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 so 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    I hadn’t thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this:

    https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ribbonfarm-resurrected

    For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably won’t notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest it’s no longer a standard WordPress blog.

    It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.

    It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.

    The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. It’s fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.

    ?O kay? wget -r wasn’t good enough for a static copy?

    Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.

    This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora — ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.

    wat

    I suspect I’m going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self.

    why can’t you just make a tulpa like a normal person.

    well whatever, I’ll ask about the harari.

    Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

    what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isn’t em dash trigger happy.

    now I’m afraid to google farnam street.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      22 hours ago

      It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.

      I’ve got wordpress sites in production that each do multiple million hits a day. they’re full of some of the worst plugins ever (because wordpress sites living more than a few years seem destined to become hellish katamaris), and still it’s barely at “performance engineering” levels of problem

      so when I see $1500/y of hosting? what the fuck are these clowns doing

      • flowerysong@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        11 hours ago

        Paying to run it on someone else’s computer. WPEngine charge $130/month for the level of their Essential plan that’s supposed to handle 100,000 visits/month. That’s $1560/year, which is near enough to his claim that it’s probably what he was on.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          9 hours ago

          the first part wasn’t really a surprise (I am the someone else’s computer in a number of areas), but those numbers… 100k/mo hit cap/target? holy shit. no wonder such fucked fortunes have been made off wordpress

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        22 hours ago

        for comparison: you can get two boxes of tin (together in the ballpark of 32…48 cores, 128GB of RAM, approx 1TB of NVME or 4…8TB of spinnies) at someone like hetzner, with extra IPv4 allocations, for ~$1355/y

        I’ve seen media agencies billing in the millions host on less. and venkatesh posts about his blog needing “high end hosting”? the same blog that barely had css or images? absolute clown shit

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      I could just bundle everything I’ve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      6 hours ago

      Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

      I don’t necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systems’ lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what it’s going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesn’t do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.

      Ed: hadn’t realized that the guy we were taking seriously was the author of Sapiens. Gonna have to assume I was extending entirely too much charity in my assessment.