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.)
Screenshot of an insta post of a screenshot of a tweet
Tweet:
I can’t believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI
Looks like Ziz remains on the lam again.
Neo-Nazi nutcase having a normal one.
It’s so great that this isn’t falsifiable in the sense that doomers can keep saying, well “once the model is epsilon smarter, then you’ll be sorry!”, but back in the real world: the model has been downloaded 10 million times at this point. Somehow, the diamanoid bacteria has not killed us all yet. So yes, we have found out the Yud was wrong. The basilisk is haunting my enemies, and she never misses.
Bonus sneer: “we are going to find out if Yud was right” Hey fuckhead, he suggested nuking data centers to prevent models better than GPT4 from spreading. R1 is better than GPT4, and it doesn’t require a data center to run so if we had acted on Yud’s geopolitical plans for nuclear holocaust, billions would have been for incinerated for absolutely NO REASON. How do you not look at this shit and go, yeah maybe don’t listen to this bozo? I’ve been wrong before, but god damn, dawg, I’ve never been starvingInRadioactiveCratersWrong.
The advanced sinophobia where the Chinese are so much better at everything than the west that even when they make better and cheaper bullshit machines than the Americans do and hand them out for free, it has apocalyptic consequences.
It’s wild that Yudkowsky saw a binary choice of “nuclear holocaust” and “superintelligence” and chose “nuclear holocaust” in the first place.
Like, even if I believed in FOOM, I’ll take my chances with the stupid sexy basilisk 🐍 over radiation burns and it’s not even fucking close.
I don’t want to say with absolute confidence that there’s no scenario I can imagine to which a nuclear apocalypse would be preferable (the real kind, not the Fallout kind). But I have yet to hear one.
I’m not going to link Andy Ngo but random rationalist transwomen are being accused of terror sympathy…and Aella is doing this ‘leopards ate my face’ dance.
edit: it was @jessi_cata who tipped Ngo off of all people.
Ok you brought aella up so now I can post this:
Heard this song for the first time the other day and it reminded me of aella.
side note: what’s a good way to post links to music that isn’t youtube?
Goddammit why can’t the murder cult story just stay morbidly fascinating? Now I’ve got to worry about implications and how the worst people are gonna use this as ammo.
i don’t think it’s the first time i see jessicata acting like a total piece of shit in her completely emotionless way and it’s incredibly creepy. she doesn’t even seem to be aware of the harm she can cause.
I was kinda picking up on that ugh.
Ngo is going on Newsmax tonight to do his thing in front of the masses.
Spent the last week playing with some security shit (thinking about a career change, since it looks like I will be mastering out of my PhD program) and fuck me everything about hardening your personal devices is exhausting. We are nowhere close to accessible privacy and security in our computers. The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.
Still deciding on a web browser. Used to be I could recommend Firefox because Righteous-Opposition-to-Google, but that doesn’t really track anymore with Mozilla’s behavior. Now I guess I would recommend Chrome, but it feels so gross (and I am unsure about things like Ungoogled-Chromium, for security reasons).
the basic laptop hardening
- Install Fedora Silverblue
- Be sure to set a good LUKS password
- Set a BIOS password and disable USB booting
- Rebase to secureblue
- Follow the Post Install Readme
- I personally couldn’t figure out how to set the GRUB password. I will probably get around to it eventually.
As far as passwords, the only password I have to memorize is the one to my Bitwarden vault. Everything else is stored in Bitwarden. The passwords (except for my phone PIN) are 16 characters if I ever need to type them in manually (e.g. LUKS password), whereas passwords that will always be copy-pasted are 128 characters. I am looking into integrating a yubikey, but am leaning towards “fuck that shit, why would anyone actually want to use this?” If anyone here has comments on this (am I missing an obvious pitfall? do yubikeys suck as much as it looks like they suck?) I would be happy to hear them.Anyway tl;dr is I spent the last week hardening all my devices and it sucks. In some cases it was a complete waste of time (my Steam Deck does not appear to have a way to set a password in the BIOS). In other cases (e.g. my Framework), it was probably worth it but a deeply terrible experience.
The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.
Depends on whether you include “my personal data is sent to the manufacturer of the computer against my wishes” in your threat model… Apple does many good things for security, and I wish PC hardware makers would take security-related things even just nearly as seriously as them. But I can’t trust Apple anymore either.
(Explanation: the whole iCloud syncing stuff is such a buggy mess. I don’t want it, I don’t need it, so I want it off. But I guess Apple just doesn’t test enough how well it works when you turn it off, maybe they can’t imagine someone not wanting it. The problem is, iCloud sync settings don’t stay off. Settings randomly turn themselves back on, e.g. during OS updates, and upload data before you even notice it. I’m not claiming that’s intentional, I assume it’s just bugs. But I’ve observed such bugs again and again in the past 9 years, and I’ve had enough. Still have a Macbook around, but I use it very rarely these days, only when I need some piece of software on MacOS that has no suitable Linux equivalent.)
While a PC+Linux setup can avoid the specific issue of “don’t randomly upload my data somewhere”, the setup of it all can be a mess, as you say. And then security is still limited by buggy hardware and BIOS/firmware that is frequently full of security holes. The state of computers is depressing indeed (in so many ways, security just being one of them)…
A note to the effect of:
You have basically no control over how Apple handles your data. When iOS users opted out of data collection, Apple still collected the data, they just didn’t allow third-party access to it.
is a good idea if I ever do recommend a Mac.
I don’t think I could ever recommend chromium-based browsers due to the MV3 switch. Does ungoogled-chromium do any patching to get around this? If not I think FF is the only sane option still.
I believe ungoogled-chromium does have MV2 support. Unfortunately, there are still real security concerns with Firefox. The good news is that Trivalent (a hardened version of Chromium developed by the Secureblue folks) has ad/content blocking built in. I am still mostly using Firefox, but the small amount that I have used Trivalent has been good.
- Install Fedora Silverblue
you can get banned on facebook now for linking to distrowatch https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-linux-topics-as-cybersecurity-threats-posts-and-users-being-blocked and from distrowatch https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews
but it’s not as bad as you think, it’s slightly worse. it’s not only distrowatch and linux groups got banned too
Hey, did you know of you own an old forum full of interesting posts from back in the day when humans wrote stuff, you can just attach ai bots to dead accounts and have them post backdated slop for, uh, reasons?
this was mentioned in last week’s thread
what I don’t get is why the admins chose to both backdate the entries and re-use poster’s handles. If they’d just tried to “close” open questions using GenAI with the current date and a robot user it would still be shit but not quite as deceptive
The whole thing is just weirdly incompetent. Maybe they just had everything configured wrong and accidentally deployed sone throwaway tests to production? I could almost see it as a way to poison scrapers, given that there are some odd visibility settings on the slop posts, though the owner’s shiftiness and dubious explanations suggest it wasn’t anything so worthy.
And on a less downbeat and significantly more puerile note, Dan Fixes Coin Ops makes a nice analogy for companies integrating ai into their product.
that thread is a work of genius and answers what the next tech boom needs to be
dicks in mousetrapsI MEAN whatever wastes electricity most, preferably with Nvidia cardsI do actually have a mechanism for using the sharp edges of NVidia cards for
dickmouse trapping purposes. And we could - hypothetically - use the extraneous power inputs to mine Bitcoin or something, maximizing efficiency!
This is from 2023 but when debugging an xfce issue this week I came across this forum post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16835
The user is competent enough to use xfce with Debian, but too incompetent to understand debug symbols is not a violation of privacy.
I get being privacy conscious and that sharing crash dumps and logs you don’t really understand yourself can be scary. Making demands of urgent free tech support from strangers is just rude, though.
gives a hell of a kicker to the numbers I found
Live: Chinese AI bot DeepSeek sparks US market turmoil, wiping $500bn off major tech firm
Shares for leading US chip-maker Nvidia dropped more than 15% after the emergence of DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese AI bot.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjr85l2e4l4t
lmao
Folks around here told me AI wasn’t dangerous 😰 ; fellas I just witnessed a rogue Chinese AI do 1 trillion dollars of damage to the US stock market 😭 /s
Is it too early to hope that this is the beginning of the end of the bubble?
Also, does someone know why broadcom was also hit so hard? Is it because they make various networking-related chips used in datacenter infrastructure?
When hedge funds decide to flip the switch on something the reaction never looks rational. Meta was green today ffs.
Pouring one out for the local-news reporters who have to figure out what the fuck “timeless decision theory” could possibly mean.
Taylor said the group believes in timeless decision theory, a Rationalist belief suggesting that human decisions and their effects are mathematically quantifiable.
Seems like they gave up early if they don’t bring up how it was developed specifically for deals with the (acausal, robotic) devil, and also awfully nice of them to keep Yud’s name out of it.
edit: Also in lieu of explanation they link to the wikipedia page on rationalism as a philosophical movement which of course has fuck all to do with the bay area bayes cargo cult, despite it having a small mention there, with most of the Talk: page being about how it really shouldn’t.
I kicked them a donation just for that
This is a good article, thanks for posting.
They’re probably talking about Ziz’s group. The double homicide in Pennsylvania is likely the murder of Jamie Zajko’s parents referenced in this LW post, and the Vallejo county homicide is the landlord they had a fatal altercation with and who was killed recently.
landlord was
killedstabbed in 2022, but recently they killedsomeone who shot one of zizians back thenhimwait nah i fucked up
In November of 2022, three associates of Ziz (Somnulence “Somni” Logencia, Emma Borhanian, and someone going by the alias “Suri Dao”) got into a violent conflict with their landlord in Vallejo, California, according to court records and news reports. Somni stabbed the landlord in the back with a sword, and the landlord shot Somni and Emma. Emma died, and Somni and Suri were arrested. Ziz and Gwen were seen by police at the scene, alive.
landlord’s name is curtis lind. this is about 2022 incident:
Early that morning, several of the tenants asked Lind to come out of his trailer home to help them with an issue, but instead “jumped him with a bunch of knives and swords, apparently with the intent of chopping him up and dissolving him in a bath of chemicals, which they had prepared,” Young said.
https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/27/man-killed-in-vallejo-was-main-witness-in-upcoming-murder-trial/
No no that’s right, landlord shot one of them to death and got a sword put through him but he survived. He was stabbed again recently and died.
noted, edited
That was my conclusion as well.
excuse me, what the fuck is this
Either Baader-Meinhoff or Manson family, not sure which.
i don’t think that RAF dropped acid but in revolutionary way
Also Andy Ngo has now picked this up and its being spun as a purely trans terror cell thing.
fuck
Me: Oh boy, I can’t wait to see what my favorite thinkers of the EA movement will come up with this week :)
Text from Geoff: "Morally stigmatize AI developers so they considered as socially repulsive as Nazi pedophiles. A mass campaign of moral stigmatization would be more effective than any amount of regulation. "
Another rationalist W: don’t gather empirical evidence that AI will soon usurp / exterminate humanity. Instead as the chief authorities of morality, engage in societal blackmail to anyone who’s ever heard the words TensorFlow.
engage in societal blackmail to anyone who’s ever heard the words TensorFlow.
no no wait this is geoff’s stopped clock moment
dude missed that Trump won and the people in power are Nazi pedophiles
Next Sunday when I go to my EA priest’s group home, I will admit to having invoked the chain rule to compute a gradient 1 trillion times since my last confessional. For this I will do penance for the 8 trillion future lives I have snuffed out and whose utility has been consumed by the basilisk.
Indulge yourself! Try an electric_monk o7 subscription today!
Spotted in the Wild:
Good news everyone: A new tarpit to trap LLM scrapers just dropped
