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 - gonna try posting last week’s thread a different way this time)

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    A two-part lecture and discussion series that may be of interest to techsneerers:

    Reimagining Space: Against Settler Colonial Space Futures

    This workshop is a two-part lecture and discussion series addressing urgent issues in space and how they relate to Earth. What does ethics mean in the context of space? Is it possible to explore space ethically? How do military interests drive Mars exploration? Led by multi-disciplinary researchers and organizers Dr. C. Adeene Denton and Dr. Divya M. Persaud, this series will provide an overview of how space is grounded in real-world oppression, colonialism, and genocide and a chance to discuss together how this could be changed.

    Runs on January 11th and 12th.

    • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      The first half was OK, but then they cited this paper.

      LLMs encode much more information about truthfulness than previously recognized. We first discover that the truthfulness information is concentrated in specific tokens, and leveraging this property significantly enhances error detection performance. Yet, we show that such error detectors fail to generalize across datasets, implying that—contrary to prior claims—truthfulness encoding is not universal but rather multifaceted.

      I haven’t read the paper, and probably won’t, but what the shit is this?

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        tired: checking incoming packets for the evil bit

        wired: checking LLM outputs for the truthfulness bit

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        gave it a quick skim. I lack any relevant background. the bit they push most seems to be that you can improve the performance of error detection tools by determining the most important tokens in an answer and running your tools on the tokens near those. this seems to be instead of taking absurdly naive approaches like averaging the tokens (???) or just looking at the last token of the response (???).

        what are the most important tokens? they’re the ones that change the factuality of the answer if you change them. how do you determine that? you don’t, lmao. you just ask an LLM what the most important words are

        what are the error detection tools? you will never guess

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          It turns out if you can just make the machine know what the truth is and say that you don’t get hallucinations. Unfortunately the truth isn’t emergent from pure language models and expressing Truth through language alone has been something challenging the human race since Krog try to teach Torg how make stick but pointy.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Alternate punchline: not nearly as much as he would have a few years ago, but still significantly more than is healthy for anyone. You’ll still get stalker vibes but he won’t care enough to remember your birthday.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    My hands are requesting the CEO’s home address (in Minecraft real life):

    Quick bonus I found in the replies:

    And a quick sidenote from me:

    This is sorta repeating a previous prediction of mine, but I expect this AI bubble’s gonna utterly tank the public image of tech as a whole. When you develop a tech whose primary use case boils down to “make the world worse so the line can go up”, its gonna be virtually impossible for the public to forgive you.

    Being more specific, I expect artists/musicians/creatives in general to be utterly hostile to AI, if not tech as a whole - AI has made their lives significantly harder in a variety of ways, and all signs pointing to the tech industry having done so willingly.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      in real life

      Careful not to post things that could get you into trouble with a judge without a sense of humor, or just cops/secret service. Wouldn’t be the first time I hear of a home visit because the cops got confused at a joke.

      Esp if it turns out the conspiracy theory about the murder being crypto related and they confuse this place for being a pro cryptocurrency place.

      E: on topic just not LLMs and artists but also the idea that Musk got Trump elected will cause a backlash. (Which I find dubious, more despite the man, they made the election be about a gay onlyfans support squirrel ffs)

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        5-10 years ago I’d say OP’s comment is definitely protected under the First Amendment (assuming US based) but now who the fuck knows what those turdwagons on the bench will come up with to dismantle it.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          16 days ago

          Sure, but that step comes after the cops lift you out of your bed. And you get a good lawyer etc etc. Nobody was charged after the home visit but it still was a home visit, granted that was in .nl so less risk of being shot or getting your stuff stolen. And that is assuming the law still works.

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    SALAMI dorks make the same stupid argument as bitcoin dorks:

    1. this shit is amazing look
    2. ok it’s not amazing YET but it will be soon
    3. ok but think about how long it took for [immediately, obviously useful invention] to become [what that invention is today]
    4. ur a luddite

    and yet people are still falling for it a year after SBF, the fucking poster boy for cryptocurrency, was convicted of being a fraudster.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      Welcome! The situation these people find themselves in is dire, since they’re both literally and emotionally as far as possible from the people making decisions about their labor. The modern economy doesn’t function without exploitation, and generative AI is the latest innovation in expanding that exploitation and pushing it farther away from the people who benefit and who make the decisions that require it. It does to modern knowledge workers what automation and outsourcing did to manufacturing, and the distance is sufficient that I don’t expect to see even the kind of lukewarm pushback that sweatshops got in the 90s actually manifest for them.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Insurance companies have played doctor for far too long in the US. It’s so gross.

      I don’t think private insurance should be necessary at all, but given that they exist they should be much more regulated. The doctor, not the insurance, should decide what conditions a patient has and what care is necessary; then if the insurance had said they cover it they should have to pay up without arguing.

      Like here in the lawsuit they said an old guy in the last year of his life who had muscle atrophy after breaking a leg, and had just started PT, should go home. Despite the doctor saying “shit’s weak and paralyzed yo”:

      Defendants explained that there were no acute medical issues because the patient was self-feeding and required minimal help for hygiene and grooming. This determination went against the physical therapist’s recommendation and notes describing Mr. Lokken muscle functions as paralyzed and weak.

      As if people are just hanging out in hospice care for fun or something! When I was in the hospital with pancreatitis I was about ready to start flipping tables by the end I wanted to go home so bad.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        Also:

        Mr. Tetzloff contacted Defendants to inquire about the reason for denying his claim. Defendant refused to provide any reason, stating that it is confidential.

        wtf?

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    404media:

    In the aftermath of an LGBT hate incident, the then-CEO of cloud computing giant Digital Ocean told upset staff his mentor was a member of the KKK as an attempt to explain why they must bend their values because “we love the company”

    presented without comment

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Asking employees to “bend” their perfectly sensible values like “I don’t like homophobes” or “members of the KKK suck” is insane to me, but exactly the sort of thing a tech CEO would think would resonate with his workers.

      I stay at my job not because I have molded my soul into a perfect vessel for my companies values (which, TBH, kind of suck), but because I have a mortgage payment.

      (Also as the header graphic points out, “love is at our core” and “inclusive environment” are apparently some of their values so maybe it’s Digital Ocean which needs to bend to Digital Ocean’s values).

      At least there’s a happy ending:

      A month after the all-hands meeting, in August 2023, DigitalOcean announced that it was conducting a search for a new CEO, but did not say why.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Strong suspicion that the “interim co-CEOs” bit is leading to an attempted sell-off/spin-off of the chip fabs (which are the part of the company getting the nice juicy government subsidies)

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Time for another round of Rothschild nutso’s to come around now that ChatGPT can’t say one of their names.

    At first I was thinking, you know, if this was because of the GDPR’s right to be forgotten laws or something that might be a nice precedent. I would love to see a bunch of people hit AI companies with GDPR complaints and have them actually do something instead of denying their consent-violator-at-scale machine has any PII in it.

    But honestly it’s probably just because he has money

    I think Sam Altman’s sister accused him of doing this to her name awhile ago too (semi-recent example). I don’t think she was on a “don’t generate these words ever” blacklist, but it seemed like she was erased from the training data and would only come up after a web search.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Being erased from the training data is frankly even more galling than the kind of brute force GDPR compliance they seem to have been using. It puts the lie to any claim that they’re just “moving fast and breaking things” without mind to the consequences, because clearly there was some reason to prune the training data and make sure that the model didn’t have certain information when it was to the company’s (or the founder’s) liking.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    also, tech billionaires terrified of a peasant uprising can turn their homes into fucking military bases with a home security system named (of course) Sauron

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Sorry about more insta content. Saw this today and it tickled me:

    Left: pinker

    Right: Yeonmi Park, who is known for defecting from north korea and speaking about it. That should be enough if she just told the truth, but for one reason or another (grifting dosh) she has started just making shit up, which I recommend you research for yourself if you are interested.

    Anyway the above picture probably doesn’t come as a surprise when you consider her current tack: saying that “woke” and “cancel culture” are the first steps in a country becoming like North Korea. She’s been on JRE (where she memeably claimed that there is only one train in NK that often requires people to push it). She has a book with her anti-woke thesis with opening shit-volley by old mate JBP.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        Yeah in terms of the meme mutation timeline, I believe the initial use would have been from leftists to mock outrageous/outlandishly false claims, in line with Park saying the trains thing. Since then the format has been mutated to also include “thing that exists in culture that is then exaggerated to be construed as dystopian” (see the example that soyweiser posted) and also “thing that is straight up dystopian but it’s something from the west”. So I think the only things that would approach the level of humor/absurdity of the original would have to be something else crazy out of YP’s mouth.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      LOL @ North Korea being “woke”. If they are, why are they assisting Russia, the Right’s Great White Hope, in a war against a country that these people also denigrate as “woke”? But hey, never let facts or logic get in the way of a good grift.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        I mean, with how young she is there’s absolutely no credibility she can offer on how a country becomes like the “D”“P”"R"K. But I can see the superficial similarities between the right-wing griftoverse’s depiction of cancel culture and the kind of cultural authority that gets exercised. That Bogeyman is why they use that fanciful description, after all. I can see how easily she could get radicalized from there, not that it justified any of the lies she’s believed and passed on or invented outright.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          And right now South Korea’s president has declared martial law and banned all political activity, I guess she’ll be just fine with that.

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            19 days ago

            Martial law and free speech restrictions are only bad if the bad guys do it, also we get to decide who the bad guys are

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              19 days ago

              I was curious so looked her up. I discovered that there is no rule of law in Chicago and you can just murder people in the streets. And unrelated she did a colab with Gad Saad about her failing dating in the USA or something. Didn’t watch the vid, just saw she had a few vids with Saad. (Vids from a year ago which almost nobody watched 35k/15k views. Sad!). On her twitter she has said nothing about SK, but apparently is upset about cancel culture and DEI. The grift is strong with this one.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Man that page has got some really wild sentences.

      Park’s claims that human corpses commonly float down North Korean rivers were criticized by Swiss businessman Felix Abt, who lived and worked in the DPRK for seven years.

      Now I don’t know if there’s any validity to her claim, but love the expert testimony from Swiss entrepreneur who’s been allowed to tour Pyongyang for a bit.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        It’s frustrating because there is plenty of real evidence that North Korea is in a bad way. That satellite image is stark and the volume of reports claiming food shortages and lack of basic services are hard to dispute, as is the sheer obsessive control exercised by the government to avoid the depictions of it. You don’t need to make up stories about using human corpses to fertilize your fields or whatever.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          18 days ago

          Abt deflects questions of human rights by claiming that he is neither a human rights expert nor a politician.

          And I’m not a proctologist but I still know an asshole when I see one.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          Dont think that anybody involved in this is going to be a good person. Of all the people mentioned, Pinker is prob the least worse here. And that is saying much.

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          18 days ago

          Somehow not the most horrific thing Swiss did just by trading (that would be war profiteering during Iran-Iraq war, when they sold chemical weapons precursors to one side and gas masks to other)