Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post, thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    8 months ago

    OK this is low-hanging fruit but ChatGPT-4o (4o? what even is branding?) was demoed with a feminine voice, So HN discussed it. And a couple extremely horny users canā€™t stop talking about robot girlfriend sex and the end of relationships

    the western world is already experiencing a huge decline in womens sexual appetites ā€“ AI will effectively make women completely uninterested in men

    An AI girlfriend that isnā€™t going to bring up the last three time you fought because you forget her birthday/called her fat/hit on her friends? are you sure you understand the target market?

    I guess I can never understand the perspective of someone that just needs a girl voice to speak to them. Without a body there is nothing to fulfill me.

    And after that you have a robot that listens to you, do your chores and have sex with you, at that point she is ā€œrealā€.

    If you want to solve procreation them you can do that without humans having sex with humans.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        countries with GPUs

        Did this person forget how the internet works? Or is he imaging that people just buy a desktop to fuck (and that any desktopsexuals have not done so already. (keep that blacklight away from my dvd player please).

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          Itā€™s the same fantasy zero-depth comprehension as the chuds who thought they could transact in only bitcoin come the fall of civilisation, in the same delivery format: thonkwits trying to cloutfarm in hypewave

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      It never ceases to amaze me watching these tech bros breathlessly hyping the next revolutionary product for it to be a huge nothing burger. Like thatā€™s it? You gave gpt an image to text input + and a text to speech app? Dawg, Iā€™ve been watching Joe Biden & Trump play Fortnite for 5 years at this point, text to speech just doesnā€™t hit the same anymore.

      I mean my god, at least some hardcore engineering went in to making the migraine inducing apple vision pro. If this is the best card in oaiā€™s deck, I would be panicking as an investor.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      Well, I suppose dating a chatbot taped to a fleshlight is exactly the sort of relationship these people deserve. Self-solving problem.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        I have now looked it up and heard ChatGPT-Four-Ohā€™s incredibly obnoxious fake-enthusiastic advert person voice. These people are very very sick.

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          Saw that twominutepapers did a breathless stan video about the performance of it, and it featured some rather choice opinions about the ā€œvery naturally sounding voiceā€ too

          These boots must be made of something rather hardy, to not fall apart under all this licking

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      It got submitted to lobste.rs too and there are some insane takes there too

      https://lobste.rs/s/ph5o0a/openai_gpt_4o

      this model has lower latency, and theyā€™ve priced it at half of the previous modelā€™s price, despite it having comparable or better performance. If this is not a dumping price,[ā€¦]

      Yeah itā€™s totes more efficient, itā€™s not like Altman/MSFT are desperate to goose subscriber numbers

      Iā€™ve seen first-hand how it helps non-programmers write programs to solve their problems (with ā€œbadā€ code, but bad code is still empowering people), and I think thatā€™s important given that software has been eating the world.

      Couldnā€™t the thousands of people now free from mundane work, work together now on solving climate issues or issues that require physical human labor?

      if LLMs/AI can run byrocracies (and whole countries) more efficiently, there are potential energy savings there too.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Talking about the demo and not those HN reactions (they suck): So we all in tech have collectively forgotten the whole ā€˜apple iphones didnā€™t actually work when they were being presented and it was all just theatreā€™ thing? Because I wouldnā€™t trust a slick tech demo like that at all. (I also want to know about all the edge cases where it fails and well, there is also the whole ā€˜what is this even for?ā€™ thing). (And yes some HN people did voice these concerns).

      E: also donā€™t these GPT things have a sort of token limit? After a while they just get stuck in ā€˜cannot accept more new dataā€™ mode basically (which I assume is a limit so people donā€™t use up too much compute (I hate how we are making that a word now)), how would that work? (This is more about the robofuckers, who have also not learned anything from the previous gen of this shit when somebody turned the naughty cybersex function off).

      • Mii@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        Donā€™t forget about how the presentations for Google Gemini and OpenAI Sora and Devin were all faked embellished too, but no one talks about that anymore either.

        Iā€™m still waiting for even one actual use-case for sexy Clippy that isnā€™t generating SEO spam while speedrunning climate change.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          Some people at the EFF (or people who used to work there at least, apparently they sort of sold out, not clear on the details dont quote me on this one) prob had a small heart attack on the privacy concerns of linking cameras with openAI gpt systems. Chatbot powered advertisements, as seen in the movies!

  • self@awful.systems
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    8 months ago

    this one doesnā€™t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post thatā€™s best summarized as:

    I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and itā€™s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big ā€œLā€.

    Itā€™s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.

    [ā€¦]

    But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.

    [ā€¦]

    From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didnā€™t seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.

    youā€™ve read all of this shit before. itā€™s another ā€œcentrist democratā€ who thinks the republicans have really good points now that theyā€™re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what Iā€™ve quoted here. thereā€™s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. thereā€™s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.

    this post wouldnā€™t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:

    Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.

    In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.

    I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.

    and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tearā€™s name was George Washington

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      thereā€™s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (ā€¦)

      Ofc itā€™s not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of ā€œletā€™s move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucksā€ then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!

      You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      8 months ago

      lol this mcdonough guyā€™s great

      @nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who arenā€™t interested in that.

      yes itā€™s a cynical power grab by the woke mob

      and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each otherā€™s company

      • self@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        the woke mob that is, at various points in his post, either a large group thatā€™s taken over the Nix community, or a tiny and unimportant but loud group of marginalized folks, depending on what makes his point more efficiently at the time

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          [taps the sign]

          ā€œThus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.ā€

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Libertarianism is the ideology of splitters (which is sort of ironic as that is what they accuse ā€˜the wokeā€™ of being (which also gets combined with the oppression Olympics idea, ideas which are not only not compatible, but is a thing I have only see concern trolls use against things ā€˜ow you are protesting against the Gaza genocide? But you never said anything about the Darfuris in Sudan, which is a much worse genocide, much curious, I am very intelligentā€™) it is annoying)

      E: note on a bit of language used which was a bit of a red flag to me.

      I want people to know that the author of this blog post (another ex-contributor to the discussions) is not the only one who believes the process was corrupted[emph mine].

      The language used here is quite interesting, corrupted vs coopted, or some other word, as corrupted has implications of a profane/divine sort of thinking (which fits nicely into my splitting link above. But it is probably just more like ā€˜government corruptionā€™ than this divine/profane thing).

      • self@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        oh Sheaā€™s Zulip posts are a fucking trip too. itā€™s yet another straight up tantrum from the same kind of folks who think you shouldnā€™t get banned if you tell every moderator to go fuck themselves, personally, during a phone call

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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          they absolutely are

          loved this LWN subthread where another of these guys makes vague accusations, replies look at his actual posts and say yeah you should have been kicked out

          and this one where yet another poster laments needless politicisation and the immediate responses are ā€œoh itā€™s youā€ and receipts

          • self@awful.systems
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            8 months ago

            And actually just a bit further, there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech, so the one who is delusional is you

            ahahaha you know this whole ā€œI donā€™t see any problems in the Nix community other than these woke fuckers starting dramaā€ shit would be so much more effective if the folks saying that could stop themselves from following it up with the most obviously fash shit Iā€™ve ever seen

            also itā€™s kind of amazing how fast that second poster got recognized and called out. a whole bunch of way too high profile fash and neoreactionary tech weirdos tried to make nix their hill to die on (and were probably encouraged by the lack of tech media coverage of whatā€™s going on, allowing them room to control the conversation), but theyā€™re pretty consistently getting told to shut the fuck up by people whoā€™ve had the audacity to read their previous posts and know exactly who theyā€™re dealing with.

            this is the kind of response that makes me optimistic that we can achieve less toxic open source communities as a new norm, one day. Lix seems to be doing it right; Aux unfortunately seems to be absolute chaos, but its heart is in the right place.

            e: and of course, the new Nix governance structures getting this kind of negative, effortful response from the worst parts of the community is making me optimistic itā€™s going to work, in a way that the announcement and Zulip frankly havenā€™t yet. an outspokenly antifascist nixpkgs combined with Lix would give the fash parts of the nix community effectively nowhere left to go, especially if Nix or Aux does the remainder of the work left to make Lix the evaluator NixOSā€™s tooling calls into.

                • gerikson@awful.systems
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                  8 months ago

                  Whatā€™s the backstory with Devuan? I first heard of it from someone licking Andrew Leeā€™s boots after the Freenode debacle, and that instantly branded it as really suspect. But it might just be Debian minus systemd?

            • V0ldek@awful.systems
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              8 months ago

              there are not far right people in tech, because there are basically no right wingers in tech

              There are no rws in tech because there are no rws in tech, qed

              • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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                8 months ago

                Look by my definition you can only be a RW if you voted for the republicans in the past 5 elections, and there are not many of those, so he is right!

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            8 months ago

            The guys should just have been banned for writing posts that take hours to read that the mods then have to read and respond to.

    • self@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      I keep hearing this shit from creatively bankrupt folks and fash billionaires, because itā€™s very important to them that art and creativity isnā€™t for us ā€” itā€™s an expensive relic of the past and a commodity that only they can afford. itā€™s fucking ghoulish, but that goes without saying with Sammy

      what none of them seem to have an answer for is the obvious chicken and egg problem that their weird fucking conjecture leads to. if creativity isnā€™t possible, where in fuck did all the art come from? these assholes assert that modern artists just remix their inputs like a fucking generative AI, which is plainly false to anyone who knows artists or has even objectively evaluated generative AI outputs, but where in fuck did historical artists get their inputs from if weā€™re supposing thatā€™s true? generative AI copies, but thereā€™s nothing to copy from when thereā€™s no original.

      and thatā€™s not meant to give a single inch to these shitheads and allow the fash idea that true art comes from some fantasy version of history either. modern artists do fucking fantastic creative work ā€” when theyā€™re not shackled by the capitalist systems that keep shitheads like Sammy boy buying expensive, unchallenging art pieces purely as a tax dodge

    • sinedpick@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      Itā€™s hard to understand what Samuel Alternativeman hopes to accomplish by making such statements. Does he want everyone to give up on being creative and just defer to AI? Does he think that without a source of real creativity for training, his products have any value at all?

      • Mii@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        Heā€™s either trying to generate new critihype by making Clippy intelligent again (ā€œIt learns just like those pesky hoomans do!ā€), or slither his way out of that lawsuit by claiming it couldnā€™t have stolen original ideas when there have never been any original ideas in the first place.

        Iā€™m still trying to figure out whatā€™s stupider.

        • o7___o7@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          ā€œIt learns just like those pesky hoomans do!ā€

          Itā€™s Furbies all over again

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    8 months ago

    Did the Aella moratorium from r/sneerclub carry over here?

    Because if not

    for the record, im currently at ~70% that weā€™re all dead in 10-15 years from AI. iā€™ve stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending and the amount of long-term health risks im taking

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      Is increasing the amount of long-term health risks code for showering even less?

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        For the record, Iā€™m currently at ~70% that weā€™re all dead in 10-15 years from the moon getting mad at us. Iā€™ve stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending towards a future moon mission to give it lots of pats and treats and tell it itā€™s a good boy and we love it, please donā€™t get mad.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          As a moonleftalonist, I have increased my spending towards nuking all space travel sites (not going well, apparently those things are expensive and really hard to find on ebay), as it is clear that the moon doesnā€™t want our attention, it never asked for it, and never tried to visit us. Respect the moons privacy!

          Our secondary plan is making a big sign saying ā€˜we are here if you want to talkā€™.

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Ugh, this post has me tilted- if your utility function is

      max sum log(spending on fun stuff at time t ) * p(alive_t) s.t. cash at time t = savings_{t-1}*r + work_t - spending_t,

      etc.,

      Thereā€™s no fucking way the optimal solution is to blow all your money now, because the disutility of living in poverty for decades is so high. Itā€™s the same reason people pay for insurance, no one expects their house is going to burn down tomorrow, but protecting yourself against the risk is the 100% correct decision.

      Idk, they are the Rationalist^{tm} so what the hell do I know.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      If what you really care about is stemming the ill-effects of large and growing student debt, debt cancellation is a terrible policy. If you want people to consume less of something, the last thing you should do is subsidize people who consume that thing.

      Yes, I agree, once debt is cancelled we shouldnā€™t let people go into debt and attending university should be free.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        Also that is a weird sort of argument, how would people consume less schooling? ā€˜Yeah Iā€™m going for my 4th degree now, after Biden canceled the debt of the first one, I hope he will cancel the other 3 as wellā€™

  • Mii@awful.systems
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    8 months ago

    I know this is like super low-hanging fruit, but Redditā€™s singularity forum (AGI hype-optimists on crack) discuss the current chapter in the OpenAI telenovela and canā€™t decide whether Ilya and Jan Leike leaving is good, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk, or bad, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk.

    Yep, thereā€™s no scenario here where OpenAI is doing the right thing, if they thought they were the only ones who could save us they wouldnā€™t dismantle their alignment team, if AI is dangerous, theyā€™re killing us all, if itā€™s not, theyā€™re just greedy and/or trying to conquer the earth.

    vs.

    to be honest the whole concept of alignment sounds so fucked up. basically playing god but to create a being that is your lobotomized slaveā€¦. I just dont see how it can end well

    Of course, we also have the Kurzweil fanboys chiming in:

    Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves. Use the tech to upgrade ourselves.

    But donā€™t worry, there are silent voices of reasons in the comments, too:

    Honestly feel like these clowns fabricate the drama in order to over hype themselves

    Gee, maybe ā€¦

    no , theyā€™re understating the drama in order to seem rational & worthy of investment , theyā€™re serious that the world is ending , unfortunately they think they have more time than they do so theyā€™re not helping very much really

    Yeah, never mind. I think I might need to lobotomize myself now after reading that thread.

  • self@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    a crossover sneer from the Nix Zulip:

    This is an easy place to add a hook that goes through each message and asks a language model if the message violates any rules. Computers are about as good as humans at interpreting rules about tone and so on, and the biases come from the training data, so for any specific instance the decision is relatively impartial.

    please for the love of fuck kick the fascists out of your community because theyā€™ll never stop with this shit

    • pyrex@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      This is another one for the ā€œthrow an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performanceā€ category.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      This is using-a-sheepā€™s-bladder-to-predict-earthquakes territory.

      Do you suppose that an LLM can detect a witch?

  • corbin@awful.systems
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    8 months ago

    This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely thatā€™s not an actual ancap position?

    On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesnā€™t seem to comprehend that Iā€™m mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. Itā€™s difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.

    • slopjockey@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      My man spent 10 paragraphs failing to describe the intended vibe of the event heā€™s organizing. This is what happens when you only read tweets and substacks, you completely lose the ability to describe the immaterial.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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        8 months ago

        a dance concert led by the Fooming Shoggoths, with many songs that didnā€™t make it onto their April 1st album

        dunno about you, but that absolutely informs me about the event in fullness

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          Fooming Shoggoths

          On April 1st 2024, the LessWrong team released an album using the then-most-recent AI music generation

          No, nope, nononono, nope right off, no, nope.

          If the moon gets mad at us thatā€™s why

        • barsquid@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          They are a satire of themselves. You really can read only that and perfectly imagine how insufferable the event is.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            8 months ago

            There is also the ā€˜Creating the Fooming shoggoths after action reportā€™ talk where they talk about how hard it was to get the AI to make the songs, and to get all the raunchy popculture references just right without it making references to Ernest Clines poetry.

            • barsquid@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Iā€™d rather see that than the concert, but thatā€™s a pretty low bar to meet. They are spending more time tricking the autocomplete into working than it would take to write goofy songs directly.

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      From a comment thread:

      Other ideas we chatted about having at LessOnline include maybe having some discussions about doing research inside and outside of academia, and also about learning from GlowFic writers how to write well collaboratively.

      snerk

    • carlitoscohones@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      ā€œcozy/spaciousnessā€

      The Danes do not have a term for this, but if they did, it might be* hyggelig dimensioner*. A good name for an oversized couch at Ikea. Also, the Danes would not include ā€œwhiteboards everywhereā€ as part of cozy, warm, intellectual conversation, but hey.

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      If the house doesnā€™t have a roof, donā€™t paint the walls.

      i adore this line. because yeah, what i see the rest of the tech industry doing is either:

      • scrambling to erect their own, faster, better, cheaper roofless house
      • scrambling to sell furniture and utilities for the people who are definitely, inevitably going to move in
      • or making a ton of bank by selling resources to the first two groups

      without even stopping to ask: why would anyone want to live here?

      • Steve@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        thanks! I think I began saying that when I moved from digital marketing agencies to startups around 2011

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        keep in mind that the company heavily pre-filters for believers. that means that you have a whole set of other decision-influence things going on too, including not thinking much about this

        (and then probably also the general SFBA vibe of getting people before they have any outside experiences, and know what is/is not sane)

        • Steve@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          oh that reminds me of Anthropicā€™s company values page where they call it ā€œunusually high trustā€ to believe that their employees work there in ā€œgood faithā€

          Unusually high trust
Our company is an unusually high trust environment: we assume good faith, disagree kindly, and prioritize honesty. We expect emotional maturity and intellectual openness. At its best, our trust enables us to make better decisions as an organization than any one of us could as individuals.