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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
snrk
https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676
Iām going to start replying to everything like Iām on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why donāt you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? Itās not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.
Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.
Iām dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy
Um, actually itās called a
typestate.
App developers think thatās a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.
aww, does the widdle appās business model collapse completely once it canāt harvest data? how sad
this reinforces a suspicion that Iāve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because itās an all or nothing choice and they donāt know the full impact (because itās intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs
@froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.
There are so many features of modern applications and platforms that I have to wonder why anybody would have thought it was a good idea, this is just one of them. Sharing your contacts shouldnāt even be an option. As somebody else in this thread put it, itās not your data.
Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?
I doubt it, unfortunately.
sickos yes energy if true, sigh
@froztbyte Iām so unsympathetic to that notion.
Also, literally zero of my friends here came via my phoneās contacts.
@froztbyte @blakestacey
Let me play worldās saddest songā¦@froztbyte @blakestacey they fat-finger it and regret it later
wut
@froztbyte @blakestacey I really need to get on the apple ecosystem
A medium nationās worth of electricity!
Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.
Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.
@blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I donāt understand the point of contributing if you donāt think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.
There are the weirdest people who make ācontentā out there. For example, I saw a āhow to start the gameā joke guide on steam, so I went to their page to block them (to see if this also blocks the guides from popping up, doesnāt seem so) and they had made hundreds of these guides, all just copy pasted shit. And there were more people doing the exact same thing. Bizarre shit. (Prob related to the thing where you can give people stickers, gamification was a mistake).
I am disappoint.
āThe purpose of this project isĀ notĀ to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.ā
psst itās to search and destroy
no one has seen this coming, no one
@blakestacey heroes
I wanted to see how much lactose was in Monterey Jack, and this was the very first result on bing for:
monterey jack lactose per 10 grams
https://thekitchencommunity.org/the-nutritional-profile-of-monterey-jack-cheese/
Itās absolutely over. This is why every other search I make has āsite:reddit.comā attached to it.
And no, the site didnāt tell me how much lactose there was per gram
I canāt decide if calimisinit is better pronounced in a surfer bro or British accent, so my brain combined the two and I hate it
itās actually a function call,
calimisInit()calimis.innit()?;simple as
i think it might be latin
āMy name is Scroder Cher. I take care of the place while the Master is away.ā
StrokeSimulatorGPT
Iām just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:
āGPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent emailā
Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.
No no no itās fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle theāeloquentlyāshuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep theāmuch more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasisāhallucinated ones.
As previously mentioned, the āBehind the Bastardsā podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. Iām just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? Itās like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.
This is something Iāve noticed too (I got on the internet just before). Thereās a nostalgia for the āoldā internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And Iāve always thought thatās dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.
This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.
I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesnāt Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?
There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were ācorrupting the discourseā way back in 1991.
To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.
why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? Itās like podcast incest
Iām thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.
I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part itās the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.
The funniest thing I got was ads for Maybelline in a podcast about WW2. Know your audience!
(why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? Itās like podcast incest)
Because they think you live in a real country, not the USA.
old internet
I wonder for how many people this is a reactionary impulse, wanting back to the āold internetā they didnāt actually participate in. At least in modern days the flamewar posts are quite limited in length, in the old days they could reach novel sizes. Anyway sure we should go back to the old internet, where suddenly your whole university had no internet because there was a dos attack on the network to force a netsplit on an a random irc channel.
The YouTube version doesnāt have the ads
a user called ācrypto-bitcoinā raises an issue with the World Wide Web Consortiumās Accessibility List
Image description
Image shows user joined two weeks ago.
.
Yikes. Could be a troll (I hope itās a troll)a lost not very computer literate dude who just got scammed i guess
Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: āEven after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree withā
the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band
organisers: āWe have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.ā yeah you have a great show guys
By āliberal mobā he means āpeople who asked for their money back and arenāt coming anymoreā
I wish them a merry cable grounding fault and happy earth buzz to all
ah, sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension:
(This wouldāve been more shocking to me in 2023, but after over a year in this bubble I have stopped expecting anything resembling basic human decency from those who work in AI)
Not a lawyer, but wouldnāt that be something her estate could kick up some legal dust about? Thatās two dozen kind of fucked up.
My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of āthe greenest search engineā (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a āgreen modeā which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.
See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320
Iām starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.
Theyāre from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. Theyāre famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isnāt bullshit.
Under the hood theyāre just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).
I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was āuser demandā which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I donāt believe it.
This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder whatās up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.
That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.
Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username
I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I donāt know if I have the āpressā clout to warrant a response (I know I donāt)
I got a downvote for some reasonā¦
Some people just want to watch the world burn
It seems they undid it. Maybe Ecosia are on to me
So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with āWeāre living through a technological paradigm shift.āā¦ and right there I didnāt bother reading the rest of it because I donāt want to expose my brain to it further.
But what I found funny is that also today, thereās this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support
So Hololens is discontinuedā¦ you knowā¦ ARā¦ the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.
Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.
It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.
Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!
With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing lifeās complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. [ā¦], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.
(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)
Itās interesting that someone thought āsmoothing lifeās complexitiesā is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.
Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out lifeās complexities without smoothing out peopleās complexities, but itās not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and thatās if it actually worked, which it doesnāt).
Iāve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole itās hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but itās a shame we couldnāt as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).
Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.
tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.
call me when I can actually tange them
@V0ldek @sailor_sega_saturn sorry, these are Non-Tangible Tokens
perhapsā¦ one of the most
Load bearing words!
lifeās complexities
I donāt think thereās an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.
āLifeās complexitiesā sounds like an adam curtis bit.
re: how can a chatbot help with life?
This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.
A lot less, āCopilot make this list of bullet points into an emailā and more āCopilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactorā.
I think that āgiving microsoft the power to do things in my behalfā is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!
E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants
I think itās also a case of thinking about form before function. Itās not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but thereās still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).
I am neutral on MSFT - to me itās a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because itās not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But itās really impressive how theyāve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Appleās 1984 ad, via the āHalloween Papersā era where they were every Linux weenieās biggest boogeyman, to todayās bland backer of OpenAI. Note that theyāre not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilotās Recall feature also know theyāre the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and theyāre only separate so OpenAIās reputation doesnāt stain MS.
Despite the industryās deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.
I canāt help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to ācoding for non-programmersā akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet thereās a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.
Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now theyāre actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)
And now theyāre actually Open Source!
Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromiumās case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).
You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but letās not kid ourselves. They wouldnāt need to openwash if most of their stuff werenāt still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.
And now theyāre actually Open Source
sorta, but itās a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)
one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains
Today in āPromptfondler fucks around and finds out.ā
So Iām guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesnāt end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesnāt actually understand what itās doing or when to stop, especially when itās being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesnāt remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.
Emphasis added.
āI only had this problem because I was very reckless,ā he continued, "partially because I think itās interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it āwhen youāve finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,ā I wouldnāt have had this problem.
just instruct it ābe sentientā and youāre good, why donāt these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?
so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:
āÆ pbpaste| wc -c 2063wow, so efficient! Iām so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection
these fucking people
Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Letās try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:
there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)
if it were me, Iād be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers donāt seem to have that awareness
wat
Thanks for sharing this lol
itās a classic
similarly, Mickens talks. if you havenāt ever seen āem, thatās your next todo
But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!
I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:
Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.
OMG. This is borderline unhinged behaviour. Yeah, letās just give root permission to an LLM and let it go nuts in prod. What could possibly go wrong?
(Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)
āGen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764ā:
Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:
This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that āAI trainingā has become synonymous with āart theft/copyright infringementā in the public consciousness.
Between AI bros publicly scraping against peopleās wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMsā datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldnāt blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.
I researched cool topics using ChatGPT, Claude, Google
Thatās not what research means, you embossed carbuncle.
I linked NotebookLM to the Wikipedia entry of each topic and generated the podcast audio
Itās fucking James Somerton with extra steps!
Back in my day, you had to create your own kooky āevidenceā for conspiracies.
ācuratedā
it shouldnāt surprise me that the dipshit who was massively involved in āsolving languageā doesnāt understand the meaning of words, but grrrrr
(and I say that as an armchair linguist who understands that language is as people use it (fuck prescriptivism))
dipshit who was massively involved in āsolving languageā
āIn the what now?ā, he said, voice trembling with a mixture of horror and excitement
2015 - I was a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI.
proudly displayed on his blog timeline
Wait, did OpenAI claim somewhere they will āsolve languageā?
no, thatās a personal extrapolation/framing characterising some of the shit Iāve seen from these morons
(they engaged with very few linguists in the making of their beloved Large Language Models, instead believing they can just data-bruteforce it; this plan gone as well as has been observed)
The horror. Replacing the joy of looking into something and making your findings available in your own style to others replaced by autogenerated slop. And soon this will be all over the place, we will look back on the past period of low effort clickbait with nostalgia.
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1841848120897912967#m
jfc
Edit: replaced screenshot of tweet + description with link to tweet
jesus christ, as if āpodcastsā consisting of random idiots regurgitating wikipedia werenāt bad enough as it is
aaaaaaaah
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
itās like heās purposefully trying to think as little as possible
thinking needs many strawberry reasoning tokens! maybe these grifters just arenāt as rich as they portray
canāt tell if serious
ā¦ā¦pwahahahaha
āif only you knowā in the purest form Iāve seen all week
I was thinking this
Aw man, now thatās a blast from the past!
with all the arch and OS fuckery, Iāve been starting to ponder what itāll take to run games in coming years
and all the shit locked in on steamā¦
from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:
and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders
nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects
oh, whatās that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then
a debt in the special non-financial sense
the miracle of VC is learning to write like ChatGPT
ah, the special non-financial sense, you mean blood debts? I think many of us will be happy to hold tan et co to account for blood debts
a land acknowledgement for the open source theyāre trampling on and will keep trampling on
Theyāre getting paid in āexposureā
