this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 16 points 2 months ago (7 children)

The once and future king + ol' muskrat give their most sensible total nuclear annihilation takes. Fellas, are we cooked?

[–] mii@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago

This has to be hands down the absolute dumbest take I’ve seen from Musk ever. Dude has the mental capacity of a boiled pear.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They are both stupid men who repeat stuff they hear to make them look good. So the question is who are this time the "very smart people" that are telling numbnuts like these two that nuclear war is survivable - and by extension winnable? Because if that is the US defense establishment, then yeah we might be cooked.

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

Considering they were saying this while having trouble doing internet radio at scale, a problem basically solved 20 years ago, I'm not sure we should listen to them.

Related to Musk, Trump and all the other fools. PrimalPoly revealing just how shallow and culture war brainwormed thinker he is.

Image Description.Musk: Happy to host Kamala on an 𝕏 Spaces too PrimalPoly: Suggested questions for Kamala:

  1. How do crypto blockchains work, & why are so many Americans skeptical of Central Bank Digital Currencies?

  2. How would you stop the US gov't from colluding with Big Tech social media companies to censor Americans?

  3. What is the main cause of inflation?

  4. What is a woman? Description ends, question I have for anybody with a screenreader, does this spoiler method work? And also does the screenreader properly work with the letter: X as used on twitter, namely 𝕏.

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 16 points 2 months ago (12 children)

let's see how things are going on twitter

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

friend looked at this and said "ah race science geoguesser guy"

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago

Genomeguesser

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

"Inexplicable Cimmerian Vibes" is the name of my next band.

Bonus points if this turns out to be the output of an LLM trained by phrenologists.

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

omg, next time my wife asks me how she looks, I'm definitely dropping that "legible magyar admixture"

Edit: Didn't work. She started talking about how in the old country, the Hungarians chased her family out of the village for being religious minorities. I give this approach 0 bags of popcorn and a magen david.

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

That's certainly one approach to commenting on someone's picture. Pretty sure it's better to stick with the standard "Wow! 😍😍😍" but this certainly sticks out from the crowd?

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I found the most HN comment of all time:

What sort of mating strategy are you optimizing for?

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago

Optimizing mating strategies? But I'm terrible at chess!

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

please tell me the topic was repopulating endangered species of animals

oh who the fuck am I kidding, it’s the orange site

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

we're talking about the endangered species of white cishet males here please don't demean this important topic with jokes

Edit I wish I was joking but a luser with a classical Greek-ish handle replies

Women are optimizing 80% of men out of the gene pool.

What the men do is irrelevant.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (9 children)

This came up in a podcast I listen to:

WaPo: "OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say "

archive link https://archive.is/E3M2p

OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.

While I'm not prepared to defend OpenAI here I suspect this is just to shut up the most hysterical employees who still actually believe they're building the P(doom) machine.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

I mean, if you play on the doom to hype yourself, dealing with employees that take that seriously feel like a deserved outcome.

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[–] cornflake@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Post from July, tweet from today:

It’s easy to forget that Scottstar Codex just makes shit up, but what the fuck “dynamic” is he talking about? He’s describing this like a recurring pattern and not an addled fever dream

There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?”

Embarrassing to be this uninformed about such a high profile issue, no less that you're choosing to write about derisively.

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It's amazing to watch them flock together like this, nature is beautiful 😍

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

This is what happens in the absence of a natural predator.

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago

I used to wonder if they had thought about deadlock/livelock re self driving cars. Thanks to modern technology I no longer have to wonder. Thanks!

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The wikipedia page for TESCREAL is "disputed", always a good sign when the online right launches skirmish actions against front-line trenches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

'TESCREAL' refers to a nonsense conspiracy theory that disparages people such as Nick Bostrom without citing any sources that are credible on the question of whether Nick Bostrom is an 'evil eugenicist' or whatever.

WP:LOL. WP:LMAO even.

[–] imadabouzu@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I'm ok with this because everytime Nick Bostrom's name is used publicly to defend anything, and then I show people what Nick Bostrom believes and writes, I robustly get a, "What the fuck is this shit? And these people are associated with him? Fuck that."

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A credible source on whether Nick Bostrom is a weirdo is Nick Bostrom cited verbatim

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

ah, jeez, AI bros are trying to make deepfakes even fucking worse:

Deep-Live-Cam is trending #1 on github. It enables anyone to convert a single image into a LIVE stream deepfake, instant and immediately

Most of the replies are openly lambasting this shit like it deserves, thankfully

[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago

"help artists with tasks such as animating a custom character or using the character as a model for clothing etc"

The "deepfake" and "(uncensored)" in the repo description have me questioning that ever so slightly

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Who had Trump accusing the Harris campaign of using AI to inflate crowd size photos on their Election ‘24 bingo card? Anyway, I’m sure that being associated with fraud and fakes is Good For AI.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (7 children)

Not a sneer, but something that'll inspire plenty of schadenfreude:

Brian Merchant: The artists fighting to save their jobs and their work from AI are gaining ground

Brian's done plenty of good sneers on AI, I'd recommend checking him out

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

jesus, that's telling. and I can 100% see that sentence forming in the heads of the types of people who fall over themselves to create something like these tools. so caught up in the math and the technical cool, they can't appreciate other beauty

[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1eqsoom/guys_we_have_to_do_somthing_about_this_fi%D3%8Ft%D0%B5r/

This community pops up on /r/all every so often and each time it scares me.

Sometimes I see kids games (and all games really) have ultra-niche, super-online protests that are like "STOP Zooshacorp from DESTROYING K-Smog vs. Batboy Online", and when I look closer it's either even more confusing or it's about something people didn't like in the latest update. This is like that, but with an awful twist where it's about people getting really attached to these AI girlfriend/sex roleplay apps. The spelling and sentences make it seem like it's mostly kids, too.

edit: here's a terrible example!

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yesterday I saw a link to some podcast/post float by, of an interview with some genml company “discussing people falling in love with, having relations with, and even wanting to marry”, where the ceo is “okay with it”. didn’t click because ugh, but will see if I can find it

and ofc all these weird fucking things will pop the moment their vc runs out or openai raises prices or whatever. bet you they don’t have any therapy contingency for helping people with their ai partners suddenly getting vc-raptured

[–] mii@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I remember 15 years ago when I read about a Japanese man marrying a character from a dating sim game (source, archive link).

The internet clowned on him, but he was very serious, and it was the first time when I realized that these “anime waifu” people probably aren’t all just taking the piss.

There’s a whole socio-economic angle there, of course, which I don’t think I wanna get into here, but to me this whole “AI girlfriend” market really seems like a low-effort take on “dating sim as a service” with as much game removed as possible but the exploitative nature turned up to fucking eleven.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Babe, new AI doom vector just dropped: AGI will corrupt knitting sites so crafters make Langford visual hack patterns![1]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-ai-scams-are-infiltrating-the-knitting-and-crochet-world/


[1] doom scenario is my interpretation, not actually included in ZDnet article.

Sadly, Langford hacks seem to have never achieved memetic takeoff. Having an internet legally enforced on pain of death to be text-only would probably be a good thing.

comp.basilisk.faq

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[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

yall might want to take notice of this thing https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/20460779

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-08-14/Recent_research

STORM: AI agents role-play as "Wikipedia editors" and "experts" to create Wikipedia-like articles, a more sophisticated effort than previous auto-generation systems

ai slop in extruded text form, now longer and worse! and burns extra square kilometers of rainforest

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

People out there acting like "research" using LLMs is ethical

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[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (5 children)

this will probably become a NotAwfulTech post after I explore a bit more, but here’s a quick follow-up to my post last stubsack looking for language learning apps:

the open source apps for the learning system I want to use do exist! that system is essentially an automation around reading an interesting text in Spanish (or any other language), marking and translating terms and phrases with a translation dictionary, and generating flash cards/training materials for those marked terms and phrases. there’s no good name for the apps that implement this idea as a whole so I’m gonna call them the LWT family for reasons that will become clear.

briefly, the LWT family apps I’ve discovered so far are:

  • LWT (Learning With Texts) is the original open source system that implemented the learning system I described above (though LWT itself originated as an open source clone of LingQ with some ideas from other learning systems). the Hugo Fara fork is the most recently-maintained version of LWT, but it’s generally considered finished (and extraordinarily difficult to modify) software. I need to look into LWT more since it’s still in active use; I believe it uses an Anki exporter for spaced repetition training. it doesn’t seem to have a mobile UI, which might be a dealbreaker since I’ll probably be doing a lot of learning from my phone
  • Lute (Learning Using Texts) is a modernized LWT remake. this one is being developed for stability, so it’s missing features but the ones that exist are reputedly pretty solid. it does have a workable mobile UI, but it lacks any training framework at all (it may have an extremely early Anki plugin to generate flash cards)
  • LinguaCafe is a completely reworked LWT with a modern UI. it’s got a bunch of features, but it’s a bit janky overall. this is the one I’m using and liking so far! installing it is a fucking nightmare (you have to use their docker-compose file only, with docker not podman, and absolutely slaughter the permissions on your bind mounts, and no you can’t fire it up native) but the UI’s very modern, it works well on mobile (other than jank), and it has its own spaced repetition training framework as well as (currently essentially useless) Anki export. it supports a variety of freely available translation dictionaries (which it keeps in its own storage so they’re local and very fast) and utterly optional DeepL support I haven’t felt the need to enable. in spite of my nitpicks, I really am enjoying this one so far (but I’m only a couple days in)
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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Another front in the war of the sexes has opened, and men are on the back foot!

HN: Women are using ChatGPT to catch men lying about their height

The counterattacks are planned!

"They" all lie:

I personally take my job as Photo Detective very seriously, a trait I only acquired from too many dates with people who did not look as good as their photos in real life.

Double standards!!

I'm pretty sure if men would use ChatGPT to catch women lying about their body this conversation would be in a completely different tone.

For some reason The Internet decided that 6 feet was an arbitrary limit, under which men could be just ignored.

Imagine men deciding that any woman with smaller than (insert random body measurement we can't affect) could just be filtered out?

Both sides!

Women will hate finding out that it can guess their age and weight! It can even guess their socioeconomic group, and if they dye their hair.

Great, guys can use it too. We'll see how these chicks react...

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

it can guess their age and weight! It can even guess their socioeconomic group, and if they dye their hair.

But can it detect Inexplicable Cimmerian Vibes? Can it guess the haplogroup?

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

She knows you swiped left. She slams the table with both her hands. The formica cracks beneath her mighty fists as she shouts oaths in the name of Crom.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Capitalist blames lazy workers for not putting in the hours to make themselves obsolete.

WSJ: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI—And Remote Work Is Why

Archive: https://archive.is/JXvtV

[–] mii@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI—And Remote Work Is Why

That’s another great benefit of remote work, then.

Also imagine …

work-life balance […] was more important than winning

… saying this unironically.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I always want to point out how there are never specific metrics attached to these criticisms. Whenever I've seen actual numbers checked there doesn't appear to be a significant impact between before and after companies started WFH during the pandemic.

Of course I also haven't looked to close because I've been too busy enjoying my life rather than pretending my boss is funny at a water cooler.

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