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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up
Pretty good sneer there:
BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states he’s tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family
what fascinating timing, what’s it been, a month or so since he got outed as a Russian agent?
US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I can’t tell if this is brilliant satire or not.
Fuck, I didn’t need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was “Bender” or “Wall-E” too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney’s trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?
My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.
this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it’s how top of the bubble looks like
Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don’t exist, seems baffled people don’t like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska
related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired around 12 people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren’t probably bringing serious money either way now
homepage of that radio boasts about their “almost entirely created by AI” content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it’s gonna go great
apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt’s propagandists from public media
A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI “hosts” (non-English link).
They’re trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they’re firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be “an experiment to appeal to Gen Z”. Fortunately, most people’s response seems to be “fuck off with this crap”.
I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place
Vivaldi Browser has an important teaser AI announcement: https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/113351393167122198
spoiler
“It’s not AI”
When I hear about tech companies going all in on AI as a hedge against the future, I’m reminded of this scene from Ice Age:
Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.
KendrickZitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan’s recent kicking upstairs, and Google’s bleak future.Main highlight was this snippet:
I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google’s ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google’s gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.
Really enjoying watching Ed level up from week to week. The Zingularity is Near.
As the AI bubble weakens, he only gets stronger.
Man, it’s almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.
If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, how’s GE doing these days again?
It’s not that the money is unaware this kills the business. They know. They don’t care because their process is business-agnostic. By design and intent they extract value from the business like it was a capri sun pouch and when line no longer goes up, it’s discarded for the next one.
I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy
In other news, there’s been a statement on AI training that’s racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:
Now, I’m way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I’ll whip one out:
Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists’ work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman’s run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.
A direct link: aitrainingstatement.org.
I don’t go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling
https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/
https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/
the Determinate Nix move was such an obvious next step I was convinced they had already done it; I guess they can let the mask fall off now that they’ve consolidated their control over the community. as was pointed out on mastodon, Determinate Systems previously promised this wasn’t their goal, which goes to show how much a promise from a fascist is worth.
fortunately it seems like Lix has a NixOS fork on the horizon? I only know about it because the “just fork it or shut up” assholes are now complaining that a fork’s happening (which they seem to only know about by obsessively monitoring Lix’s git forge — I don’t think there’s been an announcement yet)
I do hope Lix sticks around and flourishes
I hope so too! I like their approach so far, and a NixOS fork by the same folks seems like something I’d switch to as soon as I reasonably could
in other news, holy fuck nix
notably, this weirdo seems to have only started the podcast that looks like the only thing they’re supposedly known for a couple months before the Nix open letter, and I really don’t recognize them from the Nix community otherwise. they also appear to be using their podcast to interview Steering Committee candidates, which seems like a real obvious way to influence the selection process given the kinds of questions they seem to be asking.
Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.
poor Musky lost custody. Couldn’t handle Grimes, now he mangles rhymes.
We’re gonna have enough material for a Elon diss track at this rate
just imagining what happens the day his companies get taken away from him
"Life, it never die
Women are my favorite guy."
Wonder what is up with the folks and them getting into rhymes/poetry. Jordan B Peterson does something simple (his pinned tweet as example here. But we know he fried parts of his brain using the russian coma rehab method.
And it isn’t even the Sinterklaas period yet. No need for bad rhymes. (I’m also suddenly reminded of all the people who tried to ‘rap’ their messages in the late 90s).
Well my name is Jordan and I’m here to say/ we’re just like lobsters in a major way
“cooked, and (politically) red as fuck”?
I can pull finer bars out my arse than this fucking farce
This is probably Grok - creativity from him’s pretty sparse
Choom thinks he’s DOOM, but he won’t beat him any time soon
With how much crack this whack goes through, he’ll forget this before noon
(I’m no MF DOOM, but anything I can put out will beat this artless twat any day)
Religion is the opium of the masses
And I’m increasingly scared they’re gonna kick our asses
Maybe it’s time for all those mugs
To shut up and start hitting drugs
guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again
Don’t drink and tweet people.
E: my reaction to the people saying ‘it is bait’
Update: The QRTs are mainly sneering, but this one’s particularly good
I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more “master copy” or “master recording” than “master of a slave”. This isn’t IDE. Who names their VCS branch “slave”?
Well, I guess that guy does.
the thing is that the git branch naming was only one of the places among many where this was changed, and in many databases (and often other server-subsystem architectures) master/slave terminology was quite present. iirc there are still some that stick by it today (mostly out of direct choice by project maintainers)
it’s the same thing as whitelist/blacklist, vs allowlist/denylist (or others) - when there’s bad shit linked in baggage, and the cost of changing it (by habit and choice) isn’t all that much, there’s not really any reason to hold by the the old loaded shit
harm reduction comes in many forms
Note that I was specifically talking about branch names in Git, where it’s debatable if the default name “master” even originated from the master/slave nomenclature.
The problematic nature of the term is a lot more evident in other contexts where a counterpart of the “master” is in fact called a “slave”. Whether that’s reason enough to change the names in any particular instance is not something I’ll comment on.
Yeah. I remember when the company I used to work for switched our style guide to allowlist/denylist and apart from That One Guy the overall reaction was a big “eh? sure, whatever”. Nobody is out here pretending that this kind of change is going to completely end racism or even that it’s going to have a major impact, but past a certain point continuing to casually throw the memory of chattel slavery around is just cringe.
I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more “master copy” or “master recording” than “master of a slave”. This isn’t IDE. Who names their VCS branch “slave”?
In a better world, this would’ve probably been a solid argument for letting the master/slave naming convention stick around. We don’t live in a better world.
This guy would be a lot happier if someone had given him a pound of weed when he was 12 then introduced him to college football fandom.
Dude is about 3 years too late but I guess it’s always 8 o’clock in the outrage store.
For reference, HN went wild on this submission from a pretty obvious 4chan troll (the self-described “Black developer” just so happened to include references to a Stormfront post (since removed)):
just imagine the kinda thinking that goes into even “I can make this post for fun, that’ll be a gas”
This is both old news and kinda… not that surprising when you think about it, but I searched and didn’t see any commentary on this here.
Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe
lmao incredible
Then there’s BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had “created a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease.” How’s the machine brain doing these days? Well, the company’s lead program failed in the clinic last year, and in April announced major layoffs.
just who buys this shit? this reads like refined crypto nonsense
People who don’t get much tech/overdose on hype and heard of alphafold. Imagine how much worse things could be now after the Nobel.
i mean how many these people are out there that also have money of this kind, other than softbank i mean
Given the past several decades of trickle-up economics, I think we haven’t seen anything close to the bottom of the well of basically-idle capital seeking unrealistic returns.
I’d go so far as to say that the current crop of bubbles possibly represents the greatest downards wealth transfer (albeit from billionaires to millionaires rather than, y’know, working people) since the second world war, but I haven’t done anything near the amount of research necessary for that to be more than exciting rhetoric.
too fucking many
