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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride :3)
Possibly OT, but fits in with the “finance ruins everything” motif we’ve got going here:
My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this
Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.
Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, “will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol”. They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don’t want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,
“Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I’m using to handle the”, I swear to Gods I’m not making this up, “MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…”. Desperate emphases mine.
And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.
I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was “haha yeah, mathlab is hard”.
I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.
A) “Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they’d probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged.” -My wife
B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can’t believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it’s definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God’s chosen timeline.
mathrix laboratory
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
MATHLAB CODE
Oof ow my heart
I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I’m not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.
It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. It’s a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase “don’t be evil”, they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.
I’ve just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.
Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!
That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.
I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.
Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don’t usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his “entrepreneurial mindset”, though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways (“Just ask it!”), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 “penicillin-events” in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.
It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn’t touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn’t matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn’t leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.
The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo’s jumping headfirst into it.
For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.
https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/
There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.
As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.
There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.
It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.
Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we’re not qualified and it never goes well.
AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with “sorry, we really aren’t equipped to help you”
stop it, get some help.pdf
damn we’ve got cyberpsychos before gta 6
OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT
Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!
Congrats!
Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?
Over the weekend if I’m understanding right. Just one interview. Its at a distillery lol.
congrats, that’s awesome news!
Congrats! :D
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends won’t join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
That’s a whole lotta words to say “I’m a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers.”
he’s not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess that’s fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he’s taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, “get gud”. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
This almost reads like tptacek doesn’t understand why lucidity’s piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
I’d have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it’s a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I’m just a vibe coding Youtuber.
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
Special bootlicking points:
Source: xcancel.com
@PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog
@tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn’t let me.
For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg
(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)
I bet you’re right on the money.
Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if it’s so good, which tickled me
fly.io is closed source, of course he’s not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again
Why the bash hate?
Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
Followup to this bit of news: ‘Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI “hybrid” movie’
Link to interview: (variety) (archive)
relevant section from interview:
As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.
“It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.
When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.
“It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”
“I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”
She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”
I mean I don’t doubt that some folks on the internet were absolute bastards about it. At the same time, while I’ve got a lot of love for Rian Johnson’s work and don’t have any room to criticize the process that creates it, I do have concerns. First off, while it’s artistically satisfying and a good personal defense, retreating into a bubble away from criticism doesn’t stop the economic and social repercussions of that criticism, which can definitely reflect back on the artistic product as it did when the far less interesting JJ Abrams was brought back to do the last Star Wars movie instead of letting Rian keep going. I don’t have a good solution for that, since fighting the internet hate machine isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, but it’s still a problem. This is especially the case with Gen AI here because the economic and social consequences that technology has on artistic production and creativity are the whole point of the criticism. Like, it’s not just that AI art is bad - we’ve seen plenty of bad art from human beings make it to theaters. Even if it gets less bad it’s replacing actual people with artistic visions and actual lives with a machine that is, somehow, even more of an environmental disaster and economic drain on society. It sounds like this is the kind of story that might be trying to engage with some of that in a meaningful way, but I don’t think that justifies actually using it here. Like, if you’re paying to enter the torment nexus in order to post up your propogands about how we shouldn’t have created the torment nexus, you’re still paying the fuckers who created the torment nexus for their creation of the torment nexus.
I have to wonder whether Lyonne bought a pig in a poke, as it were. There has been, AFAICT, no actual investigative reporting about whatever the deal was for. Is it really just a new coat of paint slapped on the same kind of FX work that’s been done for decades? (“Set extensions” sounds like the Star Wars prequels, for glob’s sake.) Just how much here is A Guy Instead?
It would be darkly funny if the studio got reamed online for being anti-art sellouts, while also getting ripped off.
… That could be a good movie.
Agree 1000%. I don’t want to read into Johnson’s comments (not enough context from the article). That being said, he is only about two degrees separated from TESCREAL: the wife of his frequent collaborator JGL is Tasha McCauley, a former board member of OpenAI. JGL himself has spoken at EA events, and is reportedly directing an “AI thriller” for Johnson’s production company. My guess is that he isn’t surrounded by AI-critical people, which sucks, and would explain the lack of acknowledgement of the slop vortex on his part.
Not gonna lie, if Rian Johnson ends up being in that milieu I’ll be absolutely heartbroken.
new yorker profile on moldbug (archive)
(still reading)
I wish the author had asked more follow-up questions to push back on this psychotic little imp (…easier said than done…?). Still there’s plenty of anecdotes which make Yarvin look pathetic (or just pitiable at best)
(Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”)
👁️
“In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.
I wish Moldy a very ‘May you and you alone experience the consequences of your beliefs’
Thiel has always had a prophetic touch
…really?
I mean he accurately predicted the kind of dystopian shit Peter Thiel would do with a morally indefensible amount of money, so that’s something.
this is the one who pinged me to see if i could tell her about using Urbit a while back
It brings moi le grand ennui to peruse the excessively florid and terminally gallicistic language of this higly self-esteemed publication elevating the persōna of urbane wordliness M. /jaʁvɛ̃/ is purposefully cultivating. The fustian pomp the reader is treated to gives off an air of arrogance-born naïveté—much as if the erudite hack composing the presented profile of our very good friend were oblivious to the genteel PR she’s lending the man of the hour.
For real though, it’s yet another example of liberal old media platforming a repugnant fascist bozo by playing along with their intellectual academic act, fully falling for the “evil Albert Camus” charade. These profile pieces mistake a subtle undertone of contempt for actually effective interrogation or criticism of the subject’s philosophy. Moldbug’s ideas barely have the philosophical depth of a villain from a young adult novel. The criticism of the slimy fascist’s neofeudal fantasies and his supporters’ implementation of them amounts to no more than a literary raising of eyebrows. In the name of respectable bipartisan stiff-upper-lip propriety it’s beyond the pale to call Curtis Yarvin’s ideology the puerile parody of high school libertarianism it is. A veneer of eloquence for chuds to point at and say “behold, not all nazis are stupid: this guy knows words!”
Curtis Yarvin is just an internet age Julius Evola for the type of people who are somehow also impressed by Julius Evola.
Curtis Yarvin is just an internet age Julius Evola for the type of people who are somehow also impressed by Julius Evola.
Quality sneer!
They should have just had Isaac Chotiner interview him to destruction.
Also, happy Pride :3
Yes, happy pride month everyone!
I’ve decided that this year I’m going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows… wonder if anyone will notice.
Thank you.
I’m helping with the church pride gloat, but I’m not going to signal anything because I honestly feel its not safe to.
Hell yeah!
Seems there’s a lot of buzz about pride month this year. I’ve been to one pride parade as a teen and have approximately zero LGBT fashion items, but solidarity and visibility seems more important in recent years. I should find a necklace with trans flag colors or something.
Found a damn-good sneering of AI art on Newgrounds recently - highly recommend checking it out.
Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:
https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz
(reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)
OpenAI is very different. They mainly lose money on ChatGPT, but it’s not really lost money, because they in turn accumulate fresh daha to further train their models. Data that none of their competitors have access to.
OpenAI is also different because AI is a major geopolitical factor at the moment and unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you must have noticed that geopolitics is much more important than money these days. ChatGPT is an incredible intelligence gathering channel and cutting access to AI APIs would make US sanctions hurt that much more. The only other country that can compete with US companies when it comes to bulk training data access is China, via their social media alternatives like TikTok and RedNote. You can imagine the geopolitical implications of that too.
Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.
First we mine, then we craft hey does anyoune else smell burnt toast?
Sounds like they should nationalize OpenAI.
lol jfc
