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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    22·
    2 个月前

    via mastodon

    image description

    a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:

    lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :

    are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.

    but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.

    but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.

    maybe you’re not being negative enough

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 个月前

      Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 个月前

      Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.

      Anyway it’s not that great but here’s my attempt at the sneer you asked for:

      “Additionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions.”

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        2 个月前

        Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 个月前

      Like a century of science: yeah we’re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. There’s no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.

      MSFT: hold my beer

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    3 个月前

    Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be “analyzing” the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”

    https://awful.systems/comment/4649129

    Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 个月前

      It’s remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He’s worked on that, but it’s clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn’t very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I’m thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.

      But you can’t convince me that you’re really the world’s best technical interviewer if you’re also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you’re suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who’s financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they’re concerned about where he might end up otherwise?

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 个月前

        The only thing I’ve seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 个月前

        Lex hasn’t optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee’s and the (implicitly) listener’s ego.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 个月前

        Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what they’re saying. I gather that it’s easy to empathize with and doesn’t require listeners to actually learn much since they’re essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.

        • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          2 个月前

          I don’t think it’s very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new “AI” major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that “computation” is more important than electrical engineering.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      2 个月前

      some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”

      Someone’s been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 个月前

        The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.

        Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasn’t really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          2 个月前

          It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it’s a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it’s a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it’s so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don’t the people we keep electing to fix it just… do that?

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            2 个月前

            Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn’t started using it and outcompeting everyone?

            There’s only 2 answers to that:

            1. the gold standard doesn’t work in the modern economy, the one that has lifted millions out of poverty and created untold wealth (to great environmental damage, sure)
            2. the gold standard is being kept from them by (((they)))

            Answer 2 is obvious if you’re a fascist.

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
              4·
              2 个月前

              Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.

              I’m familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they can’t print money and the populace doesn’t trust them to print money - so every year it’s more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.

              So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    2 个月前

    One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.

    Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.

    This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    2 个月前

    OpenAI manages to do an entire introduction of a new model without using the word “hallucination” even once.

    Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its ‘reasoning’ when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, it’s not really clear.

    Can’t wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don’t exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      2 个月前

      Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:

      bless you Melanie.

      Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you

      Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesn’t understand the rules of chess

      ^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)

      Dog tax

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 个月前

      Would there ever be a way to tell that they didn’t just feed the answers into the training data?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 个月前

      Every day? I dont think I have read that post at all. (This is both a joke and not a joke, as I had not read it, I did now and I was amused, so thanks).

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 个月前

      I immediatelly knew who and what you were talking about without even clicking.

      May the fact that he also lives inside my head rent-free be some solace to you.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    2 个月前

    Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.

    A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) “if you think that’s bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱”.

    Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 个月前

      quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isn’t doing it:

      Do you have any references/examples of this?

      tons

      rapid7 for example use LLMs to analyze code and identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.

      Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this.

      must’ve been another company then which i got confused with the name

      Good thing you have tons of examples.

      Right?

      e: you’ll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steve’s other posts are about

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      2 个月前

      Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.

      a new source of anxiety has formed

      in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I don’t think Lemmy’s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but it’s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 个月前

        awful’s probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and they’re one of the bigger operations around

        pro-tip: do not learn things about how TLDs work (and I mean the bit beyond dns architecture), it is cursed knowledge you can’t unlearn

        and with that warning delivered, y’all may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late it’s a gateway drug

        regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. AP’s identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/

        (e: good lord I was out of it when I wrote this post)

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        2 个月前

        .mobi? They became the admins of the file format? And they paid for it? Good luck with that. ;)

        E: me after reading the article. Ow god nothing fucking works indeed, that is dire. I actually checked the date to see if this wasn’t some old post. Nope 9/11 2024. Buffer overflow + lapsed domains.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      6·
      2 个月前

      I liked this comment on the HN post:

      Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    2 个月前

    I told one of my college professors I’d been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said “can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it” and without thinking I said “why would I use chat-gpt? It’s rubbish” and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.

    This was after he’d said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    2 个月前

    new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about “ontologically, is ‘superhuman prediction’ the same class as superintelligence?”

    why? oh, y’know, just things:

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 个月前

      I’ve clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn’t just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You’d prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I’m fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 个月前

      Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.

      I’ll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 个月前

      I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.

      Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?

      How did you go from “predict the future”, an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      2 个月前

      ‘This tool can do X at a superhuman level’ is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      2 个月前

      From the reactions:

      “With enough garbage the model will become sentient”

      “I mean thats how humans are raised tho”

      AAAAAAAAAAAA

      (There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).

      As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. “Holy shit, I think therefore I am!”

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 个月前

      2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution

      • Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
      • Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
      • Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements

      ah good, we’re still on schedule for that I guess

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      7·
      2 个月前

      you left the best one:

      First successful experiments in “temporal arbitrage” using quantum prediction models

      not only they know about “temporal arbitrage experiments” but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment

      • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 个月前

        Frankly, it just didn’t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 个月前

      how’s the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        2 个月前

        we have some dedicated Nix threads on FreeAsm, our community for open source stuff that might give you a good recap of the latest stuff. where I’m sitting as a former Nix contributor and advocate is — nothing is fixed, all this obvious fash shit worked so well it’s being tried in other open source communities, and I really would like a nice alternative to NixOS so I can finally release a lot of the Nix stuff I’ve been sitting on (and also because nixpkgs keeps breaking — so many maintainers left that some of the further corners of the package set I use are already showing a lot of rot)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 个月前

      the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      2 个月前

      The terms, concerningly, don’t give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be “unable to fully delete or de-identify” user data due to “technical” or “other operational reasons.”

      My villain arc is going to be turning into Thanos and collecting them stones just to enforce GDPR forever into cosmic law with a snap of my fingers.