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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Nice and lengthy sneer against AI in academia came out a couple days ago - highly recommend reading.
Cloudflare CTO calls the vercel CEO “Triangle man”: https://nitter.net/dok2001/status/1963611108998095246
Found here: https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/41781c11-4524-4279-8945-6e6ffa3c523c
Is “triangle man” a slur I’m unaware of or a goofy name to be calling someone for whatever reason?
@yellowcake @irelephant it’s… from a TMBG song
Vercel’s logo is a triangle. Unless there’s extra context I’m missing.
Small point, but I heard nitter is run by chuds, xcancel is better.
E: I always get clowdstrike and cloudflare confused, which were the ones who protected the nazis again and which ones were the ones who took down the internet for a day? ;) (Ha, the last page even leaves out this incident)
Are you thinking of nitter.poast.org? That’s run by the same guy behind poa[.]st, a really awful pleroma instance.
iirc, xcancel.com became popular before nitter.net was revived.
I don’t know the guys behind it, just repeating what others have heard. I’d have included a source if I had one sorry.
Promptfondlers on lobste.rs are unhappy about the tag “vibecoding”, used to denote development using GenAI. I’d not recommend reading the thread, just want to observe that if slop coding had actually taken the coding world by storm, I doubt there would be much pearl clutchign about how slop-slingers are treated on the site. We’re talking about people willing to pay Scam Altman money monthly after all.
shoutouts to @dgerard@awful.systems and @mawhrin@circumstances.run for reminding me that Steve Klabnik being really shitty isn’t a temporary state of affairs
Anthropic to pay 1.5 billion to authors
That’s… quite a bit. I wonder if we’ll start to see more complaints about people reaching their token limit “prematurely” or if Anthropic will release a $1000/month “unlimited” plan or something like that.
given the run rates all these fuckers have, I half expect they feel glad it’s “as low as it is”. couple of the authors I’ve seen speak about it reckon pay out better to them (once off) than they tend to get from book royalties (I saw chisnall and some others post around it earlier). precedent from this is probably a good thing, even if I wish it went harder (esp given how likely “a fine you can afford is just a tax” is to develop as a normal situation)
re burn rates: openai confirmed in the last day or so that it expects a $118b burn through 2028. fucking obscene
According to the article, it could be higher than 1.5 billion, though by how much they don’t really say. But they’re estimating about $3000 per book. For a class action that actually seems extremely high.
But compared to the anti piracy fines for sharing music from decades ago it is pretty low.
Saw people suggest it was because the judge doesnt want to kill the goose that is laying pyrite eggs.
yep, I was seeing some folks reckon it might be 20~30x what they’d make in later royalties. I’m not knocking the suit or the value to authors - mostly just wishing it were more so it might cause an even sharper effect
there’s a place called r/nuclearweapons where people come, collect declassified and FOIA’d info, do some maths and speculate on how nukes work. 7d ago they had an incident where reddit admin removed a couple of posts from one user https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n4c1i3/we_had_a_thing_happen/ head mod stepped down in a response
four days later this thing surfaced https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n75vej/our_schmuck_from_doge/ linked article https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5464437-ai-nuclear-weapon-detection/
so probable sequence of events is that someone from anthropic talked up some bozo from doe or somewhere else, bozo from doe ran confabulation engine on some part of internet, and then notified/threatened reddit admin, who complied by removing some rando’s account. whoa they must have saved quadrillions of americans by that brave action
why is everything about these people so fucking stupid
access to nukes is limited by availability of fissile material. not maths of it, not supremely complex engineering because it’s not that hard, not by money, not by access to ores, not anything else. it just requires one of two very specific, expensive and slightly dangerous to operate facilities which is well within budget of any serious state actor and unless diplomatic or military action is taken, a state that decides to get nukes will get them. this is the case now and has been for the last 50 years or so
but yeah some idiots wowed by chatbot will Save the World. this also puts that weird block on claude’s biology topic filter in much stupider and doomerist light e: it does not escape my attention that thehill ran an article based entirely on anthropic blog post
96% accuracy. So… unusable. That is an extremely high rate of failure.
Imagine how often it triggers on just people talking about hearts of iron 4 alone.
E: read more about it:
we achieved a 94.8% detection rate for nuclear weapons queries and zero false positives
‘zero false positives’ Sure bud.
Its a real fun subreddit if you’re into that kind of thing.
I love how one of the benefits of crypto is anonymous money, but you have to upload an ID to buy some anyway.
I love how it’s a public ledger of transactions so once a wallet can be identified to an owner, everyone can see what you’ve done. Not very great system to keep anonymous.
And if you want to avoid that, you have to use a coin with some form of automatic money laundering built in (e.g. Monero), which brings its own legal problems for you and everyone working with you.
I’m just hoping GNU taler ends up being good, because it seems like it could be big.
the GNU HURD of money
to elaborate, Taler has been busy going nowhere for coming on ten years now. There is no reason to expect it will do anything. It doesn’t do anything ordinary non-nerds don’t already get from money.
Given this, and its track record of going nowhere, how does it seem like it could be big?
(I once had rms email me personally asking me to publicise Taler on my blockchain blog. I never got around to it because I couldn’t find anything interesting to say about it. Literally its only point of interest is the GNU label, same as the only reason anyone knows about Hurd.)
Hopefully it doesn’t go the way of GNU Hurd
The “solution” crypto-people have for this is to go to a “bitcoin meetup” and give people cash there. Or use an exchange that just ignores the regulation.
I am not going to a fucking crypto-meetup just so I can send someone €10 worth of bitcoin.
The common clay of the new west:
transcript
ChatGPT has become worthless
[Business & Professional]
I’m a paid member and asked it to help me research a topic and write a guide and it said it needed days to complete it. That’s a first. Usually it could do this task on the spot.
It missed the first deadline and missed 5 more. 3 weeks went by and it couldn’t get the task done. Went to Claude and it did it in 10 minutes. No idea what is going on with ChatGpt but I cancelled the pay plan.
Anyone else having this kind of issue?
I am extremely, extremely sickos.png for having all these weird little fucks find out that all this nonsense is heavily subsidised by VCs
Same here. The world’s been forced to deal with these promptfucks ruining everything they touch for literal years at this point, some degree of schadenfreude at their expense was sorely fucking needed.
replacing ChatGPT with a script that replies “Great, I’ll finish that for you by ${Date.Now() + 86400}”
I just found out the name of Scott Alexander’s psychiatry practice (Lorien Psychiatry) is a Lord of the Rings reference, so my guess as to direct Thiel money just went way up
Not totally in our wheelhouse, but seems like the Abundance movements has a bit of a right wing speaker problem: https://bsky.app/profile/therealbrent.bsky.social/post/3lxzn3lxqo22b
Oh Abundance, the repackaging of Reaganomics by liberals to court conservatives, is having a conference and has booked right wing speakers? Nobody could have predicted this
OpenPhilanthropy has been seeding (b) a bit of money to local liberal activist groups but (a) guys to get them to do Abundance shit, under that name, then the guys play coy about the EA agenda
source: talking to people wondering who the fuck these weirdos were. they said “OpenPhilanthropy” and I went “ohhh boy have I got some disconcerting news for you”
I’m not sure if it wasn’t actually Reaganomics repackaged by conservatives to court liberals.
I looked into this because I was curious. There’s a wikipedia article that discusses abundance, titled “supply-side progressivism”)
So it appears the earliest mention of liberal tinted Reaganomics is Miles Kimball’s opening blog post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal” on his blog “Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal.” I am not going to investigate his politics at any real depth, so I’d say he’s mostly a liberal/centrist.
I think my understanding of “abundance” before reading that wiki page was that known liberal quantities Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book on it, and therefore must have invented it.
oh no Kimball: "Astral Codex Ten—and its prior incarnation, Slate Star Codex—is one of my favorite blogs. "
Another link he posted last year: “Richard Hanania’s Argument for Legalizing Euthanasia”
Also he seems to be more of a “classical liberal” than what people tend to consider a liberal in the left-of-center sense.
“Classical liberal” usually registers to me as a libertarian/paleoconservative trying to mainstream themselves.
Yes this. Libertarian yahoos in waistcoats. “I’m not one of those people, I am dignified.”
that’s a big oof from me dawg.
RE: “liberal” as a label: the way that I define “liberal” is pretty much purely in the classical sense, and it still covers the “modern” “left-of-center” sense, because someone who claims to be a left-liberal that still supports the underlying liberal politics is actually disconnected from any actual leftist ideology. Most left-liberals are willing to throw actual leftists and leftist causes under the bus so that their
sports teamparty can get into power.When I said “repackaged by conservatives to court liberals” I was using ‘liberal’ in the common sloppy American sense where it just means someone on the center left to left, as opposed to the “progressive shop talk” sense of “ratfucking centrists”.
Ah yes, im a classical liberal of the style of Locke how he thought about slavery, that kind of classical stuff.
Yes, I posted it here so we can all pretend to be shocked a bit.
Yet another lawsuit has hit Midjourney, this time coming from Warner Bros Discovery.
Did you guys know Hugo de Garis went full time MGTOW a few years back?
I didnt know anything about him, not even who he was, but DuckDuckGo search suggestions suggested I search for him and mgtow, so the search engine knew. First link shows he isn’t mgtow, he is a masculinist. https://profhugodegaris.wordpress.com/masculisting-the-mgtows/
His wikipage on his beliefs is wild. Legit beliefs skynet or eclipse phases TITANs will attack.
Quote from his site a free book he provides: “MASCULISM : Men’s Rebellion Against Being Manslaves to Women, An e-Textbook of 370+ Masculist Flyers for Men’s Studies Courses””
Manslaves rise up you have nothing to lose
but your money in the divorceas half your stuff was hers anyway.is this where Yud gets his style from? jesus fuck.
The more you read the worse it gets. And sadly, no all these manosphere dweebs write like this.
(A lot of them also credit Heartiste, which is why his popularity, enough for Scott to publish the anti-heartiste faq, which he didnt write. Was such a bad sign. (Also the guy is a neo-nazi racist, openly hated black and jewish people)).
Edit: And from Hugos blog: (source: https://profhugodegaris.wordpress.com/masctemp/)
“With a video you get not only the content, but can also see the emotion behind the content. Initially I only put up a video link to YouTube, but since the CEO of YouTube is a Jewish feminazi who censors and even terminates whole masculist and MGTOW video channels”
Look anti-Semitism. The fucker.
First thought: “Who?”
Second thought: “No, Hugo”
Anyway, I know nothing about this guy. His wiki page listed an imdb page, and know you get to know that he has a Bacon number of 3.
after that Flock shit that got announced recently, looks like garry tan is currently doing his damnedest to ensure people know he’s absolutely full of it
thread starts here, features bangers like this
You’re thinking Chinese surveillance
US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
“nooooo, we’re the good kind of boot to have on your face! we’re the boot from the same country as you!” says the boot in the rising fascist upswing
your periodic reminder: don’t listen to Garry Tan, unless maybe he’s doing a tequila review
oh absolutely no intention of listening to the dork, just had to share the suffering once I saw the tweet
I’m fighting an uphill battle, but people in general still need to see it
New premium column from Ed Zitron: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI
This is truly nothing: Aella (credited as Aella Martin) has a Bacon number of 3
Enemy of awful systems Malcolm Gladwell is a full throated transphobe
that “90%” of the audience was “on [Tucker’s] side” but had been unwilling to admit it.
Why are transphobes always this full of shit. Polls always disagree with this, and it cant be ‘people are afraid to speak out out of fear’, as there seem to be very little consequences to just being a lowkey transphobe. Hell even raging transphobes who stalk people, assault kids, and call for violence in what can only be called a life destroying obsession with trans people get defended by the people in power. There is very little reason for people to lie on polls over this.
Also dislike the focus on ‘trans women’ as these whole shitty arguments forget trans men exist. (This seems to be a general problem sadly, trans men, same as intersex people, or detransitioners tend to be only brought up like gotcha arguments, and not much to discuss the different problems they also face. Obv, I’m also doing that here, so I’m not immune)
@Soyweiser @swlabr Reminds me.of Nixon’s weird claim of being backed by a “silent majority.”
I’ve heard two versions of this from historians. One claims that he was deluded enough to claim that everyone actually secretly backed him and was just unwilling to actually say so for some reason.
The other said that he meant the dead, on his quest to throw more lives at a cause that has already claimed so many.Populist groups pull that shit a lot. Wilders also keeps claiming we should all do what he wants because people voted for him (a scary and depressingly large group, but not a total majority). It is a way of trying to get more democratic power behind you than you should really have looking at the democratic support you have alone at least in the case of politics. It also is often just delusional.
I recall a neo-nazi guy being kicked from a bar once while he loudly (and alone, the whole place fell silent, was a massive vibe shift) started to sing what I think was the horst wessel song (I was not familiar with the song at the time, so this is my guess), and while he was being kicked out he shouted that everybody else agreed with him and was just afraid to say it. Whole group of metalheads/etc like that suddenly silent and a vibe of ‘something shit is going down’. Was a weird moment.
fuck, i can’t imagine someone doing this, even though we do have fascists and neonazis in poland, but man, horst-wessel-lied is a fist-in-the-face offence level.
Yeah Im not totally sure it was that song, but it was a neonazi/nazi song, and he was ejected very fast by the bartenders.
Why is it always transphobia with these kinds of people… is it because they feel racism is too risky? So they need a different outlet for hating on people based on what they believe is “science”?
the answer to all those is yes. To synthesise the bigger idea, as the saying goes: scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds. Gladwell caters to a huge audience that is centrist, leaning somewhat liberal (though he flirts constantly with race science and straight up racism, see his writings on Korean Air). As liberals move towards fascism, so must he. Of course, it’s the most marginalised that are going to be targeted first.
