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.

  •  Mii   ( @mii@awful.systems ) 
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    218 months ago

    Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we’re trying to force everyone to use one instead of using hunter2 everywhere.

    Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that “Usually there’s no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT.”

    Usually.

  •  hrrrngh   ( @hrrrngh@awful.systems ) 
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    178 months ago

    Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0

    These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/

    Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.

    Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.

    I’m sure!

    •  Mii   ( @mii@awful.systems ) 
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      138 months ago

      They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.

      Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

    • Kurzgesagt

      Yeah I’m not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as “all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s”.

    • @hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they’ve previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.

      This is extra crap because I’d already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn’t have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.

    •  BigMuffin69   ( @BigMuffin69@awful.systems ) 
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      8 months ago

      Some ‘scientists’ cough Yud/Rob/Kokotajlo cough believe in FOOM. Anyways, let’s not question this fundamental assumption so we can engage in fear baiting and mental masturbation for the remainder of our show. It’s bonkers that people keep citing Kokotajlo as an AI researcher, like, I have serious doubts this man knows what a computer is. Pretty good at grifting though. Also why is Rob Miles still listed as a PhD student. Like cant he hurry up and fuckin graduate already? Christ.

      As an aside, I remember watching a PBS space time and seeing sponsored by Open Philanthropy (or some other EA organization) and I was like no not my beloved PBS!! I know it feels :(

      • Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it’s important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.

        The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It’s fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman’s “last invention” is wrong because most, unfortunately, most “smart people’s” view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.

        In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.

    • Idea: a Pivot to AI video series hosted by an avatar that’s, like, a talking polyhedron in the style of Mind’s Eye/Body Wars era CGI.

      This would require effort and thus is a terrible idea, but I find the mental image amusing.

    • i’m not reading all that, at least now, but i’d just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development

      • I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the “spare” cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

  • I didn’t even know this was happening friend sent me the screenshot, but apparent grimusk are in the bureaucratic stages of their relationship ending. and of course it’s going extremely normal:

    •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) 
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      8 months ago

      I sadly know more, it is horrible. Not only is there a custody battle, grimes grandma is dying and she has never seen grimes kids, and because Musk isn’t reacting to anything Grimes mother put a plea online for him to please let her grandkids see her mother.

      Poor kids, just heartbreaking.

      E: source

      • heh

        that looks pretty fucking shitty. but we all already knew both of them were fucking ghouls. sucks for the kids, hopefully they can get out okay eventually. but that’s about as much as I’m willing to say (largely: reasons private, w/ heavy state load implications. I don’t mind telling/explaining, but not in public, and it’s a lot of work/context)

  •  self   ( @self@awful.systems ) 
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    138 months ago

    this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)

    this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now

    • I just half-wrote a post in this textfield then snipped it

      will dm elsewhere

      (largely snipped because I’m too fucking out of spoons today to format it without edgepruning (which it probably deserves))

    •  Mii   ( @mii@awful.systems ) 
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      68 months ago

      I’m really not a fan of Python (in general; the whole philosophy of that language is kinda opposite to my idea of programming) but I have to admit the project does look interesting at first glance.

      And after glancing at the Lemmy codebase a few times I think that an alternative or at least competition is a good thing.

  •  jax   ( @jax@awful.systems ) 
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    138 months ago

    my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:

    What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn’t want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it’ll be fine as long as there’s a big cyber noggin down the track… just google TESCREAL. We didn’t make this up.

            •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) 
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              8 months ago

              Shen always seemed like a pretty decent person who posts pretty well. The whole situation where people attacked him for accepting the theft of his bike was pretty strange. (The comic just went ‘well, guess they need it more than I do, whatever’ which seems like a healthy way to get over your bike getting stolen. And people lost their minds, how dare Shen not be angry!).

              And seems somebody made a docu about that note the person reacting to this still mad about Shens acceptance.

              •  sc_griffith   ( @sc_griffith@awful.systems ) 
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                8 months ago

                when I first saw the bike comic I remember it struck me as exactly what someone would write in the midst of a pathetic attempt at positive thinking. but if it represents how he genuinely felt, for me it goes from cringe and not that interesting to just not interesting

                that comic is especially enraging to right wingers. with them is where I’ve seen the sustained loathing for it. the idea that despised lowlies are stealing your shit and you must strike back/first is fundamental to right wing ideology, especially the right wing conception of masculinity. you’re supposed to hate the people lower than you in the hierarchy largely because their existence is theft. a guy not being mad about actual real theft by some city rando spits on a premise their whole ideology rests on

                it kind of reminds me of the “I really like girls” video which I’m too lazy to pull up. it’s just a streamer doing a cute little rap about how he really likes women, and someone put a mildly cringe animation over it. very online right wingers hate hate hate that video, because you’re not supposed to actually like women: they’re lower than men in the hierarchy. or such would be the subtext when they ranted about it

        •  maol   ( @maol@awful.systems ) 
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          48 months ago

          I had just been looking at their website or I wouldn’t have caught it, lol.

          I think Yeah Nah Pasaran have done some coverage of technofascism and TESCREAL.

          You should definitely pitch a show. You could have an evil AI as a co-presenter.

    •  rook   ( @rook@awful.systems ) 
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      128 months ago

      Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?

      (also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)

      • I’m sure such blatant and unrepentant price gouging won’t end in any violent altercations from infuriated customers!

        (Ah, who am I kidding, somebody’s gonna blow their lid over Kroger jacking up water prices on a hot day. They’ll be lucky if nobody gets shot before they ditch the idea.)

      • it’s the USA, it’s near certainly going to be multiple ways of legal

        and if they get kicked in the teeth, they’ll get around it by putting up a little sign somewhere near the door (visible, but unobvious) which claims that “by shopping there you accept the possibility”, and that may be enough

        •  self   ( @self@awful.systems ) 
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          88 months ago

          this might run afoul of some of our scattered price gouging regulations (see some instances of sellers getting slapped during the toilet paper shortage nonsense), but interestingly this was announced after the Supreme Court kneecapped our ability to enforce any regulations at all

          it’s almost like the corpos took a monstrous lesson from covid and were waiting for the right combination of deniable technology and probability of the success of the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup to announce something like this

          • hmm yeah that’s a good point. I wonder if they’re planning to skirt that by capping the raised price, just plan to avoid places with that regulation entirely, or what else

            probably it’ll be some inventive new form of extremely-USAian fuckery that I’m not in a cynical mood to guess at in speculation right now

          • I happened to come across an article mentioning the Robinson–Patman Act (from 1936) in relation with wage fixing by algorithm.

            From Wikipedia: “a United States federal law that prohibits anticompetitive practices by producers, specifically price discrimination”

            It might be relevant here. Obviously I am not a US lawyer specialised in monopoly law.

      •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) 
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        8 months ago

        I never really got the (E: thanks froztbyte, I meant user complaints here, there certainly are job complaints re self-checkout see reply below) complaints of self checkout, works great in most places in .nl I tried it.

        And then the local Lidl got a self checkout. I now get why people hate those things, somebody really designed it with the idea of ‘people in our stores are criminals we must catch’ in mind. Turns out those styles of self checkouts are more common in EE as well. A small example of a problem with it. The part where you in other self checkouts would put your bag to put your stuff into was a scale, and because of that I couldn’t put my bag there as I thought I was trying to sneak products through, and every item had to be placed there on the scale after weighing. (And then it didn’t always work correctly). You could almost smell the security person who designed it going ‘im gonna catch all those baddies!’ (that could have also been me, I need to remember to wash my clothes). The machine also felt cheap, and the way the employees had to interact with it (they had to physically touch the machine with some key, and not use a tablet like all the other self checkouts (I had gotten something with alcohol in it)) didn’t help this feeling.

        Moral of the story, there are ways to do self checkout better than others.

        • there’s that (the high-trust vs low-trust designs), but also there’s another dimension of it: cashier (and similar jobs) are one of the few low-end open to a lot of people in the US, which means this would kill yet another avenue of earning for many of them

          (to which the fix is not a simple yes or no to whether self-checkout should be an option)

          •  Mike   ( @mpk@awful.systems ) 
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            78 months ago

            One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.

          • Yeah I should have mentioned that, I do get those complaints. But most people I see complaining about self-checkout dont take that angle. Sorry I should have used my brain, realized where I was typing and not forgotten that people here tend to be more class aware.

            •  o7___o7   ( @o7___o7@awful.systems ) 
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              fr! BTW, speaking of class consciousness, I once got myself in big trouble with one of these things.

              My SO and I had just finished reading Kraken by China Mieville when we went into Krogers to pick up a few things.

              spoiler

              One of our favorite characters, Wati, managed to overthrow the reigning order in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife after thousands of years of servitude by unionizing all of the magical assistants. Dude rocked. He is tragically lost in the final chapters of the book, and we both kind of had a grown-up cry over it.

              The one open checkout line was 40 miles long (as is tradition), so she ducked into the self-checkout, and I said, “Wew, Wati would hate that we’re doing this.”

              She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day, which was 100% fair.

        •  mlen   ( @mlen@awful.systems ) 
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          68 months ago

          I run into this process every time I visit Poland (mostly because I visit so rarely that I forget) and every time I’m astonished how seriously fucked up it is.

          The most annoying part is having to scan a receipt in order to exit the self checkout area.

          In the stark contrast to the above self checkout process in Switzerland works so smoothly. Mostly because nobody is subjected to the bullshit described above. There’s even an option to grab a scanner, scan everything on the go and just pay at exit.

          • @mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then you’re good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.

            • ‘Steekproef/steekproeven/Steekproefsgewijs’ Here.

              Do note that I have some suspicions that these random checks are not random and are in fact tied to some ML algorithm combined with all the new cameras that are in supermarkets now.

      • ah heh, that would’ve been the other leg of this plan, I imagine

        “sorry about the unfortunate pricing” says the dead-ending support flow, which doesn’t have the ability to contact an actual human anywhere in the tree

  •  froztbyte   ( @froztbyte@awful.systems ) OP
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    8 months ago

    it happened

    I popped out somewhere to have a drink, and got to have someone tell me about their “edutech” startup that “uses AI”

    they very definitely overpromise (not gonna rinse their bullshit), and topped it off with “and then we use a LLM for suggesting improvements”

    (I ejected from the conversation but I can still hear it; it’s progressed to “talking about property” in the terms of mediocre early-20s white kids talking leveraging daddy and uncle’s assets)

  •  blakestacey   ( @blakestacey@awful.systems ) 
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    Oh look, an AI tool to make Wikipedia worse.

    (Apparently, the Wikimedia Foundation couldn’t even be bothered to care about the standards that en.wp contributors deem necessary for sources on medical topics. Because it’s more important to “sustain and grow Wikimedia projects in a changing online knowledge landscape”. Dammit, where’s the button that sends electrical shocks through the Internet to anyone who talks like that?)

  • person who can barely brain themselves finds they have to engage with US postal system, hilarity ensues

    (via friend who often sends me tweet-screenshots (one day I’ll convince 'em to join here))

  •  V0ldek   ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) 
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    118 months ago

    I have seen three separate instances of start-ups with “AI” in their name that proudly display a tagline along the lines of “BUILDING THE NEXT UNICORN” and jesus fuck almighty I swear I will fucking piledrive the next recruiter that tries that on me

    •  jax   ( @jax@awful.systems ) 
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      138 months ago

      dude got fucking ratioed lol

      My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!

      • It is the not totally bad idea that you understand a different perspective if you can reliably write pieces of text in such a way that somebody from that perspective cannot tell you don’t hold that ideological position.

        It fails pretty quickly when tribalism comes into play (aka do it a few times, conclude ‘our side is better at passing this test, so we are better’, ideologies being broad and people not always realizing which ideology they really are in/differences in definitions. And other issues like it is just a bit of intellectual masturbation, depending on finding neutral people of that perspective. ‘you failed the intellectual turing test so we can ignore your criticism of our side’. ‘You would fail an intellectual turing test so we can ignore you’. It being debate bro culture with extra steps. People are not actually interested in the test but use the test as an argument to bash people (you once failed at detecting sarcasm and misattributed a sarcastic joke from a leftwinger to the far right? This shows the entire left fails the intellectual turing test and should not be listened to). etc etc. /rant

        • Somehow that’s even dumber than I thought. Especially given the amount of actual political discourse taking the form of “can you believe the woke left wants to allow doctors to trans your children at the age of 3 months!”

          Could some of these people write a compelling pro-trans argument? Probably, given that their exaggerations are absurd, nonsensical , and/or contradictory on their face and that the pro-trans arguments are generally rooted in basic respect for people’s autonomy over their own bodies. But that doesn’t stop them from lying about what trans people actually want in order to gain political power by stoking the right’s identitarian outrage.

          • Depends on who you mean with ‘those people’ I think the people of themotte woudl have a lot of trouble writing a pro trans argument for example. Esp as the people in there who are leftwingers (or pretend to be) tend to be anti trans, and there is also a big tendency for them to not understand basic leftwing ideas. That one leftwinger (forgot their name for now they had some number in their name) who kept engaging there, got a few complaints they kept reexplaining the same stuff.

            Yeah, if you keep ignoring the explanations and misrepresenting people, they will have to do that. (or quit).

    •  gerikson   ( @gerikson@awful.systems ) 
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      I mean, for the doctor it’s pretty hard to tell a dude who is “GMU econ prof, NYT bestseller, father of 4, author of Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Case Against Education, Open Borders, & BBB” apart from any other entitled white guy whose read too much Facebook.