Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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.

(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Bleugh, I’ve been using crucial ram and flash for a hell of a long time, and they’ve always been high quality and reasonably priced. I dislike having to find new manufacturers who don’t suck, especially as the answer seems to be increasingly “lol, there are no such companies”.

      Thanks to the ongoing situation in the us, it doesn’t look like the ai bubble is going to pop soon, but I can definitely see it causing more damage like this before the event.

    • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I can see it making sense, what with CPUs moving to integrated RAM, and probably CPU-integrated flash, to maximize speed. The business of RAM and flash drive upgrades will become a very large but shrinking retrocomputing niche probably served by small Chinese fabs.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      This seems like a bit of a desperation pivot while the bubble money is still flowing. I’ve heard they struggled a bit with shipping PCIE CXL memory that’s capable of memory sharing between rackmount nodes, so they’re probably taking everything from the consumer channel and cramming it into the enterprise channel in a bid to be the low-cost/high-volume provider. I would expect them to eventually come limping back into the consumer market to much marketing fanfare, alongside trying to set a higher price floor there, similar to Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican pizza.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg argues that dismissing AI as a “bubble” or mere “slop” overlooks the tectonic technological shift that’s reshaping society.

      “Please stop talking about the bubble bursting, I haven’t handed off my bag yet”

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      i hereby propose a new metric for a popular publication, the epstein number (Ē), denoting the number of authors who took flights to epstein’s rape island. generally, credible publications should have Ē=0. this one, after a very quick look, has Ē=2, and also hosts sabine hossenfelder.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      We are three paragraphs and one subheading down before we hit an Ayn Rand quote. This clearly bodes well.

      A couple paragraphs later we’re ignoring both the obvious philosophical discussion about creativity and the more immediate argument about why this technology is being forced on us so aggressively. As much as I’d love to rant about this I got distracted by the next bit talking about how micro expressions will let LLMs decode emotions and whatever. I’d love to know this guy’s thoughts on that AI-powered phrenologist features a couple weeks ago.

    • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      tl;dr: AI! Agents! AI! Agents! AI! Agents! AI…

      Just one thing that caught my attention:

      AI code review helps developers. We … found that 72.6% of developers who use Copilot code review said it improved their effectiveness.

      Only 72.6%? So why the heck are the other almost 30% of devs using it? For funsies? They don’t say.

      You’d think due to self selection effects most people who wouldn’t find using Copilot effective wouldn’t use it.

      The only way that number makes sense to me is if people were force to use Copilot and… no, wait, that checks out.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Yud explains, over 3k words, that not only is he smarter than everyone else, he is also saner, and no, there’s no way you can be as sane as him

    Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity

    (side note - it’s weird that LW, otherwise so anxious about designing their website, can’t handle fucking apostrophes correctly)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Ah, prophet-maxxing. ‘they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds’

      The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes. Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.

      This guy wrote this (note I don’t think there is anything wrong with looking like a nerd (I mean I have a mirror somewhere, so I don’t want to be a hypocrite on this), but looking like one and saying you are above tropes is something, there is also HPMOR)

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Handshake meme of Yud and Rorschach praising Harry S Truman

      From the comments:

      I got Claude to read this text and explain the proposed solution to me

      Once you start down the Claude path, forever will it dominate your destiny…

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    2 links from my feeds with crossover here

    Lawyers, Guns and Money: The Data Center Backlash

    Techdirt: Radicalized Anti-AI Activist Should Be A Wake Up Call For Doomer Rhetoric

    Unfortunately Techdirt’s Mike Masnick is a signatory some bullshit GenAI-collaborationist manifesto called The Resonant Computing Manifesto, along with other suspects like Anil Dash. Like so many other technolibertarian manifestos, it naturally declines to say how their wonderful vision would be economically feasible in a world without meaningful brakes on the very tech giants they profess to oppose.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      i am pretty sure i am shredding the Resonant Computing Manifesto for Monday

      and of course Anil Dash signed it

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        The people who build these products aren’t bad or evil.

        No, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them just are bad and evil.

        With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise.

        [citation needed]

        [to a source that’s not laundered slop, ya dingbats]

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          to a source that’s not laundered slop, ya dingbats

          Ha thats easy. Read Singularity Sky by Charles Stross see all the wonders the festival brings.

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It is important to note that the reviews were detected as being ai generated by an ai tool.

      This is a marketing puff piece.

      I mean, I expect that loads of the submissions are by slop extruders… under the circumstances, how could they not be? But until someone does the legwork of checking this, it’s just another magic-eight-ball-says-maybe, dressed up as science.

      • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone is ever going to go through all 19,797 submissions and 75,800 reviews (to one conference, in one year) and manually review them all. Then again, using the ultra-advanced cutting-edge innovative statistical technique of randomly sampling a few papers/reviews, one can still get useful conclusions.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          At least this example grew out of actual humans being suspicious.

          Dozens of academics have raised concerns on social media about manuscripts and peer reviews submitted to the organizers of next year’s International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), an annual gathering of specialists in machine learning. Among other things, they flagged hallucinated citations and suspiciously long and vague feedback on their work.

          Graham Neubig, an AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of those who received peer reviews that seemed to have been produced using large language models (LLMs). The reports, he says, were “very verbose with lots of bullet points” and requested analyses that were not “the standard statistical analyses that reviewers ask for in typical AI or machine-learning papers.”

          We seem to be in a situation where everybody knows that the review process has broken down, but the “studies” that show it are criti-hype.

          Welcome to the abyss. It sucks here (academic edition).

        • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          all 19,797 submissions and 75,800 reviews (to one conference, in one year)

          tired: Dead Internet Theory wired: Dead Conferences Theory

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      that being a hung banner (rather than wall-mount or so) borders on being a tacit acknowledgement that they know their shit is unpopular and would get vandalised in a fucking second if it were easy (or easier!) to get to

      even then, I suspect that banner will not stay unscathed for long

  • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i respect used to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:

    1. wrong tool for the job
    2. bad tool
    3. are you fucking serious?
    4. environmental impact
    5. ethics of how the data was gathered/curated to generate[1] the model
    6. privacy policy of these companies is a nightmare
    7. seriously what is wrong with you

    they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seem to short-circuit something in the end-user’s brain.

    anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences — “oh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series.”

    additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?

    1. they call this “training” but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbots ↩︎

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Sadly web search, and the web in general, have enshittified so much that asking ChatGPT can be a much more reliable and quicker way to find information. I don’t excuse it for anything that you could easily find on wikipedia, but it’s useful for queries such as “what’s the name of that free indie game from the 00s that was just a boss rush no you fucking idiot not any of this shit it was a game maker thing with retro pixel style or whatever ugh” where web search is utterly useless. It’s a frustrating situation, because of course in an ideal world chatbots don’t exist and information on the web is not drowned in a sea of predatory bullshit, reliable web indexes and directories exist and you can easily ask other people on non-predatory platforms. In the meanwhile I don’t want to blame the average (non-tech-evangelist, non-responsibility-having) user for being funnelled into this crap. At worst they’re victims like all of us.

      Oh yeah and the game’s Banana Nababa by the way.

    • megaman@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      At work, i watched my boss google something, see the “ai overview” and then say “who knows if this is right”, and then read it and then close the tab.

      It made me think about how this is how like a rumor or something happens. Even in a good case, they read the text with some scepticism but then 2 days later they forgot where they heard it and so they say they think whatever it was is right.

    • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      “they call this “training” but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbots”

      You can train animals, you can train a plant, you can train your hair. So it’s not really anthropomorphising.

    • ________@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Is there any search engine that isn’t pushing an “AI mode” of sorts? Some are more sneaky or give option to “opt out” like duckduckgo, but this all feels temporary until it is the only option.

      I have found it strange how many people will say “I asked chatgpt” with the same normalcy as “googling” was.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Yes i know the kid in the omelas hole gets tortured each time i use the woe engine to generate an email. Is that so wrong?

  • FRACTRANS@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Nicky Case posted the ending to her AI Safety for Fleshy Humans series and gosh I miss when I thought she was cool 🫠

    linking to Rob Miles and an EA longtermist fund at the end of the outro really gives the game away lol

    (interestingly this also involves Hack Club, which is the org that Ghostty is now part of from @[email protected]’s post earlier today? I wonder what’s up with them)

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It’s even way too long a read and full of footnotes, as is tradition!

      Heck it’s even long enough that I just came across the second flashcard break, and I’m 1/4th of the way through part 1…

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I was annoyed at the start lumping in ai ethics with all the ai doom stuff, and then basically stopped reading.

      Do think it is interesting that Miles is part of a collaborative yt tech channel and they recently released an ai slop episode. (Which I have not watched yet either, things need to slow down for a bit please).

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I am not familiar with Case or her work, but based on my shallow research, she’s part of the cohort of internet stuff-communicators including people like Vi Hart or the Oatmeal etc. Not casting aspersions on anyone here, but I’d be interested to know who amongst them have revealed their chud nature and who has remained pristine (…for now).

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    saw this elsewhere. the account itself appears to be a luckey stan account, but the next

    There’s more crust than air or sea or land… so a vehicle that moves through the crust of the earth is going to be a huge deal

    I have built working prototypes of this

    so are we talking mining, or The Core (2003)? it feels like he’s trying to pitch it as though it’s Tiberian Sun style subterrean APC, but I can’t be sure whether I’m reading into it

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        (note: out-of-order to linked post for comment cohesion)

        Terminals are an invisible technology to most

        what a fucking sentence

        …that are hyper present in the everyday life of many in the tech industry.

        hyper? like this?

        But the terminal itself is boring, the real impact of Ghostty is going to be in libghostty and making all of this completely available for many use cases. My hope is that through building a broadly adopted shared underlayer of terminals around the industry we can do some really interesting things.

        oh good so the rentier bridgetroll wants to do just a monopoly play? that’s fine I’m sure. note: I don’t think there’s a more charitable reading of this. those shared underlayers already exist, in the form of decades of protocol and other development. many of them suck and I agree about trying to do better, but I (rather strongly) suspect hashi and I have very different ideas of what that looks like

        I’ve already addressed the belittling of the project I really find useful and care about. So let’s just move on to the financial class.

        Regardless of my financial ability to support this project, any project that financially survives (for or non-profit) at the whims of a single donor is an unhealthy project

        “uwu, think of the poor projects. yes sure I could throw $20m at this in some kind of funny trust and have it live forever but that wouldn’t allow me to evade the point so much!”

        I paid a 9-figure tax bill and also donated over 5% of my other stuff to charity this year

        “I’m not as bad as the other billionaires I promise”

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I’m too fucking old to care about hipster terminals, so I had no idea ghostty was started by a (former) billionaire. If forced to choose a new terminal I will certainly take this fact into consideration.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      bring back rich people rolling their own submarines and getting crushed to death in the bathyal zone

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      all things aside, is current ghostty any good, or still an audiophile consolephile-ware?

      i’m generally reluctant to try something which reeks of intensive self-promotion, but few months ago i decided to finally see what’s the hype about, and, well, it’s a terminal emulator.

      wezterm does much more, and with a much cleaner ui, and it’s programmable, and the author doesn’t remind me that hashicorp is a thing that exists.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        5 days ago

        been giving it a whirl for a few weeks now and greatly enjoying it. one or two minor snags I still need to solve (such as back-kill-word not working in search, just haven’t looked into it yet) but otherwise fairly pleased

        and I no longer have to see the stupid iterm2 update nag every damn day

        config.keys and hot reload are nice

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      ghosTTy is the username of a schizoposter on Something Awful who only shows up to post bitcoin price charts and get mocked into oblivion. I wonder if there’s any connection?

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I took psychic damage by scrolling up and seeing promptsimon posting a real doozie:

      I have been enjoying hitting refresh on https://fuckthisurl/froztbyte-scrubbed-it-intentionally throughout today and watching the number grow - it’s nice to see a clear example of people donating to a new non-profit open source project.

      “oooh! look at the vanity project go! weeeee, isn’t having a famous face attached to it fun?” with exactly no reflection on the fucking daunting state of open source funding in multiple other domains and projects