Want to wade into the snowy 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.
(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
2 links from my feeds with crossover here
Lawyers, Guns and Money: The Data Center Backlash
Techdirt: Radicalized Anti-AI Activist Should Be A Wake Up Call For Doomer Rhetoric
Unfortunately Techdirt’s Mike Masnick is a signatory some bullshit GenAI-collaborationist manifesto called The Resonant Computing Manifesto, along with other suspects like Anil Dash. Like so many other technolibertarian manifestos, it naturally declines to say how their wonderful vision would be economically feasible in a world without meaningful brakes on the very tech giants they profess to oppose.
h/t YT recommender, mildly unhinged: The Secret Religion of Silicon Valley: Nick Land’s Antichrist Blueprint
0:40 In certain occult circles, Land is a semi-mythical figure. A man said to have been possessed by not one, but four Lemurian time demons. Simultaneously.
Well, that explains things.
Is this some CCRU lore I’m not aware of?
That’s one Lemurian time demon for each side of the Time Cube.
Kovid Goyal, the primary dev of ebook management tool Calibre, has spat in the face of its users by forcing AI “features” into it.
https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭
also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead
You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I’m shocked.
Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you’ve done that, feel free to
re-open this ticket.i would not invite this person to my birthday
From Lila Byock:
A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education.
The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.
The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.
I try to avoid having to even see the outputs of these fucking systems, but you just made me realize that there’s going to be more than a few of them that will “leak” (read: preferentially deliver, by way of training focus) the kinks of its particular owner. I mean it’s already happening for the textual replies on twitter, soothing felon’s ever so bruised ego. the chance of it not Shipping beyond that is pretty damn zero :|
god I hate all of this
I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let’s dig into the findings.
[…]
Did you guess “that paper does not actually exist”?
Did you also guess that NOT A SINGLE PAPER IN THEIR REFERENCES APPEARS TO EXIST? […] When I was searching in various places to confirm that those citations were fabricated, Google’s AI overview just kept the con going.
Jill Walker Rettberg in the comments:
There’s a peer reviewed published paper in AI & Society called Cognitive Imperialism and Artificial Intelligence which is clearly mostly AI-generated. Citations are real but almost all irrelevant. I emailed the editors weeks ago but it’s still up there and getting cited.
Bay Area rationalist Sam Kirchner, cofounder of the Berkeley “Stop AI” group, claims “nonviolence isn’t working anymore” and goes off the grid. Hasn’t been heard from in weeks.
Article has some quotes from Emile Torres.
Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.
Yud’s whole project is a pipeline intended to create zizians, if you believe that Yud is serious about his alignment beliefs. If he isn’t serious then it’s just an unfortunate consequence that he is not trying to address in any meaningful way.
fortunately, yud clarified everything in his recent post concerning the zizians, which indicated that… uh, hmm, that we should use a prediction market to determine whether it’s moral to sell LSD to children. maybe he got off track a little
the real xrisk was the terror clowns we made along the way.
Bayesian Clown Posse
robots gonna make us Faygo, better stab a data center and by data center I mean land lord who had nothing to do with AI shit.
Whoop whoop
A belief system that inculates the believer into thinking that the work is the most important duty a human can perform, while also isolating them behind impenetrable pseudo-intellectual esoterica, while also funneling them into economic precarity… sounds like a recipe for
delicious browniestrouble.
just one rationalist got lost in the wilderness? that’s nothing, tell me when all of them are gone
The concern is that they’re not “lost in the wilderness” but rather are going to turn up in the vicinity of some newly dead people.
Is it better for these people to be collected in one place under the singularity cult, or dispersed into all the other religions, cults, and conspiracy theories that they would ordinarily be pulled into?
hi please hate this article headline with me
They somehow misused every word in that sentence.
If TCP/IP stack had feelings, it would have a great reason to feel insulted.
hi hi I am budweiser jabrony please join my new famous and good website ‘tapering incorrectness dot com’ where we speculate about which OSI layers have the most consciousness (zero is not a valid amount of consciousness) also give money and prima nocta. thanks
Tcp/ip knew what it did, with its authoritarian desire to see packets in order. Reject authority embrace UDP!
But yes, they are using ‘layer’ wrong
Well that and “core”. I could consider social media and even chatbots parts of internet infrastructure, but they both depend on a framework of underlying protocols and their implementation details. Without social media or chatbots the internet would still be the internet, which is not the case for, say, the Internet Protocol.
Also I would contend they’re misusing “infrastructure”. Social media and chat bots are kinds of services that are provided over the internet, but they aren’t a part of the infrastructure itself anymore than the world’s largest ball of twine is part of the infrastructure of the Interstate Highway System.
Heh yeah, “infrastructure” in the same way that moneyed bayfuckers are “builders”
It is also a useful study in just how little they fucking by get about how anything works, and what models of reasoning they apply to what they perceive. Depressing, but useful
Yeah, it is just a part of the application layer, and not even the whole one.
Ah but, you see, the end goal of the internet is serving slop and ads
Chicken penne is now rivaling spaghetti Bolognese as a core layer of pasta infrastructure.
please hate this article headline with me
I’m right there with you
the article headline: “Chatbots are now rivaling social networks as a core layer of internet infrastructure”
Counterpoint: “vibe coding” is rotting internet infrastructure from the inside, AI scrapers are destroying the commons through large-scale theft, chatbots are drowning everything else through nonstop lying
The real infrastructure is the friends we made along the way
Dexerto has reported on an unnamed Japanese game studio weeding out promptfondlers (by having applicants draw something in-person during interviews).
Unsurprisingly, the replies have become a promptfondler shooting gallery. Personal “favourite” goes to the guy who casually admits he can’t tell art from slop:
Nicky Case posted the ending to her AI Safety for Fleshy Humans series and gosh I miss when I thought she was cool 🫠
linking to Rob Miles and an EA longtermist fund at the end of the outro really gives the game away lol
(interestingly this also involves Hack Club, which is the org that Ghostty is now part of from @gerikson@awful.systems’s post earlier today? I wonder what’s up with them)
I was annoyed at the start lumping in ai ethics with all the ai doom stuff, and then basically stopped reading.
Do think it is interesting that Miles is part of a collaborative yt tech channel and they recently released an ai slop episode. (Which I have not watched yet either, things need to slow down for a bit please).
It’s even way too long a read and full of footnotes, as is tradition!
Heck it’s even long enough that I just came across the second flashcard break, and I’m 1/4th of the way through part 1…
I am not familiar with Case or her work, but based on my shallow research, she’s part of the cohort of internet stuff-communicators including people like Vi Hart or the Oatmeal etc. Not casting aspersions on anyone here, but I’d be interested to know who amongst them have revealed their chud nature and who has remained pristine (…for now).
I’m a bit more familiar with Case - I mainly knew her for making web games like :the game: trilogy, Nothing to Hide and We Become What We Behold.
Fucking sucks to see she’s bought into this shit.
Last I checked Vi Hart still seems like a good egg (idk if the closeted teenaged self hiding in the recesses of my brain could take it otherwise 😭)
Pam Samuelson (UC Berkeley) has a nice explainer on AI copyright - https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/does-using-in-copyright-works-as-training-data-infringe/
More grok shit: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/grok-doxxing it in contrast to most other models, is very good at doxing people.
Amazing how everything Musk makes is the worst in class (and somehow the Rationalists think he will be their saviour (that is because he is a eugenicist)).
(thinks) groxxing
the base use for LLMs is gonna be hypertargetted advertising, malware, political propaganda etc
well the base case for LLMs is that, right now
the privacy nerds won’t know what hit them
A lobster wonders why the news that a centi-millionaire amateur jet pilot has decided to offload the cost of developing his pet terminal software onto peons begging for contributions has almost 100 upvotes, and is absolutely savaged for being rude to their betters
https://lobste.rs/s/dxqyh4/ghostty_is_now_non_profit#c_b0yttk
bring back rich people rolling their own submarines and getting crushed to death in the bathyal zone
all things aside, is current ghostty any good, or still an
audiophileconsolephile-ware?i’m generally reluctant to try something which reeks of intensive self-promotion, but few months ago i decided to finally see what’s the hype about, and, well, it’s a terminal emulator.
wezterm does much more, and with a much cleaner ui, and it’s programmable, and the author doesn’t remind me that hashicorp is a thing that exists.
second person today I saw mentioning wezterm, guess I should look sometime for familiarity
enter hashimoto. cringe intensifies
(note: out-of-order to linked post for comment cohesion)
Terminals are an invisible technology to most
what a fucking sentence
…that are hyper present in the everyday life of many in the tech industry.
hyper? like this?
But the terminal itself is boring, the real impact of Ghostty is going to be in libghostty and making all of this completely available for many use cases. My hope is that through building a broadly adopted shared underlayer of terminals around the industry we can do some really interesting things.
oh good so the rentier bridgetroll wants to do just a monopoly play? that’s fine I’m sure. note: I don’t think there’s a more charitable reading of this. those shared underlayers already exist, in the form of decades of protocol and other development. many of them suck and I agree about trying to do better, but I (rather strongly) suspect hashi and I have very different ideas of what that looks like
I’ve already addressed the belittling of the project I really find useful and care about. So let’s just move on to the financial class.
Regardless of my financial ability to support this project, any project that financially survives (for or non-profit) at the whims of a single donor is an unhealthy project
“uwu, think of the poor projects. yes sure I could throw $20m at this in some kind of funny trust and have it live forever but that wouldn’t allow me to evade the point so much!”
I paid a 9-figure tax bill and also donated over 5% of my other stuff to charity this year
“I’m not as bad as the other billionaires I promise”
I’m too fucking old to care about hipster terminals, so I had no idea ghostty was started by a (former) billionaire. If forced to choose a new terminal I will certainly take this fact into consideration.
I took psychic damage by scrolling up and seeing promptsimon posting a real doozie:
I have been enjoying hitting refresh on https://fuckthisurl/froztbyte-scrubbed-it-intentionally throughout today and watching the number grow - it’s nice to see a clear example of people donating to a new non-profit open source project.
“oooh! look at the vanity project go! weeeee, isn’t having a famous face attached to it fun?” with exactly no reflection on the fucking daunting state of open source funding in multiple other domains and projects
ghosTTy is the username of a schizoposter on Something Awful who only shows up to post bitcoin price charts and get mocked into oblivion. I wonder if there’s any connection?
/r/SneerClub discusses MIRI financials and how Yud ended up getting paid $600K per year from their cache.
Malo Bourgon, MIRI CEO, makes a cameo in the comments to discuss Ziz’s claims about SA payoffs and how he thinks Yud’s salary (the equivalent of like 150.000 malaria vaccines) is defensible for reasons that definitely exist, but they live in Canada, you can’t see them.
Guy does a terrible job explaining literally anything. Why, when trying to explain all the SA based drama, does he choose to create an analogy where the former employee is heavily implied to have murdered his wife?
S/o to cinnaverses for mixing it up in there.
Cinnas
The Rolling Stone article is a bit odd (it appears to tell the story of the ex-employee who created Miricult twice, the first time without names and the second naming the accuser) but I trust them that MIRI did pay the accuser. Rolling Stone are a serious news organization which can be sued.
“Nah, salary stuff is private”, starting to think this sort of stuff is an idea introduced to protect capital and nobody else.
I was teasing this out in my head to try come up with a good sneer. First thought: for an organisation that tries to appeal to EAs, you’d think that they would do a good job of being transparent about why so much money is being spent on someone with such low output. But immediate rebuttal: the whole point of the TESCREAL cult shit is that yud get free tuocs because he’s the chosen one to solve alignment.
Was thinking more about how the radical, dont fall to biasses think for yourself and cone here to really learn to think (so we can stop the paperclipmachine and resurrect the dead) defend a half million dollars salary with a ‘thats private’.
But that is the same conclusion. The prophet must be protected.
A second post on software project management in a week, this one from deadsimpletech: failed software projects are strategic failures.
A window into another it disaster I wasn’t aware of, but clearly there is no shortage of those. An australian one this time.
And of course, without having at least some of that expertise in-house, they found themselves completely unable to identify that Accenture was either incompetent, actively gouging them or both.
(spoiler alert, it was both)
Interesting mention of clausewitz in the context of management, which gives me pause a bit because techbros famously love the “art of war”, probably because sun tzu was patiently explaining obvious things to idiots and that works well on them. “On war” might be a better text, I guess.
I associate Clausewitz (and especially John Boyd) references more with a Palantir / Stratfor / Booz / LE-MIC-consulting class compared to your typical bay area YC techbro in the US, and a very different crowd over in AU / NZ where grognards probably outnumber the actual military. LWers never bring up Clausewitz either but love Sun Tzu. But as far as software strategy posts go, I’d much rather read a Clausewitz tie-in than, say, Mythical Man Month or Agile anything.
Much of the content of mythical man month is still depressingly relevant, especially in conjunction with brooks’ later stuff like no silver bullets. A lot of senior tech management either never read it, or read it so long ago that they forgot the relevant points beyond the title.
It’s interesting that clausewitz doesn’t appear in lw discussions. That seems like a big point in favour of his writing.
If you liked Brooks, you might give Gerald Weinberg a try. A bit more folksy / less corporate.
