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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • Seems like they've actually done this now. There's a preface note now.

    This topic was chosen based on the technical merit of the project before we were aware of its author's political views and controversies. Our coverage of technical projects is never an endorsement of the developers' political views. The moderation of comments here is not meant to defend, or defame, anybody, but is in keeping with our longstanding policy against personal attacks. We could certainly have handled both topic selection and moderation better, and will endeavor to do so going forward.

    Which is better than nothing, I guess, but still feels like a cheap cop-out.

    Side-note: I can actually believe that they didn't know about Justine being a fucking nazi when publishing this, because I remember stumbling across some of her projects and actually being impressed by it, and then I found out what an absolute rabbit hole of weird shit this person is. So I kinda get seeing the portable executables project, thinking, wow, this is actually neat, and running with it.

    Not that this is an excuse, because when you write articles for a website that should come with a bit of research about the people and topic you choose to cover and you have a bit more responsibility than someone who's just browsing around, but what do I know.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th November 2024
  • So, ethics and legality are strategic liabilities? Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not even sneer-worthy. This guy is completely fucking insane.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th November 2024
  • Such meme. Much wow. I see we’re continuing with giving dumb names to everything the Muskrat is involved in. Glad that hasn’t changed.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th November 2024
  • Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it'd be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.

    But honestly, I feel like there just isn't a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton's bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn't even private. It's mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).

    Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I'm starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th November 2024
  • Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.

    I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output of format-patch into the web client but, first, I am lazy and don't wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so that git am doesn't eat it without cleanup.

    Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th November 2024
  • Wild that "We left OpenAI and founded out own company with alignment and safety"-Anthropic decides to get into bed with Palantir of all companies.

    It's almost as if their whole safety shtick is complete bullshit. Hmm.

  • What the Trump win means for AI: surprisingly little
  • Fuck me sideways. Looks like the machine will continue running at least for a while.

    That’ll go down well with everyone and not erode the public’s opinion about the shitheads even further, I’m sure, when they’re allowed to ingest everything and make their chatbots even more racist and plagiarize even more stuff.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024
  • For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:

    Mental diarrhea from Donald Trump

    https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397

    Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.

  • "I consider myself a dark elf"
  • Alignment-locked races (or classes for that matter) are just stupid. It’s probably the thing I hated about D&D the most and getting rid of alignment altogether was one of our house rules. I’m actually really happy Baldur’s Gate 3 did that, because suddenly a whole bunch of players realized how you can easily work around those restrictions.

    It’s so much more fun when you travel to, say, the Abyss and don’t operate under the pretense that everything you meet there is chaotic evil by default and that you could maybe even meet a morally complex demon. Even more fun in a Planescape campaign.

    /off-topic rant

  • "I consider myself a dark elf"
  • Dark Elf you say? Let’s ship his ass to Menzoberranzan and see how the NRx shit does there.

  • Venture capital is having a bad time — and AI isn’t going to fix it
  • Developing and Empowering our Aspiring Leaders (DEAL) Act

    That can’t possibly be the actual name of that thing. It sounds like something out of North Korea. The fuck are these people smoking?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024
  • That was the day when the transformer paper was released that kicked off this whole LLM shitshow. So my intention was just a little nod towards that. ;)

    But yeah, the real number is probably quite a bit larger than that.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024
  • Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024
  • I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.

  • LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data
  • You guys always come crawling out from whatever rock you’re hiding under for these posts as if someone saying LLMs aren’t smart makes your spider senses tingle.

    It would be almost impressive if it weren’t so stupid.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.

    As a programmer who likes to see himself more adjacent to artists (and not only because I only draw stuff — badly — and write stuff — terribly — as a hobby, but also because I hold the belief that creating something with code can be seen as artistic too) this whole attitude which has been plaguing the tech industry for — let's be real here — the last 15 years at least but probably much longer makes me irrationally angry. Even the parts of the industry where creativity and artistry should play a larger role, like game dev, have been completely fucked over by this idea that everything is about efficiency and productivity. You wanna be successful? You need to be productive all the time, 24/7, and now there's tools that help you with that, and these tools are now fucking AI-powered! Because everything is a tool for out lord and savior productivity.

    (I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I've been meaning to do for a year now,)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • If you mention SpaceBattles we also need to add Sufficient Velocity for completeness’s sake.

    There’s another one that focuses mostly on erotic fiction but since that’s not really my bag I’ve forgotten what it’s called. And I think it’s not as big as SB and SV anyway since that user base is mostly on AO3 these days.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • Earlier today, the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack, which has now been claimed by the BlackMeta hacktivist group, who says they will be conducting additional attacks.

    Hacktivist group? The fuck can you claim to be an activist for if your target is the Internet Archive?

  • Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"!
  • This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

    Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

    Not a cult btw.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025
  • They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.

    Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).

    I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.

    This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.

  • Sam Altman is full of shit (and totally has a thing for Scarlett Johansson)
    www.wheresyoured.at Sam Altman Is Full Of Shit

    Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I

    Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

    Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

    > Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

    “Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

    I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

    0
    Tired of just generating anime girls? How about letting roided Clippy play CSI?
    gizmodo.com Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works

    This AI hype cycle has dramatically distorted society's views of what's possible with image upscalers.

    It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.

    > Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.

    You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.

    > Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.

    And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.

    0
    When your big tech brain completely fails to read the room.
    variety.com SXSW Audiences Loudly Boo Festival Videos Touting the Virtues of AI

    SXSW audiences all day booed a festival video (played Tuesday in front of screenings) featuring tech pundits touting their enthusiasm for AI.

    It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.

    > “I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”

    I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).

    > Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.

    Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.

    Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.

    > […] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].

    Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".

    > […] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”

    I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.

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    mii Mii @awful.systems

    I wrangle code, draw pictures, and write things. You might find some of it here.

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