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.

Last week’s thread

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

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        I saw people say they would add 10% opaque layers of the musk with Epstein’s accomplice (whos name i forgot for a second and too lazy to look her up) photo. Would be nice if there was a tool to do so automatically. (Not that i post on twitter anymore).

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          tbh that sounds like a pretty easy script to write! Too bad I am not near a computer rn

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            I got nerd sniped into trying to resize felons_musk_and_maxwell.webp to the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the same magick invocation but I need to sleep so I’m giving up for now.

          • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            Wouldn’t really need a script, though. Just open up photoshop or GIMP and add a layer after everything is finished.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 个月前

              But that doesn’t scale properly, you want ideally some sort of browser extension that just automatically does it for you before the data gets send to twitter.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        It’s almost completely ineffective, sorry. It’s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

        On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn’t yet been invalidated and there’s no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.

        I think that “force-feeding” is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that “forced” input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          yeah this is the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about

          fucking reCaptcha is literally mass-weaponising users for data filtration, and there is no good counter besides just not using reCaptcha (which is something one can’t easily pull off without things like regulatory action, massive reputational problems that make people gtfo, etc)

          I have similar worries about cloudflare being such a massive chokepoint and using that position to enable “ai bot filter” services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and I’m not entirely sure what the case grounds/structure on that would be (if any)

          the only other viable strategy at the moment is fully breaking contact with any potential bad traffic systems, and that’s extremely fucking dire because that’s yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. I’ve had issues where I can’t get past it presumably just because I’m using some in-application browser just to get a login cookie, but other times it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked.

            • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              0·
              2 个月前

              it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked

              Fucking what. I’ve heard of sites blocking curl and I’ve been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now I’m cursed with the knowledge that I could probably just scrape stuff from everywhere

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    Forget Gladwell

    All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I’ve encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

    Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

    Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      It’s weird how rarely I see people point this, but in theory this kind of boilerplate should be technically meaningless. If copyright protections include the privilege to use the work for training a machine learning algorithm, you need explicit permission anyway. OTOH if it’s fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holder’s objection doesn’t matter.

      For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus they’re not only infringing on typical “all rights reserved” works, but also things such as Free software whose license terms require attribution if used in derivative work, and especially share-alike copyleft licensed work.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        I thinkt it’s pretty well-lknown that Spotify got all its initial music from Oink. They moved fast, got dominant, and were able to present the record labels with a big audience prepared to pay for streaming music. The labels quickly ensured they’d get the lion’s share of that revenue.

        OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didn’t work, and they’re in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what they’re doing is legal, it will cost them a lot in litigation fees, coupled with the public perception that these culture vampires are ripping off the poor honest author. Not a good place to be in.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.

      Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        At some point, something is going to reveal that all the money in AI has gone into power costs for datacenters and NVidia chips and that the AI companies themselves aren’t doing so hot. I hope it’s the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.

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

      lmao incredible

      Then there’s BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had “created a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease.” How’s the machine brain doing these days? Well, the company’s lead program failed in the clinic last year, and in April announced major layoffs.

      just who buys this shit? this reads like refined crypto nonsense

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        People who don’t get much tech/overdose on hype and heard of alphafold. Imagine how much worse things could be now after the Nobel.

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            Given the past several decades of trickle-up economics, I think we haven’t seen anything close to the bottom of the well of basically-idle capital seeking unrealistic returns.

            I’d go so far as to say that the current crop of bubbles possibly represents the greatest downards wealth transfer (albeit from billionaires to millionaires rather than, y’know, working people) since the second world war, but I haven’t done anything near the amount of research necessary for that to be more than exciting rhetoric.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Dude is about 3 years too late but I guess it’s always 8 o’clock in the outrage store.

      For reference, HN went wild on this submission from a pretty obvious 4chan troll (the self-described “Black developer” just so happened to include references to a Stormfront post (since removed)):

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487854

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      just imagine the kinda thinking that goes into even “I can make this post for fun, that’ll be a gas”

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more “master copy” or “master recording” than “master of a slave”. This isn’t IDE. Who names their VCS branch “slave”?

        Well, I guess that guy does.

        • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more “master copy” or “master recording” than “master of a slave”. This isn’t IDE. Who names their VCS branch “slave”?

          In a better world, this would’ve probably been a solid argument for letting the master/slave naming convention stick around. We don’t live in a better world.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          the thing is that the git branch naming was only one of the places among many where this was changed, and in many databases (and often other server-subsystem architectures) master/slave terminology was quite present. iirc there are still some that stick by it today (mostly out of direct choice by project maintainers)

          it’s the same thing as whitelist/blacklist, vs allowlist/denylist (or others) - when there’s bad shit linked in baggage, and the cost of changing it (by habit and choice) isn’t all that much, there’s not really any reason to hold by the the old loaded shit

          harm reduction comes in many forms

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            Yeah. I remember when the company I used to work for switched our style guide to allowlist/denylist and apart from That One Guy the overall reaction was a big “eh? sure, whatever”. Nobody is out here pretending that this kind of change is going to completely end racism or even that it’s going to have a major impact, but past a certain point continuing to casually throw the memory of chattel slavery around is just cringe.

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            Note that I was specifically talking about branch names in Git, where it’s debatable if the default name “master” even originated from the master/slave nomenclature.

            The problematic nature of the term is a lot more evident in other contexts where a counterpart of the “master” is in fact called a “slave”. Whether that’s reason enough to change the names in any particular instance is not something I’ll comment on.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        This guy would be a lot happier if someone had given him a pound of weed when he was 12 then introduced him to college football fandom.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Religion is the opium of the masses

      And I’m increasingly scared they’re gonna kick our asses

      Maybe it’s time for all those mugs

      To shut up and start hitting drugs

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      "Life, it never die

      Women are my favorite guy."

      Wonder what is up with the folks and them getting into rhymes/poetry. Jordan B Peterson does something simple (his pinned tweet as example here. But we know he fried parts of his brain using the russian coma rehab method.

      And it isn’t even the Sinterklaas period yet. No need for bad rhymes. (I’m also suddenly reminded of all the people who tried to ‘rap’ their messages in the late 90s).

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      I can pull finer bars out my arse than this fucking farce

      This is probably Grok - creativity from him’s pretty sparse

      Choom thinks he’s DOOM, but he won’t beat him any time soon

      With how much crack this whack goes through, he’ll forget this before noon

      (I’m no MF DOOM, but anything I can put out will beat this artless twat any day)

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      It doesn’t even make any sense 😭 surely “secular religion” and “childless hedonism” are not the same thing??

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    In other news, there’s been a statement on AI training that’s racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:

    Now, I’m way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I’ll whip one out:

    Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists’ work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman’s run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    Kendrick Zitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan’s recent kicking upstairs, and Google’s bleak future.

    Main highlight was this snippet:

    I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google’s ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google’s gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Man, it’s almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.

      If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, how’s GE doing these days again?

      • thesporkeffect@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        It’s not that the money is unaware this kills the business. They know. They don’t care because their process is business-agnostic. By design and intent they extract value from the business like it was a capri sun pouch and when line no longer goes up, it’s discarded for the next one.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      the Determinate Nix move was such an obvious next step I was convinced they had already done it; I guess they can let the mask fall off now that they’ve consolidated their control over the community. as was pointed out on mastodon, Determinate Systems previously promised this wasn’t their goal, which goes to show how much a promise from a fascist is worth.

      fortunately it seems like Lix has a NixOS fork on the horizon? I only know about it because the “just fork it or shut up” assholes are now complaining that a fork’s happening (which they seem to only know about by obsessively monitoring Lix’s git forge — I don’t think there’s been an announcement yet)

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          I hope so too! I like their approach so far, and a NixOS fork by the same folks seems like something I’d switch to as soon as I reasonably could

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 个月前

            in other news, holy fuck nix

            notably, this weirdo seems to have only started the podcast that looks like the only thing they’re supposedly known for a couple months before the Nix open letter, and I really don’t recognize them from the Nix community otherwise. they also appear to be using their podcast to interview Steering Committee candidates, which seems like a real obvious way to influence the selection process given the kinds of questions they seem to be asking.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      This tool solely exists so that you can ask it questions and get assistance, but also we disavow any responsibility for the answers to the questions we just told you to ask it. Has this kind of clause been held up in court anywhere? Like, I’m sure it has but it seems like the same logic would be ridiculous in any other context. Like, consider the fraught legal history of the anarchist cookbook.