Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025

I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people.

Zoom and enhance!

alignment-pill

The inability to hear what their own words sound like is terminal. At this stage, we can only provide palliative care, i.e., shoving into lockers.

people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.

i.e. working for Putin, running from Putin, or dying for Putin

big sending bibles to north korea energy

Lmaou. "We need to alignment pill the Russian youth." Fast forward to the year 20XX and the haunted alignment pilled adults are now 'aligning' their bots to the world's top nuclear armed despot.

tony_soprano_how_could_this_happen.jpg (for some reason awful systems won't let me upload pictures anymore (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ)

Holy Moses in heaven, iirc both Sam and Dario have said that their urge to build the torment nexus came from being inspired by online RAT forums. Maybe alignment 'pilling' youths is counterproductive to human flourishing? As the misspent youths say, "update your priors fuckheads"

Bryan Lunduke

Holy shit, the Linux Action Show guy? I remember listening to that podcast fifteen years ago and found it quite entertaining.

I had no idea he was even still around, let alone going techfash.

Thanks for the heads-up. I couldn't finish reading through all postings in that forum thread, it's all just making me so tired... always the same shit.

It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title "Large Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!"

Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol

i know it's not a competition, but consider https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/generative-ai-virtual-cell/681246/

To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.

The passive-aggressive language and the pettyness is such a combination.

[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

end_me_now.jpg

Eurgh. I'm now feeling angry at the thought of someone who is doing a degree in global health but gets persuaded that AI safety is more important.

The FDA thing gave me whiplash what the fuck, what did I miss

wow i hate this so much

it's neat how the cartooning gets lazier and lazier as it goes though

i don't know how much experience thiel has in actual politics, but chances are that he'll be given dead in the water projects that will just keep him busy and distracted enough to not do anything, should trump admin choose so, like this https://youtu.be/xxVsS9ZNUOU?t=193 (start from beginning for nuclear grade sneer on musk)

Sir, this is a Wendy's, also

There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot who's on the reactionary side?

i hope thiel keeps writing these, because every minute he does he doesn't spend on horrible shit like implementing them

for someone that runs a surveillance company he sure as fuck can't help yapping about his plans

jesus christ

the amount of doublethink and newspeak this is attempting to push is remarkable

also afaik thiel isn't one to regularly demean himself to writing tidbits such as this, is he? I don't recall seeing nearly as many words from mr likes-it-private as I have from andreesen et al

That reads like some bullshit you'd find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.

Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.

ah yeah exactly what i needed: a button that burns a square km of rainforest with every press, that might generate an abstract (that i've already wrote) but wrong, or fake press release that goes nowhere and also is wrong, while at the same time sending what might be restricted data fuck knows where with pinky promise that they won't blend it and force feed their imagined machine god

Earlier this week, for instance, the massive publishing body announced in a press release that it would be deploying a "new AI-driven tool" crafted to automate "editorial quality checks" and notify editors to "potentially unsuitable manuscripts". The announcement adds that manuscripts may be held back from peer review if the AI tool deems them editorially unfit.

watch this to be used as a bludgeon against ESL authors. oh noes poor country people, go somewhere else because Computer Says No. then they decrease acceptance rate on their website

A Guy in India (specialist) approach to detection of slop will still work, but it's not resistant to office politics of complaining that it's not web scale and such. i can't wait for collapse of this bubble

At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.

I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.

With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?

<insert rant about lizardman constant here again>, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!

E: ow god the first comments are 'actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ'

E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.

I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?

I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.

It is very disturbing and scary.

They're explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.

I've been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and "making fun" of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don't remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.

It was always "we don't censor speech but don't be an asshole" with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don't think I've ever seen even the worst places say, "we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead".

Holy fucking shitballs.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.

same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.

See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day it's gonna be like 5 hours tops.

After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good ol' Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of

1. this tool^[1] is just a proof of concept/prototype
2. it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
3. our infrastructure is now the tool

had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application^[2]. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.

I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3

1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.

2: Noting that, while "it's not the tool, it's the application" is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between "this is the wrong tool for the job" and "this tool will hurt people".

ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.

Examples off the top of my head:

• Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
• NETCONF
• YAML
• Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
• Alcohol
• Chiclet keyboards
• Unicode Han unification
• Layer 2 SDN
• Kubernetes
• JavaScript
• Disk partitioning
• UEFI
• Public transit fares

Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn't have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).

Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it's an accepted standard. The web couldn't function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.

The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn't a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.

I'm surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing

this rules <3

oh that's pretty great

yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.

Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.

Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire... the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?

As for losing configs, I've started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.

Surely it's better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren't present. Having worked in support I can vouch for the amount of suffering that could be avoided if more systems actually failed if some important configuration isn't in place.

Personally I think it's fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like /etc/someapp.conf with all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in ~/.config/someapp/someapp.conf where you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.

Isn't this just an economic move dressed up as an ideological one?

If only all those sneaker companies had thought to say they had to move their factories from America to Chinese sweatshops because American workers were too woke.

Ah i recall somebody got mad when I mentioned traditionally capitalists will team up with fascists.

Is that a comedy account? The announcement surely reads as if it was…

To add an insult to the injury meta renames pride themed skins in chat https://labyrinth.zone/objects/e129982d-997e-489b-985a-3ef547b66bf3

put an article in mdpi and you'll get 70 of these per month

i forced chatgpt to say that my idea will make you a billion dollars but i think it can go higher

after some reinforced asking

Shit chatgpt is self aware, it did the 'if I agree with you will you shut the fuck up' thing.

E: while I shouldn't speak on that subject, weird typos.

Must be rich indeed, the disclaimer is pure gold.

su;dr

(saw URL; didn't read)

I just want to harp on this one:

“Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”

Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? "Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users". "Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients". "Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users".

The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it's TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, "ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don't is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do".

It's YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. "Oh but it's very technical" YOU'RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR????

Thanks, that was infuriating to read.

Whenever techbros use the word "storytelling", some disaster follows...