6mo ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 July 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.

203 comments

not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, we’re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips
She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now it's nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.
I’m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I can’t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems
I’m too angry to even sneer properly at this. it’s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.

I think some people are from hell
Here is the worst thing I didn't have to read today from a transhumanist:
Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.
.
Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.
Bonus round: ::: spoiler spoiler
What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who can't reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.
This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a 'crime of homelessness' such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt they've just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something. :::
- how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant
  Okay, I mean, there's no indication as to how you'd achieve this, but yes, community help and cheap rent are absolutely a good ideal to aim at...
  Then you build a prison there.
  Aaaand you're a cartoon villain. What the absolute fuck.
  
  just want to make sure this is on the record
  those suggestions (from the deranged OP) are basically segregationist: “you take all the poor, you give them their own little world [and then they’re no longer here, where we have to look at them]”. there’s a long track record of awful enterprises that have been done with that spirit. they carry names like Apartheid, ghetto, etc.
  (there are occasionally serious well-meaning suggestions on how to provision for the poor and unfortunate in ways that allow improving lives, but those don’t tend to handwave the details, and never (afaict) involve the “make them go over there” step)
- i've seen some of these takes coming from libertarians, but never from a single person
  
  This is the kind of take a libertarian makes, and then goes 'well nobody debates me on this so my logic is solid'. While he isn't noticing that people are just avoiding the conversation all together, as nobody wants to roll in that mud with him.
  The UR example of these kinds of bad takes is the book "Defending the Undefendable", a dumb book I have ranted about before.
- Holy shit every one of those was like getting ounched in the head from a completely random direction
- robin hanson blogging about his activities on a typical monday

Catching up on SMBC and finding a quality sneer I'm a little bit surprised I didn't find here sooner.
Can I get an abot?

the wife sent this one to me
- what can I say he cooked
  
  That's how he suckers you in!
- buddy slept through ww1+2 (it fits because brits called germans huns in their propaganda), also, roughly 5% of world population
- From a piece by Scott Alexander, I think.
  
  oh no i just learned something new about my wife
- I'll allow it

https://bsky.app/profile/jonpennington.bsky.social/post/3kxqkmezcwe2o
I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. He's older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.
I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called "Yarvinating."
He's the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a "pickoff lord." That is to say, he's the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.
Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, I've got at least one other person who would remember the "Yarvinating" anecdote. I've got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.
I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. We're both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody else's Lex Luthor origin story.
Another bit of tea... He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.
see also https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that "No one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl." Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvin's participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of "touching" his performance.
- I'd never looked into how old the clown is, but
  He also lies about his age. He’s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.
  wait what? what does he claim? is the indicated year on wikipedia accurate? why the hell?
  
  wikipedia date is 25 June 1973, presumably that's the false one
- He also lies about his age.
  I also knew somebody who did that, but it was done as a joke, he obv picked an age much much younger and everybody new he was older, it was just a funny joke. (With a small layer of disliking getting older, which is understandable) From the way this is written, it seems to me this isn't like that at all.
  
  I like answering ludicrously old whenever this stupid shit comes up
  or picking timestamps that make devs wonder whether they had a value handling bug (such as 1/1/1970, the asp.net default 0, etc ec)
- A funny coincidence: https://gameshows.fandom.com/wiki/Curtis_Warren Another guy named Curtis that buzzes in early at game shows. And he's from CATHEDRAL City. It's all connected

so what rhymes with Proton getting into AI grifting? you fucking guessed it
- we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.
  further down the page
  Proton is not a crypto company. We do not speculate in crypto
  
  so I’ve accidentally been paying shitheads who speculate on crypto to speculate on crypto. I’m kinda angry at myself for not catching this.
- so what rhymes with Proton getting into AI grifting?
  
  Thanks, I hate it
- The fuck is happening over there?
  I could have “excused” the AI bullshit as “we did it to appease the corporate customers who make us money” but there’s no way you can spin this.
  I’m canceling my account. At this point I might just say fuck it and use my Yahoo mail for everything again.
  (And this time the Reddit thread is the dumpster fire I’ve been expecting the last one to be lol)
- Can't blame this shit on the survey!
  I checked, crypto shit was not in any of the top 8 results (top 5 broken out, and they mentioned 3 more, which are surely #6 through #8).
- I'm sorry, what's a 1-2-punch, idgi 🤔🤔🤔
  (big fat fucking /s ofc)

the lesswrong to MAGA pipeline
(from twitter)
- It’s my strong belief that rats only like analytic philosophy because of the word “analytic” in the title. If there were some other broad category of philosophy with a name more synonymous with “rational” they’d be all over it.
  
  @swlabr
  “Boolean psychology”

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse [Thomas Claburn, The Register]
Personal opinion: c'mon bubble
- Bosses are urging employees to increase their output with the help of AI tools (37 percent), to expand their skill sets (35 percent), take on a wide range of responsibilities (30 percent), return to the office (27 percent), work more efficiently (26 percent), and work more hours (20 percent).
  Stop working from home because AI.

Japan supermarket chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in quality service push (South China Morning Post).
Called “Mr Smile”, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude.
It has also been designed with “game” elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.
The company said its goal was to “standardise staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum”.
Thanks I hate it
Press release here: https://www.aeonretail.jp/pdf/240701R_1.pdf or here: https://www.instavr.co.jp/news/aeon-retail-smile-2024-07-01/ (Lots of big words so I didn't try to read it)
InstaVR's English website here: https://www.instavr.co/
- standardise staff members’ smiles
  Completely normal and chill thing to want
- What if instead of making robots better we just made interacting with a real person indistinguishable by demanding they conform to arbitrary metrics that the brain-slugs that control our minds think look like genuine human warmth and kindness?
- Previous workplace merged with a US company that among other things offered "sentiment analysis" for call centers - the software was supposed to detect if someone was upset or irate. Could be used to help employees deal with irate customers, but could also detect if an employee was rude or stressed. Same software could be used to ensure employees used certain stock phrases like "welcome to InitTech, how may I help you?"
  Point is, tech has been used to enforce conformity since well forever.
- Eurgh!
- @cstross
  Looks like someone took the wrong lesson from Quantum of Nightmares!
  Edit: Enjoyed the book, btw. Felt weird about shopping for groceries for most of a year afterward. A++

Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/
Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can't even buy gift cards at scale.
- it’s going well:
- Real “Scott’s Tots” energy

more on the nsfw side but this is a kinda interesting finding/use of existing tech
- niche because only some types of slop, but still!

NASBLOL (I'm not sure this abbreviation will work out): "Investors in anti-Biden cryptocurrencies are getting absolutely destroyed." (Source)

Have not read it yet, but seems relevant to our collective interests. NSFW due to NASB. Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip. (A long post about Nick Land).
- Great article. It's always fun to read about smart people lionizing a terrible person like Aleister Crowley and inevitably going insane (or dead, in Jack Parson's case).
  The article never discussed the topic directly, but for others interested in esoterica would probably enjoy reading about the concept of egregores.
  
  terrible person like Aleister Crowley
  Wait, why is Crowley terrible? Wasn't he basically an overly enthusiastic cosplayer that did all the drugs and all the sex? So basically an occult hippy? Am I just unaware of him abusing people or some other dark shit?
- you know, I’d wondered previously about the higher-than-average divinity-and-spirits obsession among TPOT. between some of the history of land/ccru there, the other shit previously observed in the stubsack (iirc?) about rightoids and aliens/fairies (and ofc the nazi history of occultism)… what a fucking faith to make
  
  Truly the weirdest consequence of crank magnetism and conspiracy syncretism is the kinds of bedfellows you find. UFO cults align with Christian dominionists because the aliens are actually demons (or vice versa - which direction isn't important).
  It feels like modern fascism is less driven by orthodoxy (right belief) than they are by orthopraxy (right action) to the degree that as long as they aren't actually in power anyone who hates on the right people and rejects the right facts can join the same club regardless of what they actually think. The weirdo occultism of the Nazis was largely tied to the project of reifying their racial hierarchy in all aspects of society by establishing that the Aryan race had the best religion and the best history in addition to the best genes and the best country. The weirdo occultism of modern fascism doesn't have that kind of thread to it that I can see, and I don't know what that means for ongoing development. Does it turn into a source of internal strife as they get closer to having actual influence? Do they settle into a more specific doctrine and cull the ranks of those who don't adopt it? Or is accepting a consensus reality actually the optional part here as long as the group can broadly agree on what to do?

No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also 'AI' is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)
- I am attempting to track down this precise story.
  They are gung ho on AI
  They laid off a pile of their QA
  They have a "virtual security analyst" which is an LLM
  
  iirc Crowdstrike does use regular ML for security, or at least a lot of security companies, I think they might have talked about it on the risky business podcast, so you might want to look at their (many iirc) crowdstrike sponsored parts. No episode directly springs to mind however.

https://xcancel.com/jrawson/status/1814232925967089808
The fuck.
Reposting this from the last Stubsack here by request.
- love is love ✌️❤️
- Amazing how many of them eventually morph into somebody else. Trained on celeb faces, and still cannot keep a consistent facial shape. One more dataset bro.
- One, this looks like absolute dogshit. Two, this looks like an ad campaign for a celebrity cloning service for spare organs. Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US. It just needs a voiceover telling you the monkey paw side effect you’ll inflict upon yourself in return for eternal youth.
  
  Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US
  as I remarked to a friend elsewhere, there's something I've noticed in a couple of these things now, and that's how "cutesy" they're made to be
  this one for example: it’s so clearly intended to be as unnatural as possible (based on the pairings presented), while trying to sell it as cozy as possible - all the gestures/poses, the music, the lighting, the clothing, the who's-picked-for-portrayal
  obviously there's going to be some kind of observation bias etc involved here (of however many of these things get created, only some with some x property end up crossing my feed/radar somehow) but still. it doesn't even have artistic shock dimensions value - it's just creepycopy.
  which has led me to wonder: what is it about genml tech specifically that makes this kind of bullshit the thing produced so frequently?

Not everyone wants ai for their search tools

ChatGPT's new search feature hasn't even launched and already its shitting the bed
The sneers are writing themselves
- OpenAI said in its announcement that search responses will include in-line citations and that users can open a sidebar to view links to external sources. The long-term goal is to then incorporate search features into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI product.
  "The long-term goal is to reinvent the Internet of 25 years ago, but worse."
  
  what do you mean you don’t want a search engine but much less efficient and much, much worse? you don’t like progress?

Trump selecting JD Vance has his running mate has led to stuff I know from this venue bleeding into stuff I follow (shamefully) for US politics. Case in point, behold Mencius Moldbug between Richard Hanania and some racist dweeb from Cambridge:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/07/meet-you-at-the-bottom-if-there-really-is-one
- Good grief, I know. It was bad enough when SBF hit the headlines, but now, it feels like the next news cycle will involve explaining how Thielbux funded a performance art piece in Dimes Square about Nikolai Fyodorov's Cosmism.
- My other kook-watching sneerhobby is Rod Dreher and there's been bleedthrough from him too! Strange bird, Vance...
  
  Yeah Dreher used to be a staple at LGM but some time ago I think they decided he was struggling so much with mental health they decided to lay off him.
  I hope he accepts he's gay and does some sort of repentance for all the stuff he's said over the years.

https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1816925777377788295#m
Yud requires calories for his massive brain.
- https://xcancel.com/mitchandodger/status/1816936244892565939#m
  asking the important questions
  
  Unfortunately the Joe Rogan case study shows that the answer is probably quite a bit more.
- Don't forget the chaser!
  
  The reactions to that are also quite something, not only does Musk bring out the worst people (bluechecks, all even less informed than him, or worse just people wanting to spread crypto/insult fat people/took over the weird posting style from Jordan B Peterson (the one with all the linebreaks at strange places, Musk also did it once in the same period he did the interview), but Yudkowsky reacted with a very gentle [citation needed], while we all know the truth.
- Maintaining my weight still requires fasting 1 month for every 2 months that I eat enough for my brain to work.
  ... his brain works?
  Objection! Facts not in evidence!
- Looks like he's in the process of killing himself
  
  And he insists exercise doesn't help him lose weight which means it doesn't have any benefit.
  Poor fuck's going to get done in by vanity.
  
  I can't really feel sorry for him but this is somehow still depressing
  
  Isn't this what happened to that creepy bloke on Tumblr. Maybe all rationalist-adjacent bloggers eventually shit themselves to death after trying to fix their health problems with punishing exercise regimes and dodgy supplements.
  
  For the people not in the know 500kcal a day is very unwise. Not only very unhealthy, also a sign of looking for a quick fix mindset, which is not a thing that works well for long term weightloss.

Whatever shambling corpse of Toys "R" Us still exists has released "the first OpenAI SORA generated brand commercial."

It looks absolutely dire, particularly in motion, but posters are still falling over themselves to call it "cool" and "exciting" or claim that people "might not notice" that it's complete and utter arse.
- That picture... Harry Potter and the Hole of Ketamine.
  
  "Drugs are like that!"
  
  https://youtu.be/jbC5hpHCCqk?si=uuqwEuRpbgzm_vyS
- I see Sora still hasn't cracked the nut of having longer output windows. or at producing things that aren't deathly boring.
  and what the fuck is up with that music? it sounds like a medical commercial selling hope
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI
- "Positive is that if you didn't tell someone it was GenAI, they might not notice!"
  Nah, they'd be able to immediately tell from just how fucking garbage it is
  
  It makes me wonder if these people have ever seen a moving picture before, because being caught up in the slack-jawed astonishment of a novel experience seems the only plausible explanation for thinking this looks good.
- AI or not this is an incredibly depressing advert, what the fuck. They went for whimsy and produced an elegy.
- the thing is, people are again taking this as direct output of the regurgitating machine. i wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a ton of editing going on to fix all of the most glaring issues, just like when sora was first announced.
  
  Yes you can very clearly see what they've added in, there's tons of matte stuff going on and cliparts of floating toys and whatever
  
  If you look at the bottom right that's exactly the case. They didn't just type a prompt in SORA and call it a day.

Reid Southern bringing us a good sneer
- @BlueMonday1984 @dgerard The completely open 'I'm scamming the elderly' at the end is kinda chilling
  
  Its a surprisingly good complement to OP Chris Paxton's Tweet about "normie opinion on AI", given it shows why said "normie opinion" is so resoundingly negative.
  I've made some brief nods to how the AI bubble is rapidly souring public perception of tech (here and here), but it really feels like AI has, to quote @datarama, "made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness".
  I feel like I should collect my thoughts on that front - I could probably make an interesting post out of it.

after all this time, TIL that Roko pronounces his name "Rocko" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIwJDnej7pg
- I'm not a native english speaker, how else was he supposed to pronounce it?
  
  I think the most common would be “roh-koh”, I could also see a front-o accentuated form being used
  that flat “rocko” as in the vid was one I wouldn’t have thought to hear
- Quick, someone file the copyright for "Roko's Postmodern Life"
- One step closer to Doctor Rockso the clown.
- it's amazing how he continues to provide fresh reasons to want to boop him on the nose
  
  man, all these old transhumanist videos https://www.youtube.com/@Transentience/videos you could waste hours of your life on old and pointless bs

AP takes down CF Vance apologia, not asserting things that they cannot evidence (that Vance did not have sexual relations with that couch)
before: https://archive.is/fXiMc after: https://archive.is/j3aot
This is the journalistic integrity we expect of AP News

Regarding that claimed breakthrough about AI winning the International Mathematical Olympiad: a reminder that a proof which hangs together logically is not necessarily a proof that makes sense.
Those formalized proofs are so incredibly ugly, it's amazing. Of course it doesn't much of a sensible indentation, but then there are single proof steps where I have no idea what it's even doing. [...] And then there are nonsense mathematical steps. The solution of problem 2 starts with induction, before introducing any variables. It applies induction to the number 12. And it write 12 as (10)+2. Then it proceeds to do the whole proof in the base case of the induction, and notices that the induction step is trivial, since the goal is the same as the induction hypothesis (but instead of the assumption tactic it uses congr 26).
- 'manual translation' undoubtably doing some heavy lifting here
  
  Spending an unknown but potentially long amount of time to maybe get a solution of potentially minimal legibility is definitely AI's killer app.
- Also, choice sneer in the comments:
  AlphaProof is more "AlphaZero doing self play against Lean" and less "Gemeni reading human proofs"

Not a sneer, but still a damn good piece on AI from Brian Merchant:
The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts
(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)
(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)

Giant Rat Penis part 2
- How do people do this without dying of anxiety?
  BTW, that last comment on RetractionWatch was grim:
  I recently saw a presentation by a job candidate (a PhD with many years experience) who used figures that were clearly AI-generated. They weren’t as funny as this example or the giant rat penis, but certainly fictional and unreal. In and of itself, troubling enough. Worse was that my colleagues involved in the interview didn’t care when I pointed it out.
  
  it's easier if you are a shameless fraud without a shred of integrity
  This is also probably why MBAs like it
- 2 Giant 2 Rat Penis
- ai use case: you can pump out pseudoscience promoting fluff disguised as papers in predatory journals with less effort
- Okay but this is about alkaline water so it's garbage even without the genAI imagery.
  It's even by Wu et al., come on, low hanging fruit

new EA hangout found, a snip at £3.5m
- "sold by the Society of the Precious Blood" paging peter thiel
- Not stately enough.

Just found out from a screenshot in a tweet that Marc Aandreesen considers Nick Land to be some kind of patron saint of "techno-optimism". Setting aside Land's ugly views about everything... I didn't think optimism was what he was known for. More like grasping, desperate, disgusted embrace of the onward march of capital.
- Nick Land (...) “techno-optimism”
  His thing is literally called DARK ENLIGHTENMENT, fucking Final Fantasy villain level of grandiose menacing naming, how on earth would that be "optimism".
  Marcee do you even like know who your idols are?
- "Nothing human makes it out of the near-future." - Nick Land.
  
  The Pinhead we have at home.

I'm not familiar with Indian politics but I'm curious if anyone understands what this site is or what its politics are https://democracycollective.in (I'm just nosy and curious, I saw this pop up out of nowhere)
Though maybe I already have an idea:
- You can read a blog post from the dude who started that site here: https://rushabh-mehta.medium.com/starting-a-new-political-party-28a2e70cc8c3 I didn't spot any huge red flags, but I didn't dig too deep (nor do I know the first thing about Indian politics).
  Apparently he aims to start an online political party without any leaders or hierarchy where everything gets voted on. Not to be too cynical, but looking at how small it is right now I imagine they won't get far enough to see why that doesn't really work.
  
  @sailorsegasaturn @hrrrngh A few of these have sprung up after Five Star Movement got popular in Italy. These political descendants have been real quiet after the drama flared up. Our local instance (Movement Now) has one MP.

Jeremy Keith on the bullshit "privacy sandbox" in chrome and firefox: https://adactio.com/journal/21285
I like Jeremy because he is an OG, but I think his requirement for proof that targeted advertising "works" before the browsers implement these features is off the mark for me. He's an agency guy, a bit like Andy Budd, so they tend to have these really visceral takes about the state of the web but with this skewed perspective of best interests
- Google just announced they're not getting rid of third party cookies after all. They announced this in a wordy blog post with so much spin as to be confusing (as is tradition): https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/
  
  We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content.
  god, the opening paragraph made my head spin with tech pr copy
- There was no technical reason why we couldn’t have web fonts. The reason why we didn’t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.
  I was a bit surprised when I learned fonts are CORSd at least party as a sort of primitive DRM so that font companies would buy into the webfont spec (that's how I remember it anyway, it's been awhile since I dug up the relevant mailing list messages)

Let's see how long HN takes to ban yet another literal Nazi.
- I'm pretty sure that if the community "takes out the trash" (i.e. downvotes to dead status[1]) the mods won't bother to ban the user.
  [1] I happen to believe thta this is not sufficient to get rid of bad actors

Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community
https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m
Edit: OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m
- just changed the litter tray, you may wanna repost in the fresh new stubsack
  
  Done 🫡

Not a sneer, but a mildly interesting open letter:
A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.
The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.
Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.
Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people's work, and the fact a lot of people's work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say "no", the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.
- OpenAI is creating the trustless economy that makes bitcoin necessary. taps forehead
- News article about how hard it is to block AI scraping: https://www.404media.co/websites-are-blocking-the-wrong-ai-scrapers-because-ai-companies-keep-making-new-ones/
  
  At this point, I wouldn't fault anyone for blanket-blocking all scrapers/robots - sure, doing that will make you unfindable by search engines, but search is basically useless nowadays for finding anything actually interesting, and trying to play whack-a-mole with AI scrapers just means you're gonna get your shit stolen.
  Might as well go back to word-of-mouth.
- The best proposal I've seen so far ~~short of destroying all AI scrapers~~, and essentially what anyone familiar with the specs would come up with.
  The only thing I'd add is an analogue to data-nosnippet to exclude only specific sections of the HTML document (w/o needing to reach for an entire iframe); though that's harder to implement on the crawler end so maybe that's for the best.
  Google uses a second User-Agent directive; while Bing suggests using noarchive. Both of these are pretty hacky and not general, so it'd be good to see the industry standardize on the above proposal.
  
  The proposal itself does still assume that AI scrapers are being run by decent human beings with functioning moral compasses, which is why I feel its inadequate.
  This take might be overly harsh on AI/tech as a whole, but at this point I've run out of patience regarding this bubble and see no reason to believe anyone in the AI space is a decent human being, at least for the time being.

pivot-to-ai.com needs a new theme. Blocksy looks really nice - but it doesn't work with WP Dark Mode and caches badly.
Need a 2 column blog theme suiting full short posts on the front page, that plays nice with Dark Mode. Any tips?

Ayo is this real? It'd be fucking wild if it was real

https://xcancel.com/brndxix/status/1816231803973521728
- Like the couch story, this is real.
  (No but for real, how would we know? Doubt any of us work at twitter and if we did we prob would be in no position to talk, would not be surprised if it was, and considering they are going after the information with a weird agressiveness (I saw the 'stay informed' thing myself). I think this has a high likelihood of not being false.
  E: More things I cannot confirm But very much lol if okta accidentally exposed this information (which makes me more doubtful it is true), first crowdstrike now okta jesus. (Don't get me wrong, this should be impossible unless they really fucked up some things, im just lolling on the possibility that it is true, not saying it is)
  E2: fake according to a former employee, And a journalist asked Okta, they denied it so yes very fake.

Libertarian nerds run straight into actual California, not the AI-generated dreamland they imagine
Mercury news: "Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report"
https://archive.ph/UbdBw
The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience, and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”
HN shows what they think of the 3 people with actual thoughts on the issue by downvoting them to death
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047746
- which spent more than $800 million buying more than 60,000 acres of mostly agricultural land near Fairfield
  Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman, just in case anyone thought there was a difference
  
  @dgerard
  Was the stumbling point when they explained to the county the part about the perpetually tortured child?
- Who could have predicted this except for everybody ! There's a reason none of these galt gulches ever get built.

Butters and Trump are ruining my ability to get anything done in town today. Not a big fan of this dumb shit inconveniencing me IRL.
- Here's a tweet of Winklevoss feeling snubbed by VP Harris (twittercom)
  The Biden-Harris Administration wages all-out war on the crypto industry for 4 years. Despite all of this, Kamala is still invited to the @TheBitcoinConf in Nashville and given a chance to speak to our industry and reset the relationship. What does she do? She declines. She can’t even take the first step and show up to start mending fences. Our industry won't forget this. We will show no mercy in November.
  and another much longer one.
  My hope is that in the not-too-distant future there are no politicians at any Bitcoin or crypto conferences. Not because they are not welcome, but because crypto is so universally accepted that it is no longer a campaign issue and therefore would be a waste of their time. Like going to a conference on whether or not email or the Internet should be legal or allowed.
  Ooh, Like the internet! I got Bingo!
  Bitcoin bros: more of this self-aggrandizing rage please. It's so entertaining to read.
  
  @sailorsegasaturn @techtakes
  NO SLURP JUICES FOR KAMALA
  
  They targeted gamers.
  Gamers.
  We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
  We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.
  We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
  Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
  Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
  These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
  Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.
  
  Ooh, Like the internet!
  Considering the history of legislation and the internet (and the recent KOSA thing) being treated like the internet is the last thing you would want.

203 comments

Mercury news: "Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report"