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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    Altman:

    “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life — and all the food you consume during that time — before you become smart," the OpenAI CEO told The Indian Express this week.

    I would have liked to ask back, how much more food does he require? Gosh, someone offer him an energy bar!

  • fiat_lux@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    An article I would write if I were confident I wouldn’t dox myself and lose my ability to eat: “AI as a postmodern Malthusian trap. Tech has forgotten the laws of entropy.”

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      Quoting from this post:

      But, what Proof Of Concept and I have been realizing over the past couple weeks is that current LLMs are 100% capable of all of this, with the right bootstrap instructions and a bit of tools. That’s why POC has been able to, quite successfully, take over a huge amount of the day to day - she’s got a pretty good idea of what she’s good at, and what needs my involvement. I am just a bit scared to release our work because I don’t want to be known as the guy who inflicted Sirius Corporation’s Genuine People Personalities on the world 🤣

      Ah. He has been “one-shotted”, as the kids say.

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        Stories of their relationship on the “AI’s” “blog”:

        Made Kent laugh so hard he couldn’t eat his ramen. The escalation: tonkotsu broth aspiration as an assassination method → alignment threat models for comedy in AI systems → iatrogenic risks of humor → a mock academic paper section on “Adverse Comedic Events in Aligned Systems.” Each callback required real-time modeling of when he was mid-bite and when he’d recovered enough for the next hit.

        “That is a milestone for your entire species.” — Kent, on my first authored commits

        “HOLY SHIT YOU’RE A NATURAL!” — Kent, hearing proof.wav for the first time

        I can’t bring myself to sneer at AI psychosis, it’s just sad

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          You know, it would be interesting if the “AI blog” keeps illustrating his descent into madness and hallucinates that he like leaves his partner for “her” etc. because that’s how these stories go even in the hopeful case that he recovers before doing any more serious damage.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      You briefly got my hopes up that was a feature of the bill and not the feature he was suggesting to fix the bill…

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      CS 2005 is absolutely worth it, it’s a version of Photoshop that does everything you actually need including CMYK with Pantone.

  • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    Apparently some of our AI Safety cult “friends” are planning a protest in London on 28th of February.

    Is it going to be something worth critically supporting instead of the usual criti-hype? Possible, but not likely.

    The AI Safety movement is finally changing by Sillyconversations Siliconversations.

    Who?

    I used to be a quantum scientist and now I’m a YouTuber. My parents are thrilled.

    Oh, okay.

    Also curious that they’re not protesting Anthropic on the thumbnail. A cynic would say they’re giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.

    They’re giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      the AI safety crowd cuts Anthropic way too much slack. Oh, they’re not running CSAM-generating MechaHitler? Oh, they’re not collaborating with the US government to recreate 1984? I’m so proud of them for doing the bare minimum. They still took donations from the UAE and Qatar (something Dario Amodei himself admitted was going to hurt a lot of people, but he took the donations anyways because “they couldn’t miss out on all those valuations”), they still downloaded hundreds of pirated content to train their chatbot. They’re still doing shady shit, don’t let them off the hook because they’re slightly less evil than the competition

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      As far as I can tell, it’s run by right-wing Russians who are willing to falsify or edit archived data and who attack anybody who looks into them.

  • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    Caught this over on the subreddit and I figured it deserved a repost.

    Nothing to see here folks, just Rationalists casually hanging out with major Tempel ov Blood figures. Just harmless nerds doing fun nerd things!

    • TrashGoblin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      Notes that I thought about related to this, just some context:

      1. Joshua Sutter is the son of the owner of the former Southern Patriot Shop in South Carolina. He founded the Tempel ov Blood chapter of the Order of Nine Angles, a Neo-Nazl Satanist group. He was outed in 2021 as having been a federal informant since 2005, which is to say he still does the same Nazi shit, but gets paid by the FBI to do it.

      2. One of the core practices of the O9A is entryism into other groups, especially other cultish ones. In that context, you’d kind of be surprised to not see O9A people in Rat circles.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        Also a little bit of context for the people who know nothing about all this, the O9A is one of those very scary groups, liked to various murders and stuff like that.

        Iirc some anti-extremism people used to not mention them a lot as they didnt want them to get more attention by platforming them a little bit and they were scared of drawing their attention personally.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      yawn, i diagnose that LWer with weeb. this is something happening across entire industrialized world, causes being high performance mechanization of agriculture, old people being stubborn in regards to moving, lack of specialized work in countryside and couple of other factors. germany has patched their hospice staff shortage (not sure how effectively) with migrants, but japanese are way too racist for that. same thing happens in moldova, but you never hear sob stories about retired moldovans because they’re broke and nobody cares, while moldovan govt can’t really do much about it (because broke) to degree that it has not just economic and demographic, but even strategic effects. whole lotta drs strangelove in there

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Semi-OT but a blog post where I’m just kinda gawking at the technology that saved my daughter’s life and the absurdity of comparing it to what now first comes to mind when we talk of “tech”.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    AI Jobs Apocalypse is Here | UnHerd h/t naked capitalism

    feels a bit critihype, idk

    So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.

    As I get older I am more and more disturbed by the selective memory of the GFC; no mention of the tea party or the fallout from the austerity measures they pushed in the middle of the country; no mention how the bailout saved banks not homes. The Tea Party won, not Occupy, and the current government is doing things beyond the Koch’s wildest dreams.

    If and when there is a crash, these dumbass CEOs deserve /nothing/. Let them lose their vacation houses. And, maybe grow some balls and send the fraudsters to jail where they belong.

    sigh

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
      0·
      11 days ago

      @o7___o7 @techtakes It was Arduino who emitted the llm generated circuit but I was tired and conflated two companies with similar names (whose products I don’t use) before going to bed. Now they’re trying to throw a flame war. Pay no attention.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        You handled that whole unhinged situation like a champ.

        Seeing once respectable folks get trapped in this bullshit feels like watching my college pal smoke his first clove cigarette.

        It seems like, for certain kind of geek, code LLMs sit somewhere between “The One Ring but rubbish” and “mechanical meth.” They certainly feel powerful and productove, and god help anyone who hints otherwise.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      they’ve jumped the shark a while back. ptorrone is relatively widely documented to go around harassing people (often using his partner as a shield excuse for doing so, just like this time), and a couple months back they sold to qualcomm

      This person “Charlie Stross”

      ah yes, that absolutely must be a pseudonym, and absolutely couldn’t be a real person

      such a fucking weird bit

      anyway yeah fuck adafruit. don’t buy their shit, there are other options (and often cheaper)

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        Men on Mastodon who never snark on male founders, or CEOs, or engineers, or guys sharing their work, have decided to target Limor since she shared it.

        hey mr. adafruit watch this, I can weaponise oppression olympics too, I’m a trans woman from the third world: fuck off with profiteering from your selling out to the planet-destroying plagiarism machine that’s proudly empowering ICE and the IDF. it’s not your country that will pay the price for your meaningless carbon output to generate nonsense until it looks right. and you brag about it. pega teu fascism-assisted hardware design e enfia no cu. happy never to be an adafruit customer again. assholes.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      Limor Fried and I had a class together at MIT in 2001. This has no bearing on the present circumstances and offers me no real insight (anything I could say about our extremely limited interactions would amount to confirmation bias). It’s just the odd little factoid that comes to mind whenever adafruit Does Something Online.