David Gerard
the guy who got Elon and Grimes to hook up, destroying Twitter and proceeding to blow up the United States
- 758 Posts
- 2.57K Comments
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy InsteadEnglish10·23 hours agoi love awful systems so much
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy InsteadEnglish8·23 hours agoThe Register said in its Builder.AI obit that the company is really into making its devs use AI coding. lol.
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto SneerClub@awful.systems•Is Effective Altruism Neocolonial?English2·2 days agoahem Little Big
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slopEnglish28·2 days agoquite amazing that (a) Microsoft basically bought open source with GitHub (b) and are now trying to fuck it up so hard people leave
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English7·3 days agonew Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English7·3 days agoa shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Does AI make researchers more productive? What? Why would it? Apparently you can just say that and almost get published!English3·3 days agoI mean this post seems largely correct and reasonable, but ehh be a little cautious
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Latest AI-hallucinated legal filing, from AI vendor AnthropicEnglish8·3 days agoword i hear is that too many lawyers fucking love this shit, they see plausible words and think that’s sufficient to
replacesupplement the office peonsthen this happens to them and lol
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Does AI make researchers more productive? What? Why would it? Apparently you can just say that and almost get published!English8·4 days agoIf you’re after streams-crossing - this guy is a rationalist who does Manifold Markets
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Trump announces vaporware AI data centres in the United Arab EmiratesEnglish7·6 days agofinally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South AfricaEnglish4·6 days agosomeone said it was Kendrick and Drake, i thought it was two Drakes pointing at each other
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South AfricaEnglish6·7 days agoit will explain its position with interpretive twerking
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto SneerClub@awful.systems•Death and the Gorgon - Greg EganEnglish10·7 days agoEgan already told Hanson to fuck off in a previous story, Zendegi:
“My IQ is one hundred and sixty … You can always reach me through my blog, Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future —”
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Ai scraping is an effective DDoS on the entire interentEnglish10·7 days agojwz gave the game away, so i’ll reveal:
the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent
so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)
caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.
nginx code:
# block some bot UAs for complex requests # nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable # if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot set $BOT ""; if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) { set $BOT "C"; } if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($BOT = "CO") { return 503;}
you always return “503” not “403”, because 403 says “fuck off” but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they’ve flattened.
I give this trick at least another week.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South AfricaEnglish13·7 days agowhy is this robot not sexy soyweiser
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?English2·7 days agosounds dumb as hell and I’m not surprised they avoided tagging me in then
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?English15·8 days agoThis discussion has made it clear to me that LLM enthusiasts do not value the time or preferences of open-source maintainers, willfully do not understand affirmative consent, and that I should take steps to explicitly ban the use of such tools in the open source projects I maintain.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?English3·8 days agoI didn’t see that thread. But I stand by the image as being perfect for the story on several specific points.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?English9·8 days ago“it’s a tool” - a tool
yeah, I think that’s enough