it must be ethiccal, it has two dolphins
holy shit, that’s the excuse they’re going for? they cheated on a benchmark so hard the results are totally meaningless, sold their most expensive new models yet on the back of that cheated benchmark, further eroded the scientific process both with their cheating and by selling those models as better for scientific research… and these weird fucks want that to be fine and normal? fuck them
absolutely; there’s no reason to hide the funding source and OpenAI’s access unless you’re grifting. I feel bad for the mathematicians working on FrontierMath who didn’t know though. imagine wasting valuable time on something like this then finding out it was all just a marketing stunt devised by grifters.
Besiroglu says OpenAI did have access to many of the FrontierMath problems and solutions — but he added “we have a verbal agreement that these materials will not be used in model training.”
ooh, a verbal agreement! incredible! altman & co didn’t even have to do the typical slimy corporate move and pay an intern to barely modify the original materials into the input for the training corpus, since that verbal agreement wasn’t legally binding and behind the scenes OpenAI can just go “oopsy woopsy we swear it won’t happen again” and who’s gonna stop them?
it should be fixed… again. for some reason our image cache keeps getting into a state where it either stops accepting uploads or stops accepting requests at all. I plan to upgrade us to the latest version soon, but it’ll unfortunately involve a little bit of downtime: to upgrade pict-rs to a new point release, you have to run the migrate command, but it only works for the previous release. we’re two releases behind, so I have to custom package the in-between release just to get us there.
holy fuck those comments. are all these people huffing CO2?
I get the some streamers looked at @elonmusk's gameplay and it looks like a shared account, maybe with his kids or something, and it seems unlikely he's made all that PoE2 progress on his own.
But has he actually said something about his play of PoE2 that is contradicted by this? Do we have an actual quote from him that would be a lie if their assessment of his on stream PoE2 gameplay is accurate?
The critics who leap to assuming he's not (or was not) a good (pro-level) gamer in general are making a huge leap with their "gotcha" moment.
uhm if you’d just look at the facts and ignore everything musk said and ignore the other times he was caught cheating, it’s perfectly reasonable that an extremely busy businessman like daddy musk would just have his 6 year old son play this extremely difficult game at a top level and then repeatedly claim his son’s accomplishments as his own. and by the transitive property that makes musk a pro-level gamer! QED woke critics or as professional quake players like musk and I say: lol zerg rush gg
shit. anything interesting in the network tab of your dev tools, if available?
I’d love to work on something like that. have you checked out any of soatok’s work on federated key infrastructure? I can dig up some links if you haven’t and it seems interesting; I understand soatok is developing it with the possibility that it could be an enabling technology for federated end-to-end encrypted email in mind.
I mean… it’s an apology, I don’t know what I was expecting. this still feels like a bigger, redder flag than the one cop who called them a honeypot (and at the same time didn’t seem to know what tuta is) — is this really a service I feel safe recommending marginalized people use? probably not, they should use signal. is it even suitable for the “grandma & drug dealer” use case? that question’s a bit more difficult.
could they really have said or done anything to fix this? shit, I don’t know. maybe I need to dig a lot more into who and what tuta actually is. I ran into one of their (former?) developers on mastodon and they seem to outwardly be marginalized and antifascist. if that’s what tuta’s composed of internally, then I’m a lot more able to trust them. until I do that checking though, I don’t think I’ll recommend tuta to anyone who might need it — the opsec risk of trusting your keypair to a company run by assholes is very high, especially in the current climate.
Aside: if anyone can recommend a better blogging platform, I would appreciate it.
so I can’t promise better, but you’re eligible for an account on the awful.systems blogging platform if you want one. it has MathML! it has jank! you can modify the frontend by PRing into a repo!
it hasn’t seen much use yet, but I was planning on posting a short story I’m writing there when it’s done. I can also say that as much as I don’t like WriteFreely on the web, its phone app is surprisingly ok
I’m all for stickying a post if one appears!
fucking wild you busted out a Dollar Tree word like abstruse but came here to brag about how you didn’t read the article because you couldn’t understand its extremely simply worded headline
proton’s ceo is, at this moment, trying to post through it on multiple official company accounts
thank fuck I switched to tuta
[I hold up a hand to my earpiece and make a horrified face]
a second milkshake has hit the duck (cw: fetishized racism, you know the one)
I’m waiting to hear back from tuta about what the fuck but this might be the reason why I hop providers again
image description (but see cw)
so somebody at tuta had the idea to write this post on their official account on Twitter:
Don't get cucked by Big Tech's invasive policies. Keep your private data safe and secure with state of the art end-to-end encryption with Tutanota.
and then the image attached to the post is a cuckold porn meme I started to describe here but won’t??? because describing the image put me in a really terrible mood??? it’s SFW but trust me you don’t want it. the Black men in the picture have had their faces covered by logos for Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook in that order. the white woman in the picture does not have her face covered. impact font bottom text: “YOUR PERSONAL DATA”
holy fuck I just realized the diabolical part of this horseshit:
I only know about the mdn ads cause my development browser doesn’t have an adblocker as a matter of practice (which I’m very quickly considering revising)
mdn’s only job is to be better than w3schools but here comes Mozilla removing the value from another one of their own projects
also not pictured: there was a fucking side banner ad I didn’t feel like screenshotting too, of course
HTTP: famous for doing Google pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, and nothing else. no other use has been found for http
(also, FTP! as indicated by these apps that famously don’t use or support it!)
MDN has fucking ads now????
(also, image uploads are back, weird how pict-rs sometimes just shits the bed)
image description
a fucking “ads by Mozilla” banner at the top of mdn web docs advertising mongodb’s LLM of all fucking things
huh, pict-rs has been acting up a lot lately. I’m gonna give the whole node a quick reboot later and see if that fixes things
this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:
> This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.
fucking masterful
an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol
Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.
this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
>Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
>I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
>The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
After raising $200 million from investors, Humane has only sold $9 million worth of products and has received $1 million in returned products.
after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:
> Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.
it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:
>Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.
AI shovelmaker Nvidia has been looking into making its own AI models. To that end, it’s been vacuuming up YouTube videos like nobody’s business. According to leaked internal communications obtained…
Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.
as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning
here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:
>Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company. > >A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.
The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.
so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:
>Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. > >Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.
does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.
here’s some more banal shit:
>We find there are three kinds of politicians: > >Those who support Little Tech. We support them. > >Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them. > >Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.
I find there are three kinds of politicians:
- those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
- those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
- those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. Th...
who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do
Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.
(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)
surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive
even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down
(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)
a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?
of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)
>This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.
we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)
>Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.
remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?
>This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.
yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!
>Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.
this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:
>Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.
oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this
The billionaire who wants to live forever just admitted he has long covid.
(via mastodon)
just open sourced someone else's code ama https://github.com/jawslouis/MakePlacePlugin/pull/26
from the linked github thread:
>Your project is in violation of the AGPL, and you have stated this is intentional and you have no plans to open source it. This is breaking the law, and as such I've began to help you with the first steps of re-open sourcing the plugin.
the project author (who gets paid for violating the AGPL via patreon) responds like a mediocre crypto grifter and insists their violation of the law be debated on the discord they control (where their shitty community can shout down the reporter):
>While keeping code private doesn't guarantee security, it does make it harder for bad actors to keep up with changes. You are welcome to debate this matter in the MakePlace discord: https://discord.com/invite/YuvcPzCuhq If you are able to convince the MakePlace community that keeping the code open-source is better, I will respect the wishes of the community.
aaaand the smackdown:
>Respectfully, I won't attempt to "debate" or "convince" anyone; I'm leaving this pull request and my fork here for others to see and use. It is not a matter of "better"; you are violating a software license and the law. It does not "make it harder" for anyone; Harmony hooking exists, IL modification exists, you can modify plugins from other plugins.
>The problem is that today's state of the art is far too good for low hanging fruit. There isn't a testable definition of GI that GPT-4 fails that a significant chunk of humans wouldn't also fail so you're often left with weird ad-hominins ("Forget what it can do and results you see. It's "just" predicting the next token so it means nothing") or imaginary distinctions built on vague and ill defined assertions ( "It sure looks like reasoning but i swear it isn't real reasoning. What does "real reasoning" even mean ? Well idk but just trust me bro")
a bunch of posts on the orange site (including one in the linked thread with a bunch of mask-off slurs in it) are just this: techfash failing to make a convincing argument that GPT is smart, and whenever it’s proven it isn’t, it’s actually that “a significant chunk of people” would make the same mistake, not the LLM they’ve bullshitted themselves into thinking is intelligent. it’s kind of amazing how often this pattern repeats in the linked thread: GPT’s perceived successes are puffed up to the highest extent possible, and its many(, many, many) failings are automatically dismissed as something that only makes the model more human (even when the resulting output is unmistakably LLM bullshit)
>This is quite unfair. The AI doesn't have I/O other than what we force-feed it through an API. Who knows what will happen if we plug it into a body with senses, limbs, and reproductive capabilities? No doubt somebody is already building an MMORPG with human and AI characters to explore exactly this while we wait for cyborg part manufacturing to catch up.
drink! “what if we gave the chatbot a robot body” is my favorite promptfan cliche by far, and this one has it all! virtual reality, cyborgs, robot fucking, all my dumbass transhumanist favorites
>> There's actually a cargo cult around downplaying AI. >> >> The high level characteristics of this AI is something we currently cannot understand. > >The lack of objectivity, creativity, imagination, and outright denial you see on HN around this topic is staggering.
no, you’re all the cargo cult! I asked my cargo and it told me so
>Running llama-2-7b-chat at 8 bit quantization, and completions are essentially at GPT-3.5 levels on a single 4090 using 15gb VRAM. I don't think most people realize just how small and efficient these models are going to become. > > [cut out many, many paragraphs of LLM-generated output which prove… something?]
my chatbot is so small and efficient it only fully utilizes one $2000 graphics card per user! that’s only 450W for as long as it takes the thing to generate whatever bullshit it’s outputting, drawn by a graphics card that’s priced so high not even gamers are buying them!
you’d think my industry would have learned anything at all from being tricked into running loud, hot, incredibly power-hungry crypto mining rigs under their desks for no profit at all, but nah
not a single thought spared for how this can’t possibly be any more cost-effective for OpenAI either; just the assumption that their APIs will somehow always be cheaper than the hardware and energy required to run the model
the r/SneerClub archives are finally online! this is an early v1 which contains 1,940 posts grabbed from the Reddit UI using Bulk Downloader for Reddit. this encompasses both the 1000 most recent posts on r/SneerClub as well as a set of popular historical posts
as a v1, you'll notice a lot of jank. known issues are:
- this won't work at all on mobile because my css is garbage. it might not even work on anyone else's screen; good luck!
- as mentioned above, only 1,940 posts are in this release. there's a full historical archive of r/SneerClub sourced from pushshift at the archive data git repo (or clone
git://these.awful.systems/sneer-archive-data.git); the remaining work here is to merge the BDFR and pushshift data into the same JSON format so the archives can pull in everything - markdown is only rendered for posts and first-level comments; everything else just gets the raw markdown. I couldn't figure out how to make miller recursively parse JSON, so I might have to write some javascript for this
- likewise, comments display a unix epoch instead of a rendered time
- searching happens locally in your browser, but only post titles and authors are indexed to keep download sizes small
- speaking of, there's a much larger r/SneerClub archive that includes the media files BDFR grabbed while archiving. it's a bit unmanageable to actually use directly, but is available for archival purposes (and could be included as part of the hosted archive if there's demand for it)
if you'd like the source code for the r/SneerClub archive static site, it lives here (or clone git://these.awful.systems/sneer-archive-site.git)
>RationalWiki is a highly biased cancel community which has attacked people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander before.
>Background on the authors according to a far-left website. > >Let's at least be honest.
>That is profiling work. (Not just "Ad hominem".) > >The clash with the name "rational-wiki" is too strong not to be noted.
as the infrastructure admin of a highly biased far-left cancel community that attacks people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander: mmm delicious
for bonus sneers, see the entire rest of the thread for the orange site’s ideas on why they don’t need therapy:
>I was about to start psychotherapy last month, I ask my family's friend therapist If he could recommend me where to go. So he interviewed me for about 30 mins and ask me about all my problems. > >A week later he send me the number of the therapist. I didnt write her yet, I think I dont need it as badly as before. > >Those 30 mins were key. I am highly introspective and logical, I only needed to orderly speak my problems.
to quote Key & Peele: motherfucker, that’s called a job
hey let’s see what the people who killed and buried hacker culture think should go in the jargon file!
>If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times. > >Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists […] > >Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.
I can’t wait for the corporate-approved jargon file, with any hint of anti-capitalism replaced with fun words and quotes from billionaires to share as the soul leaves my body
>So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated. > >...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.
for the absolute sake of fuck. coming soon: HackerDAO! collect 10xer tokens and finally prove to the junior devs why corporate gives you so many points to crunch on! vote on fun new jargon, but only if it’s crypto-related! surely you’re hacker enough to be on the pump side of this pump and dump!
Welp, looks like @nivenly is funding AI nonsense so I'm definitely leaving #hachyderm as soon as I decide where to go. Contribute to your instance admins, but not if the money goes to AI.
reposting here for better visibility (let me know if there’s a better way to do this now that we’re federated): the owners of hachyderm.io just started a generative AI for gaming project, and it looks like donations to them will likely end up going to that
> It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him. > >Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true). > > I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic. > >Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.
my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is
there’s also this at the top of the thread:
> I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion. > >This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed. > >Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.
turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent
musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed
remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads
Bevy is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open-source forever!
Bevy is a fun, cozy game engine to play with if you’re looking for something very flexible that implements some surprisingly advanced features. things I like:
- it’s all rust, which is an advantage for me and the chemical burns I have from handling the dialect of C++ a lot of older game engines used to be written in
- it implements a flexible entity component system, which I found pretty great for specifying game and rendering logic for things like roguelikes and simulations, where multiple game systems might interact in dynamic ways
- the API is very cozy and feels like querying an extremely fast database at times
- it’s a lot lower level than something like Unity or Godot, but you get some pretty advanced rendering features included
- the main developer seems to have a lot of industry experience and a solid roadmap
