Want to wade into the snowy 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.)

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    25 minutes ago

    linux tech issue:

    My desktop computer started with just windows on it. No issues. A while back I dual installed linux mint and windows, and pretty frequently when rebooting I’d have to deal with the computer insisting that I run fsck. I ended up switching back to just windows and thereafter had no issues.

    This week I installed ubuntu as my sole OS and it’s not going very well. I’ve had to reinstall the OS a few times already. After the install at first everything is normal, but slowly I start getting hints of things going wrong. Certain programs will just not start, that kind of thing. Eventually I restart the computer and it will present me with a demand I run fsck. I do so, and now tons of system files are gone, the install is effectively dead, and I’m back to square zero.

    I don’t understand what’s going on. I used the same media to install ubuntu on my laptop, and that works perfectly. I’ve had a version of this problem across two distros. And for some reason it doesn’t occur with windows! Complete mystery. Anyone have ideas?

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    4 hours ago

    I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

    In UCLA’s Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to “Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles” and Goal 5 is to “Become a more effective institution”. By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

    The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

    And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

    My question is:

    If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

    Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

    I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

    Thank you.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      Fun detail about this hype about ‘innovation’ (there was not just a poster but also an email) aircraft carriers use physical chits and a table for their planning. (Bonus, cant be hacked or emped). So gonna be fun to see if he will try to get rid of that and we might see a carrier sunk in the venezuelan/taiwan wars.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    Slopocalypse Now h/t The Syllabus

    For context, Kunzru wrote the novel Red Pill a few years back.

    Candace is a pioneer. Following her, we are exiting the age of the public sphere and entering a time of magic, when signs and symbols have the power to reshape reality. Consider the “Medbed,” a staple of QAnon-adjacent right-wing conspiracy culture. Medbeds are one of the many things about which “they” are not telling “you”; they can supposedly regenerate limbs and reverse aging. How evil would you have to be to deny such a boon to We the People? In late September, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself promoting the scam, promising that every faithful supporter would be given a card that would give them access to this magic technology. Trump posted it because it made him look good, a leader healing the sick, but also because it is a way to hyperstition a version of this fiction into reality. No one will really be cured, of course, because the Medbed doesn’t exist. Except now it is someone’s job to make sure it does: The president is a powerful magician who never tells a lie, so some loyal redhats will have to be given cards that let them lie down in some kind of cargo-cult version of a Medbed. Perhaps it will be a job for TV’s own Dr. Oz, who has crossed to the other side of the screen as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

    God we live in the dumbest possible world.

    This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand.

    I hope so, Jesse Welles getting on the Colbert and playing Red shows some people are moving in that direction, but is also definitely sincere-posting, and ultimately that kind of performance just doesn’t pay the bills like if he went Truck Jeans Beer. Eddington seems to have gotten under some people’s skins in an interesting way… And I’m skeptical that /any/ novel would have any impact or reach outside the NYT class, what with having to actually read something.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      17 hours ago

      Hyperstition is such a bad neologism, apparently doubleplus superstition equals self-fullfilling prophecy (transitive)? They don’t even bother to verb it properly… Nick Land got a nonsense word stuck in his head and now there’s a whole subculture of midwit thought leader wannabes parroting that shit.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      What, that doesnt even make sense. I dont type what im thinking. (My only real usage of llms was trying to break them, so imagine the output of that. And you could then imagine what you think I was trying to attempt in messing with the system. But then you would do the work. Say you see mee send the same message twice. A logical conclusion would be that I tried to see if it gave different results if prompted the same way twice. However, it is more likely I just made a copy paste error and accidentally send the wrong text the second time. So the person reading the logs is doing a lot of work here). Ignoring all that he also didnt think of the next case: people using an llm to fake chatlogs to optimize being hired. Good way to hire a lot of North Koreans.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      Sure John, let me know when you’ve got that set up. Something that retains my entire search/chat history, caches the responses as well, and pulls all that into the context window when it’s time to generate a job referral. Maybe you’ll be able to do something shotgunning together remaindered hardware this time next year? I’ll be waiting.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      I’m legitimately disappointed in John Carmack here. He should be a good enough programmer to understand the limitations here, but I guess his business career has driven in a different direction.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        9 hours ago

        Nah he has brainrot. He deadnamed and misgendered Rebecca Heinemann in his eulogy of her. Transphobia seems to really make people worse at thinking.

        (Not a big shock considering how bad his answer was towards the ‘epic own’ of the person asking him if he would hire more women. (He said: “we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn’t matter what they look like.”, which sounds like a great own, but leaves one big question. Why aren’t you trying to educate more people in what you want then? What are you doing to fix that problem if it is such a big problem for you? (which then leads to, how will you ensure that this teaching system has women in it, etc)))

        E: and if that doesn’t convince people he sucks: https://web.archive.org/web/20230528051421/https://www.giantbomb.com/john-carmack/3040-4576/forums/never-meet-your-heroes-john-carmack-throws-lot-in--1911724/ (this article seems to no longer exist live).

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          9 hours ago

          Carmack is a Gen-X Texan mostly known for using hardmode C to code an FPS. He’s so drenched in nerd testostorone I’d be surprised if he wasn’t background radiation level non-woke. Not saying he shouldn’t be as a human being, just that it would be an uphill battle for him.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            5 hours ago

            At least we have Romero. Hoe had an edgelord phase, but only when younger and realized he fucked up.

    • ________@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        15·
        2 days ago

        The orange-site whippersnappers don’t realize how old artificial neurons are. In terms of theory, the Hebbian principle was documented in 1949 and the perceptron was proposed in 1943 in an article with the delightfully-dated name, “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity”. In 1957, the Mark I Perceptron was introduced; in modern parlance, it was a configurable image classifier with a single layer of hundreds-to-thousands of neurons and a square grid of dozens-to-hundreds of pixels. For comparison, MIT’s AI lab was founded in 1970. RMS would have read about artificial neurons as part of their classwork and research, although it wasn’t part of MIT’s AI programme.

        • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          24 hours ago

          Is there even any young people we could plausibly call whippersnappers on orange site anymore, it feels like they’re all well into their 30s/40s at this point.

          I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

          But in fairness to actual whipper snappers, and to your point, the '56 Dartmouth Workshop forward privileged Symbolic AI over anything data driven up through the first AI winter (until roughly the 90s and the balance shifted) and really warped the disciplines understanding of its own influences and history - if 70s RMS was taught anything about Neural Nets, it’s relevance and importance would probably have been minimized in comparison to expert systems in lisp or whatever Minsky was up to.

          • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
            4·
            23 hours ago

            @nfultz

            In college I took an AI class and it was just a lisp class. I was disappointed. Also the instructor often had white foam in the corners of his mouth, so I dropped it.

            • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
              3·
              9 hours ago

              My college used the green Russell Norvig text, which had (checking…) 12 pages on neutral nets out of 1000 pages. I liked the class well enough, but we used Java 1.3 and lisp would have been better.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    the fifth episode of odium symposium, “4chan: the french connection” is now up. roughly the first half of the episode is a dive into sartre’s theory of antisemitism. then we apply his theory to the style guide of a nazi news site and the life of its founder, andrew anglin

    EDIT: btw if you like the episode please tell people about it! frankly we have no idea how to market or otherwise promote a podcast sooo we’re kind of just hoping the listeners do it