swlabr

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

The link opened up another google search with the same query, tho without the AI summary.

image of a google search result descriptionQuery: “a bear fries bacon meaning”

AI summary:

The phrase "a bear fries bacon" is a play on the saying "a cat dreams of fish" which is a whimsical way to express a craving. In this case, the "bear" and "bacon" are just random pairings. It's not meant to be a literal description of a bear cooking bacon. It's a fun, nonsensical phrase that people may use to express an unusual or unexpected thought or craving, according to Google Search.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (8 children)

pic of tweet reply taken from r/ArtistHate. Reminded me of Saltman's Oppenheimer tweet. Link to original tweet

image/tweet descriptionOriginal tweet, by @mark_k:

Forget "Black Mirror", we need WHITE MIRROR

An optimistic sci-fi show about cool technology and hot it relates to society.

Attached to the original tweet are two images, side-to-side.

On the left/leading side is (presumably) a real promo poster for the newest black mirror season. It is an extreme close-up of the side of a person's face; only one eye, part of the respective eyebrow, and a section of hair are visible. Their head is tilted ninety degrees upwards, with the one visible eye glazed over in a cloudy white. Attached to their temple is a circular device with a smiling face design, tilted 45 degrees to the left. Said device is a reference to the many neural interface devices seen throughout the series. The device itself is mostly shrouded in shadow, likely indicating the dark tone for which Black Mirror is known. Below the device are three lines of text: "Plug back in"/"A Netflix Series"/"Black Mirror"

On the right side is an LLM generated imitation of the first poster. It appears to be a woman's 3/4 profile, looking up at 45 degrees. She is smiling, and her eyes are clear. A device is attached to her face, but not on her temple, instead it's about halfway between her ear and the tip of her smile, roughly outside where her upper molars would be. The device is lit up and smiling, the smile aligned vertically. There are also three lines of text below the device, reading: "Stay connected"/"A Netflix Series"/"Black Mirror"

Reply to the tweet, by @realfuzzylegend:

I am always fascinated by how tech bros do not understand art. like at all. they don't understand the purpose of creative expression.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Ok, that's fair enough. The framing of "misinformation [...] I would like to seed" was just there to frame the bits. I don't really want these bits to take off.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago (8 children)

This might be tangential/way off-topic and more MoreWrite material than stub, but anyhoo:

Acronym-based misinformation campaigns I would like to seed:

  1. Internet debate clubs should start using “ASMR” to mean “A steel man risk”
  2. Opus dei, the absolutely real sect of the catholic church most famous for being the villains in the fiction IP “the Da Vinci Code”, is in fact the DEI branch of the catholic church.
  3. The company KFC has been commissioned by the Chinese Government to use FLG in its marketing, standing for “finger licking good” to drop Fa Lun Gong in search rankings for FLG.

If I think of more I’ll post them.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED

Burning man portrayed famously by Anna Gunn

Amazon also slows down its data centre commitments in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Decel gang rise up

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.

Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:

  1. No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
  2. The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.

He is busy being 93 fucking years old, lol

And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?

They probably couldn’t get Bernie.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

Christ on a futa dick

He is risen!

China and AGI: A New Yellow Peril and Red Scare in c/sneerclub@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

I think I was turned from “China probably bad” to “China might be good” when a tankie subreddit pointed out that China actually tries to rein in the billionaires and collect taxes.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You’ll accept my belief and like it, dammit! /s

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I believe you!

11
Musk accretes Gebbia, wants to run an AirBnB out of 1600 Pennsylvania (archive.md)
 

Original NYT title: Billionaire Airbnb Co-Founder Is Said to Take Role in Musk’s Government Initiative

19
What is the charge? Eating an LLM? A succulent chinese LLM? Deepseek judo-thrown out of Australian government devices (archive.is)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 

Original link

OFC if there were any real sense or justice in the world, LLMs would be banned outright.

139
OpenAI says stealing is wrong and bad unless they do it (archive.md)
 

original article

147
Musk presses H twice to perform the Nazi salute twice on stage at inauguration. (awful.systems)
 

No link given because it's all over the news. If you ask for proof you're going to have to eat my ass.

A lot of people are going to say it wasn't intended as a Nazi salute, and to that, I say: it doesn't matter. Was it a dog whistle? A variation of a Nazi salute from a South African neo-nazi party? Or just the vanilla salute? Such pontification is a waste of time. Fokker is a Nazi; you didn't need to see him salute. To all the regulars here, Musk being a Nazi is just an axiom of his whole deal. I mean, it's not called technofascism for nothing.

59
Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride” (xcancel.com)
 

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.

15
GM avoids reinventing a bus or a train with this one weird trick (archive.md)
 

Original link

14
Are we going to see prediction markets enter mainstream journalism? Taylor Lorenz says yes (archive.md)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
11 comments fedilink
 

original link

“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”

50
SF tech startup Scale AI, worth $13.8B, accused of widespread wage theft (archive.md)
 

original link

19
In which some researchers draw a spooky picture and spook themselves (static1.squarespace.com)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
9 comments fedilink
 

Abstracted abstract:

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.

*

59
Gotta pump tuah and dump that thang (www.independent.co.uk)
35
Elon is constructing a texas compound to trap, err, I mean, house his ex wives and children (www.nytimes.com)
 

Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

https://archive.is/XwbY0

16
Should a man be allowed to sell his soul on the blockchain? (Podcast ep dated 23rd February 2022) (maximumfun.org)
 

This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.

I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.

John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.

Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:

333Judge rules that the husband should continue to mine ETH until his rig burns down his house.

556Judge rules that the guy shouldn’t sell his soul, for symbolic reasons.

Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.

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