewall for safety and regulatory purposes. To that end, there are three relevant changes: 1. Code that communicates with AI providers such as OpenAI has been moved into a plugin that you must install separately. Enterprise system admins can block bundle id com.googlecode.iterm2.iTermAI to prevent it from being installed in the first place. See here for details: https://iterm2.com/ai-plugin.html 2. In addition, you must manually enable AI features in Settings. Doing so requires admin access. 3. Enterprise administrators who wish to disable iTerm2's AI access may set the user default GenerativeAIAllowed to False in their MDM systems.still never received a reply email from the author to my mail. wonder what they think/have learned of this experience tho
I’m afraid their character has been exposed
I uninstalled when they announced it but this week’s news says it’s time to uninstall macos too
I seem to remember iTerm doing something weird about 10 years ago, like adding telemetry, but I can’t find it…
iTerm2’s leak issue was first discovered ten months ago. iTerm2’s creator initially reacted by adding an option to iTerm 3.0.13 that allowed users to disable DNS lookups. The feature remained turned on by default for new and existing installations.
jfc
to get on my soapbox for a moment: iterm2 is in objc, which still has a lot of the ancillary problems that C has. testing properly is one of them - I can easily see such kind of fuckups slipping past by simple virtue of human error, possibly helped along by shitty tools/choices[0]. for example, I know of nothing in C-land that enables property-based testing, and from a quick check it seems that XCTest also runs on the human-enumerated-tests philosophy. so if no-one writes the test that’ll catch it, it could at best be caught by accident (through something else maybe triggering it).
and people are also really fucking bad at thinking in/about side effects. even a lot of systems thinkers seem to fuck that up.
/soapbox
[0] - I was recently debugging why a particular piece of Go software wasn’t outputting anything I was expecting at the log level I had it set. quickly went to its repo, glanced at the code just to check if my expectation was right, then popped a message to a friend who deals with more Go than I do (which is near-nil, because it is a GARBAGE FUCKING LANGUAGE OF AND CAUSING NIGHTMARES, gah). he reminded me of the fact that Go had fairly recently fixed a bug in its stdlib logging library that had fucked up which levels it would handle things, due to an error in the fucking switch statement. for the stdlib goddamn logger. a bug which had been there for over 2y iirc.
Yeah, I that’s probably what I was thinking of.
For the moment, I’m choosing to believe the following: 1) that itermdev was operating under hyped-engineer mode and choosing cluelessly as a result (and I sorely hope they learned something through this), 2) that Apple is too selfish to go hard on openai (because it means less money for them)
#2 I’m a smidge more certain about
But both of them are deeply “ugh, fuck” kinda feelings for me.
You’re probably right. I have just lost patience and trust for software in general.
I hear ya.
I haven’t seen the details but apparently Apple may not be paying OpenAI for the ChatGPT functionality. So macOS may not be using ChatGPT heavily.
