Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024
Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don't quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!
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 here 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.
Back during the last Sneerclub blowout I found my reddit account getting psychoanalyzed by twitter rationalists. They were very upset about the Rod Dreher thing.
for some reason this is still hilarious
extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:
anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?
he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshi's Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius
anyway, he's decided it's time to flip to the non-losing side
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430
(stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)
not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack
You sent me down the rabbit hole.
...as for what's right for you, I dunno. The one major downside of fullnode is that there is only one developer working on it, though I think that once I move the project to reddit's github and announce that "reddit is making a wallet" we will have many more eyes and developers on the project.
Just fucken lol.
And, like every other crypto guy, Ryan has pivoted to AI now. His github profile says "Building AI with AI. Founder @artintellica."
https://artintellica.com/ Truly, a website.
jesus goatfucking christ
Strange man posts strange thing.
he could have just admitted he couldn't get the ai to draw a dick. Instead, a future without dicks is his idea of a surprising future
dude's taking non-feminising estrogen u kno
Those image generators are surprisingly bad at drawing nether regions, it turns into real horror shows quickly. A thing the 'it is so over for real women' incel weirdos don't seem to talk about. (I checked it a while back no idea if it has improved since, but the conclusion was that sex workers can breathe easily (apart from them being fucked by mastercard/visa being run by cryptoprudes, governments going after them, and the general economic downturn driving the demand for sex work down but that is a different issue)).
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
The Lawnmower Man (1992), dir. Brett Leonard
I know it’s stupid to try really think about this because the idiot was only trying for engagement farming, but what the fuck did they think that image was portraying (that supported their batshit commentary)?? That we’re all gonna become the blue dude from Watchmen, but in copyright-friendly conditions?!
many victim impact statements about the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are harrowing.
some are not quite so harrowing
a lotta yall still dont get it
AI equity holders can use multiple ZIRP juices on a single AI
so if you have 1 OpenAI and 3 ZIRP juices you can create 3 new AI startups
If I came to believe the entire tech scene at this point was all ZIRP grift would I be right?
at this point it's the standard analysis, so yes
going to choose to believe that ZIRP juices are a previously unreleased Juicero product
How many victory points is that
petition to have these threads sorted by new by default, if that technology exists
new might be a good global default for everything local to our instance, given the traffic patterns of our threads. unfortunately it might take some doing to make that the default just for local stuff, without making things janky for folks reading federated content
amazingly, lemmy doesn’t even seem to persist the last sort you’ve selected correctly. which is like easy 10 lines of code to do even in React with Typescript
given the traffic patterns of our threads
Highlighting the new posts since the last time you visited a thread would be amazing if possible.
I've been kind of following development of Sublinks, which hopes to reach parity with Lemmy with more typical web tech so development can go faster/with more contributors, and also so they can pivot to better moderation tools. Maybe it works out, maybe we learn to love the jank.
Re: Lemmy, some dude (ofc) is trying to start a new "decentralized" Wikipedia, and he touts as a merit that he created Lemmy:
I have worked on Lemmy for the past four years, bringing it from a prototype to a fully functional Reddit alternative.
Some would say this is damning with faint praise, others would see it as a warning.
(https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,[email protected])
once again i'm suggesting matrix room
Yesterday before bed I saw some galaxy-brained takes on PKM (personal knowledge management software) from a 7-day old account, and curiosity took over me. I was not disappointed. (sadly they deleted their account after I woke up: /u/Few-Elephant-2600 if you're bored and have moderator API access)
Since GPUs continuously generate large amounts of waste heat during AI training, could electric/GPU stoves utilize this unused thermal energy resource through on-demand tickets as distributed networks instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove? What are the scientific challenges?
Honey can you preheat the porn generator?
Maybe you could pair it with this accursed AI of Things Smart Oven. Fun quotes:
“Users aren’t aware of any of the oven’s learning processes,”
Ovens that learn from one another
Finally, I can experience Windows progress bars when baking potatoes:
The predictive model updates the remaining baking time every 30 seconds
yet another crypto argument getting run through find/replace
This is true, with the important distinction that presumably the next generation of GPUs will produce more calculation per unit of input energy, as opposed to proof-of-work crypto mining, where the coin generation is constant in time, by design.
Since GPUs continuously generate large amounts of waste heat during AI training, could electric/GPU stoves utilize this unused thermal energy resource
I'm actually aware of businesses that already do exactly this, usefully
through on-demand tickets as distributed networks
"tickets" is this Ethereum bullshit?
instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?
- Citizens Don't Need To Cook
- Not a citizen? Get fucked scrub.
(this leaves me feeling incredibly
??????)What are the scientific challenges?
this seems like JAQing behaviour?
[ed: once again wearing my Lemmy Ate My Formatting shirt]
instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?
I'm 99% sure this person eats only gig-work delivered food
i think that there's *at least one supercomputing centre in germany that uses waste heat for heating buildings and not only their own
Didn't some soviet towns run central heating off power plant waste heat? "Where do you live? OpenAiVille, we get free^M cheaper central heating, but the noise of the severfans running every day and night is deafening."
combined heat and power isn't a technology unique to eastern block countries, but surely centralized city planning makes it easier to pump waste heat into municipal heating grid (or out to some chemical works or such). tbh it didn't even occur to me that there are serious cities (population 100k+) that don't have city-owned heating grid, even 50k towns and smaller can have their own CHP plants (tiny one, fits in shipping container or two)
and it's not just some towns no no no. it was implemented everywhere where it was practical. near big cities - these need both power and heat, so okayish coal is shipped to them by rail, burned there and provides both heat and energy. beijing for example runs on 10 or so large CHP plants iirc. near lignite mines - lignite is burned there (does not make sense to ship it anywhere else, too shitty) and nearby town has free heat. where there's neither, either coal was shipped to be burned in heating plants, centralized or individual, or gas was delivered by pipelines also for heating, and energy was delivered from larger centralized facilities. if there's fuckton of energy somehow, like in russian far east with their abundant hydropower, or nothing else is practical, in some places heating was electric
NYC has steam pipelines running around the city, doesn't that use CHP plants?
at what point is "large amounts of heat" output considered the part that's the waste?
Do they know that brake discs get hot because they're stopping a car from colliding with a wall?
But for electronics basically all heat is excess. Brakes are literally supposed to turn kinetic energy into heat. A GPU is supposed to solve linear equations quickly. The generated heat is because we don't know how to not generate it. If I could power my oven with all the energy waste while playing Crysis I totally would.
Plus, heat of the brakes is also technically waste. Case in point, Formula 1 cars have specially designed systems whose purpose is converting energy dissipated during braking back into battery charge to power the hybrid engine.
I’ve started noticing what might be described as “filler art” being done by AI. For example, while a local restaurant was being constructed, it had boards up to obscure the goings on with AI art on it- easily distinguished by bad hands, disturbing looking noodles, and amorphous blobs resembling, uh, more morphous blobs. I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to ruin the sanctity of my phone.
Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.
this kind of filler art, ai spam, ai porn, ai seo optimized drivel, ai generated fakes, ai propaganda, ai jpegs that are generated cheaply enough that human artists can't get by on these rates, all of these are things that people don't want to make on moral, legal or some other grounds. just like with all of other automation (well there's no physical risk in making pictures). there will be more of it
Anthropic's Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.
A friend that wants you to have an aggressive brain tumour to make an AI look good is no friend at all
There are far too many people in this world who learned both wrong things from the “Pray tell, Mr Babbage” anecdote
"But look how convincing [it] sounds!"
.... how did we get to the point where the ai bros are un-ironically telling us, as a selling point, that their shiny toy literally gives false yet convincing-sounding medical diagnoses ?!?!?!
If I were working on Claude and wanted to hype it up, I would not talk about this experiment online or in public. If I were working on Claude and wanted to be responsible towards "the public", I would use this example as a cautionary warning, not to further hype up the tool.
This feels like the slight period at the beginning of the NFT craze when I wasn't yet comfortable dismissing out of hand anyone excited about them, because surely there was a least some useful application that wasn't for scamming people, and surely this many people couldn't all be so deluded about the same idea.
“Oh, some patient data. Let me quickly casually scan this into the sv datacorp. What’s that…privacy concerns? Naaaaah I changed the filename”
oh lol just made this a post too
Apparently there's a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and... solve cold fusion?
James: You can just 'feel' the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You're literally going to ask it to 'solve cold fusion' and walk away for 6 months.
...
Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?
Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.
Where are they going to find 500 people in India who are good at solving cold fusion and will do it for pennies.
Who needs things like "experiments" and "data"? Surely a
chatbotsuperintelligence can extrapolate all of physics from two frames of a video of an apple falling.James: You can just ‘feel’ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent.
...... fucking hell that's a few layers of quackery and far-AI promise nuttery all at once
I'm not going to substantively touch on most of those, because by and large I think everyone here gets it
but
'feel' the future.... it's so ... "just vibes, man". petition to crowdfund these poor dipshits some buttplug.io-compatible sex toys or something, give them something else to feel besides vibesI'll give even odds that he was jacking off while writing that
I am extremely impressed (and a little concerned) by the fact that lemmy decided that text needs syntax highlighting
Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.
The halving will occur at block height 840,000 (a count of how many blocks have been hashed to the blockchain), and already people are predicting that will be the most valuable block to be mined to date. This is related to the point above: Ordinals works by assigning serial numbers to individual satoshis (or sats, the smallest denomination of BTC), which turns a fungible asset like bitcoin into something with provenance, identity and scarcity.
Tristan, the founder of Ordiscan.com, which tracks Ordinals projects, predicts that collectors of these “rare sats” could value the data in block 840,000 at $50 million dollars. Under the “Rodarmor Rarity” system, which assigns value to Bitcoin protocol events like difficulty adjustments and halvings, the first satoshi in the block alone could be worth upwards of $1 million, he wrote in a blog post.
They're turning
Bitcoinssatoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?i wasn't really a sneerclubber before, but i did hang out in r/buttcoin. i remember that this was briefly an alleged thing among cryptobros few months ago, with side effect of making seleccion of bitcoin maxis very angry, and somehow making tx even slower and more expensive
Someone on discord linked me to this AI generated horror-show of a "childrens" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nywBUSaHFgY (I hesitate to give them any more views, Internet Archive says youtube vids take a few days to process though)
Which appears to be a channel of entirely AI generated video paired to children's songs. And it is gosh darn creepy and gross and exploitive and unhealthy.
I hope youtube cracks down on shit like this.
Behind the Bastards had a few episodes on how AI children's books are on offer at Amazon - also creepy and unhealthy.
Amazingly atrocious. I think this is my favourite https://youtu.be/A26bO26VnKQ
has anti aging research actually accomplished anything or is the entire field a grift?
This is tangential, but there's a surprisingly interesting article about penis enlargement from ProPublica. It's sobering to see people who've convinced themselves it must have worked, because it's too horrible to consider whether they actually made things worse. If there are any crazy, invasive age therapies out there, maybe there'd be similar themes.
https://www.propublica.org/article/penis-enlargement-enhancement-procedures-implants
Jesus Christ, I'm a penis haver and reading this gives the same sensations as watching people be punched in the balls.
The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.
Also, this fucking quote:
You have to treat your penis like a Rolex.
What in the fuck's mercy is this supposed to mean? You're supposed to change its battery every few years? Take it off at night? I have a watch, just, you know, not a Rolex, a normal-person fucking watch, and I can't decipher this. Is there some specific species of brain worm you get when you buy specifically a Rolex watch?
Tangential to your tangential - nice to see that the moral compass of McKinsey associates is still true north.
By the end of the year, Elist was doing roughly 60 Penuma procedures a month, and his oldest son, Jonathan, left a job at McKinsey to become the CEO of International Medical Devices, as they called their family firm.
On a lighter note:
[Dr. Penile Implants] has also been named as a defendant in product liability lawsuits regarding inflatable penile prosthesis brought by plaintiffs Dick Glass and Semen Brodsky.
There seems to be some legitimate research into the effectiveness of anti-aging compounds like retinol, also they’ve come out with some good advice like wearing sunscreen, drinking enough water, and eating balanced diets to promote skin health which reduces the signs of what we usually associate with aging, if you count that.
so the actual advice is "don't eat trash less healthy than asbestos"
there are some people claiming that polyphenols, flavins or other pharmalogically mischievous, promiscuous trash like that that is barely soluble in the first place and shredded by liver within minutes after absorption into bloodstream is the Real Secret To Long Life (tm) but it's really proxy for the not-deep-fried-everything diet, or at least that's the impression that i'm getting
one specific strain that boils my piss the most is curcumin peddlers, because they waste everyone's time and it's a part of government-funded altmed disinformation campaign (of India in this case)
I’ve tried various face creams of different levels of prestige and not really noticed a difference, so, no, I guess.
Think dgerard mentioned last time I talked about it re H+ transhumanism anti aging that it all seems to have stalled.
none of it ever went anywhere (because these people are clowns who barely understand the thing they claim to be doing) and de Grey got kicked out of the pseudoscience charity he founded for sexual harassment
I still think about that Alcor stuff.
CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/
the website links to a "concept paper" which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that don't add up to much at all
such as these under "gamification";
Badges (NFTs), points, scores, rankings, etc.
Early education (elementary school levels) are easier to gamify. High school subjects become more difficult as the subject becomes more complex. Hopefully by then, the kids have developed enough learning habits to sustain their on-going learning.
or under "completely online"
There are some drawbacks to the online approach, such as lack of peer support, group learning, etc. We won’t be able to solve all problems. We will try to address some of these issues in later iterations.
Use AI & automation
Scalable
The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so there's at least some money there (?)
anyway, dodgy af
Giggle Academy (from prison?)
my brain latches onto this as "gigglepig" (a la Brooklyn 99), and will accept no other meanings
this project intrigues me because we're able to see the brainstorm doc that he believes is shareworthy, combined with a reasonably slick website and a careers page.
There is no open position for a "product designer" or any kind of role that would be interested in concretely working on addressing the clear problem statement in the brainstorm doc. I have to assume there isn't anyone in the group doing that already because they would not let a brainstorm doc be published like that, as if it has any value.
This is what bothers me so much about iterative design culture and the "doing something is better than nothing" mantra. It makes out that identifying the problem/purpose is the assignment, and undermines the REAL design work of coming up with a good response to that purpose.
If this project gets off the ground, they'll start building and they'll hire UX designers and they'll just make something that resembles an online school and focus on making sure it has blockchains and nfts and all that shit, and the whole concept of "design" will be relegated to user acceptance and finding frictions to remove.
At no point will anyone sit down and say "how can we effectively address illiteracy in developing countries" and find out why, what, how, and all the barriers, all the realities, the complexities, the options for means to achieve certain things, all the DESIGN.
Its no different for everything else in tech, they all start from this point where nothing was initially designed beyond throwing together an idea and iterating it into a behemoth that needs an army of staff to groom its hair and clip its toenails. The people given design titles (ux designers, product designers) are not answering to an overarching design or any principled basis for design.
it should also be said that the giggle academy is probably a publicity thing for CZ's character
I've been hoping to post something about the wild mid-tournament apex legends hacks, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of sourcing beyond the videos of its consequences
my pet conspiracy theory is that the two streamers had installed cheats at one point in the past and compromised their systems that way. but i have no evidence to base that on, just seems more plausible to me than "a hacker discovered an RCE in EAC/Apex and used it during a tournament to install game cheats on two people and [appear to] do nothing else"
Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.
Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304
'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929
This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217
[1] when a notable person in CS dies there's sometimes a black bar under the HN header
fucking christ. it takes a lot to fuck up my day, but a quick scroll through that thread seeing how quick these vultures (including one notable person who’s the reason why I’m ashamed to talk about my lambda calculus projects) are trying to capitalize on Vernor’s legacy is absolutely doing it
HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied.
why in the fuck? is the famous sci-fi author with a heavy CS background not notable enough for the standards of the site whose creator is a much less notable self-help author whose CS background is failing to make a working Lisp 3 times and writing programming textbooks nobody reads?
The replies to somebody aggressively (and downvoted) pointing out some of the flaws in Jarts post are bad. Damn.
an LLM cannot be used to create a better LLM
By that logic most humans are also not intelligent.
No you dweeb, they are talking about model collapse, that thing what happens to this 90's tech.
Oh, it doesn't work? That's because IT'S NOT INTELLIGENT.
Ok, let's run this test of "real intelligence" on you. We eagerly await to see your model. Should be a piece of cake.
This is both a weird adhom and a god is hiding in the gaps style argument. (While I have some sympathy for this Peter Watts style argument it is incredibly weak (their post history (8) is more of this very weak stuff)).
Edit: forgot to mention what I actually initially wanted to say:
Idiocracy
I still think that movie actually is quite hopeful, it shows us a world where the current consumerist society in the USA can remain to exist for 500 years (that is how long he is frozen), and there is nobody invading and taking over when the USA becomes this automated and dumb. We should all hope the future is this hopeful (guess they fixed the climate, and achieved fully automated luxury capitalism (which still sucks)) and non-violent.
Ah damn, Justine has my respect for a bunch of cool and interesting stuff but this is just embarrassing, unless I'm missing some extremely dry satire.
She wants/wanted the US government to be replaced with a Silicon Valley CEO.
just realised that Musk's angry face in the Don Lemon interview is the same face as an angry Skibidi Toilet
if my style isn't ridiculous-ulous-ulous-ulous
CW: Palestine-Israel.
Something I’ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesn’t really surprise me, but that’s not what I’m commenting on.
One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israel’s use of “AI” in warfare. I’m only going to link one source and I’m not going into it too deeply.
So what I’m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.
To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said it’s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.
*of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.
the old thing was use of ai in iron dome, because generally mistaking a civilian target for a rocket is pretty hard given differences in size and speed, and autonomous air defense is a thing that already exists for decades. the ai part comes from predicting if a given rocket will fall on populated area, and pointing radar-guided interceptors to those that do
the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you're doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it's working or not you'd need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage
people at palantir are probably making very detailed notes
the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you’re doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it’s working or not you’d need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage
Yeah, and I don’t think they are ever going to be explicit about how their “AI” works.
The path to hell is paved with liberal markets.
also a very big opinion with the rationalists and EAs