Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!
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.
Rare moment of clarity on EA forum: the fuck are we giving $100k to a video game for
But wait, the game developer wrote a story called Singularity 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20240302011145/https://singularity1999.tv/
I’m not sure I’m brave / bored enough to read.
The sim city clone looks like it could have been neat with some more love, it has a bit of a Streets of SimCity / SimCopter vibe to the aesthetics which was my jam back in the day. Though from the reviews it looks like it made the decision of shying away from low level management aspects or angry headlines yelling at you for your dumb city building choices (so I wouldn’t have played it for that reason, is it even sim city without being told “you’re going to regret this”??)
Someone else played simcopter?
I enjoyed it for what it was (helicopter crimes simulator), but lemme tell you the real fun to be had was in Streets of SimCity.
From the level editor, to the soundtrack (I considered it to be edgy at the time), to the bugs (if you don’t create launchers by self-intersecting bridges in SCURK then what are you even doing?), to the ridiculous campaigns and the ability to blow up a nuclear reactor. I didn’t even mind that the graphics looked like sawdust.
Come to think of it I always liked blowing up the nukes as a kid, so I also considered Recoil (the tank game) to be the peak of entertainment.
Everything Maxis did is remake worthy.
wait, we have a SimCopter & Streets of Sim City subthread now? fuck yes. I’m here to attach missile launchers to cars my dad fondly remembers, jankily load my simcity2000 game into the level editor and play the resulting broken mess, and crash (both my car and the game engine)
Just gonna leave these songs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPkFmwT7MZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiyXwJWbUoY
lol at the “delved” there. Wonder if it’s some intentional contrarian
The response of the grant evaluator is even worse. Just excuses, no admission that they fucked up. Barely even a consideration that this is the sort of thing people have done with flash games, and created in literal weekends at game jams
Nah man we had so much fucking dosh flowing in we had no idea what to even do with it! I mean, how could I possibly resist not allocating some of it to my friends?
Obviously the most effective of altruisms is whatever is most likely to create more paperclip believers. The EA games (it’s in the game!) philanthropic singularity will allow us to reach the next stage of human evolution: all economic output devoted to mosquito nets and button press simulators.
The EA games (it’s in the game!)
I actually heard this in my brain, you monster. well done.
challenge everything
violence.gif
CW: Dongs, Blood and Thunder,
So yeah…remember that Roko post from last week where he explained how much men don’t need women? Oglaf did it first.
This is Roko’s ideal future; Roko’s Modern life, if you will. Checkmate, ladies.
(NSFW)
https://www.oglaf.com/dark-miasma/ (part 1 of 24 lol) https://www.oglaf.com/burningjewels/
But nature finds a way:
https://www.oglaf.com/honor/ https://www.oglaf.com/son-of-kronar/ https://www.oglaf.com/son-of-kronar/2/
Blood and Thunder, Victory at Sea, (…), Scented Candles
I’m sorry what is any of this. I’m scared to click any of the things since I can’t even comprehend the content warning.
If you don’t already know what oglaf is, it takes but a single click to find out
I’ve been around internet enough to expect “Scented Candles” to be some insanely disgusting psychosexual performance art, not… literal fucking candles.
The deeply amusing thing about oglaf is how often it isn’t porn or even NSFW.
and it’s remarkably wholesome, in a way. it’s never particularly gross or over the line, it’s always oglaf
Sorry! I leaned too hard on the inside jokes. Oglaf is a pretty successful fantasy-themed web comic with adult humor. It’s nothing you’d need therapy to get over, though it has more nudity than you’d want your boss to notice if they walked by your desk.
“Blood and Thunder” was heavily memed around a dozen years ago.
Fuck yeah Oglaf!!! I need to do my biannual catchup binge
Even Kronar dislikes Musk (nsfw obv).
At last, a compelling reason to use Chat-GPT: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1801360053045497942
Tim cook is an absolute hustler
ChatGPT is dying Use Apple to make it die faster
Update: this guy is an influential (apparently) right wing poster who got doxxed.
Where are these people coming from?
"The smile. The optimism. Versus the steely 1000 yard stare.
Ideology preformed in the instant of conception
Physiognomy, simply, does not lie."
man will wheaton really turned to the dark side, didn’t he?
He did???
got told to shut up one too many times. See what happens when you censor people libs?
Ah yes, pragmatists, well known for their constantly sunny and optimistic outlook on the future, consequences be damned (?)
immediately know which represents pragmatism vs esoteric theory
What neither of them are doing ‘The Stare’, Moore can do it, Crowley could do it, Rasputin can do it. Get these low budget farces out of here, and give me a proper Stare.
Moldbug tries, but he mostly just looks in a way that makes you think ‘he just farted and is trying to figure out if I noticed’.
I kinda want to go read the old Singularity fic and enjoy any Zeerust that pops up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40631663
Orange site post with a bunch of people saying burnout is a learning experience and that its okay to be perpetually depressed because it makes you more disruptive.
I don’t have anything clever to say about this.
I mean, it is a “learning experience” in the same way a car crash is technically both an experience and something you probably didn’t know first hand before.
Can you gaslight people into thinking burnout is good, actually? HN gives it the ol’ college try
I wonder if we can start requiring history of science, philosophy, and literary & artistic theory classes in secondary school (or at least before giving out doctorates), just to limit incredibly annoying adults who think they’re geniuses. I also thought I invented brain-in-a-vat thought experiments when I was ten, but I don’t opine on them reinvented from first principles.
Didn’t we discuss this fallacy the other day?
maybe you’re referring to when i brought it up in last week’s thread? and yeah, this is basically the same
can’t wait for AI bros to invent the trolley problem
twice as fast trolleys, with ChatGPT driving
new thing for the next little while: anytime a promptfondler claims a prompt has intelligence, “oh yeah so why do you have to ask it things? why isn’t it here having a beer with us?” for the 3 minutes of entertainment it may provide
making that subscript was not intentional, but rofl. gj lemmy
Proof that pasta doesn’t exist:
- An atom isn’t pasta.
- Adding an atom to something that isn’t pasta doesn’t make it pasta.
- Therefore nothing is pasta.
omg, I’m not real.
This is the proof by induction method for the people who don’t know btw.
iterm2 update, moving the shit out of the core application (like it probably should’ve been in the first place):
3.5.1 This release adds some safety valves to eliminate the risk of private information leaving the terminal via the AI endpoints. While an API key and explicit user action were always needed to use AI features, some users asked for an impenetrable firewall for safety and regulatory purposes. To that end, there are three relevant changes: 1. Code that communicates with AI providers such as OpenAI has been moved into a plugin that you must install separately. Enterprise system admins can block bundle id com.googlecode.iterm2.iTermAI to prevent it from being installed in the first place. See here for details: https://iterm2.com/ai-plugin.html 2. In addition, you must manually enable AI features in Settings. Doing so requires admin access. 3. Enterprise administrators who wish to disable iTerm2's AI access may set the user default GenerativeAIAllowed to False in their MDM systems.still never received a reply email from the author to my mail. wonder what they think/have learned of this experience tho
I’m afraid their character has been exposed
I uninstalled when they announced it but this week’s news says it’s time to uninstall macos too
I seem to remember iTerm doing something weird about 10 years ago, like adding telemetry, but I can’t find it…
iTerm2’s leak issue was first discovered ten months ago. iTerm2’s creator initially reacted by adding an option to iTerm 3.0.13 that allowed users to disable DNS lookups. The feature remained turned on by default for new and existing installations.
jfc
to get on my soapbox for a moment: iterm2 is in objc, which still has a lot of the ancillary problems that C has. testing properly is one of them - I can easily see such kind of fuckups slipping past by simple virtue of human error, possibly helped along by shitty tools/choices[0]. for example, I know of nothing in C-land that enables property-based testing, and from a quick check it seems that XCTest also runs on the human-enumerated-tests philosophy. so if no-one writes the test that’ll catch it, it could at best be caught by accident (through something else maybe triggering it).
and people are also really fucking bad at thinking in/about side effects. even a lot of systems thinkers seem to fuck that up.
/soapbox
[0] - I was recently debugging why a particular piece of Go software wasn’t outputting anything I was expecting at the log level I had it set. quickly went to its repo, glanced at the code just to check if my expectation was right, then popped a message to a friend who deals with more Go than I do (which is near-nil, because it is a GARBAGE FUCKING LANGUAGE OF AND CAUSING NIGHTMARES, gah). he reminded me of the fact that Go had fairly recently fixed a bug in its stdlib logging library that had fucked up which levels it would handle things, due to an error in the fucking switch statement. for the stdlib goddamn logger. a bug which had been there for over 2y iirc.
Yeah, I that’s probably what I was thinking of.
For the moment, I’m choosing to believe the following: 1) that itermdev was operating under hyped-engineer mode and choosing cluelessly as a result (and I sorely hope they learned something through this), 2) that Apple is too selfish to go hard on openai (because it means less money for them)
#2 I’m a smidge more certain about
But both of them are deeply “ugh, fuck” kinda feelings for me.
You’re probably right. I have just lost patience and trust for software in general.
I hear ya.
I haven’t seen the details but apparently Apple may not be paying OpenAI for the ChatGPT functionality. So macOS may not be using ChatGPT heavily.
looks like perplexity misbehaves in a way that’d allow them to hide
quick whois on the ip from that log snippet says ec2, so they’re probably doing scaleout via dynamic instances (I’ve been wondering about this for a variety of the services)
full fucking parasitical, again and again
need a meme image that represents the way Apple is legitimising openai after all the crypto degens were desperate for apple to legitimise nfts. the jealous hot mess rejected for another hot mess
degens
Not your fault, but I really dislike this word and wish people wouldn’t start copying it from the cryptobros. Not a fan of calling people degenerates.
fair shake. I never intended it as a shortened word, just a crypto word in itself. consider this my last use
NullBulge
oh you know it was some furries
edit: their website (now down, but up on the wayback machine) uses ai-generated furry art, which few self-respecting furries (much less hacktivist ones) would touch with a ten-foot pole. or at least, the ones in the furry circles i keep. so it could very well just be opportunists
re your edit, well furry art could be traced back to the creator of the art/or the person who commissioned it, so using AI shit for opsec isn’t totally strange.
that’s one possible reason, yeah. just seems like a really odd choice – much like the fact that they dislike “crypto promotion” but still accept payment for secrets in crypto. doesn’t feel like it would be that hard to find a sympathetic furry artist willing to draw in a nondistinct style or keep work under wraps. idk
the only reason it seems odd to me is that the overwhelming majority of furries either actively dislike or hate “ai art”. maybe they’re the odd ones out, or they just don’t care for a throwaway group
Yeah it is weird still. They could also have easily picked a historical piece of furry art, or use some Disney furry images.
but the NULLGE
Lawrence Lessig falls victim to the siren song of the blarney engines. Also, lol cnn
Many people refer to concerns about the technology as a question of “AI safety.” That’s a terrible term to describe the risks that many people in the field are deeply concerned about. Some of the leading AI researchers, including Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio and Sir Geoffrey Hinton, the computer expert and neuroscientist sometimes referred to as “the godfather of AI,” fear the possibility of runaway systems creating not just “safety risks,” but catastrophic harm.
And while the average person can’t imagine how anyone could lose control of a computer (“just unplug the damn thing!”), we should also recognize that we don’t actually understand the systems that these experts fear.
Companies operating in the field of AGI — artificial general intelligence, which broadly speaking refers to the theoretical AI research attempting to create software with human-like intelligence, including the ability to perform tasks that it is not trained or developed for — are among the least regulated, inherently dangerous companies in America today. There is no agency that has legal authority to monitor how the companies develop their technology or the precautions they are taking.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/opinions/artificial-intelligence-risks-chat-gpt-lessig/index.html
New AdamSomething about tech bros reinventing the train but worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5M7Oq1PCz4
https://zhukeepa.substack.com/p/ai-alignment-and-the-distributed
This came across the dash and well…
oh boy
bonus Leverage
I couldn’t remember who Chris Langan was, and mobile search gave me “Chris Langham”:
Christopher Langham (born 14 April 1949) is an English writer, actor, and comedian.
No mention of philosophy, but this turned up
On 2 August 2007, Langham was found guilty of 15 charges of downloading and possessing level 5 child sexual abuse images and videos.
OK so maybe the correct person?
No it turns out Langan is the person with “the world’s highest IQ”.
From the podcast transcript
… if people look up Chris Langan on Wikipedia, under his views section, they’ll be like, ah, these are some far right views. The CTMU is obviously not about that, but… anything you want to just fill in for people that might be curious about that part of it?
[…]
When people bring up his political views, I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn’t mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright. I don’t think Chris is remotely a Nazi. In my personal interaction with him, he’s been a wonderful person. He’s been kind and generous with me, and I respect him personally.
No doubt Himmler’s friends and family thought he was a great guy too.
From a brief glance at the CTMU it fits into:
- not even wrong
- not that deep
- cloaked in really unecessary jargon
It’s fascinating to see people re-invent the same bad eschatology, it’s like there’s crazed compulsive shaped hole in the heart of man or something.
Wikipedia tells me that Langan says that he can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics … I feel like there’s gonna be some bad Bayes in there somewhere.
@carlitoscohones @techtakes See also Frank Tipler, “The Physics of Immortality” (or: Astrophysicist goes cray-cray, tries to prove TESCREAL bullshit only takes a left turn into evangelical Christianity by way of the fine structure constant)
From what I recall from the halcyon days of science-blogging, it was more bad Gödel than bad Bayes, but a dose of the latter would be unsurprising.
previously featured here, too
Yeah I realized that as soon as I found the correct result.
So many high-IQ fascists, I get memory buffer overruns.
I had missed that post, no idea Ben had fallen that far. (Like I knew the psi stuff, not the fanboying of the person people need to ‘well not all nazis were bad’ things about).
He’s been kind and generous with me
Reminds me of this comic, xcancel
I often mention that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that doesn’t mean his philosophy should just be dismissed outright
Very true. It should instead be dismissed because it is the exact sort of reactionary nonsense a craven nazi would try to pass off as philosophical inquiry.
