Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st December 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st December 2024
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 - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)
I listen to a podcast about black/african american conspiracy theories, and I got a podcast ad from Ed Zitron, so there’s that.
Musk also called out the Department of Energy’s chief climate officer in its loan programs office. The office funds fledgling energy technologies in need of early investment and awarded $465 million to Tesla Motors in 2010, helping to position Musk’s electric vehicle company as an EV industry leader.
It seems that Tesla was estimated at 1.35B in 2010.. I don't know how to curse this guy anymore.
A senior adviser to climate at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was also singled out. The original X post said the woman “should not be paid $181,648.00 by the US taxpayer to be the ‘Climate advisor’ at HUD.” Musk reposted with the comment: “But maybe her advice is amazing.” Followed by two laughing emojis.
What a fucking elon musk thing to say. And of course this leads to harassment.
It is depressing to see he will become the first lady soon.
Police are openly admitting to using chatGPT to hallucinate reports. I'm sure they were before, but now they're comfortable enough to admit to it.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this. Nothing at all.
All
Coppers
Are
Bots
oh of course it’s fucking Axon
great news for lawyers hopefully
NASB: Baldur Bjarnason's released a second edition of The Intelligence Illusion
someone pointed out that (paraphrasing) "yeah, you and I are never gonna care for autoplag output but kids are gonna grow up on it and expect it for everything" and that makes me want to do bad things.
pleased to say my kid is as disgusted by this shit as their parents are
ehh i don't know, as a child i'd occasionally get a vhs with weird cheap counterfeit cartoons on it and they just creeped me out. children can actually tell imo.
I can see the challenge in sorting out AI slop from actual art or writing being normalized in the same way that occasionally having to check your spam filter in case an important work email got filed alongside "GrOwYoUrEgGpLaNtEmOjIfOrChEaP", but there's a difference between a world where AI slop exists and AI slop itself actually being worth a damn.
The promptfans testing OpenAI Sora have gotten mad that it's happening to them and (temporarily) leaked access to the API.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/artists-appears-to-have-leaked-access-to-openais-sora/
“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the [Sora early access] program for a $150B valued [sic] company,” the group, which calls itself “Sora PR Puppets,” wrote in a post ...
"Well, they didn't compensate actual artists, but surely they will compensate us."
“This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.”
OK, I could give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they're new to the GenAI space, or general ML Space ... or IT.
But I'm not going to. Of course it's about PR hype.
I'd say lol but I'm like 72% sure this is straight out of the video game industry's playbook and very much intentional to create hype because everyone has forgotten this shit even exists.
Also, I'm still waiting for just one use case for video-generating autoplag that is, even in theory, not either morally reprehensible or outright criminal.
the richest boy in the world sued to stop The Onion from turning infowars into a parody of itself on the grounds that he thinks infowars’ twitter accounts shouldn’t be transferred as part of the bankruptcy even though that’s something that happens constantly and also wouldn’t impact the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings even if it were grounded in anything resembling fact
Musk has also tweeted occasionally that he believes The Onion is not funny.
it’s getting really hard to adequately describe how funny musk isn’t. it’s not just try-hard shit like the weird sink thing, the soul-sucking cameos, or the fact that he’s literally throwing his money into stopping a comedy site from existing — it’s everything taken as a whole. I’d call him anti-comedy, but he’s so much less interesting than that implies
The Onion clowns on Ol' Musky constantly, despite his efforts to shut them down. Around the peak space X buzz, they wrote a headline that was like "Musk invents the first infinitely divorceable wife", which he managed to scrub from the internet (or at least, I can't find it within 5 seconds), but other than that, he can only cope and seethe. He knows the onion is funny and can do nothing to become funny himself.
I would label him as anti-humor or humorless. Dishumorous?
Musk is the most boring and pathetic kind of unfunny where he desperately wants to be in on the joke but is terrified that the joke is on him (because it is). Rather than accept this with any kind of humility he instead cannot accept the L and has basically spent all his vast money and power making that everyone else's problem.
He is the worst mad scientist, ranting about how they called him mad when what we actually said was "lol u mad bro?"
after going closed-source, redis is now doing a matt and trying to use trademark to take control over community-run projects. stay tuned to the end of the linked github thread where somebody spots their endgame
this is becoming a real pattern, and it might deserve a longer analysis in the form of a blog post
I don't think the main concern is with the license. I'm more worried about the lack of an open governance and Redis priorizing their functionality at the expense of others. An example is client side caching in redis-py, https://github.com/redis/redis-py/blob/3d45064bb5d0b60d0d33360edff2697297303130/redis/connection.py#L792. I've tested it and it works just fine on valkey 7.2, but there is a gate that checks if it's not Redis and throws an exception. I think this is the behavior that might spread.
Jesus, that's nasty
it is! and “we have no plans to break compatibility” needs to be called out as bullshit every time it’s brought up, because it is a tactic. in the best case it’s a verbal game — they have no plans to maintain compatibility either, so they can pretend these unnecessary breakages are accidental.
I can’t say I see the outcome in the GitHub issue as a positive thing. both redis and the project maintainers have done a sudden 180 in terms of their attitude, and the original proposal is now being denied as a misunderstanding (which it absolutely wasn’t) now that it proved to be unpopular. my guess (from previous experience and the dire warnings in that issue) is that redis is going to attempt the following:
- take over the project’s governance quietly via proxies
- once that’s done, engage in a policy where changes that break compatibility with valkey and other redis-likes are approved and PRs to fix compatibility are de-prioritized or rejected outright
if this is the case, it’s a much worse situation than them forking the project — this gets them the outcome they wanted, but curtails the community’s ability to respond to what will happen until it’s far too late.
John "Animats" Nagle choosing the most racist angle possible to respond to problems in education. The topic is giftedness and yet Nagle needs to start with "Ashkenazi Jews".
Wow, that starts bad and gets worse.
It starts with this quote, which is absolutely fine:
But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program.
Now for the expert analysis:
Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory.
Yes! This is true, following from the quote, as long as the thing that is "inherently" discriminated for is socioeconomic background. Of course, Animats immediately makes it about race.
[insert common race science stats here] There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.
AKA I disagree with the analysis and consensus that all this IQ stuff is socioeconomic rather than genetic.
(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)
Jesus fucking christ.
Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]
Nobody tell this guy that Gladwell is black.
Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.
I guarantee that in the not happening future where AI is smarter than humans, chuds like this guy will still be racist.
We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.
🙄🙄🙄
So there's apparently a memecoin site with the not-at-all suspicious name pump.fun and Coffeezilla made a video about it on his second channel.
Also: Epilepsy warning for that site. It's full of flashing colors and moving elements like late 90s Geocities.
I have no idea what the fuck is even going on there, but apparently people threaten to kill themselves or their animals if you don't invest in their shitcoin there, or run actual cockfights where they murder the chickens live on stream if the line doesn't go up.
I click the link and the first thing I see is an Andrew Tate NFT. "Yikes" doesn't cover it
This is completely off topic I think but I need you all to see this, it's important on a spiritual level
This map is infinitely sneerable, every region you look at is somehow worse than the previous one, regardless of the order in which you do that.
Tag yourself, I'm Cracked Coast, population 17.
I'm scared of Big Ulster
Ah yes Africa, the small country on the northern coast of Africa.
Kind of interested in the precise type of brainworms that result in Greece annexing Northern Epirus from Albania but think Thrace should be its own thing.
Unifying belgium and the Netherlands makes me think really bad things about the map designers. People who want that are either fools who dont know much about the region or white nationalist fascists. (They often also want SA included)
someone needs to stop paradox gamers from interfacing with the real world
Yeah people who make maps like this seem to miss the whole point, borders are rigid, populations are fluid. And even paradox games seem to understand this with various mechanics. (which then tend to take a bit of a genocidal undertone (see the 1 culture speedruns)). E: anyway, due to the massive population in the benelux (30m) and the relative small weak neighbors, this is the best start on this map).
There is no Poland, which unfortunately tracks, historically.
I can see Denmark having Scania now, which is what a lot of the more racist Scanians have wanted since forever. But you can't just split Sweden (Sverige, Svea Rike) into Sweden and Svealand, which isn't even historically correct (it's way too big).
Also Ulster being 50% of the island of Eire is gonna work out great.
Sweden/Svealand is one of many examples here of "where do you think the name came from?" for neighboring regions. My favorite example of this pattern is probably Finland, though. Helsinki is it's own thing, and we get both Finland and Finnmark. Truly outstanding.
I like how the Spanish coast is in Africa. Also, Kyiv and Helsinki are their own city-states (or autonomous post-state administrative zones or whatever) but Rome, London, Munich, etc. aren't.
You missed the most beautiful city-state of OSTBREST
Why does the region around Armenia look so unchanged? Why is Transylvania in Ukraine? Italy becomes Romania, ok I've had enough
currently in vc delusion, the public just doesn’t understand how to move about efficiently
the levels of not-even-wrong from these dipshits continue to be astounding
Also, this plan has a very much a fuck disabled people and old people factor. And what a lonely world they live in.
If I mathed right that'd be one waymo every 350 feet of road on average. Is that a lot? It sounds like it might be a lot. Especially since self-driving cars greatest weakness appears to be driving in the vicinity of other self-driving cars.
Well, if my math is right, on a 50km/hr road you'd see one about every 8 seconds.
If you asked people what they wanted, they would say a car that drives itself
Is that a Henry Ford reference? Very clever lol
Eugenics in action:
Danish parenting tests under fire after baby removed from Greenlandic mother
Psychometric tests are widely used in Denmark as part of child protection investigations into new parents, and have long been criticised by human rights bodies as culturally unsuitable for Greenlandic people and other minorities.
In a 2022 report, the institute said that because the tests were not adapted to take cultural differences into account, Greenlandic parents ran “the risk of obtaining low test scores, so that it is concluded, for example, that they have reduced cognitive abilities, without there being actual evidence for this."
Psychological assessments of her were made by a Danish-speaking psychologist. Kronvold, whose first language is Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), is not fluent in Danish.
Oh man that is so grim
Kronvold, 38, was given an FKU test in 2014 before the birth of her second child, a boy, and again recently while pregnant with her third child. Speaking through an intermediary, she told the Guardian that on this last occasion she was told it was to see if she was “civilised enough”.
Rationalists like to keep all their eugenics talk hypothetical or speculative, because if you ever hear or read about actual neo-eugenics it become clear how outrageous it is
billy spears got it right. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
is biometric "gait analysis" total bullshit? it feels like total bullshit, but I only DuckDuckWent for 20 seconds or so, idk
Before looking this up, I imagined that "gait analysis" was some kind of crackpot manosphere thing like analysing the angles that people lean to in photographs.
It probably is total bullshit
I don't know. Some walks are very distinctive.
I woke up and immediately read about something called "Defense Llama". The horrors are never ceasing: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/24/defense-llama-meta-military/
Scale AI advertised their chatbot as being able to:
apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities
However their marketing material, as is tradition, include an example of terrible advice. Which is not great given it's about blowing up a building "while minimizing collateral damage".
Scale AI's response to the news pointing this out -- complaining that everyone took their murderbot marketing material seriously:
The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.
On the one hand, that spectacular failure could potentially dissuade the military from buying in and prolonging this bubble. On the other hand, having an accountability sink for war crimes would be a tempting offer to your average army.
The eventual war crimes trials will very likely reveal that "AI targeting" has already been used as an accountability sink for a premeditated ethnic cleansing policy in Gaza.
I’ve been wondering about this
One the one hand, military procurement (at least afaik) tends toward complete functional product
On the other hand, military R&D programs have been among the most spectacularly profligate financial black holes in recent decades
None of the options involved feel great, even if “it gets shunted from mil procurement and all industry claims get publicly brandished as the bullshit it is” comes to pass (which tbh still feels like an optimistic outcome, with unclear time horizons)
My organic chemistry professor used ChatGPT to write a lab procedure. My other chemistry professor's daughter is VP of AI at Microsoft. AAAAA
do you have it? i'm in this field and i wonder how badly it fucked up
Software licensing is notoriously labyrinthine, so resources like the site Microsoft will close – Get Licensing Ready – can be very handy. Today, the site offers over 50 training modules plus documentation.
I'm sorry, mister MSFT, why did you cause there to be more educational content about your stupid licenses than there is for theoretical physics in an undergrad programme, have you ever considered that it's time to stop? Get some help?
Oh boy, if licensing education is too expensive to run, do I know a bad purchase for Microsoft to have made
To be fair “training modules" can be quite brief. 50 online training modules is probably less work than one semester of Physics I.
Starting things off with a fresh post from Brian Merchant: Tech under Trump, part 1
Sidenote: Love how the tech VCs all grew up in the media landscape of tech workers going 'the management of this company is a group of idiots' an then didn't think that would apply to themselves.
The classic Scott Adams manœuvre.
OT: is Tallinn nice?
i've been there for few days for conference once and it does look at least like a nice place to visit with no obvious glaring problems to be seen. walkable, organized, you can get around without a car np, doesn't seem to be extremely expensive but again, i haven't been there for a long time. it's like you took nicer parts of Warsaw, slapped a port next to it and cooled down a few degrees
unless you're talking about that EA techbro billionaire, then i've got no idea
looking to move?