Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
What in the sweet fuck happened here, does this count as vandalism?
Fix0red
None of those are well defined “problems”. An entire applied research field is not a “problem” akin to other items on this list lik P vs NP.
Thank you for your service o7
To be clear, I can’t edit Wikipedia to save my life. Editor in this case was Elestrophe.
On this topic I’ve been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?
nope, you’ve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense they’ve been crashing the instance repeatedly.
when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki
i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine
I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but it’s also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasn’t even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.
Just a heads-up, I tried reading up on Iocaine and the project website is giving me the madlibs nonsense version on my phone’s browser, so I hope the version you’re planning to enable here isn’t quite as aggressive (the making.awful link is currently working for me).
Between this and Cloudflare’s geolocation provider no longer saying my IPv6 address block is in Russia, I’m hopeful that my browsing experience might ever so slightly improve for a bit.
making is running the version of the configuration I intend to deploy, so if it works for you there it should (hopefully) work in prod too
is one of the source texts for the markov chain text generator our old favorite Harry Potter fan-fic?
oh you fucking know it
also all 3 parts of Das Kapital and the full text of My Immortal
Markov chains to bind the basilisk
lemmy.ml by way of hexbear’s technology comm: The Economist is pushing phrenology. Everything old is new again!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38830374
[…]
EDIT: Apparently based off something published by fucking Yale:
Reminds me of the “tech-bro invents revolutionary new personal transport solution: a train!” meme, but with racism. I’ll be over in the angry dome.
What does it tell about a scientist that they see a wide world of mysteries to dive into and the research topic they pick is “are we maybe missing out on a way we could justify discriminating against people for their innate characteristics?”
“For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing” fuck off no one is this naive.
I remember back before I realized just how full of shit Siskind was I used to buy into some of the narrative re: “credentialism” so I understand the way they’re trying to sell it here. But even extending far more benefit than mere doubt can justify we’re still looking at yet another case of trying to create a (pseudo)scientific solution to a socially constructed problem. Like, if the problem is that bosses and owners are trying to find the best candidate we don’t need new and exciting ways to discriminate; they could just actually invest in a process for doing that, but trying to actually solve that problem would inconvenience the owning/managing classes and doesn’t create opportunities to further entrench racial biases in the system. Clearly using an AI-powered version of the punchline for “how racist were the old times” commentary is better.
That fucker’s going on the bitin’ list.
Not a scream just a nice thing people might enjoy. Somebody made a funny comic about what we all are thinking about
Random screenshot which I found particularly funny (Zijn rant klopt):
Image description
Two people talking to each other, one a bald heavily bespectacled man in the distance, and the other a well dressed skullfaced man with a big mustache. Conversation goes as follows:
“It could be the work of the French!”
“Or the Dutch”
“Could even be the British!”
“Filthy pseudo German apes, The Dutch!”
“The Russ…”
“Scum of the earth marsh dwelling Dutch”
You flatter me, I haven’t thought about any shit as cool as this in a while.
Geweldig!
I was told repeatedly growing up that they like Canadians over there because of the whole liberation thing. Is this true?
Yes we do. Lot of Canadians gave their lives for our liberation. (not just Canadians, which is why the Trump admin removing the sign about the Black Americans at the American WW2 burial ground here has not gone over well, but also the French gave a heroic defense of Zeeland at the start of the war, and the Brits, and the Polish (they got the blame for the failure of market garden for some stupid reasons, but they jumped late even when the operation wasn’t going well, after being stalled due to the weather)).
you know, if those ASML folks in dutchland weren’t quite so busy what with their EUV lasers and all that, we might not be in quite this same pickle right now,
Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.
Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders’ themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!
Just saw this post on DHH, it’s really good: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
If you’re not careful, one day you will wake up and find that you’ve pushed away every person who ever disagreed with you.
David Hamburger-Helper
Fresh from the presses: OpenAI loses song lyrics copyright case in German court
GEMA (weird german authors’ rights management organisation) is suing OpenAI over replication of song lyrics among other stuff, seeking a license deal. Judge rules that whatever the fuck OpenAI does behind the scenes is irrelevant, if it can replicate lyrics exactly that’s unlawful replication.
One of GEMA’s lawyers expects the case to be groundbreaking in europe, since the applicable rules are harmonized.
I cannot believe I am rooting for GEMA. What a weird world this has become.
A fact-generative AI, you say? https://aphyr.com/posts/398-the-future-of-fact-checking-is-lies-i-guess
TIHI
I reiterate the hope that AI slop, will eventually push us towards better sourcing of resources/articles as a society going forwards, but yikes in the meantime.
Rolling Stone on the emergence of the ai chatbot psychosis religion
What if we turned a markov chain containing two decades of internet fan fiction into an oracle. Just spitballing here…
I doubt I’m the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI “pop” music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or don’t, I ain’t your dad).
tangent: I’ve seen people using this Bubblegum Slop (BS for short) in their social media stories. My guess is that fb/insta has started suggesting you use their slop instead of using music licensed from spotify, or something.
Just so we all know, not liking AI slop code is xenophobic.
Definitely been seeing the pattern of: “if you don’t like AI, you are being x-phobic” where “x” is a marginalised group that the person is using the name of as a cudgel. They probably never cared about this group before, but what’s important to this person is that they glaze AI over any sort of principle or ethics. Usually it’s ableist, as is basically any form of marginalisation/discrimination.
E: read the link. Lmao that’s… not xenophobia. What a piece of shit
Gerard and Torres get namedropped in the same breath as Ziz as people who have done damage to the rationalist movement from within
LMAOU congrats David.
what’s the
u?French, perhaps.
🇫🇷 En passant 🥖
A lesswronger wrote an blog post about avoiding being overly deferential, using Eliezer as an example of someone that gets overly deferred to. Of course, they can’t resist glazing him, even in the context of an blog post on not being too deferential:
Yudkowsky, being the best strategic thinker on the topic of existential risk from AGI
Another lesswronger pushes back on that and is highly upvoted (even among the doomers that think Eliezer is a genius, most of them still think he screwed up in inadvertently helping LLM companies get to where they are): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jzy5qqRuqA9iY7Jxu/the-problem-of-graceful-deference-1?commentId=MSAkbpgWLsXAiRN6w
The OP gets mad because this is off topic from what they wanted to talk about (they still don’t acknowledge the irony).
A few days later they write an entire post, ostensibly about communication norms, but actually aimed at slamming the person that went off topic: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJ89ffXrKfDyuHBzg/the-charge-of-the-hobby-horse
And of course the person they are slamming comes back in for another round of drama: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJ89ffXrKfDyuHBzg/the-charge-of-the-hobby-horse?commentId=s4GPm9tNmG6AvAAjo
No big point to this, just a microcosm of lesswrongers being blind to irony, sucking up to Eliezer, and using long winded posts about meta-norms and communication as a means of fighting out their petty forum drama. (At least us sneerclubers are direct and come out and say what we mean on the rare occasions we have beef among ourselves.)
Via Reddit!SneerClub: “Investors’ ‘dumb transhumanist ideas’ setting back neurotech progress, say experts”
Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology at McGill, said: “Rich people who are fascinated with these dumb transhumanist ideas” are muddying public understanding of the potential of neurotechnology. “Neuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.”
Fun article.
Altman, though quieter on the subject, has blogged about the impending “merge” between humans and machines – which he suggested would either through genetic engineering or plugging “an electrode into the brain”.
Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something that’s even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.
Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something that’s even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.
I think he exists in the tension between rationalism/transhumanism and what he can get away with selling to the public, and that necessarily means his schtick appears dumber and more incoherent. He’s essentially got two major groups he’s trying to manipulate simultaneously; true believers and those who have yet to be persuaded. As he runs out of hype on the public-facing side, it’s suddenly a desperate scramble to keep the true believers that make up the bulk of his workforce on board. Hence his pivot to marketing his latest and by far most important product: publicly traded shares in OpenAI.
Apropos of nothing, L. Ron Hubbard died in a dingy trailer in Creston. Ever been to Creston? It’s a long ways from Hollywood.
Pretty sure this brand of cyborg fantasizing is quite popular in mainstream rationalism, unless you’re reading something more creative in this than superbabies, brain uploading and HDMI to visual nerve for undetectable on-demand pornography.
‘Genetic engineering to merge with machines’ is both a stream of words with negative meaning and something I don’t think he could come up with on his own, like the solar system sized dyson sphere or the lab leak stuff. He just strikes me as too incurious to have come across the concepts he mashes together on his own.
Simplest explanation I guess is he’s just deliberately joeroganing the CEO thing and that’s about as deep as it goes.
‘Genetic engineering to merge with machines’ is both a stream of words with negative meaning
Iron-compatible osteoblasts that build bio-steel! Synapses with silicon, no, make that graphene neurotransmitter filters in the gap! C’mon, Sam, hire me and we can technobabble so much harder than this!
I must insist on cash payment, though. No stock options. And I prefer to be paid weekly.
“What if we figure out DNA well enough that we could edit a babby to grow NAND gate cells and put a calculator inside their body so they can do instant arithmetic like a computer?”
I assume he’s talking about that kind of stuff, but being vague so you can’t call him out if he gets details wrong.
Brb gonna go collect a trillion dollars for my startup idea that makes babies grow a malignant style parasitic twin that is actually a compute farm
These people aren’t looking for scientists, they’re looking for alchemists
Third episode of Odium Symposium is out (that’s the podcast I cohost). We talk about Cato the Elder and his struggle against militant feminist action in the roman republic. You can listen to the episode at https://www.patreon.com/posts/crack-sucking-143019155 or through any of the sources on our website, www.odiumsymposium.com
further things: one, that’s the first website I’ve made where I wasn’t just plugging into a template, and I’m a little proud of it even though it’s almost nothing. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions
two, a future episode idea I have is to examine what I’m thinking of as “the trustless society.” it’s about the replacing of social relations with legal or financial intermediaries. Those of you who are long time buttcoiners will be familiar with this process. if any of you have specific readings to recommend I would love to hear it. I’ll probably mostly focus on balaji but anyone or anything will help
New site looks good! I think Let’sEncrypt is still the easiest and cheapest way to set up a decent cert but I’ve been away from IT for over a year now and someone else here can probably help point you in the right direction. At least for now the site probably doesn’t actually have security concerns it would address, but it pops up a browser alert on first hit so it’s probably a good idea?
Also I just started listening to the latest episode while writing this up and had forgotten how great that opening medley is.
+1 to letsencrypt for https. certbot can even auto-configure your webserver for you, taking it from http base to https-with-redirect, no terrible advice from shitty exist-for-volume blogs required
superquick tldr:
- install
certbotand the applicable plugin package for your webserver; if you don’t know the name use p.d.o (or your distro’s own) to find the package name - run
certbot; there’s extra flags you can pass if you want to automate, but ootb it’ll ask you questions and start the process for cert + config (iirc - I mostly run it automated and non-interactive)
it’s probably better for my development as a human being to learn this properly, but it turns out github pages hosting does the letsencrypt process if you check a box in the page settings
The eternal debate over whether the veggies you had to eat contained moral fiber.
- install
