Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st December 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st December 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 - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)
Police are openly admitting to using chatGPT to hallucinate reports. I'm sure they were before, but now they're comfortable enough to admit to it.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this. Nothing at all.
the richest boy in the world sued to stop The Onion from turning infowars into a parody of itself on the grounds that he thinks infowars’ twitter accounts shouldn’t be transferred as part of the bankruptcy even though that’s something that happens constantly and also wouldn’t impact the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings even if it were grounded in anything resembling fact
Musk has also tweeted occasionally that he believes The Onion is not funny.
it’s getting really hard to adequately describe how funny musk isn’t. it’s not just try-hard shit like the weird sink thing, the soul-sucking cameos, or the fact that he’s literally throwing his money into stopping a comedy site from existing — it’s everything taken as a whole. I’d call him anti-comedy, but he’s so much less interesting than that implies
after going closed-source, redis is now doing a matt and trying to use trademark to take control over community-run projects. stay tuned to the end of the linked github thread where somebody spots their endgame
this is becoming a real pattern, and it might deserve a longer analysis in the form of a blog post
Starting things off with a fresh post from Brian Merchant: Tech under Trump, part 1
The promptfans testing OpenAI Sora have gotten mad that it's happening to them and (temporarily) leaked access to the API.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/artists-appears-to-have-leaked-access-to-openais-sora/
“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the [Sora early access] program for a $150B valued [sic] company,” the group, which calls itself “Sora PR Puppets,” wrote in a post ...
"Well, they didn't compensate actual artists, but surely they will compensate us."
“This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.”
OK, I could give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they're new to the GenAI space, or general ML Space ... or IT.
But I'm not going to. Of course it's about PR hype.
Some anti-AI propaganda via spellingmistakescostlives
The old place on reddit has a tweet up by aella where she goes on a small evo-psych tirade about how since there's been an enormous amount of raid related kidnapping and rape in prehistory it stands to reason that women who enjoyed that sort of thing had an evolutionary advantage and so that's why most women today... eugh.
I wonder where the superforecasters stand on aella being outed as a ghislain maxwell type fixer for the tescreal high priesthood.
John "Animats" Nagle choosing the most racist angle possible to respond to problems in education. The topic is giftedness and yet Nagle needs to start with "Ashkenazi Jews".
Eugenics in action:
Danish parenting tests under fire after baby removed from Greenlandic mother
Psychometric tests are widely used in Denmark as part of child protection investigations into new parents, and have long been criticised by human rights bodies as culturally unsuitable for Greenlandic people and other minorities.
In a 2022 report, the institute said that because the tests were not adapted to take cultural differences into account, Greenlandic parents ran “the risk of obtaining low test scores, so that it is concluded, for example, that they have reduced cognitive abilities, without there being actual evidence for this."
Psychological assessments of her were made by a Danish-speaking psychologist. Kronvold, whose first language is Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), is not fluent in Danish.
Nothing huge, but some wonderful examples of people trying to rules lawyer fucking dictionary definitions of plagiarism in this HackerNews thread about the parents that sued the school because their kid got in trouble for copy pasting from an LLM.
Thankfully the case was ruled in the school's favor. Just got a laugh out of some of the comments that are just unintentional satire of stereotypical HN comments.
So there's apparently a memecoin site with the not-at-all suspicious name pump.fun and Coffeezilla made a video about it on his second channel.
Also: Epilepsy warning for that site. It's full of flashing colors and moving elements like late 90s Geocities.
I have no idea what the fuck is even going on there, but apparently people threaten to kill themselves or their animals if you don't invest in their shitcoin there, or run actual cockfights where they murder the chickens live on stream if the line doesn't go up.
New post from Brian Merchant: No thanks to generative AI, which is about AI-run publisher Spines and their attempt to enshittify the literature world. Pulling a paragraph near the end here:
For another, the needle can move here; if the noise is loud enough, AI publishing can get slapped with a stigma that can at least help slow the erosion of the industry. Public shame can be a powerful tool, when warranted! So yeah: This is why I’m thankful that we’re building this community, and that there are people out there willing to go to the mat to oppose things like the AI-enabled automation of book production. (I fully resent that ‘AI enabled automation of book production’ is a phrase I had to write in 2024.)
Giving my thoughts, I feel Merchant and co. have a headstart when it comes to moving the needle here, for two main reasons:
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AI has been thoroughly stripped of whatever "wow factor" - showing off that your gen-AI system can make books isn't gonna impress Joe Public the way it would've back in '22 or '23.
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The one-two punch of the slop-nami and the plagiarism lawsuits have indelibly associated "AI" as a concept with "zero effort garbage made of stolen shit" - as a consequence, using or supporting it will immediately disgust a good portion of the crowd right out of the gate
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NASB: Baldur Bjarnason's released a second edition of The Intelligence Illusion
Irish election watch: Scary far right candidate uses scary AI images for his leaflet in the Dublin Bay North constituency.
I woke up and immediately read about something called "Defense Llama". The horrors are never ceasing: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/24/defense-llama-meta-military/
Scale AI advertised their chatbot as being able to:
apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities
However their marketing material, as is tradition, include an example of terrible advice. Which is not great given it's about blowing up a building "while minimizing collateral damage".
Scale AI's response to the news pointing this out -- complaining that everyone took their murderbot marketing material seriously:
The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.
Not even buying things on blu-ray is safe anymore from being tainted with "AI" nightmare fuel.
currently in vc delusion, the public just doesn’t understand how to move about efficiently
the levels of not-even-wrong from these dipshits continue to be astounding
