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.)

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    5 小时前

    what are some of the all time most ludicrous and/or bigoted lesswrong posts? i am starting a podcast where my cohost and i show each other shockingly weird or bigoted texts and discuss them. mostly we’re doing historical ones but rationalist stuff is fair game

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      7 小时前

      This author touches on a point that dovetails with my thinking:

      Dijkstra, in “On the foolishness of ‘natural language programming’,” wrote, rather poignantly: “We have to challenge the assumptions that natural languages would simplify work.” And: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulation, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”

      I think it likely that these tools will not be judged, in the long term, by the ambitions and hopes of the AGI cultists and hype-men, but by comparison to the many other attempts at natural-language programming in English. Smalltalk, Visual Basic, I even want to throw in AppleScript, as simple and threadbare as it was. How are all of these doing now?

      AppleScript has been complemented or perhaps superseded by at least two more graphically-oriented attempts at system automation targeted at non-technical users. One could argue that its falloff came from an imperfect marriage with the message-passing/service-oriented architecture based on Objective-C and inherited from NeXT in Mac OS X, a system design which is itself now vestigial. The comparison with LLM coding assistants is imperfect, as they seem to be typically targeted at the more granular level of the class or the method, rather than explicit high-level hooks in an application. A better comparison here would be the last year or so worth of “AI agents,” but, uhm, ahh…

      Smalltalk seemed to have a pretty big boom in the late 80s/early 90s, but tapered off rapidly after that. I like the more modern implementation of Pharo well enough, but it strives to throw in everything and the kitchen sink, with a downright balk-worthy amount of packages listed when you open up the class browser. On top of that, a few weeks ago I noticed someone in their Discord telling a newbie that current good practice is to file out your code every once in a while and then start over with a fresh image, as various background processes in stock images typically become unstable over time. This is orthogonal to the natural-language-like design, but it is a stumbling block to the sense of “liveness” and interactivity that is similarly a big hook for LLM assistance. Furthermore, as far as I know, they still don’t have a stable answer for system-level parallelism in the VM. All I’ve seen is a rather awkward technique for spinning off tree-shaken child VMs if there’s some method you want to run in parallel. You’ve got to really love Smalltalk to want to work past that shortcoming!

      VB.NET I can’t really speak to, except that it seems Microsoft now considers it a stable language with little if any new feature development. The original implementation never seemed to have a good rep for maintainability, and the very idea of native Forms seems out of fashion compared to JavaScript web-app frontends. And the land of JavaScript, of course, seems to be the most fertile and uncontested kingdom of LLM coding assistance. I’m genuinely interested to hear more experiences with modern VB, as it strikes me as the last great corporate-sanctioned push for non-technical users to build their own apps, and thus the most worthy comparison.

      All this is to say that each of these previous attempts at natural-language programming haven’t bit-rotted too hard, implementations are still available and you can probably salvage a legacy project with some effort. But each of them have been sidelined by industry over time. Not necessarily because of Dijkstra’s objection to the ambition of approaching natural language, although I don’t think we can totally discount that as a factor. But other technical or platform restrictions certainly hamstrung each of them. And LLM tools are still mostly API-based SaaS, which always has the glaring technical vulnerability of the provider running out of money. Yes, people will still pursue local models, but the bubble bursting could do a lot more harm to this approach than proponents anticipate.

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    9 小时前

    I just wanted to lob a sneer at this article fawning over Sora 2: https://spyglass.org/soras-slop-hits-different/

    And again, a lot of this stuff — slop or not — is funny. Really, truly funny. Sora is scaling comedy in a way that we’ve never seen.

    did this motherfucker just try to say “scaling comedy”? If you ever wondered why techbros are so unfunny, here’s something to point at.

  • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    11 小时前

    After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.

    If you’re the kind of motherfucker who will create SlopTok, you are not the kind of motherfucker who should be in charge of OpenAI.

    Not that anyone should be in charge of that shitshow of a company, but hey!

    Bonus sneer from the comment section:

    Sam Altman in Feb 2015: “Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”

    Sam Altman in Dec 2015, after co-founding OpenAI: “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

    Sam Altman 4 days ago, on his personal blog: “we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation.”

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      5·
      9 小时前

      After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.

      I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.

      Got another bonus sneer from the comments as well:

      Polluting human knowledge with crap, making internet useless, taking away jobs from creative people by making things that look creative enough. Governments are complicit, politicians are bribed. Like that suck-up youtuber [Two Minute Papers] repeats, “What a time to be alive” right ?

      (Sidenote: It massively fucking sucks how Two Minute Papers drank the AI Kool-Aid, I used to love that channel.)

      • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        9 小时前

        I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.

        No, it’s absolutely justified and I agree with basically everything he says in the video (esp. the title, there is really no reason for technology like this to exist in the hand of the public, or anyone really, there’s zero upsides to it). It’s just funny to me because the video is just so different from his usual calm stuff.

        But honestly, good for him and (hopefully) his community too.

  • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    11 小时前

    after playing silksong and hades ii, i am now pretty confident that game devs sniff their farts more than any other artists

    “the player can’t pause during the boss because he controls time” fuck offfffff

    (hades ii is mostly excellent, though, and silksong is a diamond encased in dogshit — there is a wonderful game in there, if you can find it)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      2 小时前

      That sounds really neat for all of 30 seconds before your cat knocks over their water bowl mid-fight and needs your immediate attention, thus reminding you why pause functions exist at all.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    15 小时前

    I could never live in a dyson sphere. I cant stand how they stop charging after six months.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      14 小时前

      My mom has a Dyson sphere Ball. It sucks, which is actually good in this case because that’s what it’s supposed to do.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      14 小时前

      You can get a mod to insert Weyland-Yutani cells, after a short incubation period you’ll see a real burst of improvement.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    19 小时前

    Mildly interesting thread about the progress of blacksky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3m2n62lzbeu2p

    They’re aiming for full independence from bluesky, which is a laudable goal though not one they’ve achieved yet. They’re currently getting a reasonable amount of user funding rather than being a typical vc furnace (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) but I’m not sure what their plan is for moderation which is what will carry the project in the long term. I’d like to say it can’t be worse than bluesky, but moderation at scale is a nightmare.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      16 小时前

      one nice thing is that the migration process to the bluesky is painless and straightforward. if we had the ability to not only take our toots (export does exist) but also move them to a new mastodon server, that would be a very nice boon for the fediverse. (it’s also one of the oldest open tickets in mastodon’s github issues. and yes, i know of slurp, but that’s not really frictionless.)

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      15 小时前

      Good post but it’s overfocused on “technical” as a meaningful and helpful word for denotation. Quoting what I just said on Mastodon:

      To be technical is to pay attention to details. That’s all. A (classical) computer is a detail machine; it only operates upon bits, it only knows bits, and it only decides bits. To be technical is to try to keep pace with the computer and know details as precisely as it does. Framed this way, it should be obvious that humans aren’t technical and can’t really be technical. This fundamental insecurity is the heart of priestly gatekeeping of computer science.

      If a third blog post trying to define “technical” goes around again then I’ll write a full post.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        14 小时前

        A technical is a civilian vehicle (typically a pickup truck) modified with a system for mounting weapons (typically machine guns or heavier, crew-operated weaponry) on it. An ongoing debate among military philosophers concerns whether a zamboni with a T-shirt cannon should be classified as one.

        • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          4·
          13 小时前

          An ongoing debate among military philosophers concerns whether a zamboni with a T-shirt cannon should be classified as one.

          Strictly speaking, no. Whilst T-shirt cannons and other such armaments can cause serious injuries (a hot dog cannon hospitalised a Phillies fan in 2018), they aren’t weapons in any real sense.

          • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            11 小时前

            We’re perhaps underrating the distribution of t-shirts with appropriately subversive messaging as a tactic in psychological operations. The sudden appearance of a zamboni, and distribution of assets via novel ballistic means, is also likely to drive enthusiasm among the target population.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    1 天前

    from here:

    OpenAI, which has tapped the world’s second-largest insurance broker Aon for help, has secured cover of up to $300mn for emerging AI risks,

    1. nice to see that at least someone dealing with these loons still has their shit grounded in reality

    2. I wonder what is quantified as “emerging risks” under that policy structure - I’d bet it’s not the same stuff the cultists are worried about

    either way, more please!