Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
new zitron: ed picks up calculator and goes through docs from microsoft and some others, and concludes that openai has less revenue than thought previously (probably?, ms or openai didn’t comment), spends more on inference than thought previously, openai revenue inferred from microsoft share is consistently well under inference costs https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
Before publishing, I discussed the data with a Financial Times reporter. Microsoft and OpenAI both declined to comment to the FT.
If you ever want to share something with me in confidence, my signal is ezitron.76, and I’d love to hear from you.
also on ft (alphaville) https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e7d5
ed notes that there might be other revenue, but that’s only inference with azure, and then there are training costs wherever it is filed under, debts, commitments, salaries, marketing, and so on and so on
e: fast news day today eh?
I doubt I’m the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI “pop” music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or don’t, I ain’t your dad).
tangent: I’ve seen people using this Bubblegum Slop (BS for short) in their social media stories. My guess is that fb/insta has started suggesting you use their slop instead of using music licensed from spotify, or something.
Third episode of Odium Symposium is out (that’s the podcast I cohost). We talk about Cato the Elder and his struggle against militant feminist action in the roman republic. You can listen to the episode at https://www.patreon.com/posts/crack-sucking-143019155 or through any of the sources on our website, www.odiumsymposium.com
further things: one, that’s the first website I’ve made where I wasn’t just plugging into a template, and I’m a little proud of it even though it’s almost nothing. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions
two, a future episode idea I have is to examine what I’m thinking of as “the trustless society.” it’s about the replacing of social relations with legal or financial intermediaries. Those of you who are long time buttcoiners will be familiar with this process. if any of you have specific readings to recommend I would love to hear it. I’ll probably mostly focus on balaji but anyone or anything will help
Pavan Davuluri is apparently the “president of windows and devices” at microsoft. I, for one, am glad that I moved to linux when windows 10 got the axe, before anything tried to agenticify my pc.
Also, when did “frontier” become “first in lines to drink whatever it is the cult leader is serving up”?
https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336#m
alt text
Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at #MSIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Windows and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!
“Agentic” is meant to seem sci-fi, but I can’t help but think it’s terminal business-speak. It’s the clearest statement yet of the attempted redesign of the computer from a personal device to a distinct entity separate from oneself. One is no longer a user or administrator, one is instead passively waiting for “agents” to complete a task on one’s behalf. This model is imposed from the top down, to be the strongest reinforcement yet of the all-important moat around the big vendors’ cloud businesses. Once you’re in deep with “agents,” your workflows will probably be so hopelessly tangled, vendor-specific, and non-debuggable/non-reimplementable that migrating them to another vendor would be a nightmare task orders of magnitude beyond any database or CRM migration. If your workflows even get any work done anymore at all.
#AngryGoose Agentic, mister Davuluri? Agent for whom, motherfucker?
Rolling Stone on the emergence of the ai chatbot psychosis religion
What if we turned a markov chain containing two decades of internet fan fiction into an oracle. Just spitballing here…
I want to keep bots from scraping my content because I don’t want to feed the slop machine.
You want to keep bots from scraping your content because you’re afraid it’s gonna learn how to take over the world.
We are not the same.
Iphone Pocket: Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth"
Not satire I superpromise
I think they need to hire an English teacher for their marketing department.
Introducing iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry ____ iPhone
Please complete the sentence, a smartphone isn’t a person.
Oh joy, I can perform a threat display by twirling it around my head like a bolo. I think I will get the pink or bright yellow one
More evidence for my conspiracy theory that all companies have switched their PR strategies to full-time ragebaiting. wake up sheeple
It’s like a thong for your iPhone
this is a more perfect description than any I could’ve come up! my thesis was largely on what a boon it would prove to thieves (although I recognize that flavour of thief probably varies by country and not all have them)
3D-knitted, or “knitted” for short.
“the concept of “a piece of cloth,”” will just forever live in my brain now, I suspect
Apple is Touching Cloth.
Not a scream just a nice thing people might enjoy. Somebody made a funny comic about what we all are thinking about
Random screenshot which I found particularly funny (Zijn rant klopt):
Image description
Two people talking to each other, one a bald heavily bespectacled man in the distance, and the other a well dressed skullfaced man with a big mustache. Conversation goes as follows:
“It could be the work of the French!”
“Or the Dutch”
“Could even be the British!”
“Filthy pseudo German apes, The Dutch!”
“The Russ…”
“Scum of the earth marsh dwelling Dutch”
You flatter me, I haven’t thought about any shit as cool as this in a while.
Geweldig!
I was told repeatedly growing up that they like Canadians over there because of the whole liberation thing. Is this true?
Yes we do. Lot of Canadians gave their lives for our liberation. (not just Canadians, which is why the Trump admin removing the sign about the Black Americans at the American WW2 burial ground here has not gone over well, but also the French gave a heroic defense of Zeeland at the start of the war, and the Brits, and the Polish (they got the blame for the failure of market garden for some stupid reasons, but they jumped late even when the operation wasn’t going well, after being stalled due to the weather)).
you know, if those ASML folks in dutchland weren’t quite so busy what with their EUV lasers and all that, we might not be in quite this same pickle right now,
Fresh from the presses: OpenAI loses song lyrics copyright case in German court
GEMA (weird german authors’ rights management organisation) is suing OpenAI over replication of song lyrics among other stuff, seeking a license deal. Judge rules that whatever the fuck OpenAI does behind the scenes is irrelevant, if it can replicate lyrics exactly that’s unlawful replication.
One of GEMA’s lawyers expects the case to be groundbreaking in europe, since the applicable rules are harmonized.
I cannot believe I am rooting for GEMA. What a weird world this has become.
What in the sweet fuck happened here, does this count as vandalism?
Fix0red
None of those are well defined “problems”. An entire applied research field is not a “problem” akin to other items on this list lik P vs NP.
Thank you for your service o7
To be clear, I can’t edit Wikipedia to save my life. Editor in this case was Elestrophe.
Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.
Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders’ themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!
Just so we all know, not liking AI slop code is xenophobic.
Definitely been seeing the pattern of: “if you don’t like AI, you are being x-phobic” where “x” is a marginalised group that the person is using the name of as a cudgel. They probably never cared about this group before, but what’s important to this person is that they glaze AI over any sort of principle or ethics. Usually it’s ableist, as is basically any form of marginalisation/discrimination.
E: read the link. Lmao that’s… not xenophobia. What a piece of shit
On this topic I’ve been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?
nope, you’ve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense they’ve been crashing the instance repeatedly.
when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki
i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine
I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but it’s also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasn’t even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.
Just a heads-up, I tried reading up on Iocaine and the project website is giving me the madlibs nonsense version on my phone’s browser, so I hope the version you’re planning to enable here isn’t quite as aggressive (the making.awful link is currently working for me).
Between this and Cloudflare’s geolocation provider no longer saying my IPv6 address block is in Russia, I’m hopeful that my browsing experience might ever so slightly improve for a bit.
making is running the version of the configuration I intend to deploy, so if it works for you there it should (hopefully) work in prod too
is one of the source texts for the markov chain text generator our old favorite Harry Potter fan-fic?
oh you fucking know it
also all 3 parts of Das Kapital and the full text of My Immortal
Markov chains to bind the basilisk
lemmy.ml by way of hexbear’s technology comm: The Economist is pushing phrenology. Everything old is new again!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38830374
[…]
Reminds me of the “tech-bro invents revolutionary new personal transport solution: a train!” meme, but with racism. I’ll be over in the angry dome.
That fucker’s going on the bitin’ list.
What does it tell about a scientist that they see a wide world of mysteries to dive into and the research topic they pick is “are we maybe missing out on a way we could justify discriminating against people for their innate characteristics?”
“For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing” fuck off no one is this naive.
I remember back before I realized just how full of shit Siskind was I used to buy into some of the narrative re: “credentialism” so I understand the way they’re trying to sell it here. But even extending far more benefit than mere doubt can justify we’re still looking at yet another case of trying to create a (pseudo)scientific solution to a socially constructed problem. Like, if the problem is that bosses and owners are trying to find the best candidate we don’t need new and exciting ways to discriminate; they could just actually invest in a process for doing that, but trying to actually solve that problem would inconvenience the owning/managing classes and doesn’t create opportunities to further entrench racial biases in the system. Clearly using an AI-powered version of the punchline for “how racist were the old times” commentary is better.
New singularity dropped and I’d missed it: https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/economics-transformative-ai/coasean-singularity-demand-supply-and-market-design-ai-agents
I don’t really see AI getting rid of ticketmaster or other transaction costs in the real world, so this is just some econ theory crafting.
users trade off decision quality against effort reduction
They should put that on the species’ gravestone.
