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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    Taylor Swift is on the side of humans* in the battle against the AIs (instagram).

    Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.

    I’m sure everyone remembers what this is referring to, y’know with the rest of the US election being so low-key and boring, but just in case here’s an article with screenshots (Guardian).

    Anyway I’m not here to talk politics. SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift) thinks Taylor Swift will be a “cultural linchpin” against deepfakes.

    As I’ve said before, Taylor Swift may be the cultural lynchpin for addressing abusive AI imitation and I think this was her personal opening salvo. Taylor Swift was previously driven to political advocacy partly by right-wing memes of her aping Hilter on genetic purity. I think she takes INCREDIBLE personal exception to herself being used as a puppet and this directly aligns with it. Directly addressed to political leaders.

    Indeed that Donald Trump post isn’t the first time she’s been targeted. There was Deepfake Swift Porn in January that prompted Microsoft to add more safeguards**. A scam involving fake Le Creuset cookware (nytimes), and on a lighter note: fake Taylor Swift teaching Math on TikTok (Petapixel, whatever the heck a petapixel is).

    The January incident prompted some legislatures to introduce the No AI Fraud Act, though looking at it it looks like it hasn’t made it far through congress.

    * Maybe not on the side of humans against climate change. With the private jet and all. God the US needs trains then at least all the celebrities could ride in luxurious rail cars like the olden days.

    ** Not sure about Microsoft but these safeguards aren’t effective in general, I found a subreddit of people sharing AI image generator prompt tips to get around filters and it was pretty disturbing. But that’s another story.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      With the private jet and all.

      A story I heard, one of the problems with private jets (and private jet trackers) is that often private jets cannot be stored at normal airports. So after delivering the rich people to the airport it needs to take off again, and go to a smaller airport to stay there. This drives up the environmental costs to insane levels (now each trip is 3 takeoffs), but this also causes weirdness with the people tracking the planes of celebs, as they now overinflate the actual flights they are in, which annoys weird pedants (like me). I wonder if the celebs taking these flights are even aware of it. Anyway, remember this if you hear a story of ‘celeb X took their private plane to skip traffic’ stories, there is a chance they were not actually in this plane. (So put down those surface to air launchers you lunatics).

      Not that the usage of private planes isn’t insane and should be banned/heavily regulated.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift)

      it’s some US infosec guy working at a corp, identity was figured out a couple years ago

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        Wait, why would he be Taylor Swift?

        I always thought it’s swift as in fast, there’s nothing about his posts that would attempt a satirical impersonation even.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            3 个月前

            Yeah, that. From the era of horse_ebooks, Riker Googling, etc

            they used to run the account with a Swift avi for the first while, then switched to Cortana (iirc?) for a bit (can’t remember if this coincided with twitter having its “impersonating accounts” panic), and dunno after that because I stopped seeing it

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        Yeah I was being a bit tongue in cheek there. I follow them and a bunch of accounts on ActivityPub because it’s the only way to keep the feed from drying up when running my own instance.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 个月前

    Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be “analyzing” the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”

    https://awful.systems/comment/4649129

    Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”

      Someone’s been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 个月前

          It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it’s a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it’s a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it’s so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don’t the people we keep electing to fix it just… do that?

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            3 个月前

            Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn’t started using it and outcompeting everyone?

            There’s only 2 answers to that:

            1. the gold standard doesn’t work in the modern economy, the one that has lifted millions out of poverty and created untold wealth (to great environmental damage, sure)
            2. the gold standard is being kept from them by (((they)))

            Answer 2 is obvious if you’re a fascist.

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
              0·
              3 个月前

              Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.

              I’m familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they can’t print money and the populace doesn’t trust them to print money - so every year it’s more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.

              So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      It’s remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He’s worked on that, but it’s clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn’t very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I’m thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.

      But you can’t convince me that you’re really the world’s best technical interviewer if you’re also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you’re suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who’s financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they’re concerned about where he might end up otherwise?

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        The only thing I’ve seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what they’re saying. I gather that it’s easy to empathize with and doesn’t require listeners to actually learn much since they’re essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.

        • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 个月前

          I don’t think it’s very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new “AI” major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that “computation” is more important than electrical engineering.

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        Lex hasn’t optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee’s and the (implicitly) listener’s ego.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.

    https://www.lex.tec.br/

    The most black mirror part for me is where he’s selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future “AI”, represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn’t a parody, they’re literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        OK Venturebeat have hastily beaten a venture-retreat and are decrying fraud complete with an AI generated header image that really screams “promptfondler caught red-handed fondling”.

        Contains such choice quotes are “fraud in the AI research community”, which are very reminiscent of Capt. Renault’s reaction in the casino in Casablanca.

        https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-leader-reflection-70bs-performance-questioned-accused-of-fraud/

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 个月前

          “eagerly waiting for them to upload their weights to Hugging Face” really is the same vibe as “eagerly waiting for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange to give me my coins back”

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 个月前

          I should be trying to sleep, given I need to be on the road by 0630 tomorrow (it is 22h22), but this rapid fire set of events has greatly improved how happy I’ll feel about shit sleep by morning

          now do chatgpt4ahegao, cowards

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 个月前

          “Hey if the R1 could do it with a shipped physical product, why couldn’t one just do it with software alone?” - genius bayfucker, 2024

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    Cohost going readonly at the end of this month, and shutting down at the end of the year: https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down

    Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.

      I never used Cohost, but I know a couple people who do and fuuuuuuuck this sucks. 'Least Newgrounds is still going, though that’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      To be clear: Cohost did take funding from an anonymous angel, and as a result will not be sharing their source code; quoting from your link:

      Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.

      We are unable to make cohost open source. the source code for cohost was the collateral used for the loan from our funder.

      Somebody paid a very small amount of money to get a cleanroom implementation of Tumblr and did not mind that they would have to build a community and then burn it to the ground in the process. It turns out that angels are not better people than VCs.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        Looking at both cohost and tumblr, I don’t think the funder has an asset that’s worth very much.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 个月前

          Yeah, having the source to a site (even if it includes stuff like day to day ops, backups etc) isn’t worth much if you don’t have a community. It’s a bit like “open source” LLMs, sure you can run a mudball of python on your computer but the real worth is in ingesting and classifying.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
          0·
          3 个月前

          A small Lemmy or Mastodon that’s run by some guy and takes donations for hosting has a better grasp of funding than Cohost did

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            3 个月前

            (smashes imaginary intercom button) “Who is this ‘some guy’? Find him and find out what he knows!!”

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      i used (and use, until the shutdown) as my primary social media site. i’m not surprised, but i can’t say it hasn’t been disappointing. for all the issues it has (and it did have a lot) it was pretty much the only site that felt somewhat cozy to use for me. stings quite a bit

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about “ontologically, is ‘superhuman prediction’ the same class as superintelligence?”

    why? oh, y’know, just things:

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      I’ve clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn’t just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You’d prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I’m fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.

      Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?

      How did you go from “predict the future”, an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.

      I’ll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      ‘This tool can do X at a superhuman level’ is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      how’s the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        we have some dedicated Nix threads on FreeAsm, our community for open source stuff that might give you a good recap of the latest stuff. where I’m sitting as a former Nix contributor and advocate is — nothing is fixed, all this obvious fash shit worked so well it’s being tried in other open source communities, and I really would like a nice alternative to NixOS so I can finally release a lot of the Nix stuff I’ve been sitting on (and also because nixpkgs keeps breaking — so many maintainers left that some of the further corners of the package set I use are already showing a lot of rot)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.

    Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.

    This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    I told one of my college professors I’d been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said “can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it” and without thinking I said “why would I use chat-gpt? It’s rubbish” and his face dropped. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.

    This was after he’d said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    via mastodon

    image description

    a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:

    lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :

    are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.

    but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.

    but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.

    maybe you’re not being negative enough

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    saw this ridiculous shit on the side of a jag on the highway a little bit ago

    best guess is rental-contract jag by a hustler, but the half-hearted AI non-mention is why I thought to post it here. we’re rapidly evolving in the grift cycle!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      It looks like a media prop making a soft parody of buzzword laced sites that don’t actually say anything. ‘we provide business solutions and services’ lol

      And of course, due to my browser being slightly locked down (or the whole site being broken) the whole ‘check it out’ button does nothing.

      The animated button that looks like it might direct you to a chat option (but actually just scrolls you back up to the start of the page for some unknown reason) is also great. (This is isn’t really their fault btw, it is that wordpress themes one)

      Hello world!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      From the reactions:

      “With enough garbage the model will become sentient”

      “I mean thats how humans are raised tho”

      AAAAAAAAAAAA

      (There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).

      As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. “Holy shit, I think therefore I am!”

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution

      • Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
      • Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
      • Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements

      ah good, we’re still on schedule for that I guess

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      3 个月前

      you left the best one:

      First successful experiments in “temporal arbitrage” using quantum prediction models

      not only they know about “temporal arbitrage experiments” but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment

      • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 个月前

        Frankly, it just didn’t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 个月前

    A new substack about AI: Ludd. “Citizen Journalism on AI, Publishing, and the new Tech Landscape”. First post is about Repeater Books, Israel and AI: second is about AI and climate change.