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.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that’s JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat

      one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn’t wrote a thing about ai earlier

      then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i’d expect even from him

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 months ago

          anything newer than 2022? won’t be on scihub, because scihub got in a court case in india, that they hope they can win and secure reasonably stable place where they can operate from

          tho it seems to me that the entire article is that three screens of text

    • mlen@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can’t they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software

  • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    The whole space scene really depresses me now. The Musk cult and TESCREAL and more overt ideologies (I’ve seen claimed old time L5 people throw around ‘spiteful mutant’ and other stuff). The whole thing just seems to be going nasty.

    Astronomy thankfully is still chill.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    Here’s a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, to make long running threads easier to follow. I’m posting it in the stubsack because it’s the thread I had in mind when writing it.

    Pasting it in the browser’s console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I’ve cross tested it any… Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won’t steal your crypto, or mine any new.

    In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.

    (()=>{
        function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
            const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
            return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
        }
    
        const nodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
            .map(x => {
                return {
                    Node: x,
                    Date: Date.parse(
                        x.dataset.tippyContent
                            .split('\n').at(-1)
                            .replace(/Modified |at /g, ""))
                };
            });
    
        const dates = nodes.map(x => x.Date).filter(x => !isNaN(x) && x != null);
        dates.sort();
    
        const minDate = dates[0];
        const maxDate = dates.at(-1);
    
        nodes
            .filter(x => x.Node.closest('.ms-2') != null)
            .forEach(x => x.Node.closest('.ms-2').style.backgroundColor = getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, x.Date))
    })()
    
    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      other handy thing you can do: make a bookmark that has the URL be javascript:(function() { function bits go here} )();, and stick it in your bookmark bar

      • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Yes, do this if your browser allows it, it’s way better. Just paste the code in the OP prepended by “javascript:” without quotes in place of the url and as far as i can tell it works.

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          I only now saw how badly the syntax on my post is fucked, that’s what I get for trying to snip things in a dodgy textentry rather than a real editor 😅

          leaving it up for posterity tho.

    • nfultz@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      In the spirit of “worse is better”, here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:

      ! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
      awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)
      
    • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      This is really cool!

      I was just thinking it would be cool to have something like RES’s ‘Previously Read’ feature that only shows the new comments, and everything else is darkened or collapsed. This does a similar thing though and it’s great for these weekly threads

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it’s already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy

      also musk’s downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          The upshot of this is that if acausalrobotgod ever gives us a time machine, you just need to plant one tree on your way to killing hitler, and you solve so many problems.

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
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            3 months ago

            Maybe there’s an easy way to prevent apartheid in South Africa entirely? That alone led to so many waste-of-oxygen white dudes, we could nip Musk in the bud and much more

    • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      It’s been 3 days, my hope that this is real is fading :(

      Musk will always own that hilariously disturbing baby roleplay Twitter alt though

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      For as much as they like to talk about building things and solving problems the software industry doesn’t seem to put a lot of effort into building things well or solving their own problems.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    Rumor, but lol if true “A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets” Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Leukemia patients are always over-represented in their data because the it’s soooooo much easier to use the calipers on people with no hair.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      christ and it’s always the fucking bad-faith bullshit arguments. I bet if you pulled another dimension to the same fucking numbers there you’d instantly find some Rather Interesting correlations with income brackets, and if you pulled a dimension for care/spend class you’d find Another interesting correlation

      I wish these people just fucking wouldn’t, gah

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      that’s just “poors don’t deserve healthcare” what else

      otoh aren’t they going against their benefactors (old rich ghouls)?

      • slopjockey@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        I’d never heard of him. His latest tweet is complaining about the left wing slant on his thread and he says that you can’t “get away from the culture war I guess”. Yet every fifth post below is a rage post about libs and lefties.

        • barsquid@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It’s like how all topics are either the cishet white standard quo or “political.” Raging about libs and lefties is standard quo and telling a dimwit they are a dimwit is “culture war.”

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:

      Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.

      “Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they’re lazier and lazier written each time.

      Second, what’s the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?

      Also

      1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses

      Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        TP0 is the OSI connection-mode transport layer protocol’s transport protocol class 0 duh.

        Transport Protocol Class 0 (TP0), the simplest OSI transport protocol, performs segmentation and reassembly functions. TP0 requires connection-oriented network service.

        (source)

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        I thought it meant “thread poster zero” because I never really understood the order in which one reads tweets and replies, so when I saw “TP0”, three frames later I already deduced an entire vocabulary of terms to designate each persona in a twitter screenshot

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          from the top down with either dfs or bfs depending on how you found the thread to spread, or from the inside out (by clicking through QTs until you get to the root). because twitter totally made browsing this shit easy.

          what’s hard.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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        Cremieux used to post to Reddit as user Tr***yPornO (with the slur instead of the asterisks). Nobody here wanted to call him that, so it was rapidly abbreviated TPO or TP0. He posted the same breathtaking racist shit with low quality cites that didn’t check out as he has since. He also told all manner of inconsistent lies about who he was.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          At least he wears his kink proudly, not many rightwing weirdoes would just admit they’re really into that.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            3 months ago

            I wouldn’t be too quick to conclude it’s that - I’ve seen a number of these creeps wear/handle-pick slurs as a trying-to-be-funny pejorative

            • V0ldek@awful.systems
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              3 months ago

              Oh I’m sure he’s trying to be edgy, but in that case there’s nothing that would trigger him more than what I’ve said :>

        • slopjockey@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          Speaking of breathtaking racism with low quality cites, does anyone remember ebola chan? He was my favorite because he was a reactionary with 4chan temperament, so he’d mald when pushed instead of spewing out word salad.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      This does suck for all the non-LLM ML stuff that has actual usage. (Even if a percentage of that was also snake oil, or had dubious success rates).

      • otherstew@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Ehh, if you’re calling your ML stuff AI then that’s on you (and you’re probably not technically serious about what you’re doing anyway). Other people are pointing out that AI isn’t a term that many compsci/software people would use, and neither the article (or afaict the study) or my experience suggest that ML has the same negative association as AI.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          AI has been and always will be the term for making the computer play a game against you. A search tree with some prunning is not ML, but if you use it to implement a chess bot then it is AI in the game sense.

          If you’re not doing video games then the term is essentially meaningless

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn’t it?

      At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

        I expect history to repeat itself quite soon - where previously using the term “artificial intelligence” got you looked at as a wild-eyed dreamer, now, using that term’s likely getting you looked at as an asshole techbro, and your research deemed a willing attempt to hurt others.

  • corbin@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    This orange thread is about San Francisco banning certain types of landlord rent collusion. I cannot possibly sneer better than the following in-thread comment explaining why this is worthwhile:

    While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren’t the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don’t cover them in giant metal spikes.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          You are mistaken in my reasoning, I’m saying a person with a well paid university position (which gives him access to money and the university library, which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them) should understand that a lot of training material is indeed not free. This being in addition to the university paying him for his own research, and him prob being pretty annoyed if he was replaced with an iSandberg bot and now was homeless. (This is in addition to what Yud said).

          Turns out making papers about replacing the earth with fruit is something Anders-GPT can do perfectly well on its own.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            3 months ago

            which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them

            wrong assumption tbh. the open-access fight is happening because the publisher cartels are extortionate and access is extremely uneven. I (personally/directly) know more than a few people presently in academia who roll libgen on a daily basis because it is easier/quicker/the only option/the only actually working option for the things they need

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              3 months ago

              Fair enough, my bad. No idea it had gotten that bad. But still, I wasn’t intending to rag on libgen, just his idea that these things (which also includes education) are free already.

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                3 months ago

                if you want to get really mad, shibboleth “elsevier”. it’ll be a speedrun of learning some of the worst of what’s fucked atm

            • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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              3 months ago

              it’s often easier to pirate the published version of your own paper than to access it by official means

    • imadabouzu@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      It’s the same story as has ever been. “Smart People”'s position on anything is often informed by their current economic relationship wrt to the things they care about. And maybe even Yud isn’t super happy about his profession being co-opted. What scraps will he have if his own delusions became true about GPT zombies replacing “authentic voices”?

      No one is immune to seeing a better take when it’s their shit on the line, and no is immune from being in a bubble without stake.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        I’ve read enough of the Yudster’s work to recognize that he is particularly vulnerable to being replaced by a small shell script that outputs a massive volume of text that says very little of substance, and what little there is is weirdly racist.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.

      BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace “robot overlords” in TESCREAL with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, “The Authoritarian Peril”:

      https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg

      with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:

      A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur’s Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        with advanced near-perfect lie detection

        how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become “near-perfect” with GPUs.

        • o7___o7@awful.systems
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          Ya know, it’s funny that you point this out, it’s a thing about their style of argument that’s been nagging at me for a while.

          There’s a pattern in the promptfondlers’ propaganda where they claim that they they’ve identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a “truth oracle” in the compsci sense of the word “oracle.” If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

          I guess that’s true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions for your infinite knowledge genie.

          Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle, you just can’t get there from here, but try telling them that.

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
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            If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

            Damn bro, they’re gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER SEVEN DECADES AGO

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it’s on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      The proud tradition of “no really, Trump isn’t that bad if you pretend he’s a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth”

    • cornflake@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I’ve found it impossible to share threads without.

      • earthquake@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        https://status.d420.de/ there’s a few nitters post-rebirth, all of them probably using a fleet of real accounts and anti-bot protection instead of the guest accounts that first-age nitter used.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”

      Jesus.

      Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice

      Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?

      Siri, how can I unread a post?

    • fnix@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:

      If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.

      Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.

      What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:

      What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths

        Wh… What? Does favouring seatbelts also induce millions of premature deaths, because of… because of what? What the actual fuck dude?

    • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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      Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn’t realize you can still start threads there.

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Strange, they didn’t count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald