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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
via mastodon
image description
a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:
lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :
are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.
but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.
but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.
maybe you’re not being negative enough
I was reading David and Amy’s stuff on energy costs of AI and ended up skimming the MSFT “environment sustainability report” and… god
Like I don’t even know how to satirise this. Help me sneer pros, for I am too depressed to make fun of this.
Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.
Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.
Anyway it’s not that great but here’s my attempt at the sneer you asked for:
“Additionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions.”
Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN
Like a century of science: yeah we’re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. There’s no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.
MSFT: hold my beer
Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be “analyzing” the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
It’s remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He’s worked on that, but it’s clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn’t very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I’m thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.
But you can’t convince me that you’re really the world’s best technical interviewer if you’re also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you’re suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who’s financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they’re concerned about where he might end up otherwise?
The only thing I’ve seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.
Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what they’re saying. I gather that it’s easy to empathize with and doesn’t require listeners to actually learn much since they’re essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.
I don’t think it’s very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new “AI” major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that “computation” is more important than electrical engineering.
Lex hasn’t optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee’s and the (implicitly) listener’s ego.
some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”
Someone’s been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).
The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.
Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasn’t really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.
It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it’s a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it’s a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it’s so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don’t the people we keep electing to fix it just… do that?
Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn’t started using it and outcompeting everyone?
There’s only 2 answers to that:
- the gold standard doesn’t work in the modern economy, the one that has lifted millions out of poverty and created untold wealth (to great environmental damage, sure)
- the gold standard is being kept from them by (((they)))
Answer 2 is obvious if you’re a fascist.
Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.
I’m familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they can’t print money and the populace doesn’t trust them to print money - so every year it’s more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.
So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.
When [musk’s new] supercomputer gets to full capacity, the local utility says it’s going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes per year.
The locals might get ornery about this, and I’d be willing to make the trip to help.
There are some steam turbine power plants (like coal-fired) (on smaller side) with power output like that
One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.
Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.
This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its ‘reasoning’ when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, it’s not really clear.
Can’t wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don’t exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.
Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:
bless you Melanie.
Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you
Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesn’t understand the rules of chess
^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)
Dog tax
Would there ever be a way to tell that they didn’t just feed the answers into the training data?
I have thought about this guy every day since I saw this post
If only all my snark could elicit such absurd perfection.
I immediatelly knew who and what you were talking about without even clicking.
May the fact that he also lives inside my head rent-free be some solace to you.
Every day? I dont think I have read that post at all. (This is both a joke and not a joke, as I had not read it, I did now and I was amused, so thanks).
Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.
A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) “if you think that’s bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱”.
Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isn’t doing it:
Do you have any references/examples of this?
tons
rapid7 for example use LLMs to analyze code and identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.
Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this.
must’ve been another company then which i got confused with the name
Good thing you have tons of examples.
Right?
e: you’ll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steve’s other posts are about
I wonder if he got standard ML and LLM confused. (I did hear there was some usage of LLM/ML to help with some documentation stuff I think on a riskybusiness podcast, but I would have to relisten for the details. It could also just have been promotional stuff, while they are not actually using it).
Poor DeiSteve, it always sucks when you have a decades old username which suddenly takes up political meaning.
“created: 51 days ago”
Oh no.
Standard ML the programming language or standard as in conventional and ML as in machine learning?
Machine learning.
E: Turns out the DEI guy might have been right btw. https://www.rapid7.com/about/press-releases/rapid7s-ai-engine-supercharges-security-operations-with-generative-ai/ if by generative AI they mean a LLM.
And from their blog: https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2023/11/29/rapid7-takes-next-step-in-ai-innovation-with-new-ai-powered-threat-detections/ so there could be a chance the ‘I used to work there’ person didn’t know everything going on in Rapid7. “Rapid7 Has Been an AI Innovator for Decades”
Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
a new source of anxiety has formed
in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I don’t think Lemmy’s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but it’s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed
awful’s probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and they’re one of the bigger operations around
pro-tip: do not learn things about how TLDs work (and I mean the bit beyond dns architecture), it is cursed knowledge you can’t unlearn
and with that warning delivered, y’all may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late it’s a gateway drug
regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. AP’s identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/
(e: good lord I was out of it when I wrote this post)
the original post is fucking amazing
here in the future, nothing fucking works
.mobi? They became the admins of the file format? And they paid for it? Good luck with that. ;)
E: me after reading the article. Ow god nothing fucking works indeed, that is dire. I actually checked the date to see if this wasn’t some old post. Nope 9/11 2024. Buffer overflow + lapsed domains.
Fuck it, we’re going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.
you have no idea how much I’ve been tempted to do UUCP
I liked this comment on the HN post:
Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.
new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about “ontologically, is ‘superhuman prediction’ the same class as superintelligence?”
why? oh, y’know, just things:
I’ve clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn’t just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You’d prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I’m fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!
You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.
BRB training an LLM to be a super-goalpost-mover
Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.
I’ll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.
As zero cannot exist as a chance, there is a chance this will happen.
That’s why I vote 3rd party in presidential elections.
how to spot the US angst:
I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.
Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?
How did you go from “predict the future”, an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??
obvies they’re just 30% better at predicting the future than you
I’ll cut you with a Y axis I swear on me mum
azimu(s)th
‘This tool can do X at a superhuman level’ is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.
I told one of my college professors I’d been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said “can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it” and without thinking I said “why would I use chat-gpt? It’s rubbish” and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.
This was after he’d said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.
Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)
2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling
- Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously
- Development of “Schrödinger’s Ledger” prototype, allowing superposition of financial states
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution
- Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
- Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
- Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements
ah good, we’re still on schedule for that I guess
I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting LinkedIn to become a wretched hive of “quantum” bullshit, but hey, here we are.
Tangentially: Schrödinger is a one-man argument for not naming ideas after people.
Somebody played cookie clicker.
you left the best one:
First successful experiments in “temporal arbitrage” using quantum prediction models
not only they know about “temporal arbitrage experiments” but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment
Frankly, it just didn’t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.
Turns out purging your ranks of wokes and furries is more fun than, you know, actually developing a working Linux distro: Nix 2.24+ is vulnerable to (remote) privilege escalation.
(linking to the lobste.rs discussion because I feel it does a decent job curating related links around disclosure timelines etc.)
how’s the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?
we have some dedicated Nix threads on FreeAsm, our community for open source stuff that might give you a good recap of the latest stuff. where I’m sitting as a former Nix contributor and advocate is — nothing is fixed, all this obvious fash shit worked so well it’s being tried in other open source communities, and I really would like a nice alternative to NixOS so I can finally release a lot of the Nix stuff I’ve been sitting on (and also because nixpkgs keeps breaking — so many maintainers left that some of the further corners of the package set I use are already showing a lot of rot)
Lix fixed it last month of course
found a quality sneer in the wild https://mander.xyz/post/17910623
From the reactions:
“With enough garbage the model will become sentient”
“I mean thats how humans are raised tho”
AAAAAAAAAAAA
(There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).
As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. “Holy shit, I think therefore I am!”
diminish humans and humanity
AKA tell on themselves
this isn’t surprising, but now it’s confirmed: in addition to the environmental damage generative AI does by operating, and in spite of all attempts to greenwash it and present it as somehow a solution to climate change, of course Microsoft’s been pushing very hard for the oil and gas industry to use generative AI to maximize resource exploitation and production (via Timnit Gebru)
tbh i don’t see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works it’s gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesn’t care, because they’re selling shovels so it doesn’t matter if their shit doesn’t work as long as someone’s buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where there’s already some money
My heuristic is basically: until we can easily control the environment of earth, terraforming will not be on the horizon. Given that we are hell-bent on driving off of as many cliffs as we can, I’m pretty happy to continue thinking that we’ll never get off this rock proper within the ol’ lifespan
this is a fun read
another I ran into earlier (via an outfit from these parts) is this piece from The Conversation. I wish I could get as irked about linear extrapolation as I usually do, but in lieu of guardrails arresting (and clawing back!) all that shit from all these ghouls…
You could build a whole library of articles like this: here’s one from early last year
(Edit: I based parts of this post on misremembered/misinterpreted tweet from musk, so reader beware, I’m being wrong about Musks stated plans here, see my later reply in the thread. Not sure if I should leave the post up, edit it (eurgh effort), or just delete)
Made a decision for the don’t waste time common good.
@Soyweiser You’re assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it can’t and it won’t. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Mars—extended duration in space, remember—in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you don’t need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)
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