Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 11 August 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 11 August 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting 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: 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.
Jesus, take the wheel!
--intel, probably
you know
I actually meant to post that (a friend sent it to me earlier, and it was why I even got around to starting the new stubsack)
adhdbrain is a fuck
(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)
(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)
Anything that takes the edge off a possible Great Recession sequel's fine in my book
Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we're trying to force everyone to use one instead of using
hunter2everywhere.Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that "Usually there's no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT."
Usually.
what
whattttttttt
whatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
and it's not like crowdstrike didn't just happen. I guess maybe it was too recent, and the lesson-of-pain hasn't percolated through to dipshit"integration advisor" technical sales fuckwits yet
bonus round, whatever the hell lemmy did here:
Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0
These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/
Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.
Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.
I'm sure!
They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.
Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.
Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.
They prob should do a video on this effect as shown by the early ELIZA experiments. That even the smartest people could get fooled by a dumb program. Doubt they will though if they are into EA stuff.
Kurzgesagt
Yeah I'm not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as "all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s".
@hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they've previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.
This is extra crap because I'd already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn't have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.
Some 'scientists' cough Yud/Rob/Kokotajlo cough believe in FOOM. Anyways, let's not question this fundamental assumption so we can engage in fear baiting and mental masturbation for the remainder of our show. It's bonkers that people keep citing Kokotajlo as an AI researcher, like, I have serious doubts this man knows what a computer is. Pretty good at grifting though. Also why is Rob Miles still listed as a PhD student. Like cant he hurry up and fuckin graduate already? Christ.
As an aside, I remember watching a PBS space time and seeing sponsored by Open Philanthropy (or some other EA organization) and I was like no not my beloved PBS!! I know it feels :(
Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it's important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.
The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It's fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman's "last invention" is wrong because most, unfortunately, most "smart people's" view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.
In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.
Idea: a Pivot to AI video series hosted by an avatar that's, like, a talking polyhedron in the style of Mind's Eye/Body Wars era CGI.
This would require effort and thus is a terrible idea, but I find the mental image amusing.
I've never heard of this outfit. Is it a sort of skepticsphere darling?
more a sort of 'I love science' youtuber I think.
Regarding the paper "Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning", a comment by e. e. arroyo:
"Yes! we can make explainable predictions of compounds with AI now!"
- They could only explain 15% of predictions
- They could only understand 9% of those explanations
- 60% of those were wrong
- The 4 active compounds left are probably, arguably, not even a novel class
i'm not reading all that, at least now, but i'd just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development
I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it's not like there's no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the "spare" cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.
"for SBV values of explaining"
babe wake up, antitrust law was confirmed not dead
(I will say this one surprised me)
The government has asked for "structural relief" - which could, in theory at least, mean the break-up of the company.
How likely would this be?
I heard that one of Bidens good things is to put actually effect people on antitrust laws. Sadly I also heard that Harris is planning on putting somebody else on there.
A lot of what Biden did was based on the wide margins the executive had. But now with Chevron deference dead people can sue those efforts and will win via the 5th Circuit or SCOTUS, because they're institutions bought by people who most vehemently hate antitrust laws. Similar reasoning applies to right-to-repair efforts.
In other words, USA will never have nice things unless Harris pulls off a major court reform.
Surely the words being put into the son's mouth should be "What's his TikTok?".
my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:
What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn't want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it'll be fine as long as there's a big cyber noggin down the track... just google TESCREAL. We didn't make this up.
big cyber noggin? @[email protected]
lol holy shit, apparently a US chain is trying to do"AI-based" individualised pricing of goods in-store
can't wait to hear of someone being charged $500 for a packet of gum
An "Oops, racism!" incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.
probably a couple of them, too :|
(I can speculate a few off the top of my head as-is, but not sure I want to enumerate them)
Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?
(also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)
Is that in any way legal?
Common Kroger L.
They just got done being bullied into dropping plans to go to 100% self-checkout, too.
I never really got the (E: thanks froztbyte, I meant user complaints here, there certainly are job complaints re self-checkout see reply below) complaints of self checkout, works great in most places in .nl I tried it.
And then the local Lidl got a self checkout. I now get why people hate those things, somebody really designed it with the idea of 'people in our stores are criminals we must catch' in mind. Turns out those styles of self checkouts are more common in EE as well. A small example of a problem with it. The part where you in other self checkouts would put your bag to put your stuff into was a scale, and because of that I couldn't put my bag there as I thought I was trying to sneak products through, and every item had to be placed there on the scale after weighing. (And then it didn't always work correctly). You could almost smell the security person who designed it going 'im gonna catch all those baddies!' (that could have also been me, I need to remember to wash my clothes). The machine also felt cheap, and the way the employees had to interact with it (they had to physically touch the machine with some key, and not use a tablet like all the other self checkouts (I had gotten something with alcohol in it)) didn't help this feeling.
Moral of the story, there are ways to do self checkout better than others.
ah heh, that would’ve been the other leg of this plan, I imagine
“sorry about the unfortunate pricing” says the dead-ending support flow, which doesn’t have the ability to contact an actual human anywhere in the tree
Oh look, an AI tool to make Wikipedia worse.
(Apparently, the Wikimedia Foundation couldn't even be bothered to care about the standards that en.wp contributors deem necessary for sources on medical topics. Because it's more important to "sustain and grow Wikimedia projects in a changing online knowledge landscape". Dammit, where's the button that sends electrical shocks through the Internet to anyone who talks like that?)
at least Wikipedia has some rather strident
rulessuggestions on LLM use - tl;dr under no goddamn circumstance, don't be a fucking idiot. And this seems to be using it as a forest-burning search engine rather than anything that will generate wiki text.
this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)
this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now
I’m really not a fan of Python (in general; the whole philosophy of that language is kinda opposite to my idea of programming) but I have to admit the project does look interesting at first glance.
And after glancing at the Lemmy codebase a few times I think that an alternative or at least competition is a good thing.
I just half-wrote a post in this textfield then snipped it
will dm elsewhere
(largely snipped because I'm too fucking out of spoons today to format it without edgepruning (which it probably deserves))
it happened
I popped out somewhere to have a drink, and got to have someone tell me about their “edutech” startup that “uses AI”
they very definitely overpromise (not gonna rinse their bullshit), and topped it off with “and then we use a LLM for suggesting improvements”
(I ejected from the conversation but I can still hear it; it’s progressed to “talking about property” in the terms of mediocre early-20s white kids talking leveraging daddy and uncle’s assets)
Congrats on your stoic non-reaction and ejection. You are now provably better than the whole alpha-maleosphere.
Sometimes I feel blessed to be beneath this all.
I didn't even know this was happening friend sent me the screenshot, but apparent grimusk are in the bureaucratic stages of their relationship ending. and of course it's going extremely normal:
I sadly know more, it is horrible. Not only is there a custody battle, grimes grandma is dying and she has never seen grimes kids, and because Musk isn't reacting to anything Grimes mother put a plea online for him to please let her grandkids see her mother.
Poor kids, just heartbreaking.
E: source
heh
that looks pretty fucking shitty. but we all already knew both of them were fucking ghouls. sucks for the kids, hopefully they can get out okay eventually. but that's about as much as I'm willing to say (largely: reasons private, w/ heavy state load implications. I don't mind telling/explaining, but not in public, and it's a lot of work/context)
I have seen three separate instances of start-ups with "AI" in their name that proudly display a tagline along the lines of "BUILDING THE NEXT UNICORN" and jesus fuck almighty I swear I will fucking piledrive the next recruiter that tries that on me
(E: And he is certainly not joking. More: My doctor, and all of you were wrong because I didn't explain myself well (this longer post, while coming closer to a point still sucks. High 'shooting the people who clean phones into space' feeling))
dude got fucking ratioed lol
My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!
"Ideological Turing test"?
Not gonna look up what that is, but I'm sure it's debatebro "civility" fetishism.
It is the not totally bad idea that you understand a different perspective if you can reliably write pieces of text in such a way that somebody from that perspective cannot tell you don't hold that ideological position.
It fails pretty quickly when tribalism comes into play (aka do it a few times, conclude 'our side is better at passing this test, so we are better', ideologies being broad and people not always realizing which ideology they really are in/differences in definitions. And other issues like it is just a bit of intellectual masturbation, depending on finding neutral people of that perspective. 'you failed the intellectual turing test so we can ignore your criticism of our side'. 'You would fail an intellectual turing test so we can ignore you'. It being debate bro culture with extra steps. People are not actually interested in the test but use the test as an argument to bash people (you once failed at detecting sarcasm and misattributed a sarcastic joke from a leftwinger to the far right? This shows the entire left fails the intellectual turing test and should not be listened to). etc etc. /rant
I made the mistake of reading the comments on that substack and I'm beginning to actually feel the raw desperation of these sycophants for someone of "note" to notice them.
Innumeracy is the opioid of the masses.
This is the genius-level discourse that Bryan Caplan foments in his marketplace of ideas.
Is he ever going to specify which booster? If he refused Tdap he is a menace to society not because of risk of tetanus but spreading pertussis to the vulnerable.
Still, anyone that took him seriously before this should be embarrassed.
I mean, for the doctor it's pretty hard to tell a dude who is "GMU econ prof, NYT bestseller, father of 4, author of Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Case Against Education, Open Borders, & BBB" apart from any other entitled white guy whose read too much Facebook.
Practically is there much difference?
Woo, complaining about a community note is big Karen energy.
went and peeked at the ezra klein podcast on the off chance he's gotten into anything interesting
lol
To be fair, it's hard to really internalize that all these rich and powerful techbros are actually morons after all these years of journalists like Ezra Klein breathlessly reporting their weird ideas and baseless claims about what they were going to be able to do in the next couple of years.
I rewrote it for accuracy:
There's something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It's clear we're witnessing the advent of a wilfully stupid fart machine, one that could transform the atmosphere into farts and the way we think about farts and creating farts and the value of human farts itself. At the same time, I can't for the life of me figure out why I'd want to sit in a room filled with my own farts.
So I wanted to understand what I'm missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate farts better into my life right now. And Eating Mollusks is the perfect guide: He's a pro-fartor at the Fartin' School at the University of Farts
the nuanced take nobody wants to hear: farts are a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or bad. that's what progress is. we can't let the possibility of a few bad uses of farts overshadow how farts can unleash the futures of truly creative individuals, businesses and societies.
to address another common point: yes, there are kinks to be worked out. sometimes farted information can be wrong. farted music doesn't always come out with the clarity we want. farted art is sometimes missing details. but farts are already revolutionizing and democratizing the arts, science, and even the concept of human interaction. we can't lose sight of the great potential of farting - just like the early days of the internet, we don't know what amazing things we'll end up with because of it.
person who can barely brain themselves finds they have to engage with US postal system, hilarity ensues
(via friend who often sends me tweet-screenshots (one day I'll convince 'em to join here))
For those who are wondering, real tweet. I checked. Guy is defending himself by going 'physical mail is outdated and shouldn't exist'. This guy is going to get cybercrimed by somebody so hard.
E: also interesting, and relevant to our interests, you can just buy prestamped envelopes, so thanks chatgpt.
Holy shit, this is LinkedIn matetial
Dude got a check delivered to him, presumably via the same mail system he is shitting on? But fine, apparently "not getting paid" is also a competitive advantage.
Also checks, lol????
Also checks, lol???
the US (banking system, but not exclusively that) is living in the past to a stunning degree
couple years back when I visited (mid 2010s), in DC I had someone make a physical imprint of my CC for a payment, and in NYC doing card transactions on the subway ticket machines it doesn't ask for card pin but instead for zip code (and as a non-resident, you just enter
0000(never tried to see if others work))checks/cheques are still a rather frequent way of inter-business/inter-person value transfer
Microsoft added AI to MS Paint. W H Y ?
death of another gateway drug to digital creativity
And it still cannot edit webps?
Though they did introduce layers, so I guess that's neat.
Not a sneer, but an interesting article from WaPo (archive link) about the rise/return of "dumb tech", and its link to the backlash against smart tech
hmm, it's nice that this exists but feels like they could've gone a bit further in their writing, providing more exposition than just making a laundry list of instances found to be doing the thing. this reads very "I picked up on a trend and just wanted to be the first to mention it in writing"
just about a month since we had the LLM security thread, and now there's some more hilaribad coming out at blackhat
what if we simply took the output of the easily manipulated word salad generator and parsed it into instructions for the computers that are in charge of all our communication to follow
wow, remember when a bunch of random posters came to that security thread to try and gaslight us into thinking the very similar attack described in @[email protected]’s blog post wasn’t a security vulnerability? and now it’s a Black Hat talk, aka “you fucked up and now the world knows about it”
"It's kind of funny in a way - if you have a bot that's useful, then it's vulnerable. If it's not vulnerable, it's not useful," Bargury said.
holy fuck that’s damning. LLMs are so worthless on their own that they can’t do anything unless you’ve got everything hooked up to RAG, which is just a wide-open API with access to all your data.
rootkits as a service
There is a thing in crypto called "ux/acc" which, from what I can fathom, is a new way to avoid thinking about why it isn't being adopted
crypto/blockchain UX quality is strongly correlated with risk of getting all your tokens stolen.
I've written about this a few times, like this one from https://fasterandworse.com/known-purpose-and-trusted-potential/ but I think you've summed it up perfectly
Nothing could make this more evident than the crypto/web3 community’s obsession with “mass adoption” which they generally resolve to being a UX problem. They know that the complexity of crypto is intimidating to non-technical people (crimes and scams aside) so they relentlessly try to remove as much of the complexity as possible.
The unfortunate thing about removing complexity is that you never remove it, but rather, you move it to another place. The other place is always what crypto people like to call a “trusted third party” the very thing that Bitcoin, was created to eliminate.
ux/acc is the noise you make after eating something that you really shouldn't have eaten
ux/acc is the sound of a cat coughing up a hairball
15 years to realize their UIs might be bad. How many years until they realize UI and system design (including protocols, backend, etc) are inextricably linked?
sometimes I'm trying to decide whether to pay for a bagel with credit or ethereum, and I go with credit because it's got nice bridges, chain abstraction protocols and cross-L2 UX
If your turds are lovingly polished by highly trained artisans, they're still shit.
The replies are gloriously butthurt.
Not just ratioed, his tweets get, for the amount of followers he has, an low amount of likes and retweets, exceptions seeming to be his stolen meme posts (The fascist hard times one was very scare with over a million of likes), esp considering the amount of views.
Goes to show how much of the views/follower count is just worthless padding.
E: unrelated to the ratio of Musk, but related to Musk so only worth an edit, he is claiming the advertisers not wanting to advertise is a RICO case. Poor Popehat.
Seeing that, I too immediately thought, in popehat voice, "It's not RICO."
Presented without comment:
can anyone recommend a language learning app or system that isn’t dependent on LLM garbage? after bouncing off of Duolingo I almost landed on Readlang, but:
- all of its features seem to be LLM-dependent
- because of that, its word and phrase explanations have a bit of oddity to them that I feel will get worse when I get past the beginner material
- it’s a lot slower than it should be because it’s calling into ChatGPT for everything
- even though this is supposedly their strength, I’ve had really bad instances where a GPT-based translation app translates Spanish (which should be fairly easy) into absolutely nonsensical English, and I’m kind of terrified I’ll make a fool of myself learning Spanish from a system where that’s a statistically likely probability
- maybe I don’t want to pay some asshole to not write me some study materials????
- plagiarism and the rainforests
- it feels like Readlang really doesn’t need an LLM or a $6/month subscription that’ll almost certainly go up? like, it’s essentially an e-reader with a manual translation feature (that could be just a Spanish word/phrase dictionary) that also generates flash cards whenever you activate the translation. is there really not an e-reader or browser plugin that just does this shit without LLMs?
with that rant out of the way, I’m open to suggestions that aren’t Duolingo’s model or another round of passing grades and zero vocabulary retention at the community college
Honestly, almost anything can work. Some, sort of flash card system, and some, sort of input in the language that you enjoy. I use Anki and yes it's trash but I have never found spending anymore than the least necessary time on the tech of language learning worth it.
The crucial thing, in my experience, is that language acquisition only works if you're paying attention because you actually care about the material in front of you. I think a lot of people make the mistake of only studying aspirationally and well beyond their current capacity, forgetting how to be a child and be highly curative and explorative. Weird shit, even practically unuseful shit, is surprisingly better than you'd think.
I have a memrise lifetime thing that I bought some years ago and occasionally use, but I've never done a comparative test so I can't tell you how much better/worse it is than anything else. they did try integrating some chatgpt-backed "have a conversation" junk a while back but it's optional (and when I asked support about it, as well as which data is used for training, the answer said it was optional. I have no measure to tell how true this was/is)
you don't say which you want to learn (except mentioning spanish) but best other addition I have is that languagejones (youtube channel) recently did a review of every language on duolingo, including some comparisons with how those languages were treated on other platforms. might be worth a look
bonus round: the most recent agma schwa cursed conlang circus featured some absolutely amazing entries (I watched part 3 last weekend while recuperating on the couch). some of the ones from it include goptjaam and seraphim and I promise you they may be the most cursed thing you see all day
ah yep, this is for Spanish! I’ll give memrise and that languagejones video a look
I think what excited me about Readlang is that I could use real text (which gives my ADHD brain something other than language learning to be excited for) and it’s like a semi-automated version of the process I’ve seen Spanish speakers use to learn English with a translation dictionary and handwritten flash cards. I might just have to try a variety of apps (for as much as these free trials will let me — a lot of these companies are terrified I’ll learn something of value without paying them a fuckload of money) until I find one that tickles the same part of my brain
can we pin this one?
I believe it'll happen a bit later when david/self/blake are around
i completely forgot until i saw this comment
i've been running on adrenalin since thursday for reasons i'm not going into yet (started deeply fucked up, i'm smiling but i'm very fucking furious, may be resolving to less fucked up cross fingers, i'm smiling like that Ukrainian politician who made the phone video welcoming the Russian invaders into Hell) so expect nothing of me for a little while until all is more determinate
it's useful having a cowriter, we can cover for each other
Summary of the recent crowdstrike report: 🧵https://infosec.exchange/@munin/112916974811882522
Munin wonders if the weird writing style of the report might be because crowdstrike used an LLM to generate a summary of several source documents, which would be funny-yet-depressing if true.
The actual causes of the incident probably won’t suprise anyone… “didn’t bounds-check, didn’t test parser on bad data, didn’t stage rollouts” in order of should-have-done-this-first-ness.
Minor, but it's CrowdStrike not cloudstrike
Oops, I’ve been trying to avoid calling it “clownstrike”, and didn’t quite manage to fix that initial syllable.
People are so trained to shout at Cloudflare for protecting the neo-nazi sites that this is every understandable.
Image description
Simpsons cartoon, Marge shouts 'Cloudflare, no!' to her left. Bart, with the Cloudflare logo on his head walks in from the right, 'What?'. Marge apologizes to Bart, 'Sorry force of habit'. Marge shouts 'Crowdstrike, no!'.
STTP 301 https://awful.systems/post/2119241
(sneer text..)
