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)
New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.
And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this one’s thankfully unrelated to the article’s main point):
The idea that “[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitabletm” (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.
That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valley’s failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.
Eigen “Turn the Homeless into Soylent” robot strikes again
arggghhh no one can make me feel blind rage like this smarmy nazi piece of shit can
You know, I can’t tell if this is supposed to be “I know you’re saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but it’s more complicated than that” or “I know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and I’m honestly okay with that”.
Gonna guess the latter given where it’s coming from and the fact that the actual “more complicated” is a salad of non sequiturs.
eigen is squarely in the tpot crew
it’s definitely not coming from a good place
apparently those qualcomm NPUs (the “AI assist” chips in the copilot(?) laptops) aren’t very good
The what in the what now?
What a terrible day to tech.
(yes this post is a creative attempt at generating alt text for my image).
wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?
non processing units
Musk’s twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer
Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn’t not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script
the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends
have implemented jwt (used the library, first in the company)
so uh, they keep self-fellating on Twitter about how they invented their own CAD program over the objections of the haters
here it is, it’s an extremely thin wrapper around the typescript version of manifold with live reloading on changes. note that not only is manifold already a CAD library, they already have a web-based editor that reloads the model on code changes, and kache’s live reloading is just
nodemon. the server part looks like it’s barely modified from a code example. the renderer is just three.js grabbed from a CDN.it’s so weird they didn’t take the necessary 2 weeks to learn how to write the CAD parts of the CAD system they made!
hackers and builders (both in the a16z definition of) are some of the fucking worst things out there today
builder (derogatory)
the absolute worst type of coworker from my cubicle days: heard about a technology at a conference, decided they invented it
Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that’s not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.
Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.
(MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)
I almost want to go Twitter diving to see if kache has the requisite unhinged rant about how universities are only making quantum physics hard to get money/because of woke or whatever
e: holy shit I already regret this
yeah, 3b1b animations can take you through all of undergrad math in probably a month if it all existed and you used anki
We could bottle this arrogance and sell it as an emetic.
And besides, we all know that mathematics videos peaked with the Angle Dance.
Oh. He retweets Cremieux.
oh, cool, they also claim to be a twitter engineer. that’s probably telling too (if true)
i see your twitter engineer and i raise you elite promptfondler
jesus christ
twitter gon’ have nothin’ left but the cranks
Just guys like that and guys like this
This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.
our good buddy Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux aka TP0 gives a talk to Stanford libertarians
i haven’t watched this but i am confident it is the most cursed fuckin thing
one hour thirty frickin eight
Somebody on the twitter is doing an expose on TP0 (This is part 2, part 1 also linked).
Molly White reports on Kamala Harris’s recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.
VP Harris’s press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.
Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected
[…]
Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.
More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.
Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.
“regulation” here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don’t live in a sensible world.
Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.
who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto
God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.
This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.
the upside of it listing a pile of author names: one can go look up their published works, and add them to crank trackers if necessary (seems likely)
the ToC is some fantastical fucking nonsense
this is one hell of a hat trick
only needs a quantum chapter somewhere in there for bonus scoring round…
25085 N + Oct 15 GitHub ( 19K) Your free GitHub Copilot access has expiredtinyviolin.bmp
As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.
I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.
my bet: tweets that came to felon’s attention which he couldn’t view because the poster had block felon
This is a license for stalkers & abusers ! No surprise from someone like Elon I suppose
I’m really really not happy about this. There is one person I’ve been trying to keep out for the last few years and now they can come crawl all my fucking posts?? And report my account!?
Edit: apparently being protected should offer me some protection still.
He also put ‘everything you post is now training data for ais’ in his tos apparently. So nightshade poison those images and start building a following on other sites artists. (And as a non artist, reminder to self to like and repost more artists I like).
E: quick source
Bob Dylan has responded to a Bitcoin Groyper account
In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
(Rationally) “If there’s grass on the field play ball”
Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this
[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684](Roko gets dunked on.)
He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.
Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?
Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn’t seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.
Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))
Okay but “Elon is not smarter than me” is a universally true statement in the exact same way as “dumb as a rock” is a universally applicable idiom.
Indeed, it isn’t that Roko is smart, it is the bar is so low.
If he’s so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?
That launch happened Feb 2018. By that time, I was already solidified as a musk sceptic and didn’t pay attention to the hubbub. Thinking back on it:
- Why was this a thing?
- per wikipedia:
Musk explained he wanted to inspire the public about the “possibility of something new happening in space” as part of his larger vision for spreading humanity to other planets.’
What I like about the phrasing “possibility of something new” is that nothing new really happened with that launch. We’ve already sent all kinds of junk into space in configurations varying in impressiveness.
- Naming the mannequin Starman falls apart since the eponymous starman is an extra terrestrial. Just goes to show that Musk is not a Real NerdTM and just makes surface level references to look cool.
I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I’ll admit I did get a kick out of the “don’t panic” dashboard.
But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):
I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.
It’s backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can’t afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!
Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!
Why was this a thing?
Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.
🙄🙄🙄
Hope Musk’s existence and influence today was worth it, nerds from 2018!
Update: My previous statement was wrong, turns out @ai_shame is still around
Like Vitalik Buterin creating eth because he was mad his op WoW char got nerfed, we now have more gamers lore. J D Vance played a Yawgmoth’s Bargain deck.
the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over
We cannot allow a dark ritual gap.
“O Cent O Pence (R)” is an anagram for “Necropotence”
Trump is clearly campaigning on the critically overlooked black draw engine platform, possibly to spite blue voters.
Edit: “One Percent Co.” was right there! It’s all coming together now!
