swlabr

joined 1 year ago
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

gilding the lily a bit but

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

Does a sealion have bootlicker nature? Ugh.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Please, señor software engineer was my father. Call me Bob.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago

Oh yeah to be clear: I also find this kind of reporting to be disingenuous and disgusting.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 60 points 4 days ago (5 children)

NBC/the media really killing it with painting him as a self-radicalised spook.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 5 days ago

One too many poop pills

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

"I'm going to double down on not reading this article herpa derpa gerpa poop" that's you. Please fuck off

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

FWIW, I read this somewhat charitably: I didn't read this article as "I want there to be prediction markets in journalism" as much as "The right-wing fuckos are very into this shit, so expect for it to froth up out of the sewers in 2025." That being said, as discussed elsewhere, many of the finer points are questionable.

N.B: I am not aware of Lorenz's shit opinions.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 28 points 6 days ago

Techbros: “I’m hungry for that Lab Grown Meat!”

Labs:

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's probably worth 14B in the way a fire that you feed 14B of cash into is worth 14B

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Oh yeah, haha. I often face the dilemma dilemma in which I have to choose between ignoring the 'incorrect" usage (i.e. not a choice between two things that are difficult to choose between) and seethe OR mention the correct usage and look like a pedant. Sometimes it's a trilemma, and I'm all over the shop. But more seriously, I usually let it slide and let people use it to mean "a situation".

I doubt that Lorenz has a dilemma in line with the correct usage. I couldn't fight the urge to steelman, spoilered below, which I suspect this is nothing near what Lorenz had in mind.

exhausting Steelman within. I only tried to come up with something, it's not a good steelman. I'm so sorry about this.In the world that Lorenz posits, where prediction markets somehow represent accurate news reporting, either a journalist participates in the market whilst reporting news (conflict of interest), or they don't, and they are bad at their job (and not performing at your job is unethical, I guess?)

 

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.”

 

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.

*

 

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

https://archive.is/XwbY0

 

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.

 

On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9

 

Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.

I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.

1
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/meta@awful.systems
 

Wish I had a screengrab of this, but occasionally when I open the awful.systems page, it looks like I've logged in as a different user. Just now the username "autumnal" appeared instead of my own. Don't know how to reproduce.

This has happened in chrome on macosx a few times, haven't seen it elsewhere.

1
VoughtCoin (the-boys.fandom.com)
 

TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.

It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.

 

Uncritically sharing this article with naive hope. Is this just PR for a game? Probably. Indies deserve as much free press as possible though.

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