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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - theyāve switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.
this is quite infuriating, i had a number of mozilla/firefox people telling me that this feature wouldnāt work with opt-in (itās bullshit though) because too few users would enable it, and neither fucker asked himself : āwait, if weāre afraid we canāt convince our user base to buy-in, perhaps we shouldnāt develop the feature?ā
Sounds like a good idea to piss off your primary user base, because at this stage I feel the only people singing Firefoxās praise are privacy advocates who wonāt touch Chrome & friends with a ten-foot pole.
(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)
Itās also enabled in the dev builds, by the way. I just checked.
(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)
it definitely reads like the same shithead, but Iāve had them blocked on mastodon for some time so I canāt say for sure if it was for rampant LLMery or for doing the āwithout advertising the modern web would die and you donāt want that do youā thing advertisers do constantly
Lol what an absolute tool. Thatās the same shit the marketing bozos at my job say when I inform them that, no, I canāt auto opt-in our customers into whatever stupid Facebook ad campaign theyāre pushing this week because itās literally against the GDPR and our privacy laws.
But I guess thatās the logical next step if your whole business model depends on
lazydeceiving people into clicking the button with the flashiest color in the cookie popup without reading the label.P.S. the modern web can die in a fucking fire.
this is not peopleās laziness; itās that the practice is deceptive. donāt reinforce the business narrative.
Fair point, youāre right.
and because it feels like itās worth screaming this into the void in case thereās any marketing assholes reading: fuck yes Iām here to kill the modern web
Well, I needed an excuse to use Supermium - no better excuse than this.
I donāt really know if any chromium-based options are a real solution - thereās so much code in there that a lot of times wonāt get caught (cf. brave etc for this very thing), and goog is actively working to push their own agenda and they have a lot more dev-hours than anyone else to churn shit out
ladybird and servo seem like the most promising alternative paths right now, and ladybird less so because chuds -_-
Ladybird isnāt going anywhere. The web standards move too fast and theyāre not going to be able to catch up. I wish it was another way, but thereās no way a couple of million $ is going to move the needle here when (probably) tens of billions have been poured into chromium/FF.
also it looks likely to have other possible problems
oof. Something tells me heās a good guy and just knee-jerked that response without thinking about it. But then I realize it doesnāt matter because the kind of community you create doesnāt depend on who you are deep down but what you say publicly.
Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didnāt like the feel of Chromium.
I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went āfuck it, Iām sticking with Libreā.
The Firefox CTO put out a message about this on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02218-7
Might be slightly off topic, but interesting result using adversarial strategies against RL trained Go machines.
Quote: Humans able use the adversarial botsā tactics to beat expert Go AI systems, does it still make sense to call those systems superhuman? āItās a great question I definitely wrestled with,ā Gleave says. āWeāve started saying ātypically superhumanā.ā David Wu, a computer scientist in New York City who first developed KataGo, says strong Go AIs are āsuperhuman on averageā but not āsuperhuman in the worst casesā.
Me thinks the AI bros jumped the gun a little too early declaring victory on this one.
See, in StarCraft we would just say that the meta is evolving in order to accommodate this new strategy. Maybe Go needs to take a page from newer games in how these things are discussed.
this is simple. we just need to train a new model for every move. that way the adversarial bot wonāt know what weaknesses to exploit
In chess the table base for optimal moves with only 7 pieces takes like ~20 terrabytes to store. And in that DB there are bizzare checkmates that take 100 + moves even with perfect precision- ignoring the 50 move rule. I wonder if the reason these adversarial strats exists is because whatever the policy network/value network learns is way, way smaller than the minimum size of the ātrueā position eval function for Go. Thus youāll just invariably get these counter play attacks as compression artifacts.
Sources cited: my ass cheeks
i donāt think that can be quite right, as illustrated by an extreme example: consider a game where the first move has player 1 choose āwinā or āhypergo.ā if player 1 chooses win, they win. if player 1 chooses hypergo, begin a game of Go on a 1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000,000 board, and whoever wins that subgame wins. for player 1, the ātrueā position eval function must be in some sense incredibly complicated, because it includes hypergo nonsense. but player 1 strategy can be compressed to āchoose winā without opening up any counterattacks
more generally I suspect that as soon as you are trying to compare some notion of a ātrueā position eval function to eval functions you can actually generate youāre going to have a very difficult time making correct and clear predictions. the reason I say this is that treating such a ātrueā function is essentially the domain of combinatorial game theory (not the same as āgame theoryā), and there are few if any bridges people have managed to build between cgt and practical Go etc playing engines. so itās probably pretty hard to do
(I know thereās a theory of ātemperatureā of combinatorial games that I think was developed for purposes of analyzing Go, but I donāt think it has any known relationship to reinforcement learning based Go engines)
60% of the time, it works 100% of the time.
Muse is a new creative platform that can create your own AI-generated series so you can dive into a new world of storytelling without the need for personal content creation.
Who the fuck are these people and why do I not have a button that spreads Lego bricks across their floor?
Yeah, I always hated the part of art and storytelling where there was always a tiny and sometimes misshapen window into the human soul there. Better to do away with that and replace it with an endless parade of #sponsoredcontent. That way thereās no risk of suddenly developing empathy or accidentally connecting with the people Iām exploiting as a billionaire VC.
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From the just released GOP 2024 party platform (PDF), this is a single bullet point in CHAPTER THREE: BUILD THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN HISTORY:
Republicans will pave the way for future Economic Greatness by leading the World in Emerging Industries.
Crypto
Republicans will end Democratsā unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency. We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We will repeal Joe Bidenās dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.
Expanding Freedom, Prosperity and Safety in Space
Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.
When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.
unAmerican
This is somehow the worst thing Republicans did this year.
Human Flourishing
This term was already very iffy, but this cements it into being full on red flag territory.
When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.
Wouldnt be surpised if we discover he is behind it, the whole manufacturing things in space (yes I also played SMAX Musk) has his smell over it. What makes this a bit more funny is that Musk has also been hired to help safely crash down the ISS into the sea (Personally considering the cost of lifting stuff out of our gravity I would try to keep it up there, if I wanted to build more things in space, but due to capitalism we cannot (really, the ISS is going to be trashed because figuring out who own what part and resolving all that is too hard, capital says no)). Which brings up a fantastic opportunity for a random person on twitter who has Musks ear. We can now put a city at risk of being crushed by the ISS by tweeting āhey musk, make the ISS do a barrel rollā.
@gnomicutterance @dgerard Has the Republican writing style guide been updated to mandate that Weird Capitalisation thing that Cheeto Benito does or something?
dogwhistles all the way down
Fantasy PnP RPG Capitalisation.
https://xcancel.com/kitten_beloved/status/1810709361175691474
In which TPOT unites to yell at scooter because he isnāt down with mental health apartheid schemes.
ādisorderly cities are required by the state religionā
When they are absolutely sure the tweet will not escape containment, they will just take assumptions like āa certain percentage of people has incurable Criminal Mindā as given and go from there.
that twitter account is absolutely something
looks at profile āadorable and harmlessā and then 2 tweets later, turns out they are racist.
Iām always shocked to see someone to Milkshake Duck themselves this hard within a single post.
cozy twitterTPOT all over
tangent: these screencaps are from scott? he doesnāt mention long acting injectable antipsychotics (one shot every 2-4 weeks or so, no pills needed; needs consent ofc, result is vastly increased compliance) is that not a thing over there?
e: he mentions it but doesnāt discuss it for whatever reason
Depot injections are āleftismā it seems.
Scott: āleft thoughtā okayyy
Funniest fuckinā sentence I have read today:
First off, if youāve read The Singularity Is Near, which was published 19 years ago in 2005, you should be aware that the sequel book is a lot less technical.
Wait, this guy published āis Nearā twenty years ago and then UNIRONICALLY published āis Nearerā?
Come the fuck on, this has to be satire?
The sequel to āApocalypse Nowā, āApocalypse Even More Presentlyā
Asymptotically approaching the Singularity.
Gooning for rats
Buy my new book āYouāre older than youāve ever beenā.
Twenty years pass
Buy my new book āAnd now youāre even olderā
iirc he predicted the singularity somewhere in 2040 so it does make sense, even if it looks weird.
Oh gosh, hopefully I live to see āSingularity Is Still Near, Just Not as Near as I Thought: Trust Me Brosā released in 2041
āSorry no singularity, climate change is an existential threat after allā.
(Iām bitterly reminded of the SSC post where he starts with āwhy donāt we hear about the ozone layer anymore, well the scientists fixed it!ā where he goes after the environmentalist movement. There is only one problem with the āwe fixed the ozone layerā thing. Butt wait, there is more!)
tl;dr is upset that Kurzweil is not as much of a doomer as they are
Over at āwork on climateā thereās been an influx of companies that will greenwash using ChatGPT. One company I interviewed for (in my estimation it) boiled down to using ChatGPT to make generic greening recommendations for a business and attach hallucinated numbers that the client can then pass off for themselves.
Edit: is there a list of companies that use āprompt engineeringā so that I can just avoid them?
(Iāll try put a decent summary of links on this later)
thereās a UK party that (aiui) committed electoral crimes by submitting non-existing genML-created people as candidates, a whole new usecase!
gonna be real fun to see that catching sunlight, if TNI manages to do due process right
what a coincidence, āaiuiā is the sound I make when I get caught doing electoral crimes.
If you want more crazy, that political party is actually a limited company in which the leader is also the majority shareholder and the bylaws permit him to fire and appoint a majority of directors at will. Iām not sold on whether all those candidates were actually fake, but journalists from more credible outlets than Byline Times are no doubt working on physically tracking down every one off these candidates as we speak to verify their existence or otherwise.
max headroom for prez
one guy whose pic looks like a fucking Auton actually got in touch with the Grauniad and showed them the original of his ridiculously yassified campaign photo
it continues to do my head in that I vacillate on whether thereās more insane politics shit for yāall in TNI, or in what we have here in ZA
There was a new government elected last week on a platform which can be broadly summarised as āno more insane politics shitā. So far theyāre showing dangerous signs of competence and rational thought. What a load of weirdos.
Am I crazy to think that guy has muskās face?
found this linked in ed zitron comment section for some reason: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/phil-vs-llms/
With a momentās contemplation after reading it, I just realized how spectacularly bad this could go if, for example, you went to do a search for an chemicalās Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and a Large Language Model (LLM) gave you back some bullshit advice to take in the event of hazmat exposure or fire.
jokeās on you, MSDSs are already dogshit. these things only exist to cover ass of manufacturers and are filled with generic, useless advice https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-msds https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/un-safety-data-sheets there is MSDS for sand, MSDS for tear gas and ethanol lists the same dangers, toxicity is overemphasized (because itās common) and some other dangers like explosiveness are underappreciated (because itās not), we donāt even need LLMs for this, humans (lawyers mostly i guess) did the same on accident
also bonus points for first-principling what could have been instead of asking somebody that actually knows, like any proper rationalist would do. also, vinyl chloride is not reactive with water and spraying pressurized containers with water can be a sensible thing to do, because this cools them down, so it decreases pressure meaning it decreases risk of rupture, which would be a bad thing, if manageable for firefighters to do it safely. see: some fires involving propane tanks
An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;
Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (āappropriate respiratorā), itās your job to figure out what it is
MSDSs are already dogshit
one of those cases of āminimum legally requiredā type of things? maybe with a dash of āthe specification and requirements were written ${time} ago and havenāt evolved a lick since then, despite much shift in industry and progressā?
there are no real enforced requirements of accuracy, most of typical known hazards are covered by generic useless advice and everything else is just filled by āno informationā
ah, vibes-based danger diamonds
itās less of this and more of prop65 the size of rationalist footnote
actual pictograms are not vibes based, there are thresholds for toxicity, flash point etc
You know, I would expect the at-a-glance symbolic information to be more useful just from sheer accessibility. But I never would have expected them to be more accurate and rigorous than the detailed safety sheets.
MSDS is a multi-page document that is mostly filled with boilerplate, but you could expect some more detailed precautions and instructions, like for example in case of HF burn apply calcium gluconate cream, use special glass for diazomethane because it can explode in contact with ground glass surface, pay special attention around whatever-class of compounds because these are potent sensitizers, or such. most of the time itās not there, because people that write it never used these compounds, and people that do donāt read that and donāt need reminder after that detailed advice propagated to them via what is basically folk tales from labmates. itās more useful to have a comprehensive chemical engineering handbook or similar resource (as searchable pdf) that has listed dangers for common dangerous reagents
from that second link upthread:
Experienced chemists know to go to sources like Saxās or Bretherickās for more useful advice, and tend to ignore safety data sheets entirely. But theyāre not really made for experienced chemists (nor, apparently, by them either). For more general users, you would want these things to do some good, or at least do no harm, but the idea of a safety data sheet that actually makes its readers less safe is really unacceptable.
An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (āappropriate respiratorā), itās your job to figure out what it is
Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh, still better than an LLM directly endangering you with bad advice
as if we needed LLMs for that. at least two of my profs have abstract tattoos left from experimenting with homemade explosives when they were in high school
as reminders? or are they just that metal?
(e: mostly unsure whether you mean ink or scartissue with āabstract tattoosā)
sorry if that was unclear, metal acetylides that they played with when ignited give off a cloud of fine metal particles and soot, they had hands close enough that these particles got embedded in their skin, permanently. so basically tattoo ink but explosively deposited
ah, gotcha. so, metal, but not quite the type I had in mind! no worries on the initial confusion, was just not entirely sure what you meant wrt mechanism
Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (āappropriate respiratorā), itās your job to figure out what it is
I lolled.
NSFW, Sterling on the weird language of LLMs
https://bruces.medium.com/preliminary-notes-on-the-delvish-dialect-by-bruce-sterling-ce68a476247b
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weāve reached some zenith of insane facebook AI slop
hot Japanese cabin crew, barefoot, on a farm, with Jesus
(image)
a deficiency of tractors in the training data
a deficiency of tractors in the training data
Just one more dataset bro, i promise bro just one more dataset and itāll fix everything bro. bro just one more dataset
Iām also glad to see that whatever incremental improvements have been made the system is still unable to consistently do hands.
But just enough fingers!
with south california band reject jesus, no less
we think thatās supposed to be Korean or Japanese Jesus, insofar as anything out of an AI is supposed to be anything
š¶ reach out and touch fAIth / your own personal jesus š¶
(ā¦sorry)
š¶ Three ladies! / deedle-dee-dee-dee-deet / Three ladies! / And Iām the Son of Man, Ja! š¶
Iāve been out-of-the-loop for a bit on the Nix drama. Is there a good summary of the last couple weeks?
Man there was a long thread about different forms of self-identifying as Muslim that was finally purged by mods after 2 days.
Evaluation is 5-20% faster than 2.18, depending on which benchmark is in use, thanks to eldritch horrors.
this is awesome
nix flake lock --update-input nixpkgsis now the much more reasonablenix flake update nixpkgs.but this is making me go āfuck yeahā on the inside. it seems like a small change, but I canāt emphasize enough how frequently this command gets used (for every flake dependency, not just nixpkgs) for how longwinded and non-memorable the old form of it was. itās kind of fucking incredible how many UX warts Nix has just from the old evaluatorās devs digging in their heels on shit like this.
which reminds me, I need to check if lix/aux are going to do a cli-side nixpkgs search with a reasonable invocation
what do you mean you donāt like when your package search command is one of several random, probably-unmaintained ecosystem packages that has to very slowly index everything every time nixpkgs updates because it doesnāt have access to the evaluatorās internals?
I keep getting the itch to do something like that old hfimd page for a variety of ops infrastructure tools, because fucking hell
Store path names starting with . are now permitted, fixing some home-manager issues.
Oh hell yeah
Medium article about Yud came across my dash (I hope the link works).
Hereās a link that bypasses the URL shortener.
Also: ew.
Perilous Waif follows the story of its narrator Alice Long, a cybernetically enhanced orphan with a variety of superhuman powers in the 25th century. One of these enhancements causes Aliceās body to grow very fast, giving her the body of a thirteen year old at just age six.
Thanks for posting this. I live in Sweden and many of these actors are new to me.
FWIW we have our own word for people who try to hijack the judicial system with spurious lawsuits etc: rƤttshaverist (ājustice wreckerā). I donāt believe the Roman/German law system really meshes well with the SovCit movement in common law systems, but Iām sure people are trying to apply it.
My god this sounds boring as shit
I really canāt imagine reading a book by someone whose vision of the future is āmen will be taller and have more muscles, women will stay the same height but theyāll all be conventionally attractive and have voluntary control of their uterusā.
Babel-17 came out in 1966, and its vision of the future was that a good shipās captain knows how to complete a poly triad and you canāt leave Earth without a full crew including three ghosts and a furry.
Now thatās the kind of stuff that makes puppies sadā¦
(New wave SF is a bit of a blind spot for me. Never really read any Delany, even though his autobio is one the best Iāve read)
If Books Could Kill back with Hananiaās piece of work https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/afe6b965e80359c1edbb86f78bde3997
opening line āThis bookās so fucking stupid, I regret choosing itā
Itās weirdly open about its nostalgia for the good old days when you could throw around racial slurs and watch porn at work with no consequences.
So remember when Google Domains got sold off to Squarespace because it wasnāt profitable enough and Google has the attention span of a squirrel?
Well that meant bye bye MFA for anyone who didnāt check their email diligently enough, allegedly leading to a number of cryptocurrency domains getting hacked.
The cryptocurrency aspect is mostly just funny, but Google and Squarespace should know better than to effectively disable MFA out from under people. Tech companies put profit over people all the time. And then everyone blames the people for not being hyper-vigilant about computer security.
Edit: The tweet linked in that bleepingcomputer article is funny if this was indeed the issue: https://twitter.com/pendle_fi/status/1811683909509558562
Some ādefiā company realized this could be a problem 22 hours before they were hacked. Even had time to write a tool to mitigate the impact of getting hacked. Got hacked anyway. Did they uhhā¦ IDK change their password? Make sure MFA was set up? They donāt say.
āAny messages beyond this tweet from anyone claiming to be from Pendle is a scamā
33 replies from scammers. Holy shit.
I know cryptocurrency people have a weirdly high tolerance for getting scammed and blaming the victim, but the twitter spam is constant now. Youād think theyād get tired of it at some point and switch to a platform that lets them moderate better.
presumes that people know thereās better possible
soapbox.gif: you see a dynamic of this sort with a lot of people who have largely only ever interacted with āthe internetā through vendor-mediated apps and shit. you can often pick up on it by people that speak in frames of āthis appā - the app is their gateway to that engagement, and they have never known substantially otherwise. and itās a day-vs-night type difference in experiences in so many cases! there are some sites that I outright refuse to even open on mobile simply because the anti-nagblocker/etc capabilities that I have on RealComputer with RealOS (i.e.: not some artificially hobbled shit run by a monopolist fuckwad company) just completely block the annoying shit, whereas it is almost impossible to have that experience on mobile
and for so many people, the latter type (of experience/internet) is all they ever know
hey if the cost of operations is a tweet (or an openai chatgpt api call) and the possible reward is a couple dozen suckers at $200-equiv, Von Neumann ends up with a hangover
Canāt wait to find out that the Perseid meteor shower, which has inspired humanity for centuries, is actually just Von Neumann probes from a long-dead civilization that spam their equivalent of tea.xyz pull requests on any planet that has advanced to hosting source forges.
ātoughened up our defensesā like adding DNS monitoring. so they just ā¦ didnāt have that before? for a user-facing public web service? cool.
(and yeah lol at how little detail the rest of this covers)
code is lol
all these libertarian pyramid schemes sit at convenient crosssection of high reward and low probability of being caught, which makes me believe that no good people were harmed in this incident
More details: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/researchers-weak-security-defaults-enabled-squarespace-domains-hijacks/
It sounds like Squarespace just let people take over domains without actually logging in wtf?
Whatās more, Monahan said, Squarespace did not require email verification for new accounts created with a password.
āThe domains being migrated from Google to Squarespace are known,ā Monahan said. āItās either public or easily discernible info which email addresses have admin of a domain. And if that email never sets up their account on Squarespace ā say because the billing admin left the company five years ago or folks just ignored the email ā anyone who enters that email@domain in the squarespace form now has full access to control to the domain.ā
