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.)
yeah and I’m a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
Aella in the comments: I’m just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
Pepper
That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.
Woman good at science? Must have a man brain. Send tweet.
Oops forgot to be weird about jews lemme amend that white jews can also be smart even if they have girl brains.
not a single serious person in that thread lol. also is rationalist castle’s isp blocking scihub? weird that that libertarian crowd didn’t hear about it
Why am I getting James Somerton flashbacks
She can’t tell the difference between “the people who wrote the paper” and “the group that runs the website that hosts a copy of the abstract of the paper”. This speaks to a plentiful lack of curiosity. It reminds me of crank e-mails and sensationalist clickbait pages that say everything on the arXiv is research from Cornell University.
I’m not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And “no worse than the average psychology paper” is not high praise.
second take from me. Here’s the full tweet:
one of Earth’s top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work, open for all to read in a widely read venue on that science topic, where it will receive far more peer scrutiny than any lesser forum provides
I’m going to read this as a joke because he didn’t end it with a period, and he is secretly beefing with aella
After moving out at 17, Aella briefly attended college in northern Idaho but ran out of money after a semester.
Aella already has better credentials than EY
How briefly do you have to attend college to still be this clueless about how citations work?
well it’ll become apparent during first attempts at writing a paper that requires them, but it can be a very long time if subject is dense enough
Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, that’s not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but it’s still an achievement.
Ah more anti-intellectualism from the proto cult leader.
This does mean, as the standards are so low, that we all have a phd on Rationalism.
Ahh the missing period, an even worse tone indicator compared to /hj (youtube).
Both follow-up tweets end in periods, so I guess he transitioned to being completely serious 1/3 of the way through? Or maybe a missing period means a joke, a present period means he’s serious, and partial periodization means that he’s typing with one hand.
Glad I clicked the link, I was pretty sure hj meant handjob.
I am still avoiding YouTube, so I guess “hj” will mean handjob forever.
It’s clearly meant to mean /HalleluJah
I expect her methodology was great but I don’t actually know what it was.
Science!
cursed thought
…is that yud for “she’s refused to fuck me”?
cursed corollary to Poe's Law
Yud being secretly contemptuous of Aella is indistinguishable from Yud being horny for Aella
Many such cases
As background: the Kaufmann report that prompted all this is a load of absolute garbage. As discussed fairly extensively on social media (example).
As for Aella’s addition: oh god why did I read this?
The methodology was apparently running a “Big Kink Survey” which was “trending on TikTok” and had “very good SEO”. I suppose this is the right data needed to draw conclusions about what rate 14 year olds are transgender.
The whole this is also full of weird gender essentialism (I never want to read the word “biofemales” again).
I think this is evidence for an increasing split between afabs and amabs
But don’t worry she’s very pro trans (JK Rowling sense):
Despite having been cancelled by the more radical subgroups of trans people, I’m nevertheless very pro trans.
Which is why she wants to make a massive reach and be concerned that maybe trans people are getting too much healthcare:
I think it’s unlikely that 11.5% of afabs are actually trans men in a way that would last through adulthood. If my data is measuring any real trend in the world, and if that trend meaningfully increases permanent changes to bodies, then this high percentage might actually be quite bad.
… Nevermind that her data doesn’t even touch on stuff like rate of HRT, or regret rate; these “concerns” are all pulled out of thin air.
(I also lament that this makes things really rough for the trans men for whom this is not a fad, and for whom earlier transitioning would be a huge quality of life improvement.)
Like dear cis people are you OK? Is society not transphobic enough for you? :'(
Are you worried that if a teenager is allowed to explore their gender a little that it will cause a bunch of precocious little cis girls to accidentally glance at a vial of testosterone the wrong way and grow a fantastic beard overnight?
When I started estrogen (later than I should have and fuck you Idaho) I was absolutely 100% sure that it was the right thing to try, and that I’d stop if I didn’t like it. Never looked back (estrogen is tasty and I encourage everyone to try it at least once), and I had years before there was much you could call permanent.
But of course it’s not the “permanent changes to bodies” that made me a 6ft tall amazonian beauty that people like Aella are concerned about. “What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??” fundamentally assumes it is OK to accidentally withhold critical medicine from countless trans people just to be “safe”.
“What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??”
They always like to dress up these statements as medical concern. But it shines through that, despite whatever the person may express otherwise, deep down they think being trans is not really acceptable. Maybe partially acceptable at best, but should be avoided if possible. Very similar thought model to classics like “oh I’m fine with gay people, but what if my child sees two men holding hands and then wants to try it too??”
at://did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/app.bsky.feed.post/3m5z5da4mvk24
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3m5z5da4mvk24
Windscribe’s twitter account being transphobic.
Free speech can he expensive for dipshits.
Little late but just found out that Google has partnered with Movember to push Gemini.
Databricks CEO: “we’ve already achieved AGI fam, the haters just keep moving the goalposts”
WTF are databricks? LLM feces?
I looked it up.
boring answer
the company is a data analytics platform. According to wikipedia they promote the model of a “data lakehouse”, a hydrid of a “data lake” and a “data warehouse”. I don’t know what any of this means
Sneer answer: 100% LLM feces. Databricks puts the anal in analytics
So data lake and data warehouse are different words for the giant databases of business data that you can perform analytics on to understand your deep business lore or whatever. I assume that a data lake house is similar to the other two but poorly maintained and inconvenient to access, but with a very nice UI and a boat dock.
I’m pretty sure a data lakehouse is a database where if you insert data in it, it only appears two years later/earlier, and if you try to read from it, all the entries come from two years in the future/past. It’s very prone to predestination issues but can help with finding love
AFAIK data warehouse = regular database data lake = place to keep various files that don’t fit into DB
Data lakehouse aims to integrate these two, I don’t think it’s a totally stupid idea.
Yeah, fair. Wasn’t so much sneering at the idea of data storage, but the “data lakehouse” jumped out at me as a possible fun term to bring up.
The statistics back up his unease. Buy-now-pay-later services have exploded to 91.5 million users in the United States
with the rapidly checked population number I found (340.1m), that’s 26.9%
…, with 25% using the services to finance their groceries as of earlier this year
perfectly normal, I’m sure nothing can go wrong here. and this won’t be tied in with just the recent SNAP shit, either
what’s the german word for “the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up”?
It’s so weird to see Klarna on that list, because I keep forgetting Klarna is now a huge juggernaut, not the little service that every etailer here in Sweden uses for checkout services
let’s hope that the outcomes of this helps them become a weeeee teensy l’il curious financial service again 😶
Achterbahnschraubeninkrementallösungsaußerplanmäßigedekonstruktionsgefühl
no bolts!
but otherwise? I mean, pretty close.
(yes I did upvote this post)
wasn’t sure if it was “schrauben” or “bolzen” that were used in roller coasters 😁
I’d be lying if I told you I knew! my most interesting interaction with technisch-mechanisch deutsche has been through the lens of shorthand column names in an oracle db (where truncated col name length limit caused applied). no, not kidding. that was an interesting project more ways than one!
(very Choose Your Own Adventure db schema too, and I suspect I’m still among the only in country who have strong knowledge about it today)
what’s the german word for “the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up”?
The word you are looking for is “Tja”.
I was mostly riffing on the Internet Meme of “what’s the german word for…” but you are not wrong
My clients’ billing systems now send me invoice factoring spam every month, which is basically the same trade as a payday loan or bnpl. I worry how many other freelancers are clicking that button and how this has become so normalized, it’s bad enough out there already, without paying 2.5% per month.
invoice factoring
Is that somewhat new in the US? I recall seeing ads for it here in Sweden for 15 years or more.
For me, I started noticing Taulia spam via a clients SAP last Jan, and Bill.com started doing similar a few months after. I think the new part is that these are now integrated into the platforms, like how Klarna bnpl is directly integrated into the ecom storefronts.
jesus, that seems insidious
and unfortunately I speak enough ghoul that I suspect I know how that’s being sold, too! a way for companies to “manage outflow”? and perhaps a dash of “cultivating a reputable $x base” in there too?
nvm that these intermediation fuckers are going the standard Bridgetroll[0] route too, which is also a problem
[0] - rentseeker
most BNPL loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus, creating what regulators call “phantom debt.” That means other lenders can’t see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.
Only good things can come of this.
right? for like 18~24mo now, the autoplag “boom” and the fucked up neo-credit-arrangements in real estate (again) have been my primary guesses for how this shit is all going to up in vapour
and then suddenly a surprise third entrant!
it’s worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it’s 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i’ve found, so it’s closer to 34%
from what i understand, american anomaly is that they take debt like that even when not strictly necessary in order to pump up their credit scores which might be useful later, but even then, 9% of population relies on going to loan shark the app in order to get food, absolutely nothing to look at here, move along,
it’s worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it’s 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i’ve found, so it’s closer to 34%
yep, entirely correct. and the numbers will also only reflect for those that are loantakers/account holders (which implies an even smaller number), because only one person needs to take out the bnpl to groceries it up for family support
I just didn’t have the time to dig into the numbers properly this morning when I posted
it’s all bad. just every single fucking part.
And most stats are flying under the radar because the Trump administration has made it impossible to get reliable data on things. But at least we live in a rational market system that optimally allocates resources, so I’m sure the decision-makers will handle this situation wisely and—
Not wanting to be left behind, more established finance companies are racing toward BNPL now, too … What started as a niche checkout option is becoming embedded financial infrastructure.
Morris sees this shift happening everywhere. “When I talk to some of these software companies that are now embedding payments, lending and insurance,” he told me, “and you say, ‘Okay, five years from now, where are you going to make your money?’” the answer surprises even veteran investors like him. “They say, ‘You know what, I think I’m going to make more money in embedded finance than I am in my core software.’”
Continued Morris: “It starts off as a nice little add-on, but when the powers of the marketplace drive down the returns in the core business, it’s often these financing businesses that have the greatest longevity and market power.
“I’ve made a self-licking lollipop so the fun times will never end and I see no way this could ever go wrong.”
Checked back in on Framework’s rotting corpse.
The company’s retired their official Discord server (in the Blade Runner sense), about a month after the mod team jumped ship over the company’s fash turn. There’s discussion on the Framework forums about it, too.
Its not the only social media platform they’ve abandoned - they left Bluesky and Mastodon to court fascists on Twitter a while ago.
All the fash stuff is incredibly bad, but I cannot get over this:
I personally found a lot of enjoyment in the Framework discord. The format of a discord server is a lot more useful for chatting and discussion within a community than something like a forum (which seems a little more siloed).
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. EITHER YOU ARE INSANE OR I AM.
I feel like “we’ll just build a world model” is on the same level as saying " I’ll just solve the P vs NP problem."
Not content with forcing AI on anyone and everyone, Apple has forced the lying machines on AI-rejecting writing software Scrivener.
Many of these tools are useful, and don’t use generative AI – that is, AI that creates – but use AI to summarize texts or alter images.
Oh no, has this become the common definition of generative AI? I’m guessing some AI company must have tried to launder the name and make it seem less bad. Both of those examples are clear-cut generative AI.
In other news, it appears that Cloudflare has pulled a Crowdstrike
Claims to be against politics in the workplace, takes down rightwing websites anyway
can we print this on shirts and send it to their office(s)?
I guess the main problem is getting reaction shots with the recipients…
I would love this, lmfao
found this sneer-y blog post prompted by some linkedin lunatic posting his “agentic cockpit”
Sometimes, I get to peer into the AI pilled brain, and it is… uh… not good.
But now if I suffer from Imposter syndrome I can remind myself that some other people take advice from clankers.
https://bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3m634z3r7kk2l
Transcript:
The fact I can login every morning and ask an AI to review all my emails and chats from yesterday then given what it knows about my goals and my role it should suggest what I could have done better is amazing.
Bubble or not, AI is huge for personal productivity and overall improvement.
They say the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but outsourcing the examination to an LLM gives you more time to hustle and grind, maximizing financial returns. That’s what they mean, right?
relatedly, Josh Johnson’s video about this is pretty great. I’m afk rn but I’ll get a link soon and update
e: link
Of course! It’s to know less and less, until truly, the only thing they know is that they know nothing.
I keep wondering: is this really a need which many people fundamentally have, or is AI usage doing something to their brains?
To be fair though it’s not just their brains turning to mush, google has genuinely been getting worse too.
i don’t remember who said it, but they described genai as in some way reverse bayesian spam filter - so if spam filter can adapt to variety of spams, now there’s automated tool to flood the zone with spam that does pass the filter. this was used for seo with predictable results
feel like I’ve seen variations on that in a few places myself. would be interested in seeing a source, if anyone has. could be an interesting piece by itself
google has genuinely been getting worse too.
That’s a one-two punch of Prabhakar Raghavan publicly executing it for profit and the slop-nami drowning out human-made work via SEO-optimised garbage (indirectly assisting Google’s enshittification efforts in the process).
Publishers have been reportedly readjusting their businesses to account for this shit - combined with Google’s enshittifcation and the slop-nami, we may see Google (if not search engines in general) lose a lot of relevance due to AI.
Recently my research lead recounted a meeting among the senior people, where they hammered out a bunch of project pitches. Some of the wording was still a little rough, but they were going to pass it all through DeepL anyway, to make it read good. Also everyone’s bad at spellling these days, since you got a thing that autocompletes for you, right? They were proud they remembered how to spell “continuous”.
Sure, everyone has days they can’t word good, but this starts sounding like worrying de-skilling. These people spend a good portion of their paid time working on and arguing over wording.
slightly OT veering to the point: I try to maintain a relatively diverse set of feeds on muh socials, including finding people from other cultures and backgrounds in that. and yet I’d ended up muting this person some months ago for constantly being very Thotleader with borderline populist “edgy” takes that always have some pernicious shit wrong with it
this skeet is a perfect example of it.
Yeah, I found his credulousness about "AI"quite amusing. Like when he went to a wrong station in Japan, because he asked ChatGPT. And posted about it, not realizing how much of a dumbass it made him look like. But it’s starting to wear off.
But hey, he at least admits there is a bubble.
And also, I haven’t unfollowed/muted/blocked Mike Masnick yet. And he’s at least twice as annoying about AI.
Unrelated: Did chrome just detect me writing about AI to shill Gemini to me? (puts on tinfoil hat)
I unfollowed masnick but haven’t muted yet. been close tho
Internet Comment Etiquette: “Fixing the AI Coke Ad” nsfw, happy friday
Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms
Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation “feature”, guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn’t get him or didn’t deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It’s such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.
Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:
It’s indeed the case that I haven’t been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it’d had Twitter’s options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven’t been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Uh, considering his recent twitter post… this sure is something. Also" “it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience” no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).
From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their “Inkhaven Residency”. Feh.
ooooh photographic matthew embarking upon his f*shtech turn out loud at last?
Maybe? Or maybe they just had the right social connections to sell “blogging residency” as a thing that should be supported for some unspecified amount? I couldn’t find any more details.
Automattic has a budget for sponsoring events https://automattic.com/events/ but a web host based in San Francisco does not sponsor Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, and Gwern by accident.
Small forum tyrants
Mozilla continues to double down on AI, promising to “do for AI what we did for the web” in their latest (probably AI-extruded) blogpost.
In related news, I found a toot thread attributing the current shitfest (and AI’s popularity in general) to “a strong majority of even the actually well-intentioned, smart leaders in tech [getting] their brains fully cooked by these heuristics machines”. Where the OP is finding those “well-intentioned, smart leaders”, I do not know.
Hijaking the Mozilla mention to point to https://tabstack.ai/ again, the upcoming Mozilla-branded scraper API for AIs that promises to “stealthily” (their words) bypass captchas. Cos I don’t think enough people have heard of it still.
