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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
Found another website doing a good job keeping eye on the slop machines and their promoters: The AI Dirty List.
It also lists those who have fought against the bullshit fountains as well.
YCombinator will let founders accept payments in butts:
Hmm, we already tried the thing where a bunch of startups have their cash on deposit with a couple of normal, FDIC-insured banks that had grossly mismatched duration in their capital structures. I wonder how this will play out
“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”
pegged butts
heh heh
following up the previous thread about Eliezer in the Epstein files, he’s responded on reddit
Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation
Either deliberately whitewashing the situation or completely missing the point of why people are mad at Epstein, Yud really can’t help himself.
edit: Or depending on the timeline and the fact that ‘prison time for soliciting a 14 year old’ was on top of Epstein’s wiki as early a 2016 he’s explicitly saying they didn’t mind that part with 300k on the line.
Double-highlighting this choice bit:
Diligence is costly in executive attention,
Your periodic reminder that this man is considered a major influence by many of today’s working venture capitalists
Lots of ‘this isn’t a big deal’ shrieking in that thread.
I might be crossing a line into conspiracy theory nut over here, but is it weird that both this and his response to the zizzian’s rape allegations have undertones of “i don’t know/im not completely sure”??
It’s possible it just means the responses aren’t vetted by a lawyer, and will be revised as neccessary.
OT: paying the cat tax…again. Please ignore the ash on Hector’s head, its an ongoing mystery where thats been coming from.
You can basically tell their personalities from the photo.
patio11 and tptacek are experts on daycares in Minnesota. This is very on topic for a technology website that eschews politics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915587
It’s a real fuckin scum scrum over there(1). Between these dorks and Mozilla Jake, it seems like every nerd-ass fash clown in tech got the memo to talk like an emotionally abusive ex with dying wizard characteristics.
(1) even more so than ususal
I miss when Patrick McKenzie was just sharing an American’s view on Japanese culture and reminding devs that names are not always Firstname Lastname in the Latin alphabet and ‘just’ paying yourself twice the average local income from your business is not a failure. The following is deep twitter pundit brain for a rich white man in Chicago who has lived most of his adult in Japan and SoCal referring to social programs for poor brown people in Minnesota:
I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
I knew nothing about, and had no opinion on, daycare facilities in Minnesota run by Somali immigrants, before Trump-supporting media entities decided to make the topic an astroturf issue. On the other hand, I had plenty of experience with people whose worldviews had been severely warped by such coordinated media campaigns. Mr. McKenzie should take some time to reflect on this.
Yes, I think the people who should have opinions beyond “the state government found some fraud and is investigating further cases” are people who live in Minnesota and have connections to daycare or immigrant communities. Its notorious that the NYT repackages stories by reporters in smaller orgs (or randos on social media) and puts its own spin on them! They don’t have a specific editorial line on social services in the Midwest, just instincts.
more proximately, he also went to the Manifold Markets meetup for statistical predictors that just happened to include Jordan Lasker, which is why he keeps making these posts with curiously Lasker-adjacent talking points. It’s very disappointing.
patio11’s sometimes bosses at Stripe are such ambitious capitalists that they sometimes scare him. Maybe his racist friends told him that the Japanese are honorary Aryans?
Btw, been appreciating your posts lately!
Tangentially on topic:
Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! I’ll ikely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and I’m hopeful that it’ll win all the awards.
Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:
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In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol
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Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.
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Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.
I reread the last couple of ‘main line’ laundry files books before I dived into the latest. The complete capture of the US government by The Sleeper’s minions tracks what’s actually happened since in the US I had a panic attack and needed a day or two to calm down.
Same thing happening in the UK now. I can t think of anywhere safe to hide.I hear ya. I mean, Stross’s George Clooney stood and fought the horrors, while ours ran away to France. (The book really captured the unique American flavor of High Weirdness and the stickiness of Amerca’s belief in its own mythos, didnt it though?)
In the here and now, I try to remind myself that they’re the ones who suck and that they should hide.
When Woke 2 comes we’re going to be insuffferable.
@o7___o7 @techtakes That’s why I’m fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.
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Very impressed with this comment from the creator of the Zig programming language, regarding dealing with AI slop submissions, and generally about LLMs for coding.
I should look into Zig again! Technically, I’ve always leaned more towards Rust, because I like its more uncompromising approach to safety, while Zig always seemed to me a bit more middle-of-the-road on that. But I’ve been disappointed about how wide-spread LLM usage has become in Rust circles, I fear that its culture might tip over in favor of slop. (But it’s not there yet and I hope it won’t happen!)
Anyway, I’m ordering the “Introduction to Zig” book…
I was taught to take off every Zig, not install them! Clearly it was a more innocent time.
Wow, I also now found the migrating to codeberg post. I should revisit Zig.
And the correct policy regarding “AI”, too. Viva Zig
Ryan Mac:
Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.
We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.
For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.
Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.
Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir’s chairman and tells Epstein there is “no need to rush.” This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.
Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel’s VC funds.
One of @ering.bsky.social’s great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the “optics” of telling founders that Epstein was involved.
So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.
At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.
[…]
While reporting this, I had something happen that’s never happened. A comms rep for one of the co’s disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI’s chatbot.
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI’s say so.
Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift
- recall might be rethought, again
- copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) “under review”
- no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows
Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if you’re smart what happens after the launch is someone else’s problem. I wouldn’t be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately “scaled back”.
Does (deservedly) mercilessly bullying Slopya Nadella actually work?
R3call
Buisness plan: daily reminders to Recall the Recall Recall. It’s memento mori for CEOs as a service.
Today in excellent cold opens: “I didn’t talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so I’m so healthy.”
new odium symposium episode. this one is a lot lighter than the previous two. we went back and looked at joseph swetnam, the guy the word misogyny was coined to describe, and how he got relentlessly dunked on by his peers.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/9-first-149546072, or on any platform
So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein
But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so
How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?
Similarly, what’s going on with Charles Murray (Bell Curve) ???
He converted to christianity? https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Religion-Seriously-Charles-Murray/dp/1641774851
But now supports euthanisia? https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-i-changed-my-mind-on-assisted-suicide/
Over in the epstein files, Jim Watson tried to make an intro but Murray never replied? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA00475960.pdf
Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.
Also, looks like Harris also deliberately side-stepped the dinner bait but I don’t know how much of that was because of Chomsky’s presence. Epstein tried again a year later without the Chomsky attendee name-drop, but Harris might have just not replied.
At least there are no surprises with Dawkins, even his sleazy friend Brockman seemingly finds him tiring
Glib jibes aside, I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at many of the docs that aren’t just quasi-celeb emails, the few I did see were far too much for me. I’m horrified at nearly everyone from all ideological stances on a number of different levels I never considered. I can only hope the remaining victims someday are able to find some peace, and some kind of huge systemic reform can come from this. What a vile world we live in.
Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.
Quakers have a history of being anti-racist, but views on stuff like abortion and euthansia cam vary a lot. Quakerism is big on both individual conscience but also social justice and activism. It’s an interesting denomination.
being a member of the old boy club beats ideological differences.
that one in which the person behind/running @FirefoxWebDevs drops the mask so fast it looks like a magic track: gallery link
thread by @self, toots by myself and others. the poster managed to keep their civility for quite a while until I dared™ to highlight their lack of a reply outside of UK 5pm, at which point they immediately ramped up
(and based on some screenshots I’ve been sent, he’s also been doing the classic tail-darvo moping elsewhere)
Thanks for lighting his ass on fire. o7
and it wasn’t even my goal to do that! couple of replies across hours, trying to see if this guy is capable of … irunno, unassing their head(?) and engaging with the criticisms
then the subtlest thing set them off and shit went mask off so fast
but hey, at least this way we now just know and don’t have to guess. so much easier
The vibes were wretched. Why do people to have to battle emotional abuse from a goddamned web browser?
but hey, at least this way we now just know and don’t have to guess. so much easier
+1, yeesh. Btw, if Dingus McGee there resides in the UK, might some of that shit might be legally actionable? I’d certainly have strong feelings about being defamed by the representative of a rather well-funded technology company lol
I’ll have you know we’re acting like someone who’s rude to “serving staff” right now, where serving staff is defined as a formerly chrome currently mozilla developer relations marketing guy with fucking flatlined vibes
uhm @self can you show me where I wrote this? can you show me where I wrote these exact words? no? that’s so irrational of you.
listen here you little shit, we have a USER STUDY that proves that those who don’t even think of “serving staff” are the most virtuous humans. no you can’t see the data why would you even ask that
for those who hadn’t seen before, FWD is an account that showed up on the fedi not too long ago (3~4mo?), and has been acting as a Mouthpiece (and semi consent manufacturing outlet)
across a number of “polls” (with forced answer paths) they’ve had their replies absolutely blasted, and across literally hundreds of replies they’ve dodged the point so hard they might have invented a new sports class
earlier today I attempted to (quite lightly) check with them if they understand why their responses aren’t all-liked. it didn’t take much of long for them to go off the rails
OT: vehicle shopping is such a clusterfuck these days jfc. Do not recommend. Also car salesmen are on par with rationalists, I swear to god.
the last time I drove a car was in 2015 or so, and back then every car I got had no computers in them. I dread the day that I need to have a vehicle again and my friggin car will upload bullshit into the cloud or whatever. the idea of having screens of any kind on a car is repulsive to me
Navigation stuff is unfortunately (and embarrassingly) critical for me, otherwise I’d be in total agreement with you.
I’ve been deliberately learning to navigate without GPSes and tech devices, as a life skill (also on foot/public transport). I’m terrible at navigating, but I’m realising navigating is kinda like handwriting—in that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of saying “I’m terrible at this” as a kind of immutable personality trait, while in fact it’s perfectly expected that one is bad at a skill that one never uses, and turns out I can get better at it even with a little bit of deliberate practice. I suck at things but I can improve.
In the meantime when I use an electronic map to navigate, I still would rather stick a smartphone to the dashboard a car and use whatever navigation app I prefer, than have the screens and navigators built into the car.
OT but, though this is mostly about appreciating things in nature rather than navigating a city by car or on foot, this book has helped me a lot with not being anymore a person with a “bad sense of direction”, even when walking downtown: The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley . I really recommend it for people who hike, even occasionally.
I’ll check this out, thanks!!
One thing I discovered on my mom’s late-model VW SUV is that the manufacturer-provided semi-physical/capacitative touch dash buttons are pretty much useless when interacting with Apple CarPlay; that all becomes touchscreen-only. And the forced transition in inputs is not particularly obvious. I have to wonder if most implementations are like that, compounding confusion on top of distraction.
Huh, I just realized yesterday that my car (also a late-model VAG model) does have a touchscreen that reacts to gloved fingers. This was the base infotainment system, not Carplay.
Unfortunately the steering wheel controls are touch, not physical. A big downgrade.
The “we’ll save some bucks by removing physical knobs and pose this as futuristic by making some vital functions only accessible via multiple levels of menus on a touchscreen” thing is the worst and should be banned.
