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)
Bob Dylan has responded to a Bitcoin Groyper account
Ah, so apparently Google has found a new way to make Youtube comments worse.
Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.
I know you probably had no intention behind the number, but I just had to check. 2686 days ago was 12 June 2017. Pretty sure we’ve known about how google fumbles shit from way before then!
But users like engagement! Which means seeing that the person wrote a thing and not reading the thing and making a human connection with someone who is, y’know, engaged in conversation.
I know chatbots don’t track meaning, but I’m pretty sure words still mean things.
That will certainly improve the mh of yters who already feel they are under extreme pressure.
sammy boi is giving up on the pretense that any of this was about enriching lives, and is now only focusing on the eyegrab (archive)
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we’ll see
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we’ll see
I suspect we’ll see a fair amount. Giving some specifics:
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I suspect we’ll see Sammy accused of endangering all of humanity for a quick buck - taking Altman at his word, OpenAI is attempting to create something which they themselves believe could wipe out humanity if they screw things up.
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I expect calls to regulate the AI industry will louden in response to this - what Sammy’s doing here is giving the true believers more ammo to argue Silicon Valley’s may potentially trigger the robot apocalypse that Silicon Valley themselves have claimed AI is capable of unleashing.
perhaps saltman will have enough audacity to promote this as a way to ensure that some account is owned by a human, after flooding every corner of internet with ai slop and fake accounts
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A quick update: @ai_shame is quitting Twitter, and Musk using posts for AI training is the reason why:
here’s the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:
New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That’s water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here’s a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don’t have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.
there’s a (mid) joke here about how a boy who’s obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics
and who wouldn’t trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:
After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”
alignment offer
That’s sure a choice of words, ain’t it
this guy’s information diet is 90% recycled memes by volume, isn’t it
New piece from The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date
The full piece is worth a read, but the conclusion’s pretty damn good, so I’m copy-pasting it here:
All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.
Not a sneer, but an unsurprising development: Bluesky’s seeing a surge in users:
It really is incredible how bad twitter got to make me root for the company that thinks DID is good protocol design and that was started by Jack Dorsey.
But heck it I’m (cautiously) rooting for Bluesky.
This sadly has caused my login problems to reappear on bsky. No idea what they are doing with their service, but I’m having regular issues with the site. Also seems ‘downforeveryoneorjustme’ enshittified. (the image is showing a part of the site which is now an advertisement for some AI bullshit chatbot/imagegenerator everything aislop roleplay thing). (seems to be fixed now, but wow did bsky have weird issues for me).
looks like the name server is getting hammered
apparently those qualcomm NPUs (the “AI assist” chips in the copilot(?) laptops) aren’t very good
Thus leading to this sneer on HN. I’m quoting it in entirety; click through for Poe’s Law responses.
I was telling someone this and they gave me link to a laptop with higher battery life and better performance than my own, but I kept explaining to them that the feature I cared most about was die size. They couldn’t understand it so I just had to leave them alone. Non-technical people don’t get it. Die size is what I care about. It’s a critical feature and so many mainstream companies are missing out on my money because they won’t optimize die size. Disgusting.
gonna have to ship this person a 20d100 kit. maybe custom woodgrain? show some thought, y’know
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?
hang on I have another.
NPU? More like, N-Pee-eeeww!!
non processing units
inference-tasks focused coprocessor
cope rocessor
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.
who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto
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.
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…
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
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.
saw this via a friend earlier, forgot to link. xcancel
socmed administrator for a conf rolls with liarsynth to “expand” a cropped image, and the autoplag machine shits out a more sex-coded image of the speaker
the mindset of “just make some shit to pass muster” obviously shines through in a lot of promptfans and promptfondlers, and while that’s fucked up I don’t want to get too stuck on that now. one of the things I’ve been mulling over for a while is pondering what a world (and digital landscape) with a richer capability for enthusiastic consent could look like. and by that I mean, not just more granular (a la apple photo/phonebook acl) than this current y/n bullshit where a platform makes a landgrab for a pile of shit, but something else entirely. “yeah, on my gamer profile you can make shitposts, but on academic stuff please keep it formal” expressed and traceable
even if just as a thought experiment (because of course there’s lots of funky practical problems, combined with the “humans just don’t really exist that way” effort-tax overhead that this may require), it might inform about some avenues of how to to go about some useful avenues on how to go about handling this extremely overt bullshit, and informing/shaping impending norms
(e: apologies for semi stream of thought, it’s late and i’m tired)
I don’t know what’s worse, that or some of the weird twitter responses it’s getting
I can also hear Timnit Gebru wailing in despair all the way from my house, because this is exactly the kind of AI-reinforced bias that she was talking about while everyone was arguing about whether to listen to the doom cult. These are not theoretical problems with the technology; they are fully extant and easily demonstrable. The more these systems are integrated into processes that effect actual people the more often we’ll see this kind of thing happen.
why not both
fig. 1: how awful.systems works
25085 N + Oct 15 GitHub ( 19K) Your free GitHub Copilot access has expiredtinyviolin.bmp
it just clicked for me but idk if it makes sense: openai nonprofit status could be used later (inevitably in court) to make research clause of fair use work. they had it when training their models and that might have been a factor why they retained it, on top of trying to attract actual skilled people and not just hypemen and money
There’s no way this works, right? It’s like a 5y.o.'s idea of a gotcha.
This would be like starting a tax-exempt charity to gather up a large amount in donations and then switching to a for-profit before spending it on any charitable work and running away with the money.
i’m not a lawyer and i’ve typed it up after 4h of sleep, trying to make sense of what tf were they thinking. they’re not bagging up money, they’re stealing all data they can, so it’s less direct and it’d depend on how that data (unstructured, public) will be valued at. then, what a coincidence, their proprietary thing made something useful commercially, or so were they thinking. sbf went to court with less
There’s no way this works, right?
the US legal system has this remarkable “little” failure mode where it is easily repurposed to be not an engine of justice, but instead of engine of enforcing whatever story you can convince someone of
(the extremely weird interaction(s) of “everything allowed except what is denied”, case precedent, and the abovementioned interaction mode, result in some really fucking bad outcomes)
