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.
new class of kook just dropped
existing class of kook - hooks into the Zizians
do these kooks follow single inheritance or multiple inheritance rules? I’m a bit more worried about the latter
lol, multiple
how do you reckon? not sure I directly see the overlap (and while admittedly I haven’t gotten to dive full depth on the zizians, the bits I did get to so far struck me as what would happen if adolescent spock became a logical extremist)
I was struck by the outright “hey we’ve got cult camp” kitted out in whatever-the-fuck they’ve done to (one of the strands of?) buddhism while also pitching this on-surface as “people are cyborgs now”
although it did remind me of how much buddhist and related reading+pondering I saw in the postrat scenes, and now I’m wondering if that’s a thing that I missed in others of this before
Buddhist thinking has always been a big undercurrent (at least compared to the rest of the western world) in the hacker/computer science world, so doesnt have to come from anything LW related.
so there’s a whole network of specifically Thiel-associated SF tech guys who are into particular churches
it’s above-baseline among the tpots (at least relative to other areas I’ve observed it)
Compared to the hacker baseline that is odd indeed.
This community is for those willing to bring wisdom and compassion into the world. It is not for those easily duped by what they find in their minds or online.
no red flags there
It is not for those easily duped by what they find in their minds or online.
fuck I hate when my own brain dupes me into getting on the internet
1990s dialup: barely only once
Penny Arcade weighs in on deepseek distilling chatgpt (or whatever actually the deal is):
“Wow, this Penny Arcade comic featuring toxic yaoi of submissive Sam Altman is lowkey kinda hot” is a sentence neither I nor any LLM, Markov chain or monkey on a typewriter could have predicted but now exists.
apparent list of forbidden words in nsf grants
https://elk.zone/mathstodon.xyz/@sc_griffith/113947483650679740
"Gender Neural”
That typo is probably going to screw a lot of Neuroscience grants just because it’ll match on some dumb regex.
Also, apparently Hispanic and Latino people don’t exist?
“De <space> colonized” is also on there, that will give some interesting problems when automated filters for this hit Dutch texts (De means the).
E: there are so many other words on there like victim, and unjust, and equity, this will cause so many dumb problems. And of course if you go on the first definition of political correct (‘you must express the party line on certain ideas or be punished’) they created their own PC culture. (I know pointing out hypocrisy does nothing, but it amuses me for now).
Apparently “Trauma” is banned. That’s going to be a problem.
This is what happens when you give power to bigoted morons.
Note: They’re all problems. Just “Trauma" is kind of extra-important because of its use as a medical term.
Trauma surgery, Barotrauma, Traumatic Brain Injury, Penetrating Trauma, Blunt Trauma, Abdominal Trauma, Polytrauma, Etc.
Victim and Unjust are also there, which lawyers prob love to never be able to use.
I’m not sure lawyers file for many NIH grants, but “victim" probably comes up in medical/science research. Pathology would be one possibility.
A quick pubmed search finds NIH such supported research as:
"In 2005 the genome of the 1918 influenza virus was completely determined by sequencing fragments of viral RNA preserved in autopsy tissues of 1918 victims”
Insights on influenza pathogenesis from the grave. 2011, Virus Research
"death of the child victim”
Characteristics, Classification, and Prevention of Child Maltreatment Fatalities. 2017 Military Medicine
Etc
I was already assuming the pc word list would spread to other subjects.
I don’t think “victim” is really a word that’s even used especially much in “woke” (for a lack of a good word) writing anyway. Hell, even for things like sexual violence, “survivor” is generally preferred nomenclature specifically because many people feel that “victim” reduces the person’s agency.
It’s the rightoid chuds who keep accusing the “wokes” for performative victimhood and victim mentality, so I suppose that’s why they somehow project and assume that “victim” is a particularly common word in left-wing vocabulary.
Good point, had not even thought of that. Shows how badly they are at understanding the people they are against. Reminds me how they went, a while back going after the military for actually reading the ‘woke’ literature. Only the military was doing it explicitly so they would understand their enemies, so they could stop them.
There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it’s really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I’m greeted with:
Note: I have absolutely no idea what “Fcitx” even is. Or why and how it’s launched, or whether I’m actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to “improve the experience” with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I’m just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don’t even want to know how much lifetime I’ve already spent chasing Linux problems like that.
Fcitx is an input method editor used to type different languages, especially those that need to be composed from context (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) I believe it comes preinstalled with KDE (at least in kde-full it does, unsure about the smaller packages), but it should be totally safe to remove if you don’t need this functionality.
Thanks! I uninstalled it and things appear to work normally.
I dunno, still not as bad as the last Win10 update I was presented with that wanted to resize the recovery partition and shrink my C drive at the same time. That was the push I needed to switch to my Gentoo install and never look back. I presume that Windows is probably pretty decent about live partition resizing these days, but I don’t know that for sure, and I don’t want to waste time being concerned about it on a system that’s mainly for gaming anyway.
Yep, I’m certainly not claiming that Windows is better at it these days… (Possibly unpopular opinion: Windows usability peaked with WinXP.)
Somebody pointed out that HN’s management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it’s the sort of thing Dan might blank:
but I don’t want to get hellbanned by dang.
Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It’s caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices – the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.
I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.
d’ya…d’ya think they’ll make it all the way along the path, to the realization?
no
The ones who walk towards Omelas. (And Omelas is fine actually, you damn hippy).
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim
Finally it turns out torturing the kid was unnecessary and spreading out the suffering would have worked fine. All Omelas had to do was raise their income tax a little bit.
Somewhat related I was thinking about how different this blog post from a DOGE “employee” reads during Elon Musks coup attempt: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-my-life/ – it was discussed here but no one really knew what was coming at the time.
There’s also a youtube video which has been popping off on social media over the last week and is a gentle introduction to techno-fascists for the general public.
wow the sanewashing of trump in those threads is insane
Pivot to AI: Amy is retiring! Probably! yes my cowriter has heard the call of revolution and will be having full and frank debates in the marketplace of ideas. WIth sweet reason.
Send her my thanks for her service! o7
Anyone matched the list of names of the dinguses currently wrecking US agencies from the inside with known LW or HN posters?
at least one matches, i forget the name but it’s all over bsky
Matches for HN or LW?
We know one of them retweeted groypers as well.
LW, one is an actual LW poster
Mein gott…
looking for advice/suggestions:
anyone seen anything yet (uBlock ruleset, {tamper,grease}monkey scripts, etc) that can block the “talk to our prompt” widgets that have started showing up on too many fucking webpages? I’m getting sick of the things, and I haven’t really yet found an exhaustive list of this shit from which to build up a list
@froztbyte @dgerard you have an example of those?
of things I’ve found in the space that do address this somewhat includes this (a list of domains of either explicitly full of slop or heavily supporting slop)
brave supposedly has something as well but, well, it’s brave so it’s a non-starter
this is a now-archived project that maintained a list of chat widgets
regarding instances of widgets, off the top of my head some places where I’ve seen chat prompts unhelpfully placed: pluginboutique.com, hetzner.com, most aws doc and product pages (“Explainer”). I think hydro.run also had some trash popping up (I have a block for it), but can’t recall under which section
(DDG also pops some up constantly unless you have the cookies set, but that fails in fresh browser instances)
So the far right people are already infighting each other with disinformation. Now they are accusing others of being part of the USAID thing. See this tweet by I,hypocrite (lporiginalg) (Note the guy is a bad guy (an anti-Semite for example), so this is fasc on fasc action).
"So let me get this straight…
Vaush
Aella
Richard Hanania
James Lindsay
Were all funded by USAID? WHO ELSE?
<community note pointing out this isn’t true>"
They are coming for you Aella, hope you have an exit strategy (Just saying: Publicly burning bridges, and dropping the chatlogs of others would create a lot of goodwill on the anti-fascist side, and would be a good first step in rebuilding trust with some people (even if for a lot this cannot be regained)).
Perhaps using a lot of lying shitheads to get political clout is a bad idea, as even when you are in power, they will not stop lying (and being shitheads).
Basically this is the usual battle between the literal neo-nazi antisemites and the more mainstream fascists who’ve pivoted from virulent antisemitism to anti-muslim racism and support for Israel (but that won’t stop them from having a go at the (((globalists))) every other day). Fun for all.
Yeah very much whoever wins we lose. We should just build a large trebuchet and fire them all into the sun. But sadly the gov does nothing.
The gov is currently just another faction of the fash infighting.
Thankfully im not American. Checks Dutch news ow fuck our fasc is also infighting
Yeah, thankfully little happening here, too. Checks Finnish news oh, apparently a cop guarding the president’s house killed himself in November. Also some expert’s “this kind of Muskian coup could not happen here because that would be illegal” shirt is raising questions already answered by his shirt.
Well here thankfully the fight is over (today it was, tomorrow it will be something else, no wait our fasc doesn’t work the weekends, monday it will be) the crisis of not having enough prison cells, which they wanted to fix by letting people with sentences of less than a year out 2 weeks earlier. Which caused a rift between the party ‘member’(*) who wanted to do it and the fuhrer Wilders (whos negative reaction on this was published via twitter of course).
*: Technically Wilders party has only one member, Wilders.
Evergreen reaction image.
I don’t know if this is the right place to ask, but a friend from the field is wondering if there are any examples of good AI companies out there? With AI not meaning LLM companies. Thanks!
sounds a bit of a xy question imo, and a good answer of examples would depend on the y part of the question, the whatever it is that (if my guess is right) your friend is actually looking to know/find
“AI” is branding, a marketing thing that a cadaverous swarm of ghouls got behind in the upswing of the slop wave (you can trace this by checking popularity of the term in the months after deepdream), a banner with which to claim to be doing something new, a “new handle” to use to try anchor anew in the imaginations of many people who were (by normal and natural humanity) not yet aware of all the theft and exploitation. this was not by accident
there are a fair of good machine learning systems and companies out there (and by dint of hype and market forces, some end up sticking the “AI” label on their products, because that’s just how this deeply fucked capitalist market incentivises). as other posters have said, medical technology has seen some good uses, there’s things like recommender[0] and mass-analysis system improvements, and I’ve seen the same in process environments[1]. there’s even a lot of “quiet and useful” forms of this that have been getting added to many daily use systems and products all around us: reasonably good text extractors as a baseline feature in pdf and image viewers, subject matchers to find pets and friends in photos, that sort of thing. but those don’t get headlines and silly valuation insanity as much of the industry is in the midst of
[0] - not always blanket good, there’s lots of critique possible here
[1] - things like production lines that can use correlative prediction for checking on likely faults
Thanks for the replies, I guess the “good” was vague on purpose, to see how people interpret it…
This popped up on one of my feeds today and I saved it, can’t remember from where, it’s relevant to the above so sharing here: https://oneproject.org/ai-commons/ (AI Commons: nourishing alternatives to Big Tech monoculture).
They talk about AI for good, at some point they mention how the term is sometimes used just for marketing.
There are companies doing “cool-sounding” things with AI like Waymo. “Good” would require more definition.
The only thing that comes to mind is medical applications, drug research, etc. But that might just be a skewed perspective on my end because I know literally nothing about that industry or how AI technology is deployed there. I’ve just read research has been assisted by those tools and that seems, at least on the surface level, like a good thing.
I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it’s “normal overwrought” or “LLM bullshit.” You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens, so of course I don’t say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like “as a language model”).
No one describes their algorithm as “efficiently doing [intermediate step]” unless you’re describing it to a general, non-technical audience — what a coincidence — and yet it keeps appearing in my students’ writing. It’s exhausting.
My sympathies.
Read somewhere that the practice of defending one’s thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.
I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”. My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn’t get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.
I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”.
But we know the tech behind these models right? They dont change their weights when they produce output right? You could have a discussion if updating the values is learning, but it doesnt even do that right? (Feeding the questions back into the dataset used to train them is a different mechanic)
That’s true, and that’s one way to approach the topic.
I generally focus on humans being more complex than the caricature we need to be reduced to in order for the argument to appear plausible. Having some humanities training comes in handy because the prompt fans very rarely do.
Microsoft’s own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place
The whole paper is an absolute nightmare funfair ride through the behaviours that have become almost instantaneously widespread through the professional world - something Microsoft have invested billions into accelerating and worsening no matter the consequences.
i got quoted as an ai authority, talking about elon’s rational boys https://www.dailydot.com/news/elon-musk-doge-coup-engineer-grant-democracy/
AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire
I love you, David.
If Jason Wilson calls you for a quote, you give him your best.
a phrase to make your skin crawl right off:
Lighthaven cuddle puddle
And after that shot, a chaser:
Is the Dark Enlightenment actually fascist? Not at all. It’s probably the least fascistic strain of political thought today, though this requires understanding what fascism really is, which the word itself now obscures. Is it racist? Perhaps. The term is so malleable that it’s hard to say with clarity.
The dark enlightenment is not fascist nor racist is one of those things you can only say if you just started reading up on them, remember the dark enlightenment map from 2013 (on rationalwiki, on the nrx page) contains quite a few open racists/fascists, the worst of all was heartiste, who posted like he was on stormfront (but really overcompensating for being lonely). Also hbd and ethno nationalists.
Also cery easy to go, nah it isnt fascist/racist and then not give definitions.
the post itself is a good showcase of certain parts of fascist ideology. might write it up
“is this ideological project which has directly incentivised burning books and harming atypicals the same as the fascist projects which did the same? the answer may surprise you!”
weirdly early for the revisionist PR to start, though, they’re barely done setting shit on fire
You could question how much the current setting on fire, as in a funny way the nrx creepy nerd Vance has been sidelined by jocky Musk. (I know Thiel helped in getting employees for doge so it doesnt totally fit, but just lol at nrx being benched like this). (Yes, I’m leaning a bit on the jock/creep thing here)
this is the least fascist strain of political thought. and everybody knows. everybody knows. sometimes, this happened twice, maybe more, I have men come up to me, big strong men with tears in their eyes, and they say, mr president, we’ve never seen a strain of thought less fascist
the axe is bundled inside of cut-down pool noodles!
I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of “well I don’t know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology” and sometimesI wish I’d collected receipts to say “I told you it’s not”.
Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:
- Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
- Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home’s evil cousin
- Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies
And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.
year of Nakamoto 17
so what you’re saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest
you forgot sanctions evasion, volunteering as a liquidity pool for iranian laundromat, and north korean ransomware
Ok, maybe cryptocurrencies made those a little bit easier than doing the same thing with MMO money or having to mail physical goods. I can even go out on a limb and credit the blockchain itself for them, even though the design kind of makes transactions inherently more traceable than some possible aleternatives do.
there are always swiss banks and abu dhabi charities
The rise of ransomware and cryptocurrencies sadly are linked.
I know, that’s why I’m giving them this one.
Sorry, misread your tone.
No worries. I do agree ransomware industry might not have taken off or at least might have taken off a lot slower if the victims had to make a gold mule video game character or mail cash or precious metals through seedy relay addresses to pay the ransom. So I’ll habe to credit cryptocurrency, if not necessarily blockchain per se, for that dubious achievement.
Yeah good point on the blockchain tech split vs actual cryptocurrencies. Esp considering the stories some of the exchanges basically did away with the blockchain for internal trades.
