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.
(happened to notice this while digging into something else)
upwork’s landing page has a whole big AI anchorblob. clicking from frontpage takes you to
/nx/signup(and I’m not going to bother), but digging around a bit elsewhere finds “The Future Of Work With AI”so we’re now at the stage where upwork reckons it’s a good bet to specifically hype AI delivery from their myriad exploitatively arbitraged service providers
(they’re probably not wrong, I can see a significant chunk of companies falling over each other to “get into AI” at pay-a-remote-coder-peanut-shells prices)
This part of Ed Zitron’s latest post jumped out at me:
While Acemoglu has some positive things to say — for example, that AI models could be trained to help scientists conceive of and test new materials (which happened last year) — his general verdict is quite harsh: that using generative AI and “too much automation too soon could create bottlenecks and other problems for firms that no longer have the flexibility and trouble-shooting capabilities that human capital provides.”
Click, click, search… Oh:
The recent report from a group of scientists at Google who employ a combination of existing data sets, high-throughput density functional theory calculations of structural stability, and the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to propose new compounds is an exciting advance. We examine the claims of this work here, unfortunately finding scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility, and utility.
The materials (and some subtle walkbacks on PR) shit has featured here before too iirc
Contained such wonders as : H2O12
that sounds like a super pleasant and stable molecule
I think the only one discussed in depth was a different paper (here), but all these things blur together.
ah, my mistake. I guess it was another total bullshit google materials project. easy to confuse those, just like their 734 chat services
different paper, same line of work. rebuttals come from different authors tho, and happen at different stages (but point at exactly the same errors - excessively low symmetry/unlikely ordering of similar ions/metals and not looking for disordered structures)
so in retrospect it’s even dumber, because they were publicly exonerated at least twice within three months, but it seems not publicly enough
“Exonerated”?
sorry, had a brain fart, edited now
note to self: don’t post after midnight
No worries. I figured it was a typo for “excoriated” or something like that.
Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - they’ve switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.
Sounds like a good idea to piss off your primary user base, because at this stage I feel the only people singing Firefox’s praise are privacy advocates who won’t touch Chrome & friends with a ten-foot pole.
(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)
It’s also enabled in the dev builds, by the way. I just checked.
(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)
it definitely reads like the same shithead, but I’ve had them blocked on mastodon for some time so I can’t say for sure if it was for rampant LLMery or for doing the “without advertising the modern web would die and you don’t want that do you” thing advertisers do constantly
Lol what an absolute tool. That’s the same shit the marketing bozos at my job say when I inform them that, no, I can’t auto opt-in our customers into whatever stupid Facebook ad campaign they’re pushing this week because it’s literally against the GDPR and our privacy laws.
But I guess that’s the logical next step if your whole business model depends on lazy people clicking the button with the flashiest color in the cookie popup without reading the label.
P.S. the modern web can die in a fucking fire.
this is not people’s laziness; it’s that the practice is deceptive. don’t reinforce the business narrative.
Fair point, you’re right.
and because it feels like it’s worth screaming this into the void in case there’s any marketing assholes reading: fuck yes I’m here to kill the modern web
this is quite infuriating, i had a number of mozilla/firefox people telling me that this feature wouldn’t want with opt-in (it’s bullshit though) because too many users would enable it, and neither fucker asked himself : “wait, if we’re afraid we can’t convince our user base to buy-in, perhaps we shouldn’t develop the feature?”
The Firefox CTO put out a message about this on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/
Well, I needed an excuse to use Supermium - no better excuse than this.
I don’t really know if any chromium-based options are a real solution - there’s so much code in there that a lot of times won’t get caught (cf. brave etc for this very thing), and goog is actively working to push their own agenda and they have a lot more dev-hours than anyone else to churn shit out
ladybird and servo seem like the most promising alternative paths right now, and ladybird less so because chuds -_-
Ladybird isn’t going anywhere. The web standards move too fast and they’re not going to be able to catch up. I wish it was another way, but there’s no way a couple of million $ is going to move the needle here when (probably) tens of billions have been poured into chromium/FF.
also it looks likely to have other possible problems
oof. Something tells me he’s a good guy and just knee-jerked that response without thinking about it. But then I realize it doesn’t matter because the kind of community you create doesn’t depend on who you are deep down but what you say publicly.
Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didn’t like the feel of Chromium.
I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went “fuck it, I’m sticking with Libre”.
dril goes to the oracle for advice.
Answer: The Philippines.
The “Thank you Grock” at the bottom made my day
Dril needs no orcale tbh
truly a man who rocks out with his grock out
That feels like a too perfect tweet, which I also couldn’t find a direct link to. So I’m going to assume it was faked. Did find these prophetic words however, Xcancel
friend mentioned that dril has posted that it’s a fake (but don’t have link handy)
Your friend was also spreading fake news. Dril said it was real, xcancel. But yes your friend was correct.
haha, I’ll send word along
So remember when Google Domains got sold off to Squarespace because it wasn’t profitable enough and Google has the attention span of a squirrel?
Well that meant bye bye MFA for anyone who didn’t check their email diligently enough, allegedly leading to a number of cryptocurrency domains getting hacked.
The cryptocurrency aspect is mostly just funny, but Google and Squarespace should know better than to effectively disable MFA out from under people. Tech companies put profit over people all the time. And then everyone blames the people for not being hyper-vigilant about computer security.
Edit: The tweet linked in that bleepingcomputer article is funny if this was indeed the issue: https://twitter.com/pendle_fi/status/1811683909509558562
Some “defi” company realized this could be a problem 22 hours before they were hacked. Even had time to write a tool to mitigate the impact of getting hacked. Got hacked anyway. Did they uhh… IDK change their password? Make sure MFA was set up? They don’t say.
code is lol
all these libertarian pyramid schemes sit at convenient crosssection of high reward and low probability of being caught, which makes me believe that no good people were harmed in this incident
“Any messages beyond this tweet from anyone claiming to be from Pendle is a scam”
33 replies from scammers. Holy shit.
I know cryptocurrency people have a weirdly high tolerance for getting scammed and blaming the victim, but the twitter spam is constant now. You’d think they’d get tired of it at some point and switch to a platform that lets them moderate better.
presumes that people know there’s better possible
soapbox.gif: you see a dynamic of this sort with a lot of people who have largely only ever interacted with “the internet” through vendor-mediated apps and shit. you can often pick up on it by people that speak in frames of “this app” - the app is their gateway to that engagement, and they have never known substantially otherwise. and it’s a day-vs-night type difference in experiences in so many cases! there are some sites that I outright refuse to even open on mobile simply because the anti-nagblocker/etc capabilities that I have on RealComputer with RealOS (i.e.: not some artificially hobbled shit run by a monopolist fuckwad company) just completely block the annoying shit, whereas it is almost impossible to have that experience on mobile
and for so many people, the latter type (of experience/internet) is all they ever know
hey if the cost of operations is a tweet (or an openai chatgpt api call) and the possible reward is a couple dozen suckers at $200-equiv, Von Neumann ends up with a hangover
Can’t wait to find out that the Perseid meteor shower, which has inspired humanity for centuries, is actually just Von Neumann probes from a long-dead civilization that spam their equivalent of tea.xyz pull requests on any planet that has advanced to hosting source forges.
More details: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/researchers-weak-security-defaults-enabled-squarespace-domains-hijacks/
It sounds like Squarespace just let people take over domains without actually logging in wtf?
What’s more, Monahan said, Squarespace did not require email verification for new accounts created with a password.
“The domains being migrated from Google to Squarespace are known,” Monahan said. “It’s either public or easily discernible info which email addresses have admin of a domain. And if that email never sets up their account on Squarespace — say because the billing admin left the company five years ago or folks just ignored the email — anyone who enters that email@domain in the squarespace form now has full access to control to the domain.”
“toughened up our defenses” like adding DNS monitoring. so they just … didn’t have that before? for a user-facing public web service? cool.
(and yeah lol at how little detail the rest of this covers)
(I’ll try put a decent summary of links on this later)
there’s a UK party that (aiui) committed electoral crimes by submitting non-existing genML-created people as candidates, a whole new usecase!
gonna be real fun to see that catching sunlight, if TNI manages to do due process right
what a coincidence, “aiui” is the sound I make when I get caught doing electoral crimes.
If you want more crazy, that political party is actually a limited company in which the leader is also the majority shareholder and the bylaws permit him to fire and appoint a majority of directors at will. I’m not sold on whether all those candidates were actually fake, but journalists from more credible outlets than Byline Times are no doubt working on physically tracking down every one off these candidates as we speak to verify their existence or otherwise.
max headroom for prez
one guy whose pic looks like a fucking Auton actually got in touch with the Grauniad and showed them the original of his ridiculously yassified campaign photo
it continues to do my head in that I vacillate on whether there’s more insane politics shit for y’all in TNI, or in what we have here in ZA
There was a new government elected last week on a platform which can be broadly summarised as “no more insane politics shit”. So far they’re showing dangerous signs of competence and rational thought. What a load of weirdos.
Am I crazy to think that guy has musk’s face?
Over at “work on climate” there’s been an influx of companies that will greenwash using ChatGPT. One company I interviewed for (in my estimation it) boiled down to using ChatGPT to make generic greening recommendations for a business and attach hallucinated numbers that the client can then pass off for themselves.
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs/ google giving preferential treatment to itself by putting a piece of spyware in chromium that will work only if google domain asks about it
Pedro Domingos tries tilting at the doomers
The doom prediction in question? Dec 31st 2024. It’s been an honour serving with you lads. 🫡
tesla: special treatment for those that might cause embarrassing press
gives all the “it works for me” type comments a whole new colour
Funniest fuckin’ sentence I have read today:
First off, if you’ve read The Singularity Is Near, which was published 19 years ago in 2005, you should be aware that the sequel book is a lot less technical.
tl;dr is upset that Kurzweil is not as much of a doomer as they are
Wait, this guy published “is Near” twenty years ago and then UNIRONICALLY published “is Nearer”?
Come the fuck on, this has to be satire?
The sequel to “Apocalypse Now”, “Apocalypse Even More Presently”
Asymptotically approaching the Singularity.
Gooning for rats
Buy my new book “You’re older than you’ve ever been”.
Twenty years pass
Buy my new book “And now you’re even older”
iirc he predicted the singularity somewhere in 2040 so it does make sense, even if it looks weird.
Oh gosh, hopefully I live to see “Singularity Is Still Near, Just Not as Near as I Thought: Trust Me Bros” released in 2041
‘Sorry no singularity, climate change is an existential threat after all’.
(I’m bitterly reminded of the SSC post where he starts with ‘why don’t we hear about the ozone layer anymore, well the scientists fixed it!’ where he goes after the environmentalist movement. There is only one problem with the ‘we fixed the ozone layer’ thing. Butt wait, there is more!)
This happened a while ago and I still have mixed feelings about it: a band I like started a music label and named it p(doom): https://pdoomrecords.com/
oh no
Muse is a new creative platform that can create your own AI-generated series so you can dive into a new world of storytelling without the need for personal content creation.
Who the fuck are these people and why do I not have a button that spreads Lego bricks across their floor?
Yeah, I always hated the part of art and storytelling where there was always a tiny and sometimes misshapen window into the human soul there. Better to do away with that and replace it with an endless parade of #sponsoredcontent. That way there’s no risk of suddenly developing empathy or accidentally connecting with the people I’m exploiting as a billionaire VC.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @blakestacey Their end game is to have content, not art, as you said, because, well, art makes us empathize when we just wanna see another… well, I don’t even know how to describe **content** I was gonna joke about action movies but some of them are fantastic metaphores. For example, the Matrix movies being a whole empathy session for Trans struggles.
found this linked in ed zitron comment section for some reason: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/phil-vs-llms/
With a moment’s contemplation after reading it, I just realized how spectacularly bad this could go if, for example, you went to do a search for an chemical’s Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and a Large Language Model (LLM) gave you back some bullshit advice to take in the event of hazmat exposure or fire.
joke’s on you, MSDSs are already dogshit. these things only exist to cover ass of manufacturers and are filled with generic, useless advice https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-msds https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/un-safety-data-sheets there is MSDS for sand, MSDS for tear gas and ethanol lists the same dangers, toxicity is overemphasized (because it’s common) and some other dangers like explosiveness are underappreciated (because it’s not), we don’t even need LLMs for this, humans (lawyers mostly i guess) did the same on accident
also bonus points for first-principling what could have been instead of asking somebody that actually knows, like any proper rationalist would do. also, vinyl chloride is not reactive with water and spraying pressurized containers with water can be a sensible thing to do, because this cools them down, so it decreases pressure meaning it decreases risk of rupture, which would be a bad thing, if manageable for firefighters to do it safely. see: some fires involving propane tanks
An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;
Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (“appropriate respirator”), it’s your job to figure out what it is
An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (“appropriate respirator”), it’s your job to figure out what it is
Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh, still better than an LLM directly endangering you with bad advice
as if we needed LLMs for that. at least two of my profs have abstract tattoos left from experimenting with homemade explosives when they were in high school
as reminders? or are they just that metal?
(e: mostly unsure whether you mean ink or scartissue with “abstract tattoos”)
sorry if that was unclear, metal acetylides that they played with when ignited give off a cloud of fine metal particles and soot, they had hands close enough that these particles got embedded in their skin, permanently. so basically tattoo ink but explosively deposited
ah, gotcha. so, metal, but not quite the type I had in mind! no worries on the initial confusion, was just not entirely sure what you meant wrt mechanism
MSDSs are already dogshit
one of those cases of “minimum legally required” type of things? maybe with a dash of “the specification and requirements were written ${time} ago and haven’t evolved a lick since then, despite much shift in industry and progress”?
there are no real enforced requirements of accuracy, most of typical known hazards are covered by generic useless advice and everything else is just filled by “no information”
ah, vibes-based danger diamonds
it’s less of this and more of prop65 the size of rationalist footnote
actual pictograms are not vibes based, there are thresholds for toxicity, flash point etc
You know, I would expect the at-a-glance symbolic information to be more useful just from sheer accessibility. But I never would have expected them to be more accurate and rigorous than the detailed safety sheets.
MSDS is a multi-page document that is mostly filled with boilerplate, but you could expect some more detailed precautions and instructions, like for example in case of HF burn apply calcium gluconate cream, use special glass for diazomethane because it can explode in contact with ground glass surface, pay special attention around whatever-class of compounds because these are potent sensitizers, or such. most of the time it’s not there, because people that write it never used these compounds, and people that do don’t read that and don’t need reminder after that detailed advice propagated to them via what is basically folk tales from labmates. it’s more useful to have a comprehensive chemical engineering handbook or similar resource (as searchable pdf) that has listed dangers for common dangerous reagents
from that second link upthread:
Experienced chemists know to go to sources like Sax’s or Bretherick’s for more useful advice, and tend to ignore safety data sheets entirely. But they’re not really made for experienced chemists (nor, apparently, by them either). For more general users, you would want these things to do some good, or at least do no harm, but the idea of a safety data sheet that actually makes its readers less safe is really unacceptable.
Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (“appropriate respirator”), it’s your job to figure out what it is
I lolled.
NSFW, Sterling on the weird language of LLMs
https://bruces.medium.com/preliminary-notes-on-the-delvish-dialect-by-bruce-sterling-ce68a476247b
deleted by creator
it looks like many of the LLM “delvisms”, including the unusually high rank of the word “delve” itself, just boil down to… Nigerian English.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt
