Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? 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.
Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and "just asking questions". As if I didn't hate this clown enough.
(For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They're praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They're so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament's far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There's no leeway. They're literal card-carrying national socialists.)
They want to ban kosher food and circumcision, but love the Israeli government and the war on Gaza, which says... so many things, about so many people.
he's been openly a nazi propagandist pretty much since he took over twitter. they are hiding black crime stats from you.png, "this is the actual truth," etc. without saying "I am literally a Nazi" or "we should do holocaust" I genuinely don't know how much more open he can be about it
Notice that he, of course, does not list any of those "policies" that he's "read".
(for mastodon users who don't get the image: it's Andrew Lawrence's "you know the ones" tweet)
@mii
I really didn't think the second part of "Those who don't learn history" was going to be so literal.Maybe I'm missing something.
translation: thinking about this too much, or at all really, would be disastrous for my political ideology and ego, so someone else please waste their time and energy typing up a reply i won't read, so i can continue having the image of an intellectual engaged in vigorous debate without actually having to do anything
Imho that is just plausible deniability, just asking questions style shit. So news papers can keep writing 'his politics are so vague, we don't know' while he keeps unbanning fascists on twitter.
@mii @blakestacey I cannot and will not argue about your points, they're absolutely valid. The words you're using however are not correct. Nazis are fascists, as are these right wing monsters. They are antisocialist, not socialists. They are against socialism and against democracy and only for their own brand of autocracy.
This fucking thread on HN right now.
OP is an enlightened freelance webdeveloper who is very scared about ghosts from their computer.
"I find myself in a unique position here, as my diverse background and experiences have given me a perspective that allows me to see the potential impact of AI more clearly than large parts of the society I'm living in"
Another poster is also very scared about ghosts from the computer and converted their entire net-worth into NVidia shares. Now that they are heavily invested in a company deeply entangled with ghosts from the computer the apocalypse basically has to happen. After all it couldn't be that they overreacted.
Computer ghost phobia:
spooked by AI 🤝 Falling for jump scare flash games
How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?
This is an antinomy so, problem solved I guess?
Proof that pasta doesn't exist:
- An atom isn't pasta.
- Adding an atom to something that isn't pasta doesn't make it pasta.
- Therefore nothing is pasta.
omg, I'm not real.
I wonder if we can start requiring history of science, philosophy, and literary & artistic theory classes in secondary school (or at least before giving out doctorates), just to limit incredibly annoying adults who think they're geniuses. I also thought I invented brain-in-a-vat thought experiments when I was ten, but I don't opine on them reinvented from first principles.
Didn't we discuss this fallacy the other day?
maybe you're referring to when i brought it up in last week's thread? and yeah, this is basically the same
can't wait for AI bros to invent the trolley problem
This is the proof by induction method for the people who don't know btw.
CW:
spoiler
Dongs, Blood and Thunder, Victory at Sea, Child birth, Scented Candles
So yeah...remember that manly Roko post from last week where he manplained how much men don't need women? Oglaf did it first.
This is Roko's ideal future; Roko's Modern Life, if you like.
(NSFW)
https://www.oglaf.com/dark-miasma/ (part 1 of 24 lol)
https://www.oglaf.com/burningjewels/
But nature finds a way:
Even Kronar dislikes Musk (nsfw obv).
Blood and Thunder, Victory at Sea, (...), Scented Candles
I'm sorry what is any of this. I'm scared to click any of the things since I can't even comprehend the content warning.
Sorry! I leaned too hard on the inside jokes. Oglaf is a pretty successful fantasy-themed web comic with adult humor. It's nothing you'd need therapy to get over, though it has more nudity than you'd want your boss to notice if they walked by your desk.
"Blood and Thunder" was heavily memed around a dozen years ago.
Fuck yeah Oglaf!!! I need to do my biannual catchup binge
(Well, this goes some way to explaining "AI" "art")
This has got to be some sort of sucker filter, like it's not that he particularly means it, it's that he is after the exact type of rube who is unfazed by naked contrarianism and the categorically preposterous so long as it's said with a straight face,.
Maybe there's something to the whole pick up artistry but for nailing VCs thing.
It really is as simple as that. The dude got a fair bit of attention from his LSTM blog post and got addicted. Turns out, you can't churn out awesome blog posts that often so you gotta switch to the harder stuff.
according to modern film scholars, this cultural shift was brought about by the lasting audience impact of that scene in Speed (1994) where the bus fucking noclips across a gap while pretending there’s a ramp it’s using to jump (or Keanu made it pop a wheelie?)
"Are you telling me I can jump a bus across a 50 foot gap at 67 miles per hour?"
"No Neo, I'm telling you that when you're ready, you won't have to."
Wasn't 1994 right about when they stopped making movies in black and white?
I also hate movies where I can see the actual action going on and it isn't all shaky cam and cuts cuts cuts.
Who? Is that some indie movie director?
Andrej Karpathy is a former director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI
So just a rando with a stupid opinion. Go back to your totally-not-naive AGI vision board.
At last, a compelling reason to use Chat-GPT: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1801360053045497942
Tim cook is an absolute hustler
ChatGPT is dying Use Apple to make it die faster
iterm2 update, moving the shit out of the core application (like it probably should've been in the first place):
3.5.1 This release adds some safety valves to eliminate the risk of private information leaving the terminal via the AI endpoints. While an API key and explicit user action were always needed to use AI features, some users asked for an impenetrable firewall for safety and regulatory purposes. To that end, there are three relevant changes: 1. Code that communicates with AI providers such as OpenAI has been moved into a plugin that you must install separately. Enterprise system admins can block bundle id com.googlecode.iterm2.iTermAI to prevent it from being installed in the first place. See here for details: https://iterm2.com/ai-plugin.html 2. In addition, you must manually enable AI features in Settings. Doing so requires admin access. 3. Enterprise administrators who wish to disable iTerm2's AI access may set the user default GenerativeAIAllowed to False in their MDM systems.still never received a reply email from the author to my mail. wonder what they think/have learned of this experience tho
I'm afraid their character has been exposed
I uninstalled when they announced it but this week's news says it's time to uninstall macos too
For the moment, I’m choosing to believe the following: 1) that itermdev was operating under hyped-engineer mode and choosing cluelessly as a result (and I sorely hope they learned something through this), 2) that Apple is too selfish to go hard on openai (because it means less money for them)
#2 I’m a smidge more certain about
But both of them are deeply “ugh, fuck” kinda feelings for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40631663
Orange site post with a bunch of people saying burnout is a learning experience and that its okay to be perpetually depressed because it makes you more disruptive.
I don't have anything clever to say about this.
I mean, it is a "learning experience" in the same way a car crash is technically both an experience and something you probably didn't know first hand before.
Can you gaslight people into thinking burnout is good, actually? HN gives it the ol’ college try
NullBulge
oh you know it was some furries
edit: their website (now down, but up on the wayback machine) uses ai-generated furry art, which few self-respecting furries (much less hacktivist ones) would touch with a ten-foot pole. or at least, the ones in the furry circles i keep. so it could very well just be opportunists
New AdamSomething about tech bros reinventing the train but worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5M7Oq1PCz4
shitty 4k upscales, coming soon for a favourite film near you! (via kottke)
Come to think of it, yeah, the people that need things to be in 8k 144Hz in order to enjoy them would absolutely be fine with AI igniting the atmosphere in the name of high quality pixels
with Glassholes v2 likely to be a thing again sometime soon, can't wait to see the the ai app that Makes People Around You Attractive. we'll look back fondly to silly fuckups by computational photography pipelines
"The smile. The optimism. Versus the steely 1000 yard stare.
Ideology preformed in the instant of conception
Physiognomy, simply, does not lie."
immediately know which represents pragmatism vs esoteric theory
What neither of them are doing 'The Stare', Moore can do it, Crowley could do it, Rasputin can do it. Get these low budget farces out of here, and give me a proper Stare.
Moldbug tries, but he mostly just looks in a way that makes you think 'he just farted and is trying to figure out if I noticed'.
Ah yes, pragmatists, well known for their constantly sunny and optimistic outlook on the future, consequences be damned (?)
man will wheaton really turned to the dark side, didn't he?
got told to shut up one too many times. See what happens when you censor people libs?
He did???
Update: this guy is an influential (apparently) right wing poster who got doxxed.
Where are these people coming from?
Rare moment of clarity on EA forum: the fuck are we giving $100k to a video game for
lol at the “delved” there. Wonder if it’s some intentional contrarian
But wait, the game developer wrote a story called Singularity 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20240302011145/https://singularity1999.tv/
I'm not sure I'm brave / bored enough to read.
The sim city clone looks like it could have been neat with some more love, it has a bit of a Streets of SimCity / SimCopter vibe to the aesthetics which was my jam back in the day. Though from the reviews it looks like it made the decision of shying away from low level management aspects or angry headlines yelling at you for your dumb city building choices (so I wouldn't have played it for that reason, is it even sim city without being told "you're going to regret this"??)
bit of a combo-sneer this morning
CNBC put out an article uncritically repeating yet another round of lieboy pulling the exact same shit. I don't recognize the authors immediately, not sure if they're typical bootlickers or not
openai is going in hard, hiring ex-NSA person that was appointed by the walking talk racist mop (via dan gillmor). for the .... safety role! ah yes, I'm sure we'll all be so very surprised by this attempt consolidation of power.
to their credit, they did manage to get past the editor:
This is all far-out stuff even for Musk, who is notorious for making ambitious promises to investors and customers that don’t pan out — from developing software that can turn an existing Tesla into a self-driving vehicle with an upload, to EV battery swapping stations.
i ran the NVidia CEO's press conference through my ChatGPT based translator and it came out "lol this is gonna bomb in two quarters but holy shit it's fun while it lasts and i can def get a few scheduled insider sales done, now where's the coke"
Lawrence Lessig falls victim to the siren song of the blarney engines. Also, lol cnn
Many people refer to concerns about the technology as a question of “AI safety.” That’s a terrible term to describe the risks that many people in the field are deeply concerned about. Some of the leading AI researchers, including Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio and Sir Geoffrey Hinton, the computer expert and neuroscientist sometimes referred to as “the godfather of AI,” fear the possibility of runaway systems creating not just “safety risks,” but catastrophic harm.
And while the average person can’t imagine how anyone could lose control of a computer (“just unplug the damn thing!”), we should also recognize that we don’t actually understand the systems that these experts fear.
Companies operating in the field of AGI — artificial general intelligence, which broadly speaking refers to the theoretical AI research attempting to create software with human-like intelligence, including the ability to perform tasks that it is not trained or developed for — are among the least regulated, inherently dangerous companies in America today. There is no agency that has legal authority to monitor how the companies develop their technology or the precautions they are taking.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/opinions/artificial-intelligence-risks-chat-gpt-lessig/index.html
need a meme image that represents the way Apple is legitimising openai after all the crypto degens were desperate for apple to legitimise nfts. the jealous hot mess rejected for another hot mess
degens
Not your fault, but I really dislike this word and wish people wouldn't start copying it from the cryptobros. Not a fan of calling people degenerates.
fair shake. I never intended it as a shortened word, just a crypto word in itself. consider this my last use
https://zhukeepa.substack.com/p/ai-alignment-and-the-distributed
This came across the dash and well…
I couldn't remember who Chris Langan was, and mobile search gave me "Chris Langham":
Christopher Langham (born 14 April 1949) is an English writer, actor, and comedian.
No mention of philosophy, but this turned up
On 2 August 2007, Langham was found guilty of 15 charges of downloading and possessing level 5 child sexual abuse images and videos.
OK so maybe the correct person?
No it turns out Langan is the person with "the world's highest IQ".
From the podcast transcript
… if people look up Chris Langan on Wikipedia, under his views section, they'll be like, ah, these are some far right views. The CTMU is obviously not about that, but… anything you want to just fill in for people that might be curious about that part of it?
[...]
When people bring up his political views, I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn't mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright. I don't think Chris is remotely a Nazi. In my personal interaction with him, he's been a wonderful person. He's been kind and generous with me, and I respect him personally.
No doubt Himmler's friends and family thought he was a great guy too.
I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn’t mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright
Very true. It should instead be dismissed because it is the exact sort of reactionary nonsense a craven nazi would try to pass off as philosophical inquiry.
He’s been kind and generous with me
Reminds me of this comic, xcancel
previously featured here, too
oh boy
bonus Leverage
I kinda want to go read the old Singularity fic and enjoy any Zeerust that pops up.
looks like perplexity misbehaves in a way that’d allow them to hide
quick whois on the ip from that log snippet says ec2, so they’re probably doing scaleout via dynamic instances (I’ve been wondering about this for a variety of the services)
full fucking parasitical, again and again
