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: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of 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.
This display of a man hoping AI reclaims the awe in technology he once felt as a 17 year-old:
Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/06/25/opinion-ai-altman-silicon-valley-revival/
Its former* superfund glory.
*Oh wait https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232/
One last hurrah for the EPA and the clean air act before the scotus shanks the administrative state in a day or two.
I’ve had this open in a background tab, reading it in pieces as time allows, and I only just noticed one of it exhibits one of the things I like noticing about various publishers’ system fucking up: a lurking page title before a post-publish edit
the page title as it is in my browser right now:
Opinion | AI boom led by antihero Altman is reviving Valley dreams. the page title as it displays in the content area:Opinion \n Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory.the url slug also seems to be mostly the former - most of these renames on various publishing platforms seem to do that (keep the original slug instead of a rewrite+redirect)
can’t make direct guesses as to the exact reason why this one was updated whenever it was, but I expect public perception/reception might’ve been part of that?
it is also something that’s been of passive interest to me over some years: things as published often shift underfoot, and the time at which someone reads something then shares on and then someone else reads … there might be quite a substantive difference in the contents of such things at the times. this ranges from the benign (inserting late-received comments, errata, etc), to a complete contextual/content rework. I’ve often thought that there’s a possibly for a really interesting part project there…
unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice
also
God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better
idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical
thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like “OpenAI” and “google deepmind,” their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.
also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”
finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics
it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics
hell of a stinger there at the end
Zuckerberg Accuses Rivals of Trying to Create AI-Powered God
Title says it all
Not a cult.
from r/EnoughMuskSpam
Haha this reminds me of humanoid robots belong in the trash
heck yeah I love
Physics Jenny NicholsonAngela Collierindeed! I rarely get to watch them because of the length, but they’re always so good, thoughtful and thorough. one of best talking heads on yt I know of
format/delivery is technically more than just talking head, I guess, but ykwim
Thank you —she and this video are new to me - very good!
Amazing claim considering there are I think about 10k cybertrucks in the world right now, and all of them are broken. Ok I admit, that is due to the wiper recall, but even if you ignore the wiper recall the amount of broken cybertrucks is massive.
I like the wet your finger and stick it up in the air forecasting model. OK - there’s 1.5 billion pocket-sized iPhones - so let’s say 2 billion person-sized robots, you know,
I’m wondering about the supply chain issues just making the extra half billion robots, might be kind of a big deal. Are there enough rare minerals in the whole world to do this? Lithium batteries? Computer chips?
Also, yeah, valuation based on revenue and not EBITA / profit margins, but whatever.
Lol. What, are we going to be installing Candy Crush on our robots? Expecting to be able to project recurring revenue from a humanoid robot based on smartphone numbers is a new kind of ignorance.
I’m sure Candy Crush will come pre-installed.
“Hello helpdesk? My fleet of humanoid workers I paid 500k for apiece aren’t at their workstations churning out fabric piecework, they’re all playing Candy Crush on their iPhones…”
The Death of the Junior Developer
Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there’s no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we’ll have AGI by then and it’ll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer’s time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.
If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.
As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.
Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.
this is such a sad slop. i wouldn’t guess it’s yegge, it’s so far from his style when he used to write himself.
Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they don’t alter the deal further).
Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.
I’m oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didn’t know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).
“DevOps” is a word meaning “sysadmin who can still use the command line”
Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, don’t answer that please.
There are “sysadmins” who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to using the command line.
…what… What would they use instead?
having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux
How do they sysadmin a server that doesn’t have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?
I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted
then there are others
i’m at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes it’s just not enough, cos it’s Babby’s First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was “Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren’t software engineers and hell, they don’t even call themselves engineers”.
a euphemism treadmill of “keeping shit working”
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who’s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with “Venereal Disease” and passing through “Special Clinic” on the way to “Sexual Health Clinic”. Same thankless job, just different labels.
Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.
I don’t feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before
You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the “New” button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it’s a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.
I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.
I use it, but at least on my browser the
nextbutton is disabled so I can only see the most recent page of updates. I treat that as a the jank is a feature moment, though; if there’s more than one page of new comments, I’m forced to stop reading.
yeah, it’s a Lemmy breakage
I also use the new comments page, and when lemmy default frontend broke the next page, I looked around and found https://alexandrite.app, which fixes this page. EG https://alexandrite.app/awful.systems/c/techtakes?type=Comments&sort=New
The downside is that, in implementing an infinite scroll, it unloads comments that you’re not looking at, so ctrl-f will be unreliable.
nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer
oh that’s very good
bring back rap news :<
I only visit twitter when I run out of lemmy and mastodon and I’m still not sleepy enough but can’t be arsed to read a book.
presently:
(you can turn it off but in typical fashion: sneaky new setting, default-on, way to make it turn off is hidden in settings instead of a direct “no fuck this” button. same shit twitter and fb pulled for years)
double kicker is that the opt-out settings have been been in “No, do not use my data” for months
discord feedback: “Thank you for sharing your concerns. We understand your frustration regarding ads in the client. Discord continuously explores various features and changes to enhance the user experience, including the possibility of advertisements. As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client. We appreciate your feedback and will make sure to pass it along to our development team.”
As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client.
wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again? is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments?
I ask, having instantly closed the nitro ads discord regularly pushes to my client cause the feature list looks roundly annoying and irrelevant to how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium, DMs, and an annual game of Quake)
wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again?
Remember when people used to smugly say ‘unless you pay for it, you are the product’ turns out you always are the product!
is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments
and server boosts! (and better video quality I guess?)
irunno the whole mechanic is a bit weird but I’ve been “okay” with it in the sense that at least it meant discord was getting revenue from rich-enough gamers and that would mean they didn’t have to suck on the VC nozzle. ostensibly.
like I would’ve likely never bought nitro for myself because idgaf about the featureset, but I would consider it if it meant no ads. alas.
how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium
yeah. god. it hurts how many projects have done this shit. and now I bet that exact fucking thing I predicted may start coming around…
also, slack, ~1h ago:
Free workspace content older than one year will be deleted
Your workspace, <snip> , is on a free Slack plan. This workspace has content that is older than one year which will be deleted once the policy takes effect. Moving forward, Slack will not retain messages and files older than one year for a workspace. This policy will impact your workspace starting August 26th, 2024.
the ouroboros must be hungry.
Strange sightings of electoral posters in Tokyo:
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党
This is just weird. But I guess that’s to be expected from elections anywhere in the world, disgruntled groups use them to get their message out.
Me: Mom I want AI mayor!
Mom: Shush now Saturn, we have AI mayor at home.
AI mayor at home:
finally, my sneercon cosplay! it’s like Tuxedo Mask on a severe budget
But wait, there’s more!
AI Steve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vtKT9RrrI
Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)
AI party (apparently now defunct, if it was ever halfway serious in the first place): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/
no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:
Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.
Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.
I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature
this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)
thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?
Pour one out for opera presto, which I will always mourn.
@self @froztbyte “We think you should have the freedom to…” 🤮
The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool “to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge” is so fucking galling.
It’s also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to “opt-in” could simply install a plugin.
according to Mozilla’s track record, they’re making it a core feature so it’s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and they’ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit
we’ve also only got mozilla’s word that this shit can be disabled once it’s in production Firefox at all, and we’ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozilla’s AI team does with consent — they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it
In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. […] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.
It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this garbage approach.
Of course here at awful.systems we’ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.
… the Hell?
Yeah it’s wild. Even most AI grifters don’t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we’d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.
ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone
where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into
about:configto kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymoresigh
also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, …
go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share
Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if they’re useful to anyone:
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket false extensions.pocket.api 0.0.0.0 extensions.pocket.enabled false extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs false extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp v1 extensions.pocket.showHome false extensions.pocket.site 0.0.0.0 services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket falseah, handy
iirc I nuked a few more things, api keys and such
we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs
Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!
But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what’s best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there’s been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is better than some but not at all innocent.
Mozilla: Hey, we’re going to take you out to a restaurant and get you a burger, as a treat!
The restaurant:
surprise lemmy feature discovered:
oh good lord. we went live a year ago
oh hell. we’re beating all my initial survivability projections by a lot
do we throw an instance birthday party thread? will there be cocktails? will the deployment get mopey if I don’t buy it more disk space? (yes, eventually)
Before: searching in Internet Explorer “how to install Chrome”
Now:
rabbit data breach: all r1 responses ever given can be downloaded
AI continues to be going great…
thought it was bad enough when the hackers got into my rabbithole, now this
we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it. the api keys continue to be valid as of writing.
but of course. rabbit’s done pretending they give a fuck now that their shit flopped (not that they gave much of a fuck to begin with)
https://x.com/xyz3va/status/1805689140639408277
rabbit has revoked the keys!
breaking every R1 still in service
breaking every R1 still in service
Total losses estimated at $7.13
fucking amazing. like, I shouldn’t be surprised they deployed a bunch of embedded devices without a sensible way to rotate keys OTA, but it’s always fun to watch a circus act
and here I am building up a fucking pile of infra in advance of deployment of boards for exactly this reason
it’s almost like, irunno, maybe you could say I’ve thought this through! only maybe tho. I’m not backed by decamillions+ vc dollaridoos, so who can tell whether I know what I’m doing, amirite
remember that Rabbit pivoted to this from NFTs
that’s what makes it even better - from the “self-custody of keys!!! your own credentials! v v v v v importants!” world, these dipshits still had no clue
just truly awe-inspiringly terrible
lol holy shit
we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it
european regulatory clarity approaching at mach 5 (that is if they ever sold this thing in EU)
What do normal people - people who don’t pay for twitter, or sneer at rationalists - think of Twitter atp?
Went on to Twitter (my mistake) after seeing Inside Out 2 because it’s the latest kid’s movie to feature [trope that I found passe that I can’t figure out how to spoil inline] and I see a post on my feed from “HBD Chick”.
And I’m like okay, that has to be “happy birthday, right?”. Nah, her third retweet is creamy porno redux.
Just like all the other right wingers and embarrassingly enthusiastic neoliberals and occasional Musk fans, I don’t follow her or anybody that follows her, there’s literally no connection or personal interest.
I feel like the post Elon shift is really understated for how bad the site’s gotten. Like I see more people talk about how Instagram reels is racist than I do about the average twitter replies section. I know a lot of left leaning people fled for bluer pastures, but I’m surprised you don’t see more buzz about it from regular, non-power users.
Note: all the talk I mention is online talk. Nobody in my irl life talks about social media dynamics ever, thank GOD
Only time non-online people I know IRL talk about it is when they ask me the most basic of basic stuff.
I used to hear about it IRL and now I don’t idk
not a single fucker ever calls it anything other than twitter
I wish I knew any normal people so I could give input.
Personally my Twitter pre-Elon was pretty curated. I never really “got” a big part of it unless it spilled over in other channels (I never heard of “Black people Twitter” on Twitter, only from Buzzfeed or similar). I also disengaged from US political Twitter hard after the 2016 election. So it’s possible I could still be using it and swearing over bots etc. without being overly affected, but I locked my account as an act of principle shortly after he took over.
Same here - I had a very small universe curated for myself. I didn’t leave immediately, but when I did, there were a whole lot more weird ads and bots and stuff in my feed. I think that I only ever saw prøn once, and I was actually shocked that it even existed on Twitter.
First of all, most of my “normal” acquaintances never used Twitter anyway.
Most of the ones that did just quit when it got weird and dominated by useless suggestions and creepy ads.
I had one friend last week in a group chat go “Twitter is so racist nowadays innit”, to which I said ye, why you still using it, and he responded “you’re right” and stopped.
It’s pretty amazing that this so-called genius spent $44B on a company without apparently knowing anything about how the market it operates in (advertising) actually works.
“"I do shoot myself in the foot from time to time, but at least you know it is genuine, not from the PR department,””
He is the PR department.
I assume some PR departments of potential advertisers saw that and went ‘lower the twitter spend more!’, I’m imaging the Futurama joke where Fry talks to investors while stock price tally is running live behind him.
Twitter’s main issue is that it’s not really very big. It wasn’t big even pre-Musk. If you have the choice between advertising on a really big social network (Meta (=FB, IG, Whatsapp…)) with a functioning trust & safety team and ad brokers who take you seriously and don’t accuse you of being woke, and one which has way smaller reach, no T&S to speak of, and whose owner can use his outsized influence to call your CEO a pedo whenever the ketamine kicks in, the choice is clear.
42 upvotes? In 2 hours? There is some serious weirdness going on here.
I got boosted by Charlie Stross…
Ah right, I didn’t see that as im directly on awful that explains
@gerikson @Soyweiser It is funny, because by 99% of media sites Twitter was always one of the Three Big Ones: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Those were the social networks that were linked TO, and also the social networks media followed. MAYBE Linked In, if it was a “business” publication.
Twitter had outsized impact because it’s where the journalists hung out, and structurally it was much more everyone in the same place than FB/IG
@dgerard Plus you get to write articles about “Twitter Storms” about your articles.
I realized Twitter was for weirdo wonks when the local “Idol” reality show just had IG links for the contestants (Sweden). There might be markets where Twitter is locally bigger, but in Sweden it was always a niche thing.
