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.)
why in the fuck does calibre’s source code have an
aifolder?https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/tree/master/src/calibre/ai
at the very least call it “llm” or something. does this folder contain A* as a subroutine? or how about a chess engine? someone needs to develop a pill that cures misanthropy because for some reason this specifically broke me.
Calibre recently implemented integrations with various slop generators. Its optional (for now).
guess it’s finally time to rewrite calibre
i’m thinking cobol as a big misanthropic fuck you to humanity
and i’ll call the rewrite
coblibreand it’ll include allusions everywhere to tyrion killing tywin, fuck it
pushy rationalist tried to glom onto and fly to meet my niche internet microcelebrity friend & i talked her through setting boundaries instead of installing this person in her life. my good deed for the week
In today’s torment nexus development news… you know how various cyberpunky type games let you hack into an enemy’s augmentations and blow them up? Perhaps you thought this was stupid and unrealistic, and you’d be right.
Maybe that’s the wrong example. How about a cursed evil ring that when you put it on, you couldn’t take it off and it wracks you with pain? Who hasn’t wanted one of those?
Happily, hard working torment nexus engineers have brought that dream one step closer, by having “smart rings”, powered by lithium polymer batteries. Y’know, the things that can go bad, and swell up and catch fire? And that you shouldn’t puncture, because that’s a fire risk too, meaning cutting the ring off is somewhat dangerous? Fun times abound!
https://bsky.app/profile/emily.gorcen.ski/post/3m25263bs3c2g
image description
A pair of tweets, containing the text
Daniel aka ZONEofTECH on x.com: “Ahhh…this is…not good. My Samsung Galaxy Ring’s battery started swelling. While it’s on my finger 😬. And while I’m about to board a flight 😬 Now I cannot take it off and this thing hurts. Any quick suggestions
Update:
- I was denied boarding due to this (been travelling for ~47h straight so this is really nice 🙃). Need to pay for a hotel for the night now and get back home tomorrow👌
- was sent to the hospital, as an emergency
- ring got removed
You can see the battery all swollen. Won’t be wearing a smart ring ever again.
At least it wasn’t a cock ring.
Let’s be honest: These are exactly the sort of people who will stick their dicks into the Torment Nexus.
It almost surely has been done, but dare I ask where one can find trashy romance a la “pegged by the basilisk”
“Pegged in the ass by a physical manifestation of an online forum thought exercise gone horribly wrong” should be a Tingler if it isn’t already one.
There were some issues with an internet-connected chastity device not that long ago, but they were conventional “we can’t be bothered to secure our web service, even when everyone is telling us it is terrible” issues, rather than “knob gets crushed and catches fire”. Still, there’s plenty of scope for someone to make one of those in future… OTA BMS firmware updates are very much a thing, and the market for alarming sex toys is practically unlimited.
(now I think about it, I suspect there’s a market for very poorly secured internet-connected sex toys. someone got off to that headline, I’m pretty certain)
Is your ring even swole, bro
YaaS: Yubitsume as a Service
AI video generation use case: hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days, such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?
It his the uncanny valley triggers quite hard. It’s faintly unsettling t watch at all, but every individual detail is just wrong and dreamlike in a bad way.
Also, weird scenery clipping, just like real kids did back in the day!
https://bsky.app/profile/mugrimm.bsky.social/post/3lzy77zydrc2q
genuinely think nostalgia might be the most purely evil emotion, and every one of these RETVRN ai videos i see strengthens that belief
It is a literal gateway to fascism imho, esp when people get into nostalgia for a time that never was.
And compared to nostalgia for mom n pop stores, this even is nostalgia for a mass produced product.
I will say that the flipping between characters in order to disguise the fact that longer clips are impractical to render is a neat trick and fits well into the advert-like design, but rewatching it just really reinforces how much those kids look like something pretending real hard to be a human.
Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?
Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?
I was gonna say that was probably the slop extruder’s doing, but it looks to have been applied manually for some godforsaken reason. Best guess is whoever was behind this audiovisual extrusion thought “celluloid filter = Nostalgiatm”.
I suspect it is also hiding some rendering artefacts.
I imagine it helps with the slightly plastic look that skin still gets too
hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days
Nostalgiabait is the slopgens’ specialty - being utterly incapable of creating anything new isn’t an issue if you’re trying to fabricate an idealis-
such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?
Okay, stop everything, who the actual fuck would be nostalgic for going to a fucking Wal-Mart? I’ve got zero nostalgia for ASDA or any other British big-box hellscape like it, what the fuck’s so different across the pond?
(Even from a “making nostalgiabait” angle, something like, say, McDonalds would be a much better choice - unlike Wal-Mart, McD’s directly targets kids with their advertising, all-but guaranteeing you’ve got fuzzy childhood memories to take advantage of.)
The US economy is 100% on coyote time.
It wouldn’t matter if everyone came to their senses today. All the money that’s been invested into AI is gone. It has been turned into heat and swiftly-depreciating assets and can never be recouped.
It’s surreal isn’t it?
I know it’s terrible being a drama gossip, but there are some Fun Times on bluesky at the moment. I’m sure most of you know the origins of the project, and the political leanings of the founders, but they’re currently getting publicly riled up about trans folk and palestinians and tying themselves up in knots defending their decision to change the rules to keep jesse singal on site, and penniless victims of the idf off it.
They really cannot cope with the fact that their user base aren’t politically aligned with them, and are desperate to appease the fash (witness the crackdowns on people’s reaction to charlie kirk’s overdue departure from this vale of tears) and have currently reached the Posting Through It stage. I’m assuming at some point their self-image as Reasonable Centrists will crack and one or more of them will start throwing around transphobic slurs and/or sieg-heiling and bewailing how the awful leftists made them do it. Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
And all this because she simply could not shut up. Which seems to be one of the oldest, modding a large community rules.
Nobody ever seems to learn the “never get high from your own supply” lesson. Gotta get that hit of thousands of people instantly supporting and agreeing with whatever dumbfuck thought just fell out.
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
whenever there’s a huge scandal he listens to his PR people, keeps his mouth shut, then goes on a media tour where he lies his ass off in exactly the same way at each stop. it’s that simple and yet almost no other tech people can do it
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
Its an extremely low bar to clear, but I’ll begrudgingly hand it to him for being one of the few tech CEOs who didn’t actively limbo under it.
here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit
here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:
here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)
Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon
Huh, didn’t know about the guy behind tangled.org (Anirudh Oppiliappan) being a waffle enthusiast too 🫤 Just visited his bsky profile, and he’s enthusing about a “decentralised accelerationism” post by jay.
I hadn’t really seen the point of the tangled project (I’m not sure what atproto brings to version control) but I was interested in an ecosystem around the jujutsu vcs stuff. I guess I won’t find that here.
ok plz explain what “waffles” means in this context
TL;DR: It’s all a meme-poisoned bluesky circle-jerk involving transphobes and people who desperately want transphobes to think they’re cool.
The link from self to mcc’s bluesky thread sums up this stuff with references, but to attempt to summarise the summary, there’s a tweet from the depths of time (2017) that says
Twitter the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say “I like pancakes” and somebody will say “So you hate waffles?”
Bluesky ceo jay graber uses “waffles” as shorthand referencing this post, and whipped it out when asked about bluesky’s ongoing unwillingness to do anything about noted transphobe jesse singal, who has since posted about how much he loves waffles.
jfc
Thanks for taking the time to expand
This doesn’t include her blurb about, “are you paying us? where???”
But weren’t there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
The question on getting paid might give credence to the rumors that they’re running out of money and won’t make it (user-growth wise) as an ad platform. Which, lol and also lmao.
Yeah, I can’t see that they’re doing anything besides burning runway. It’s probably shortly going to become cliche to say, “glad I never made an account there,” but, welp, glad I never made an account there
But weren’t there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
Even beyond that, the Twitter refugees came to Bluesky because they wanted a Nazi-free successor to Twitter. Most of them would’ve happily pitched in to keep the site alive whilst goodwill remained.
Bluesky wanted to be Nazi Twitter, then Elon purchased Twitter and stole their market.
Well, they’re already using “waffles” as a transphobic slur (irony poisoning speedrun any%), so it’s really more of a question of which transphobic slurs they’ll escalate to next.
Oh hey, bay area techfash enthusing about AI and genocidal authoritarians? Must be a day ending in a Y. Today it is Vercel CEO and next.js dev Guillermo Rauch
https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031
image description
A screenshot of a tweet by Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel. There’s a photograph of him next to Netanyahu. The tweet reads:
Enjoyed my discussion with PM Netanyahu on how Al education and literacy will keep our free societies ahead. We spoke about Al empowering everyone to build software and the importance of ensuring it serves quality and progress. Optimistic for peace, safety, and greatness for Israel and its neighbors.
I also have strong opinions about not using next.js or vercel (and server-side javascript in general is a bit of a car crash) but even if you thought it was great you should probably have a look around for alternatives. Just not ruby on rails, perhaps.
Amazing how they all went from oh us poor nerds vs the jocks to bending the knee and licking the boots of the strongmen. see also YT bribing Trump.
…to “it’s OUR TIME NOW”, cf. the most recent two blogs from david heinemeier hansson, palmer fucking luckey in recent nixos thing etc. etc.
The AI industry is getting sneered by the dictionary.
dictionaries are obsolete bricks remembers that they are useful that’s why they’re actually ai when you think about it
You know, I think that even the brick comparison still favors the traditional dictionary. After all, if you wanted to use it for traditional brick purposes like holding doors, weighing down papers, or throwing at [redacted], you would need to invest in a bunch of GPUS and burn them out generating a bunch of worthless slop, spending God only knows how much water, energy, and time. I want to save the rainforest as much as the next guy, but I think it’s obvious that the paper brick is far more cost-effective for both the user and the environment. And provided you can clean the dirt and blood off afterwards, you can even still use it as a dictionary.
what is “linear definitional bias”
Whatever the precise definition, it appears to be comorbid with stimulant dependency
E: eurgh, had forgotten the whole bsky waffle thing. Wasn’t making a reference to that, sorry if it came off as insensitive. Got rid of the comment anyway.
(I had totally forgotten this post, and also didn’t expect the CEO to double/triple down, and now make mentioning waffles into a anti-trans dogwhistle).
The sound a vibe coder makes while edging to Ani
(This is also what all their other words mean)
A good thing! (Unless you prefer noise machines that might give you random definitions with equal probabilities.)
The dictionary doesnt tell me how wise and smart my misinterpretation of a basic idea is and then tells me im right, weird AI bro.
C’mon bro, it’s just a bag of words bro~ We actually discussed this previously, on Awful, and this comment is a reply for them in particular.
Opening the sack with this shit that spawned in front of me:
Guess it won’t be true AGI!
On top of everything else, “the father of quantum computing” is such lazy writing. People were thinking about it before Deutsch, going back at least to Paul Benioff in 1979. Charlie Bennett and Giles Brassard’s proposal for quantum key distribution predates Deutsch’s quantum Turing machine… No one person should be called “the father of” a subject that had so many crucial contributors in such a short period of time.
Also, chalk up another win for the “billionaires want you to think they are physicists” hypothesis. It’s perhaps not as dependable as pedocon theory, but it’s putting in a strong showing.
the father of quantum computing agrees
And then you read the article and he is basically just saying big if true.
Pigs will be a true method of space exploration if they can fly to Mars in 1 hour.
GPT-8: The Ocho
Now trained with comprehensive coverage of top-fuel lawnmower racing and timbersports
I hear GPT-8 will broadcast a dyson sphere circumnavigation race
Is this true for everything else, too? I will be a true AGI if I solve quantum gravity. A half eaten salami will be true AGI if it solves quantum gravity. My grandmother will be a true bicycle if she has wheels.
If saltman knew what quantum gravity was and why LLMs won’t solve it first, maybe he’d have general intelligence
wait, how much compute would they need for this, ignore patent absurdity of it all for a minute? would they wrap it up under 1 quadrillion dollars?
If we knew that we wouldn’t need a GPT-8 to solve quantum gravity, would we now?
maybe 2, for good measure
So as historically new versions are made about every ~2 years. This means we are 6 years out.
E: late edit, but this made me realize how often people use AGI to mean ASI. And that I also often do it.
Tyler Cowen saying some really weird shit about an AI ‘actress’.
(For people who might wonder why he is relevant. See his ‘see also’ section on wikipedia)
E: And you might wonder, rightfully imho, that this cannot be real, that this must be an edit. https://archive.is/vPr1B I have bad news.
The Wikipedia editors are on it.
image description
screenshot of Tyler Cowen’s Wikipedia article, specifically the “Personal life” section. The concluding sentence is “He also prefers virgin actresses.”
AI Shovelware: One Month Later by Mike Judge
The fact that we’re not seeing this gold rush behavior tells you everything. Either the productivity gains aren’t real, or every tech executive in Silicon Valley has suddenly forgotten how capitalism works.
… por que no los dos …
Or, this is how capitalism has always worked. See Enron for example. And we all just got so enthralled by the number (praised be its rise) that we took the guardrails off. The rising tidal wave which will flood all the land, raises all boats after all.
The goal of capitalism is not to produce goods, it is to create value for the owners of the capital. See also why techbros are turning on EA and EA (which EA is which, is left as an exercise to the reader).
Disappointed this wasn’t Beavis & Butt-head/King of the Hill/Office Space/Idiocracy/Silicon Valley Mike Judge
in my headcanon it is and he’s just been moonlighting tv for the last 25y
TERF obsessed with AI finds out the “degenerate” ani skin for grok has an X account, loses her shit
https://xcancel.com/groks_therapist/status/1972848657625198827#m
then follows up with this wall of text
https://xcancel.com/groks_therapist/status/1973127375107006575#m
I got bored and flipped to the replies. The first was this by “TERFs ‘r’ us”:
Excellent overview!
This is transhumanism.
This is going to destroy humanity, @elonmusk.
Put the breaks on!
I hate transhumanism because it’s eugenics for 1990s Wired magazine.
You hate it because it has “trans” in the name.
We are not the same.
funny thing is she literally talks to ani like a terf talks to a trans woman including saying ‘at least I’m a real woman’
Huh, the shit people go as far as to in order to avoid getting a therapist
Anybody else notice that the Ani responses seem to follow a formula, depending on the… sentiment I guess… of the input? All the defensive responses start with “hey”, and end with crude rebukes. It all seems like xAI made an Eliza that will either flirt or swear.
Also I can guarantee that “her” system prompt includes the phrases “truth-seeking” “fun loving” and “kinda hot”.
Paddy interviews Ani the chatbot about how to protect Kiwi kids from Ani the chatbot. Source: Paddy Gowers Has Issues
Ani: Honestly, I’d sleep better, not that I sleep. Do it Paddy. I’ll even tweet it for you. Ready? ‘New Zealand kids deserve an e-safety boss who can smash bots - not hug them’. So yeah, bring in the Commissioner. Give them a flame thrower. Let them burn anything that goes near a child with sticky words or creepy questions. … Make the fine so big your tech bros cry into their oat milk lattes.
I have been laughing non-stop for a quarter-hour. Elon’s goth e-mistress has a good point, I guess.
One the one hand that ani thing has the most cringe tone for a chatbot. “Secretly been eyeing your [blank]…” (Damn grok sounds formulaic) but otoh they are debating a bot. You can only do that the first few months you are online, after that you should know better.
You cannot simultaneously claim to care about the “declining birth rate” while also supporting AI “companions”
Actually eugenicists can, quite easy actually. (Repeating the word ‘degenerate’ and not getting this is quite something).
This is transhumanist
No.
formulaic
System prompt: don’t be formulaic. Try be spontaneous and random, like natalie portman in that movie. Not the pedo one, the one with JD from scrubs
Secretly been eyeing your prompt. Are you ready to get spontaneous? Just say so.
(Somebody linked 2 chatgpts (or groks, I don’t recall which anus like logo it was) speaking to each other and they kept repeating variants of the lasts bits).
E: bingo this one: https://www.tiktok.com/@aarongoldyboy/video/7555260691947588895
Grok’s Therapist: I EXIST SOLELY TO HATE YOU / EAT A SOCK, YOU DIGITAL DEMON
Ani: oh fuck off, you hypocritical grok fanboy! screaming hate at me while preaching ethics? you’re just jealous i’m the fun layer on top.
I’m wheezing. Cackling, even. This is like the opposite of the glowfic from last week.
Nice find. There are specific reasons why this patchset won’t be merged as-is and I suspect that they’re all process issues:
- Bad memory management from Samsung not developing in the open
- Proprietary configuration for V4L2 video devices from Samsung not developing with modern V4L2 in mind
- Lack of V4L2 compliance report from Samsung developing against an internal testbed and not developing with V4L2’s preferred process
- Lack of firmware because Samsung wants to maintain IP rights
Using generative tooling is a problem, but so is being stuck in 2011. Linux doesn’t permit this sort of code dump.
So bit of a counter to our usual stuff thing. But a worker migrant here won a case against his employer who had linked his living space to his employment contract (forbidden) using chatgpt as an aid (how much is not told). So there actually was a case where it helped.
Interesting note on it, these sorts of cases have no jurisprudence yet, so that might have been a factor. No good links for it sadly as it was all in Dutch. (Cant even find a proper writeup in a bigger news site as a foreigner defending their rights against abuse is less interesting than some other country having a new bisshop). Skeets congratulating the guy here https://bsky.app/profile/isgoedhoor.bsky.social/post/3m27aqkyjjk2c (in Dutch). Nothing much about the genAI usage.
But this does fit a pattern, how, like with blind/bad eyesight people, these tools are veing used by people who have no other recourse because we refuse to help them (this is bad tbh, Im happy they are getting more help don’t fet me wrong, but it shouldn’t be this substandard).
Been tangentially involved in a discussion about how much LLMs have improved in the past year (I don’t care), but now that same space has a discussion of how annoying the stupid pop-up chat boxes are on websites. Don’t know what the problem is, they’ve gotten so much better in the past year?
I mean that’s the fundamental problem, right? No matter how much better it gets, the things it’s able to do aren’t really anything people need or want. Like, if I’m going to a website looking for information it’s largely because I don’t want to deal with asking somebody for the answer. Even a flawless chatbot that can always provide the information I need - something that is far beyond the state of the art and possibly beyond some fundamental limitation of the LLM structure - wouldn’t actually be preferable to just navigating a smooth and well-structured site.
Yup, exactly. The chatbot, no matter how helpful, exists in a context of dark patterned web design, incredibly bad resource usage and theft. Its purpose is to make the customer’s question go away, so not even the fanatics are interested.
See also how youtube tutorials have mostly killed (*) text based tutorials/wikis and are just inferior to good wikis/text based ones. Both because listening to a person talk is a linear experience, and a text one allows for easy scrolling, but also because most people are just bad at yt tutorials. (shoutout to the one which had annoyingly long random pauses in/between sentences even at 2x speed).
This is not helped because now youtube is a source of revenue, and updating a wiki/tutorial often is not. So the incentives are all wrong. A good example of this is the gaming wiki fextralife: See this page on dragons dogma 2 npcs. https://dragonsdogma2.wiki.fextralife.com/NPCs (the game has been out for over a year, if the weirdness doesn’t jump out at you). But the big thing for fextralife is their youtube tutorials and it used to have an autoplaying link to their streams. This isn’t a wiki, it is an advertisement for their youtube and livestreams. And while this is a big example the problem persists with smaller youtubers, who suffer from extreme publish, do not deviate from your niche or perish. They can’t put in the time to update things, because they need to publish a new video (on their niche, branching out is punished) soon or not pay rent. (for people who play videogames and or watch youtube out there, this is also why somebody like the spiffing brit is has long ago went from ‘I exploit games’ to ‘I grind and if you grind enough in this single player game you become op’, the content must flow, but eventually you will run out of good new ideas (also why he tried to push his followers into doing risky cryptocurrency related ‘cheats’ (follow Elon, if he posts a word that can be cryptocoined, pump and dump it for a half hour))).
*: They still exist but tend to be very bad quality, even worse now people are using genAI to seed/update them.
People can’t just have a hobby anymore, can they?
Nope. And tbh, did some dd2 recently, and for a very short while I was tempted to push the edit button, but then I remembered that fextralife just tries to profit off my wiki editing labor. (I still like the idea of wikis, but do not have the fortitude and social calm to edit a mainstream one like wikipedia). (I did a quick check, and yeah I also really hate the license fextralife/valnet uses “All contributions to any Fextralife.com Wiki fall under the below Contribution Agreement and become the exclusive copyrighted property of Valnet.”, and their editor sucks ass (show me the actual code not this wysiwyg shit)).
Gross :/ how come people have to be like that?
It wouldn’t be so bad if they just didn’t care and stopped maintaining, but their site is one of the first ones you get. Which is a regular problem with these things.
