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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
eh? I don't see Jackie D's keynote in the schedule, did the threat of a sit-in make them delete it? https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/
edit: oh, it's linked from Drew's post.
It is sometimes necessary to make assumptions to write an article (see WP:MNA).
Spoiler alert: that link doesn't justify anything. It basically advises against going off on tangents: There's no need to rehash the fact that evolution is a fact on every damn biology page. It does not say that Wikipedia should have an article on some creationist fantasy, like baraminology or flood geology, based entirely on creationist screeds that all cite each other.
Does creating a cover of Get Low called "Z-Pain" for your wife, or commissioning the creation of a giant green statue for your wife strike you as the sorts of things someone in an unhealthy marriage would do? I think not!
Coiners are terminally brain poisoned by financialization of everything. HTTP represented by three payment processors (and I don't even know if paying with Google or Apple pay involves HTTP but whatever).
Paul I am begging you to actually write out a fucking timeline. Apparently woke started in the 80s in universities when the (white) civil rights protestors of the 70s got tenure in the 60s, as an inevitable and predictable extension of political correctness in the 90s. From the title you're obviously going to indulge the conservative fantasy that "wokeness" is a coherent thing rather than a political tool to dismiss calls for action to actually address blatant injustice. But if you're going to bullshit me, at least do it competently and have an internally consistent narrative that allows for the natural passage of time.
The opening statement is also quite silly already (and makes me belief in a companion to the dead internet theory, the dementia internet theory, as I was sure we have had conversations like this as 'the internet' already, Zuck turning manospherian all of a sudden also makes me thing this (same with the fight over H-1B on the US right, they had that in 2018 already, Trump likes H-1B)).
We had the whole 'they act like they are morally superior' discussion already a lot, and that was about vegans. Only one problem, they are morally superior on almost all ethical/moral/ideological systems you can think of. Sure hedonists, stoics (who are not allowed to complain), sadists, accelerationist extinctionists, ironic nihilistic status quo pushing postmodernists, all disagree they are superior morally but who cares about the opinion of those people. Sure some of them might be annoying to people, but annoying people can be morally superior.
His statements about how politically correctness comes from the 80's is also wrong (it predates that, and has quite a complex history of being used by various different groups for different meanings), but at that moment I knew I was going to be wasting my time reading this as I would disagree with every paragraph. (as I have seen these types of articles before, they were popular a decade ago or so).
Considering popes, priests in general, politicians etc are usually male (historically) i have a feeling these quotes also exclude some groups from being moral enforcers.
It also neatly ignores social pressures, which provides good reasons for women being into certain types of 'moral enforcement'. Either because 'it is their duty to protect the kids' or the revolutionary idea that people are all people and should have equal rites, bodily autonomy, a political voice etc.
But nope: "me and the boys agree, this wokeness stuff is for girls".
This all makes me wonder, we know he has proofreaders who help him. Did he either get rid of all the people who disagree with him, or did they give up, as some people dont want understand the other side they just want to argue their forever cause they believe they are correct (so disagreement is a massive waste of time).
E:
Thanks to Sam Altman, Ben Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim Urban for reading drafts of this. [emph mine, the names that really jumped out to me]
Ah. Also 1 name which jumps out to me as prob a woman. Let me google her. Ah right. His wife, and co-founder.
Did my regular check in of a q-pilled family member’s facebook page. Zuckerberg’s new fash turn is not being received well as he is being read as the worm that he is. i.e. they are still mad about the anti-vax fact checking.
fucking hell. well i guess moving all my shit elsewhere has become my midweek project instead of my procrastinate-project.
EDIT: [rereads and comprehends the tuta addendum] well. cool. i think i'm going to reschedule that "move everything" to after my "scream and cry into a pillow". anyone have any other recs?
Bitwarden for password management
4a. Keyguard is great if you are on Android. I am looking into[2] other (non CLI) Bitwarden-compatible password managers for Desktop I should not have suggested Keyguard, since I am not aware if it has been audited. It was probably a mistake for me to use it at all. Sorry everyone.
edit: Should mention that I am also looking into a calendar replacement.
1: This is more like a stopgap for me until I confirm they are worth sticking with or find someone better. The 29.99€ 100GB lifetime storage may be worthwhile for this (though I cannot say whether I am confident they will be around in 5 years, this can at least serve as a short-term solution).
2: lassitude
I’m waiting to hear back from tuta about what the fuck but this might be the reason why I hop providers again
image description (but see cw)
so somebody at tuta had the idea to write this post on their official account on Twitter:
Don't get cucked by Big Tech's invasive policies. Keep your private data safe and secure with state of the art end-to-end encryption with Tutanota.
and then the image attached to the post is a cuckold porn meme I started to describe here but won’t??? because describing the image put me in a really terrible mood??? it’s SFW but trust me you don’t want it. the Black men in the picture have had their faces covered by logos for Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook in that order. the white woman in the picture does not have her face covered. impact font bottom text: “YOUR PERSONAL DATA”
@mav Yes, this was bad. I did not take a screenshot back then (the post was deleted after 30 minutes), but I scrolled all my way through Mastodon to find our apology:
@shalf We set up guidelines that all team members on social media duty need to adhere to. We also created a social media review group where we post & discuss every proposal before actually publishing. And it has worked fine ever since. :)
Content of Apology
Dear Privacy Fans,
Last week, on Friday, a post was made on our social media profiles which goes against our core values as team members and as a company. This post was made in poor judgement, without stopping and examining the underlying racist and sexist problems posed by this meme template, and it does not represent the culture and environment of the Tutanota Team. After a period of approximately 30 minutes the offensive post was removed from all platforms and a "brief" apology was posted.
This brief apology does not go far enough to address this mistake and we would like to update everyone on how we are working to address this issue internally and how we will make sure that this does not happen again. As a company we are working with all of our team members to foster a culture that respects diversity in all forms. This is both on a personal level between colleagues, but also at an institutional level by working to create structures which allow diversity to flourish.
Well, this Andy dipshit gave an absolute dogshit apology on reddit.
Snippets below:
sophistry and bullshitting
First, while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and it therefore should not have been made. While we will not prohibit all employees from expressing personal political opinions publicly, it is something I will personally avoid in the future. I lean left on some issues, and right on other issues, but it doesn't serve our mission to publicly debate this. It should be obvious, but I will say that it is a false equivalence to say that agreeing with Republicans on one specific issue (antitrust enforcement to protect small companies) is equal to endorsing the entire Republican party platform.
andy doesn't know his head from the DNC mascot
Second, officially Proton must always be politically neutral, and while we may share facts and analysis, our policy going forward will be to share no opinions of a political nature. The line between facts, analysis, and opinions can be blurry at times, but we will seek to better clarify this over time through your feedback and input.
The exception to these rules is on the topics of privacy, security, and freedom. These are necessarily political topics, where influencing public policy to defend these values, often requires engaging politically.
The operations of Proton have always reflected our neutrality. For example, recently we refused pressure to deplatform both Palestinian student groups and Zionist student groups, not because we necessarily agreed with their views, but because we believe more strongly in their right to have their own views.
some of the first research science on promptfondlers and model-affine dipshits is starting to see the light of day and, in what will surprise probably 0% of our regulars, it confirms some things
(I have grumped about their desire for outsourced thinking in the past myself)
Possibly I’m the last to hear about this one, but seeing as proton mail has come up here a few times before: the founder and ceo Andy Yen is apparently a Trump fan.
Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.
(from the beginning of december, on the nomination of trump staffer Gail Slater to antitrust post at the doj)
Sorry I and some others missed this post talking about the tweet so we have two top level ones atm. My more sensational post about the subject got a bit more attention. So you were not late but early.
a couple weeks back, I was (bc reasons) looking around to see how to turn off goog's annoying gemini bullshit in an account, and you can!
except then even after doing that, accounts in that org still got prompts (in the form of in-app banners, and sparklebuttons in shit like gmail) to Try The Model
it looks like people aren't biting enough, because now you get it whether you like it or not, for the low low price of pushing up your base account fee! and I checked in one org - "Gemini App" is disabled org-wide, but the fucking prompt is immediately in the UI (and you get a modal popover opening gmail)
Oh well. Nothing screams healthy business like force-feeding your product to every customer who can't hammer the conveniently hidden opt-out button fast enough. I'm sure Gemini is doing great.
Looks like LW/Lightcone managed to convince enough people to give then $2M, which will totally not be used to settle sexual assault lawsuits in the future.
Extremely simplistic drawing of a somewhat sad looking person. Drawn by the artist 'flork of crows'[sic]. Reference to the 'Really? Right In Front Of My X?' meme
but in true sammy grift: you just need to be asking the right questions to trump intelligence. “why do you want to suck, as a human?” sammy asks, not understanding a moment of humanity
the bit about it that I find subtly glorious (in how remarkably fuckwitted it is) is the baseline idea of “intellectual horsepower”
I’m not surprised that this is a view they (of the company that’s effectively going “just 12 more DCs bro it’ll be enough compute bro I promise bro just watch”) hold and consider in such a simple mechanism-rating scale
Remember how OAI claimed that O3 had displayed superhuman levels on the mega hard Frontier Math exam written by Fields Medalist? Funny/totally not fishy story haha. Turns out OAI had exclusive access to that test for months and funded its creation and refused to let the creators of test publicly acknowledge this until after OAI did their big stupid magic trick.
From Subbarao Kambhampati via linkedIn:
"𝐎𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐨𝐟 "𝑩𝒖𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝑮𝑰 𝑴𝒐𝒂𝒕 𝒃𝒚 𝑪𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑩𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒉𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒌 𝑪𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒔" hashtag#SundayHarangue. One of the big reasons for the increased volume of "𝐀𝐆𝐈 𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰" hype has been o3's performance on the "frontier math" benchmark--something that other models basically had no handle on.
We are now being told (https://lnkd.in/gUaGKuAE)
that this benchmark data may have been exclusively available (https://lnkd.in/g5E3tcse) to OpenAI since before o1--and that the benchmark creators were not allowed to disclose this *until after o3 *.
That o3 does well on frontier math held-out set is impressive, no doubt, but the mental picture of "𝒐1/𝒐3 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒃𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒅 𝒐𝒏 𝒔𝒊𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒉, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒃𝒐𝒐𝒕𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒗𝒆𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒆𝒓 𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒉"--that the AGI tomorrow crowd seem to have--that 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘈𝘐 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵--is shattered by this. (I have, in fact, been grumbling to my students since o3 announcement that I don't completely believe that OpenAI didn't have access to the Olympiad/Frontier Math data before hand.. )
We all know that data contamination is an issue with LLMs and LRMs. We also know that reasoning claims need more careful vetting than "𝘸𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘥𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨" (see "In vs. Out of Distribution analyses are not that useful for understanding LLM reasoning capabilities" https://lnkd.in/gZ2wBM_F ).
At the very least, this episode further argues for increased vigilance/skepticism on the part of AI research community in how they parse the benchmark claims put out commercial entities."
Epoch's lead mathematician here. Yes, OAI funded this and has the dataset, which allowed them to evaluate o3 in-house. We haven't yet independently verified their 25% claim. To do so, we're currently developing a hold-out dataset and will be able to test their model without them having any prior exposure to these problems.
My personal opinion is that OAI's score is legit (i.e., they didn't train on the dataset), and that they have no incentive to lie about internal benchmarking performances. However, we can't vouch for them until our independent evaluation is complete.
(emphasis mine). So there is good reason to doubt that the "held-out dataset" even exists.
With risk of falling into the 'classify people into two binary groups' thing which I have often criticized the Rationalist for. Move over jock vs nerd. There is Jock vs Creep.
After this post I went back and read all the fallout from when they added and subsequently "paused" AI Explain and it was as entertaining as I remember (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu (pause to catch breath) uh.
A well at least the mask is totally off now.
E: and a thing that has been bothering me, it is quite fucked up for somebody with Scotts education to go along with this argument about disabled people that easily.
content warning for this paragraph
(Not that this is the first time he forgets he has an official education, and cant just ignore that (yes im still mad about the time he said "well she had mental health issues and was a liar" or something about the woman who tragically ended her life after accusing parts of the community of sexual abuse, and didnt mention that a reputation like that would increase the risk of abuse)).
oh my god i didn't catch that this was astro slate star and thought i was reading some overtly racist piece of shit instead of a covert racist piece of shit. i haven't kept up with him lately but this this seems very fucked up even by scott's standards.
Only got a paragraph in because of the cheerful citation of aporia (the big Nazi website)
I love how he goes on and on about how it actually totally makes sense for the average IQ in Malawi to be 60 because most people don't graduate school, ignoring that Lynn's methodology wasn't up to any basic standard
I'm sure I'm not the first to note it, but there is a kind of irony in Scott and the gang using such a clear example of a motte-and-bailey argument (got to find a better phrase for that. Maybe some pithy reference to Patton at Calais to maintain the history theme? Inflatable Tank Defense?) in regards to IQ. When talking among friends they treat IQ tests like they are a strong correlate with innate intelligence, no caveats. As such IQ test scores are a reason to ignore environmental factors and not bother investing in equity-minded interventions. But when someone makes the obviously racist conclusion too visible, the argument shifts to be about how actually the correlations between IQ and environmental factors are obvious and really this supports anti racism. It's a straightforward form of decontextualization that relies on completely ignoring the entire history and contemporary arguments around IQ to defends a single data point. Of course once everyone agrees with that data point they can go right back to the wildly racist nonsense that they were doing in the first place.
Free SFnal short story idea, came to me literally in a dream:
Dude is living his best life, beatiful house, beatiful wife, gets a job doing computer stuff "improving the world". But his big fancy work computer is wasting a lot of space so he reformats it/installs Nix, and suddenly everythings gone, all grey wireframe, no way out. Turns out he was given root to his own simulation and there's no backup.
Feels I should have read this somehwere but haven't read short SF in ages so...
I read about this gross Robo Anne Frank LLM by a company called "School AI": Bluesky post (looks like via an activitypub bridge, but I can't be bothered to find the canonical link), News Article, School AI's website.
Gee it sure is weird how all these digital clones the AI companies keep coming up with all have the exact same (lack of a) personality.
it should be fixed… again. for some reason our image cache keeps getting into a state where it either stops accepting uploads or stops accepting requests at all. I plan to upgrade us to the latest version soon, but it’ll unfortunately involve a little bit of downtime: to upgrade pict-rs to a new point release, you have to run the migrate command, but it only works for the previous release. we’re two releases behind, so I have to custom package the in-between release just to get us there.
i see! thanks for all your work <3. I think i'll just write the thread after the upgrade, i got partially done and it started eating my images again so maybe this just isn't the moment
Trump's new cryptocurrency scheme is surprisingly forthright about being a pump & dump:
CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of The Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the Trump Cards, subject to a 3-year unlocking schedule. CIC Digital LLC and Celebration Cards LLC, the owners of Fight Fight Fight LLC, will receive trading revenue derived from trading activities of Trump Meme Cards.
Essentially according to their own website, they started by selling 20%* of the tokens to the public, and over the next few years will... sell another 80% of the tokens to the public. To the moon!
* half of that they describe as "liquidity" instead of public distribution -- whatever that means.
My gut says that liquidity in this context means "making sure that there are tokens available to purchase for initial buyers" or in other words listing them on the market instead of distributing them at initial purchase price.