Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 18 August 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 18 August 2024
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.
This came up in a podcast I listen to:
WaPo: "OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say "
archive link https://archive.is/E3M2p
OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.
While I'm not prepared to defend OpenAI here I suspect this is just to shut up the most hysterical employees who still actually believe they're building the P(doom) machine.
Post from July, tweet from today:
It’s easy to forget that Scottstar Codex just makes shit up, but what the fuck “dynamic” is he talking about? He’s describing this like a recurring pattern and not an addled fever dream
There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?”
Embarrassing to be this uninformed about such a high profile issue, no less that you're choosing to write about derisively.
ah, jeez, AI bros are trying to make deepfakes even fucking worse:
Deep-Live-Cam is trending #1 on github. It enables anyone to convert a single image into a LIVE stream deepfake, instant and immediately
Most of the replies are openly lambasting this shit like it deserves, thankfully
Picked up an oddly good sneer from a gen-AI CEO, of all people (thanks to @ai_shame for catching it):
The wikipedia page for TESCREAL is "disputed", always a good sign when the online right launches skirmish actions against front-line trenches
Not a sneer, but something that'll inspire plenty of schadenfreude:
Brian Merchant: The artists fighting to save their jobs and their work from AI are gaining ground
Brian's done plenty of good sneers on AI, I'd recommend checking him out
Babe, new AI doom vector just dropped: AGI will corrupt knitting sites so crafters make Langford visual hack patterns![1]
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-ai-scams-are-infiltrating-the-knitting-and-crochet-world/
[1] doom scenario is my interpretation, not actually included in ZDnet article.
Sadly, Langford hacks seem to have never achieved memetic takeoff. Having an internet legally enforced on pain of death to be text-only would probably be a good thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1eqsoom/guys_we_have_to_do_somthing_about_this_fiӏtеr/
This community pops up on /r/all every so often and each time it scares me.
Sometimes I see kids games (and all games really) have ultra-niche, super-online protests that are like "STOP Zooshacorp from DESTROYING K-Smog vs. Batboy Online", and when I look closer it's either even more confusing or it's about something people didn't like in the latest update. This is like that, but with an awful twist where it's about people getting really attached to these AI girlfriend/sex roleplay apps. The spelling and sentences make it seem like it's mostly kids, too.
edit: here's a terrible example!
yall might want to take notice of this thing https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/20460779
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-08-14/Recent_research
STORM: AI agents role-play as "Wikipedia editors" and "experts" to create Wikipedia-like articles, a more sophisticated effort than previous auto-generation systems
ai slop in extruded text form, now longer and worse! and burns extra square kilometers of rainforest
Another front in the war of the sexes has opened, and men are on the back foot!
HN: Women are using ChatGPT to catch men lying about their height
The counterattacks are planned!
"They" all lie:
I personally take my job as Photo Detective very seriously, a trait I only acquired from too many dates with people who did not look as good as their photos in real life.
Double standards!!
I'm pretty sure if men would use ChatGPT to catch women lying about their body this conversation would be in a completely different tone.
For some reason The Internet decided that 6 feet was an arbitrary limit, under which men could be just ignored.
Imagine men deciding that any woman with smaller than (insert random body measurement we can't affect) could just be filtered out?
Both sides!
Women will hate finding out that it can guess their age and weight! It can even guess their socioeconomic group, and if they dye their hair.
Great, guys can use it too. We'll see how these chicks react...
this will probably become a NotAwfulTech post after I explore a bit more, but here’s a quick follow-up to my post last stubsack looking for language learning apps:
the open source apps for the learning system I want to use do exist! that system is essentially an automation around reading an interesting text in Spanish (or any other language), marking and translating terms and phrases with a translation dictionary, and generating flash cards/training materials for those marked terms and phrases. there’s no good name for the apps that implement this idea as a whole so I’m gonna call them the LWT family for reasons that will become clear.
briefly, the LWT family apps I’ve discovered so far are:
- LWT (Learning With Texts) is the original open source system that implemented the learning system I described above (though LWT itself originated as an open source clone of LingQ with some ideas from other learning systems). the Hugo Fara fork is the most recently-maintained version of LWT, but it’s generally considered finished (and extraordinarily difficult to modify) software. I need to look into LWT more since it’s still in active use; I believe it uses an Anki exporter for spaced repetition training. it doesn’t seem to have a mobile UI, which might be a dealbreaker since I’ll probably be doing a lot of learning from my phone
- Lute (Learning Using Texts) is a modernized LWT remake. this one is being developed for stability, so it’s missing features but the ones that exist are reputedly pretty solid. it does have a workable mobile UI, but it lacks any training framework at all (it may have an extremely early Anki plugin to generate flash cards)
- LinguaCafe is a completely reworked LWT with a modern UI. it’s got a bunch of features, but it’s a bit janky overall. this is the one I’m using and liking so far! installing it is a fucking nightmare (you have to use their docker-compose file only, with docker not podman, and absolutely slaughter the permissions on your bind mounts, and no you can’t fire it up native) but the UI’s very modern, it works well on mobile (other than jank), and it has its own spaced repetition training framework as well as (currently essentially useless) Anki export. it supports a variety of freely available translation dictionaries (which it keeps in its own storage so they’re local and very fast) and utterly optional DeepL support I haven’t felt the need to enable. in spite of my nitpicks, I really am enjoying this one so far (but I’m only a couple days in)
Tangentially topical, here's a startup (of course) who offers CNC-milled marble statuary:
Bloomberg: This Startup Will Make a Sculpture of Your Dog for $10,000
Via this HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41248112
Not really TESCREAL, more really really late stage capitalism.
Although weirdly I'd be up for one of those really cool late Roman Republic realist busts.
Following up on this comment re: the TESCREAL wikipedia page https://awful.systems/comment/4332398
It's now been nominated for deletion (again), the discussion has blown up because it was noted on social media, and the nominator seems to be an... interesting... character
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/TESCREAL_(2nd_nomination)
Edit I now see they have admitted conflict of interest and visually downgraded their "Delete" nomination (I have no fucking clue if that actually affects anything, it would not surprise me that Wikipedia considers strong formatting a valid signal for determining weight of opinion)
OT: since we’ve occasionally featured a music thread and such, any interest in a music sub? it could be pair well with this, the awful pub.
the awful pub sub[0], if you will
this thought brought to you by prior threads as well as this that I’m listening to in late-afternoon 26C weather
[0] you know I had to, I couldn’t not
Witnessed an AI doomer freaking out over a16z trying to deep-six SB1047.
Seems like the "AI doom" criti-hype is starting to become a bit of an albatross around the industry's neck.
Capitalist blames lazy workers for not putting in the hours to make themselves obsolete.
WSJ: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI—And Remote Work Is Why
Archive: https://archive.is/JXvtV
Tangentially related. In 1878, some asshole exhumed 25 human skulls from an abandoned cemetery in far Northern Sweden and took them to Helsinki, where he and his buddies measured them to "prove" that people from the region were less advanced.
Now the skulls are finally being re-interred thanks to pressure from the local community.
Here's a background on the cemetery and the skull-snatching (in Swedish):
https://kulturmiljonorrbotten.com/2023/09/29/akamella-odekyrkogard/
Worldcoin manages to convince Bloomberg it's 2022 and not 2024
Google’s Search Dominance Leaves Sites Little Choice on AI Scraping (no archive - archive.ph appears to have died)
Because Google literally can't stop being evil even when the world's eyes are on it
chechen warlord ramzan kadyrov brags about cybertruck technical and praises musk for allegedly giving him it in grozny (take it with a heap of salt, like everything that clown says). they want to send it to the frontline armed with nothing more than NSV (think soviet M2 Browning) https://xcancel.com/NOELreports/status/1824820843463000392#m
Kadyrov claimed that Elon Musk supposedly gave him a Cybertruck in Grozny. According to Kadyrov, he plans to send this armed vehicle to the "SVO" zone.
“I express my sincere gratitude to Elon Musk! This is, of course, the strongest genius of our time and a specialist. Great man! Well, the cybertruck turned out to be a powerful project. Undoubtedly one of the best cars in the world! I literally fell in love with this car.”
would be a nice future addition to oryx's list, if they actually put it outside of chechenya
It's the weekend B) time to check in on the doomers w/ Dr. Torres...
Oh damn! I missed the irrefutable evidence of LLM reasoning. They must have done a series of replicable experiments that contradicts the overwhelming evidence that LLM reasoning is more or less a series of pattern matching heuristics. Let's take a look together at their data lads, let the scales fall from our eyes.
... this is their confirmation of reasoning? And they say we are the ones who are fucking coping, lmaou.
In other news, someone caught a former NFT artist using AI. Not shocked in the slightest an NFT grifter jumped on the AI train.
Latest from Cyberstuck: Just see for yourself. I... I have no words.
Update: I may have been bamboozled by computer imagery. Someone call Captain Disillusion.
Referencing this discussion about digital stamps in the prev megathread, you can get them in Sweden too:
