Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
it’s still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldn’t figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site
Image description: social-media post from "sophie", with text reading,
it's called "founder mode" it's about how to run your company as a founder and how that often goes against traditional management practices. it's basically what i already do but paul graham created a cool name for it in his latest essay, you know who paul graham is? y combinator?
This text is followed by an image of a man and a woman sitting in the audience of some public event. The man is talking at the woman while holding one hand on the back of her neck. The woman is staring past him with eyes that have seen the death of civilizations.
I read the white paper for this data centers in orbit shit https://archive.ph/BS2Xy and the only mentions of maintenance seem to be "we're gonna make 'em more reliable" and "they should be easy to replace because we gonna make 'em modular"
This isn't a white paper, it's scribbles on a napkin
Shape: You should chose one of the shapes that a cake can be, it may not always be the same shape, depending on future taste and ease of eating.
Freshness: You should use fresh ingredients, bar that you should choose ingredients that can keep a long time. You should aim for a cake you can eat in 24h, or a cake that you can keep at least 10 years.
Busyness: Don't add 100 ingredients to your cake that's too complicated, ideally you should have only 1 ingredient providing sweetness/saltyness/moisture.
Mistakes: Don't make mistakes that results in you cake tasting bad, that's a bad idea, if you MUST make mistakes make sure it's the kind where you cake still tastes good.
Scales: Make sure to measure how much ingredients your add to your cake, too much is a waste!
James Stephanie Sterling released a video tearing into the Doom generative AI we covered in the last stubsack. there’s nothing too surprising in there for awful.systems regulars, but it’s a very good summary of why the thing is awful that doesn’t get too far into the technical deep end.
every popular scam eventually gets its Oprah moment, and now AI’s joining the same prestigious ranks as faith healing and A Million Little Pieces:
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who stepped down as Microsoft CEO 24 years ago, will appear on the show to explore the "AI revolution coming in science, health, and education," ABC says, and warn of "the once-in-a-century type of impact AI may have on the job market."
and it’s got everything you love! veiled threats to your job if the AI “revolution” does or doesn’t get its way!
As a guest representing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Sam Altman will explain "how AI works in layman's terms" and discuss "the immense personal responsibility that must be borne by the executives of AI companies."
woe is Sam, nobody understands the incredible stress he’s under marketing the scam that’s making him rich as simultaneously incredibly dangerous but also absolutely essential
fuck I cannot wait for my mom to call me and regurgitate Sam’s words on “how AI works” and ask, panicked, if I’m fired or working for OpenAI or a cyborg yet
I’m truly surprised they didn’t cart Yud out for this shit
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who stepped down as Microsoft CEO 24 years ago, will appear on the show to explore the “AI revolution coming in science, health, and education,” ABC says, and warn of “the once-in-a-century type of impact AI may have on the job market.”
christ
billy g's been going for years with bad takes on those three things (to the point that the gates foundation have actually been a problem, gatekeeping financing unless recipients acquiesce to using those funds the way the foundation wants it to be used (yeah, aid funds with instructions and limitations..)), but now there can be "AI" to assist with the issue
maybe the "revolution" can help by paying the people that are currently doing dataset curation for them a living wage? I'm sure that's what billy g meant, right? right?
unironically part of why I am so fucking mad that reCaptcha ever became as big as it did. the various ways entities like cloudflare and google have forcefully inserted themselves into humanity's daily lives, acting as rent-extracting bridgetroll with heavy "Or Else" clubs, incenses me to a degree that can leave me speechless
in this particular case, because reCaptcha is effectively outsourced dataset labelling, with the labeller (you, the end user, having to click through the stupid shit) not being paid. and they'll charge high-count users for the privilege. it is so, so fucking insulting and abusive.
I’m truly surprised they didn’t cart Yud out for this shit
Self-proclaimed sexual sadist Yud is probably a sex scandal time bomb and really not ready for prime time. Plus it's not like he has anything of substance to add on top of Saltman's alarmist bullshit, so it would just be reminding people how weird in a bad way people in this subculture tend to be.
that’s a very good point. now I’m wondering if not inviting Yud was a savvy move on Oprah’s part or if it was something Altman and the other money behind this TV special insisted on. given how crafted the guest list for this thing is, I’m leaning toward the latter
so no surprise for this crowd, but remember all those reply guys who said Copilot+ would never be an issue cause it’d only work with the magical ARM chips with onboard AI accelerators in Copilot+ PCs? well the fucking obvious has happened
the ability to create a fully custom working environment designed to your own specifications, which then gets pulled out from under you when the open source projects that you built your environment on get taken over by fucking fascists
about 3 and a half months til Red Hat and IBM decide they’re safe to use their position to insinuate an uwu smol bean homegrown open source LLM model into your distro’s userland. it’s just openwashed Copilot+ and no you can’t disable it
maybe AmigaOS on 68k was enough, what have we gained since then?
"we couldn't excite enough people to buy yet another windows arm machine that near-certainly won't be market-ready for 3 years after its launch, so now we're going to force this shit on everyone"
There is an übermensch and there is an
untermensch.
The übermensch are masculine males, the bodybuilders I follow that are only active in the gym and on the feed; the untermensh are women and low-T men, like my bluepilled Eastern European coworker whose perfectly fine with non-white immigration into my country.
The übermensch also includes anybody whose made a multi-paragraph post on 4chan with no more than one line break between each paragraph. It also includes people at least and at most as autistic as I am.
It blew its load advertising a resume generator or something bullshit across hundreds of subs. Here's an example post. The account had a decent amount of karma, that stood out to me. I'm pretty old school, so I thought someone just sold their account. Right? Wrong. All the posts are ChatGPT generated! Read in sequence, all the karma farm posts are very clearly AI generated, but individually they're enticing enough that they get a decent amount of engagement: "How I eliminated my dent with the snowball method", "What do you guys think of recent Canadian immigration 🤨" both paraphrased.
This guy isn't anonymous, and he seemingly isn't profiting off the script that he's hawking. His reddit account leads to his github leads to his LinkedIn which mentions his recent graduation and his status as the co-founder of some blockchain bullshit. I have no interest in canceling or doxxing him, I just wanted to know what type of person would create this kind of junk.
The generator in question, that this man may have unknowingly destroyed his reddit account to advertise, is under the MIT license. It makes you wonder WHY he went to all this trouble.
I want to clone his repo and sniff around for data theft; the repo is 100% percent python, so unless he owns any of the modules being imported the chance of code obfuscation is low. But after seeing his LinkedIn I don't think this guy's trying to spread malware; I think he took a big, low fiber shit aaaaalll over reddit as an earnest attempt at a resume builder.
Personally, I find that so much stranger than malice. 🤷♂️
the username makes me think the account started its life shilling for the chia cryptocurrency (the one that spiked storage prices for a while cause it relied on wearing out massive numbers of SSDs, before its own price fell so low people gave up on it), but I don’t know how to see an account’s oldest posts without going in through the defunct API
Maybe hot take, but when I see young people (recent graduation) doing questionable things in pursuit of attention and a career, I cut them some slack.
Like it's hard for me to be critical for someone starting off making it in, um, gestures about this, world today. Besides, they'll get the sense knocked into them through pain and tears soon enough.
I don't find it strange or malice, I find it as symptom of why it was easier for us to find honest work then, and harder for them now.
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in there, the observation that LLMs and the broader “ai” “industry” wee made possible thanks to surveillance capitalism, but also the link between advertising and algorithmic determination of human targets for military action which seems obvious in retrospect but I hadn’t spotted before.
But in 2017, I found out about the DOD contract to build AI-based drone targeting and surveillance for the US military, in the context of a war that had pioneered the signature strike.
What’s a signature strike?
A signature strike is effectively ad targeting but for death. So I don’t actually know who you are as a human being. All I know is that there’s a data profile that has been identified by my system that matches whatever the example data profile we could sort and compile, that we assume to be Taliban related or it’s terrorist related.
this mostly uses metadata as inputs iirc. basically somedude can be flagged as "frequent contact of known bad guy" and if he can be targeted he will be. this is only one of many options. this is also basically useless in full scale war, but it's custom made high tech glitter on normal traffic analysis for COIN
This holiday season, treat your loved ones to the complete printed set* of the original Yudkowsky for the low introductory price of $1,299.99. And if you act now, you'll also get 50% off your subscription to the exciting new upcoming Yudkowsky, only $149 per quarter!
*This fantastic deal made possible by our friends at Amazon Print-on-Demand. Don't worry, they're completely separate from the thoughtless civilization-killers in the AWS and AI departments whom we have taught you to fear and loathe
This reminded me, tangentially, of how there used to be two bookstores in Cambridge, MA that both offered in-house print-on-demand. But apparently the machines were hard to maintain, and when the manufacturer went out of business, there was no way to keep them going. I'd used them for some projects, like making my own copies of my PhD thesis. For my most recent effort, a lightly revised edition of Calculus Made Easy, I just went with Lulu.
I suspect that for every subject that Yud has bloviated about, one is better served by reading the original author that Yud is either paraphrasing badly (e.g., Jaynes) or lazily dismissing with third-hand hearsay (e.g., Bohr).