Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 26 May 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? 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 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.
the voice for OpenAI’s Sky got taken offline because they tried to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for it (she voiced the AI in Her) after she repeatedly told them no (via this mastodon post which links the original NPR article):
A well-respected terminal emulator for the Mac decides to slather on AI sauce, and most users are not happy. But there are others who are outraged that slathering AI sauce onto a product is even seen as a negative. Let's take a break from HN to take a look at the tortured souls on lobste.rs who won't let this aggression stand, man:
I don’t like AI hype either but I don’t feel the need to use Lobsters to rally groups of people to mass punish projects who add optional AI-friendly features. That is quite disturbing.
ok. I tried writing something sarcastic and sneery but alas, I don't think I can mock this person hard enough to satisfy my ethical obligation.
Saw this update yesterday and it pissed me really off. I've been using iTerm for almost 20 years at this point and it's a really good and well-integrated terminal application for Mac OS, and no one asked for it to add spicy autocomplete.
Or maybe I'll just move over to Alacritty. I use that one my Linux machines and it's actually good, but the attitude of some of the developers when it comes to feature requests and contributions really makes me like it less than I could.
tbh the enforced civility and de facto ban on social issue discussion on lobste is not helping. (but after last “polite discussion” i had with the moderator i'm not going to bring it up anymore, just suspend the account or wait to be banned.)
yeah frankly that sort of shit is why I haven't even tried to get a lobsters account
bullshit should be called out as bullshit at any point in time. dressing it up in niceties is playing the wrong game, and has been abused by the worst people around for years
Noooooooooooooo! Argh, I'll have to seriously consider using the fork FML.
EDIT:
Not strictly required since apparently you have to provide an API key for it to be enabled, still it's not encouraging that the main developer thought this would be a good idea.
EDIT 2:
Given direct access to bad AI code to a dev workstation is bad enough, but given that the console is a primary way to connect to servers, where more havoc could be wrought, this is terrifying, I mean sure devs were already capable of bricking enviromnents, but supercharging "knowing just enough to be dangerous" is NOT a good idea.
for people who thought this might not be related to the llm brainworms, the reasoning of the iterm2 author for inclusion of the feature (when promptedy by @[email protected]) :
I got a number of requests. I also got tired of copy-pasting things to ChatGPT. Usually if I find a feature useful, other people do, too.
The latest beta has options to turn the shit off totally. The text mixes metaphors with wild abandon but I think it’s safe to say the promptfondling was not huge success
I presume I'm not the first nor (will I be the last) to ask about this,
but for the weight of the argument it's still worth asking
are you planning on keeping the openai garbage directly integrated in
iterm2? and "just turn it off with a setting" isn't a good answer tbh
I don't want it in the terminal I use. I don't want it in any software I
touch. openai are a deceptive abuse company led by an abusive liar, and
it saddens me to see yet another good thing get taken up in the hype
these charlatans drive
no "I've been $x for $y" pleading arguments here, I don't want to try
bend your ear with any number of platitudes and such you've heard from
others - just straight-up asking the above
It's nice to know we have looped back to the point in history where we casually consider which people should have agency over their reproductive rights. Oh wait, no it's not nice at all, but somehow still totally acceptable and commonplace.
Sorry, im a habitual contrarian about this movie (good for that poster that they commit to not do an idiocracy and use tools that helps people, for example searching for the name of a movie), but reminder that that movie is basically utopian as it takes place 500 years in the future, and the American way of life is still going strong, and the problem of the food crisis is basically solved in a week.
Also someone bringing up "population collapse" which is a recent(?) right-wing/techbro trope. Everything about everyone expressing worries about "sub replacement birth rates" screams "we must prevent people with wombs from making their own decisions about whether to have kids".
I don't know anything about evolution or genetics, and I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't either. Why would everyone become disabled because more disabled people survive and pass on their genes to their kids? We don't stone gingers to death and yet we are not all having red-headed kids.
The repeated use of the word "weak" (as opposed to "sick" or "disabled") seems revealing.
extremely weird shit across the board from that user. account claims to be "18M" and running "manjaro and mint", and then has a shell on sdf.org? along with the posts, "Yes, I’d prefer not being resuscitated. If I am finally dead, let it stay that way" just from that thread (and a number of other choice entries elsewhere in their history)
reporter: Oh, I'm so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!
me: y tho?
reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!
me: sorry, y tho?
reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let's not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!
me: begins weeping
reporter: Don't cry! At least we're all in this together, right???
While AI being "in" a computer might sound as obvious as blue being "in" the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an "AI computer", meaning the technology is in-built. It's the company's latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest.
What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven't worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we're the rats. Perhaps there's some comfort in knowing we'll all find out together.
I started pre-hurting in 2018-2019 when I saw SoC vendors pitch things as AI chips because you could natively run accelerated models on them for speech and image recognition. Yes, really, that was the total pitch. It’s AI because you could run models. Where to train the models, what the total scope of capacity was, total execution space, total throughput, etc? No no, not practically touched at all in those docs
And where I said pre-hurting? At the time I thought “oh god”….you can imagine how quaint that memory feels in retrospect right now
oh yeah doing embedded dev that was always the worst. my RISC-V SoC has an AI accelerator on it! cool, what does the datasheet say it does? TensorFlow lite and nothing else. ok maybe I can use that silicon for something else at least? nope, there’s no documentation on its capabilities or how it works at all, it just does TensorFlow lite. shit well ok, what can I do with TensorFlow lite? you can load the example model we’ve provided and make a shitty voice activation trigger or try to train a model but there’s no docs. well fuck me then.
Finally the realization that academia is just an industry producing artifacts (published papers) and not anything as abstract as "science" and "knowledge" gets the tool it deserves
I mentioned this in the last weekly thread, but check out the 5th citation in their example paper (the one that says nothing in particular about type 2 diabetes)
T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.
I left a HN comment that they got the names wrong for Hermina Jakupović, Germán D Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, and Tuomas O Kilpeläinen. They thanked me for my "thorough" review (read: I glanced over it for giggles at like 2 AM).
Scam investigator Coffeezilla is working on the Rabbit AI guy, and he's off to a good start. Most of the other press is about the device not working, while this focuses more on the scammy NFT / crypto past of the founder.
the follow-up video is fucking scathing, and I’d like to take a moment to remember all the orange site posters who were fucking wrong when they pretended the rabbit leak was fake
Not a sneer, and as such NSFW, but here is a short hbomberguy style video: I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology, featuring friend of the sneer PrimalPoly, by the talented münecat.
Pull a Rabbit AI and use Playwright to operate an Emacs instance running Eliza. Say that buying more infrastructure will yield better results. Pocket the money that was for supposed infrastructure investment. Profit!
Bold of you to think we have not already started doing this to mess with the EA/LW minds. Why do you think we suddenly talk less about all the outrageous weird shit they say on LW? We don't want to out ourselves. For example
Surprise Aella reference in those HN comments! (well, surprise that one commenter noted "the Bay Area's most overrated escort", and a replier directly inferred it was her)
Now I wonder if there's an app rating Bay Area escorts...
It's a well recognized rule that every time Lumina comes up, someone has to mention that Aella is connected to the project. Then, someone must make a joke about Lumina adding anti-toothbrushing to her anti-showering arsenal. HN hasn't caught up to the last bit yet.
Tedium and logorrhea in the substack comments, as intended. I wonder how often people on LW use "ink spilled" and "column inches" to describe themselves.
lol @ this austin chen guy, who seems to be an investor in Lumina, as well as a user of the project going like "dude just get on the phone with him, I'm sure he totally won't corner you with threats and such, he's a great guy I swear bro!"
Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.
It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.
The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.
The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.
you know what really fucking gets me about this thing? even "before" all of the security and DV etc arguments (and, really, they are all valid)
consider the average consumer-human (present version of) windows desktop/laptop/workstation that has survived for more than a year or so without having been re-imaged. those are already often an unusable nightmare of built-up cruft in sticky corners
and now there's going to be something that'll do constant capture and analysis every fucking moment it's running?
how the fuck is this not going to go wrong? imagine the first time that sqlite table shits the bed. a dodgy character format goes into it, or a bit of disk corruption hits, or a file locking (lololol) issue hits, or .....
I just ..... I just really can't imagine any of this is going to go very well at all in the real world
LOL, the first thing I saw of these new lappys was a breathless Verge article saying "finally MS will release the Macbook Air killer" and the very next thing is the poisoned chalise that is "you want a fast efficient Windows machine? well you just have to accept the AI recording everything you do on it". Fucking own goal.
Meanwhile some of the comments are downright terrifying, also the whole "research" output is overly-detailed yet lacking any substance, and deeply deeply in fantasy land, but all the comments a debating in favour of or against what is perceived as "real work", and in terms of presentation "vibes".
I mean my parents always said that fascist/cultish movements have issues distinguishing signified and signifier, but good grief. (Yes too much Lacan in the household)
I love the guy who goes in and says "but you really should give this guy money! I know he has produced absolutely no research or work worthy of a second glance but he's my friend and I promise he SOUNDS suuuuper smart! btw I read the Sequences once. funding now??"
I wonder what Peter Thiel would think about using disability benefits. Does he fly Ayn Rand style, where it's okay to benefit from it while actively campaigning against it?
Back when I used reddit, r/badmathematics would feature weirdos that posted REAMS of shit just like that guy's whiteboard pictures. There, we called them cranks.
Please hire me for AI safety, I create active work place hazards around me and therefore small children and animals are not safe around me, but I really work hard (unless it is cleaning up).
Wonder if he is single.
This post also reminds me of the story I heard about a brilliant but weird math professor who had a tendency to touch walls when he walked around in the building. Eventually, in supreme cargo cult behavior, students also started to touch walls in an unconscious hope this would improve their math skills. Anyway this guys hopes and dreams to be hired would be shattered if he ever hears the people hiring him are a fan of Taleb.
Good that the communities first reaction is saying this is a mh red flag. (It is also a workplace red flag)
a not-insignificant element of the TPOT cluster is the "cozy"/"vibes" aspect
and for some reason your reply just made me think the thought "while they espouse their shitty views they want to be comfortable, to maximize feeling unchallenged, to really get into it"
on the one hand it feels like an obvious realisation, but I also hadn't really thought of it specifically like that before
(admittedly I'm briefly jumping from "rats -> postrats" there by referencing the TPOT cluster, but as is known the latter haven't really changed their beliefs just their rendering)
Received: from <snip>.net (unknown [snip])
Subject: ***SPAM*** Binance Distribution of MyEtherWallet (MEW) Airdrop
my spamtrap addresses get these every now and then. I'm still amazed that I get that type of subject line in tyol 2024 - spammers are usually far more agile
Rival Consoles - Howl
Sleep Party People - Heap of Ashes
Nathan Fake - Drowning in a Sea of Love
Model/Actriz - Dogsbody
Katie Alice Greer - Barbarism
Blanck Mass - World Eater
Yves Tumor - Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
Some albums, mostly electronic, mostly experimental, that I've been enjoying.
Alternative rock band from California, but one of the main people behind the project is the creator or a super obscure but really cool and well-made ARG called House of Aberdeen from a few years back that has since been deleted. I don’t like most ARGs but I really enjoyed that one and was sad when it was all deleted, and then I found out she’s making music now.
Completely different, but the album Haunted by Poe, sister of author Mark Danielewski, is cool. It’s meant as an accompanying piece to his novel House of Leaves, which I recently read again.
Lots of things by монеточка, such as Русский ковчег, for pure outright fun jams.
I have alllllll kinds. Being able to share music in an easy manner is actually a fucking disaster of a problem in recent years. Just try to copy a fucking track name out of something like Spotify or Apple Music.
I have alllllll kinds. Being able to share music in an easy manner is actually a fucking disaster of a problem in recent years. Just try to copy a fucking track name out of something like Spotify or Apple Music.
It’s a problem I want to solve.
oh absolutely same, it’s fucking ridiculous how hard it is to share music in any way that doesn’t immediately tie you to a streaming service your friends might not have. I’d really like a web service that’d take a Spotify/Apple Music/whatever share link or a song or album title and output a link to a page that’d just link that song’s data on MusicBrainz and have a bunch of buttons to listen to it on whatever service or the best match on YouTube. I’ve been tempted so many times to create this
oh also, since it may be of benefit to you: I did this a few years back too. attempted to get my play history out. that turned out to be a mess, and definitely missed some shit in the export.
then I started looking at what option I had for starting to seed that into something else, and, fuck me. apple music desktop app? no fucking API exposed for search on the streaming half of the app. all the ex-itunes/local shit? plenty hooks. "Apple Music" side? nope.
you have to go get a fucking developer key to be able to hit the Apple Music API to be able to do that. (or to go use a "free service" which handily gives people access to your full fucking library and thus allows them to mine it, and no fucking way go fuck yourselves thank you)
exactly! I took this opportunity to start over from scratch (which is why I’m seeking recommendations) with Bandcamp and a pile of automatically organized and tagged FLACs in storage for when Bandcamp enshittifies (coming soon!), and YouTube Music on a friend’s account if I get truly desperate for a shitty recommendation engine
of all these options, the automatically managed pile of FLACs have by far the best API, because you choose what it is (and there’s some very good options even for streaming them to your own devices)
Ricardo Autobahn of Spray will soon be releasing his own album of sample-based bops. Here's "The Hands Of Porsche" and "The Frequency Range" (which came out yesterday, and I bought it immediately). The front covers of these are particularly good. I also recommend Spray's "The Big Idea", which is ideal when you need an '80s-style pop song that goes for an hour as working music.
Today, Red Hat announced a developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), a foundation model platform to seamlessly develop, test and run best-of-breed, open source Granite generative AI models to power enterprise applications. RHEL AI is based on the InstructLab open source project and combines open source-licensed Granite large language models from IBM Research and InstructLab model alignment tools, based on the LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots) methodology, in an optimized, bootable RHEL image to simplify server deployments.
the "LAB methodology". I wonder if someone broke out the rack and thumbscrews to get a name that tortured
given what I've seen people do to ubuntu-based machines to make their kerases and tensorflows run, combined with redhat's historical trend of extremely bullshit repo pains, I have to wonder what nightmare experience this will result in
I don’t know if I’ll get it on my one droid (both because I’ve turned near every setting and tracker and whatnot off in advance, and because ZA - less likely to get shit like that in advance) but loooool
they’re all just shoving this shit into every damn input control
unfortunately, logitech’s ahead of you on that one, and of course it’s the type of lazy shit you could design in an afternoon, so that means they’re gonna sell you a $50 AI Edition mouse:
Logitech Signature AI Edition mouse: $49 @ Logitech
This is a new version of the Logitech M750 wireless mouse that comes with a new teal button on top specifically intended to be used for the AI Prompt Builder. Of course, you could likely remap it using Logitech's software to do whatever you want.
and I realize the article I linked is essentially a paid undisclosed advertisement, but holy fuck:
I just tested Logitech's new shortcut to ChatGPT — and it's a big time-saver
Get ready to summon ChatGPT with the press of a button
it’s a fucking macro key that opens a popover that pastes text into ChatGPT running in a browser get the fuck over yourself
fuck me this is why I make peripherals from components these days instead of buying keyboards and mice fucking laden with this bullshit. when my current (no-name) vertical mouse kicks the bucket I’m gonna have to see what repairable mouse kits are available to replace it
Thank god I can have a button on my mouse to open ChatGPT in Windows. It was so hard to open it with only the button in the taskbar, the start menu entry, the toolbar button in every piece of Microsoft software, the auto-completion in browser text fields, the website, the mobile app, the chatbot in Microsoft's search engine, the chatbot in Microsoft's chat software, and the button on the keyboard.
when my current (no-name) vertical mouse kicks the bucket I’m gonna have to see what repairable mouse kits are available to replace it
If you like trackballs, Ploopy is great. They’re open source all the way down, mostly 3D-printable, and actually better than most commercially available trackballs.
They also have a mouse kit, but I can’t speak for that.