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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Twitter — Elon Musk’s X — may be the most fruitful platform for this kind of search thanks to its sub-competent moderation services.

      Zing.

      • mountainriver@awful.systems
        English
        0·
        2 months ago

        “…37%… That means nearly one in four…”

        Eh, no it doesn’t, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      So you’re saying that they’ve got books worth at least a grand which their owners are literally using to flaunt their wealth?

      I’m legally obligated to say stealing is legally and morally wrong buuuuuuuut

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
        0·
        2 months ago

        @BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren’t getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …

        (A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            If there is an elevator in the apartment, the driver has to take the stairs, contractually. Of course people who order that don’t live in high rise apartments where the driver can reach the door, so everybody wins.

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
        0·
        2 months ago

        @froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is “Veblen goods”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

        “a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.”

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I hate how it is called mining, like it is digging up some resource from the earth. While it is just an advanced calculator.

      Imagine they found a hidden iron ore mine (That is what I recall being mined in Sweden, if anybody knows something more interesting, like some precious stones, please inform me (looking at this gold/silver could also work)) under a hospital. But nope, just a hidden datacenter.

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    a twitter thread by sv ceo where comment section wants to do some recreational union busting, political assassinations and automating away longshoremen (lmao) over checks notes black friday bringing slightly less profit to mass retailers. to which i say, fuck your black friday then

    and he says that it’ll affect elections? specifically in “don’t do anything visible in interest of unions or trump will win” kinda way? what kinda madhouse is this americans explain https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/1836498432510562788#m

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      fuck your black friday then

      the institutionalisation of it is/was also just fucking nuts

      and then in recent years it’s slowly been creeping out into other countries too, with other vendors in other places aping “black friday deals”

      I have no mouth and I must scream

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Was salivating all weekend waiting for this to drop, from Subbarao Kambhampati’s group:

    Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved block stacking abilities. It is a straight shot from here to cold fusion! … unfortunately, there is a minor caveat:

    Looks like performance drops like a rock as number of steps required increases…

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      correct me if I’m reading this wrong — the results are that LLMs are much, much worse than classical AI at planning block placement for SHRDLU? that seems pretty damning

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yes, the classical algo achieves perfect accuracy and is way faster. There is also a table that shows the cost of running o1 is enormous. Like comically bad. Boil a small ocean bad. We’ll just 10x the size and it will achieve 15 steps inshallah.

        Imo, this is like the same behavior we see on math problems. More steps it takes, the higher the chance it just decoheres completely. I can’t see any reason why this type of thing would just “click” for the models if they are also unable to do multiplication.

        I mean this just reeks of pure hopium from OAI and co that things will magykly work out. (But the newer model is clearly better^{tm}! I still don’t see any indication that one day that chart is just going to be 100s across the board.)

        • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I feel this shouldn’t at all be surprising, and continues to point to Diverse Intelligence as more fundamental than any sort General Intelligence conceptually. There’s a huge difference between what something is in theory or in principal capable of, and the economics story of what that thing attends to naturally as per its energy story.

          Broadly, even simple things are powerful precisely because of what they don’t bother trying to do until perturbed.

          Ultimately, I hypothesize the reason why VCs like the idea of LLMs doing simple things far more expensively than otherwise is already possible, is because, They literally can’t imagine what else to spend their money on. They are vacuous consumers by design.

          • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            So what you’re saying is that Tim Apple could save us from these people by selling Marc Andreessen a billion dollar iphone?

            It’s Veblen goods again, isn’t it?

            • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              Honestly, Yes. The hardest thing for a rich person to do is spend their money. Eventually this catches up with them: to spend no money is to lose it comparatively, to spend money is to risk not getting it back. So a great deal of the money world revolves primarily around persuasion, and the very odd things that happen along the way.

              • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                It also helps to recognize how much many of these people see all of this as a competition, and trying to out-unique/out-possess their peers

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          ah yes, $42, definitely a “the same amount of compute is used” figure

          these results are remarkably damning. I knew things were bad, but god damn this is impressively shit

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      this mf’er watched all the naruto filler and fuckin’ loved it

      emails SHFiguarts every week from their work address, “Deluxe Mecha-Naruto when???”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Some notes:

      • Who told Mark Andreesen about the overlap between possible AI suckers customers and weebs? Are we going to get a16z’s next hot take - “Furries are eating the world?”

      • I’m sure most of the audience here can fill in their own 700+ word rant about the breadth of anime as a visual style, so I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. However, unlike the older trends of assuming that whichever shonen is currently most popular (the kids still like at least one Dragonball, right?) l is representative or dismissing anything with the relevant aesthetic as “some weeb shit I won’t like”, here the writers manage a much more impressive feat. They acknowledge the breadth of what anime contains, but completely fail to ask the question of “why do people like this?” Similar to the original prompts for this kind of rant, they’re assuming the art style and Japanese cultural background are the primary reasons why anyone connects with anything anime, and then expand from that premise. I’m pretty sure this is a root cause of why the whole article feels like it was written by goddamn martians.

      • Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing? What little I’ve seen is linked not to existing stories (that’s what humans call “IP”) but rather focus on original characters who have their own shit going on. Even gnoring the attempt to shove genAI into everything (as though everyone is going to want to make their own vTuber avatar and stream it someday?) this seems like assuming that the people going to watch the finals of the local Battle of the Bands are going in the holes of getting an autograph from Kurt fucking Cobain.

      • There has been some criticism of gacha games as being monstrously exploitative and basically gambling targeted at kids and/or teens, but consider just how much money it makes

      • Going back to the genAI we set aside two bullet points up, I do think anime has a unique property there. It simultaneously has a much stronger visual identity than many other aesthetics, including photorealism, but also has a massive number of scrapable examples to train off of. The more consistent style makes it easier to replicate statistically and what visual abberation you still get is less likely to fall deep into the uncanny valley. The outputs I’ve seen from even older anime genAI were better than their contemporaries, but still pretty easy to pick out. Something about shading or gradient or something, probably because since anime is drawn rather than captured like a photo there’s no detail that’s fully incidental. GenAI, of course, has no actual purpose and so all details in every output are incidental. That gives the output a weird unfocused quality I think?

      In conclusion, I’m starting to suspect that VCs don’t have souls and/or don’t interact with any human being outside of potential partners-in-somehow-not-crime or potential victims.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing?

        I think I’ve seen some people do things with Live2D models of Touhou Project characters, but that particular AY PEE is famously extremely permissive about derivative works. If you squint, you might count cases where a vtuber version of an existing character is backed by the artist or company who already owns the rights to that character, which is not unheard of.

        Other than that, no. VTubers playing characters from existing anime is not a thing that happens much. If anyone’s confused why that’s the case, consider a context where a someone who isn’t a corporate robot might use the term “IP” (as in intellectual so-called property).

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      iterating on new core loops

      We’re sorry, but the brainrot is too far advanced. Amputation is your only hope.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Ok.

      The usual lifecycle of an anime fan looks something like this: they are introduced to the format with great IP – the Attack on Titan anime or the One Piece live action show or one of the miHoYo games.

      I don’t know how things are in Japan, but I’ll be damned if I ever meet someone who gateway series into anime was a live action adaptation of One Piece.

      AI companions, an evolution of classic visual novels, are the most popular for anime characters and IP.

      The most popular what for anime characters and IP?

      Anime studios are adopting new AI technologies to create content faster and more cost effectively, but they are also iterating on new core loops with AI-native character interactions.

      Some of them probably are. Screw them.

      VTubing has transformed the way millions of anime fans interact with their favorite characters in new social and parasocial relationships by allowing any fan to roleplay as the characters themselves.

      You can’t just casually throw “social and parasocial” in there and then describe a purely parasocial relationship. Apologize to Shannon Strucci.

      Also this is like saying television has allowed us to roleplay our favorite Radio announcers. They seem to be under the impression that the vtuber phenomenon is about people digitally cosplaying their favorite anime character together when it’s more like an actor putting on a performance as an original character. And for the big ones, a bunch of Japanese style idol industry bullshit layered on top.

      While audience inteeaction is usually a part of it, the nature of the medium remains highly asymmetric.

      Ready to dive in? Let’s jam.

      Keep Cowboy Bebop’s name out of your filthy mouth.

      Anime entered the mainstream in the 2000s with popular shounen anime like Naruto, One Piece, and now Attack on Titan.

      I might be behind the times but even I don’t think AoT is new. At least say Jujutsu Kaisen or something.

      This affinity has led to one of the most popular use cases of AI recently – AI waifus and husbandos.

      May all your subculture in-jokes die a dignified death before a VC firm references them in a blog post.

      Waifu / husbando culture derives from visual novels, and AI companions are the logical extension of these animated storybook games.

      “Mai waifu” was originally a funny engrish quote from Azumanga Daioh and was used to refer to any favorite character. The non tongue en cheek relationship simulation aspect merged with the meme later on.

      Originally, visual novels were serialized books with anime-styled pictures in between.

      This doesn’t seem to be what the linked Medium article is saying and seems like they’re just mixing up light novels and visual novels.

      While there are many practical use cases for AI-simulated human interactions – AI as therapist, as teacher, as assistant, etc.

      Practical, huh?

      For instance, character.ai’s top characters are all from Genshin Impact; Raiden, Yae Miko, and Hu Tao take some of the top spots at 390M, 202M, and 113M messages respectively as of the time of this blog, compared to Elon Musk at a mere 40M messages.

      To be fair I’d rather take almost anyone, gacha game character or not, other than Elon Musk as my conversation partner, whether simulated or real.

      The majority of top anime games and visual novels are role playing games that feature a romance mechanic, and so it’s natural for fans to want to deepen their connection to their favorite IP and characters through active interactions.

      Factually dubious claim aside, how hard is it to write “series” or at least “anime” like a real human being with feelings instead of “IP”.

      I’ve watched some anime series and felt things about them. I’ve never given a shit about an anime IP. Why would I, never owned one.

      UGC Democratizes Creation for Anime Fans Anime is the new playground for content creation. Fans often engage with anime IP by creating their own versions of art, novels, and games, and innovation is happening across the stack.

      Pixiv has existed for ages. Even before that was doujinshi, and people have made art, original and derivative, since before the beginning of civilization. Your idea of modding custom animu avatars for shovelware Love Plus sequels is not new.

      There are a few notable reasons for the popularity of these games. The first is that there’s clear player demand against a shortage of high quality anime IP games; one example is Palworld’s recent success as the “Pokemon with guns” game, selling over 25M copies in a month across Steam and Xbox Game Pass.

      Palworld is evidence of a lack of high quality anime games much like all nonblack nonravens are evidence of a lack of nonblack ravens.

      The second reason is that the anime IP licensing landscape is notoriously difficult to navigate for developers, creating a potential undersupply of games.

      It’s actually incredibly easy to create and publish media based on anime and get away with it. You just can’t do it too professionally. If you love democratizing art so much, go to Comiket.

      Also there are tons of licensed games based on anime what the hell are you talking about?

      Some startups like Kasagi Labo, Layer, and Story Protocol are tackling this issue to make IP more democratized and easier to access.

      Misspelled “plutocratized” there. Also had a double take checking out the third one: “Story is the World’s IP Blockchain, onramping Programmable IP to power the next generation of AI, DeFi, and consumer applications.”

      Beyond UGC platforms, AI models and tools are enabling first-time creators to make compelling anime content that previously would only have been possible with a team of professionals.

      I’m sure I will continue to be as thrilled as I have been up to now to see more art made by people who can’t make art and filling the gap with statistical average of all art ever.

      On the other side of the spectrum, professional game studios are leading the charge for high production-value consumer experiences that build on or create new IP. Anime games are some of the highest grossing in the games industry, accounting for 20% of spend on the mobile app store despite only having usage penetration of <3%.

      Sounds great (not), but I heard someone say there was a lack of high quality anime IP games. Surely you can’t both be right?

      There are two ways that anime game studios broaden the horizon for players. First, they usually create the highest quality games of the most popular IPs like Dragon Ball, Pokemon, or Dragon Quest.

      Consistency, what’s that? Maybe invest in a bigger context window so you can remember what you generated a few paragraphs ago.

      For now, we’ve been covering mostly free-to-play (F2P) mobile games. However, there are several successful PC/console anime games as well: Doki Doki Literature Club, the Persona series, the Final Fantasy series, the Fire Emblem series, and Phoenix Wright, just to name a few.

      Doki Doki Literature Club is a fully original freeware pay-what-you-want indie game that became a viral sleeper hit. You’re comparing it to Final fucking Fantasy? From a business perspective? Hell, despite the art style it’s not even Japanese! The only connecting thread between these games is that they have vaguely anime style art in them.

      Anime is also leading the way for digital play, turning previously passive consumption of linear media into a new dynamic form of entertainment.

      It’s really not.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I agree that the Doki Doki Literature Club reference was out of place, but consider that the whole post is predicated on the assumption that anime is a radical new art form that is revolutionizing [$Product] while itself being revolutionized by the new technologies designed by a16z’s stable of startups (the ones they haven’t cashed out yet). DDLC is niche enough that the intended audience will feel clever if they know about it, but successful enough that there’s a nonzero chance they’ll have heard about it.

        It also has the most anime title they could find.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Back in the day they let you nuke a self-styled god-emperor’s fascist resource extraction empire of genocidal death cultist twice, but nowadays you can’t even spare one little warhead for a16z?

        Ok maybe this sneer is a little edgy even for my own tastes. Up it goes anyway.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        That might actually be the most infuriatingly US-centric post I’ve ever read, and that’s really saying something! God!!!

        And it’s talking about “The World” in the title of course!

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    just heard a podcast ad for amazon prime saying it causes “involuntary deal squeals” followed by a categorization of different kinds of customer grunts and squeals according to product. not making this up

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I swear I keep seeing Amazon ads in this same icky dehumanizing “cute” style, like some of the annoyance-based ads I vaguely remember from when I still had cable TV. is this just what ads become every time a corporation decides you have no other choice? (yes, almost every time)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    People are “blatantly stealing my work,” AI artist complains

    When Jason Allen submitted his bombastically named Théâtre D’opéra Spatial to the US Copyright Office, they weren’t so easily fooled as the judges back in Colorado. It was decided that the image could not be copyrighted in its entirety because, as an AI-generated image, it lacked the essential element of “human authorship". The office decided that, at best, Allen could copyright specific parts of the piece that he worked on himself in Photoshop.

    “The Copyright Office’s refusal to register Theatre D’Opera Spatial has put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work without compensation or credit.” If something about that argument rings strangely familiar, it might be due to the various groups of artists suing the developers of AI image generators for using their work as training data without permission.

    via @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.

    Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.

    And now they’re suing him.

    https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      yes. that’s all true, but academics and artists and leftists are actually calling for Buttlerian jihad all the time. when push comes to shove they will ally with fascists on AI

      This guy severely underestimates my capacity for being against multiple things at the same time.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        The type of guy who was totally convinced by the ‘but what if the AI needs to generate slurs to stop the nukes?’ argument.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Guy invented a new way to misinterpret the matrix, nice. Was getting tired of all the pilltalk

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I vaguely remember mentioning this AI doomer before, but I ended up seeing him openly stating his support for SB 1047 whilst quote-tweeting a guy talking about OpenAI’s current shitshow:

    pro-1047 doomer

    I’ve had this take multiple times before, but now I feel pretty convinced the “AI doom/AI safety” criti-hype is going to end up being a major double-edged sword for the AI industry.

    The industry’s publicly and repeatedly hyped up this idea that they’re developing something so advanced/so intelligent that it could potentially cause humanity to get turned into paperclips if something went wrong. Whilst they’ve succeeded in getting a lot of people to buy this idea, they’re now facing the problem that people don’t trust them to use their supposedly world-ending tech responsibly.

    • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Isn’t the primary reason why people are so powerful persuaded by this technology, because they’re constantly sworn to that if they don’t use its answers they will have their life’s work and dignity removed from them? Like how many are in the control group where they persuade people with a gun to their head?

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      it’s easy to imagine a world where the people working on AI that are also convinced about AI safety decide to shun OpenAI for actions like this. It’s also easy to imagine that OpenAI finds some way to convince their feeble, gullible minds to stay and in fact work twice as hard. My pitch: just tell them GPT X is showing signs of basilisk nature and it’s too late to leave the data mines