Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
Google is space data-center curious, too:
https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/
A redditor posted the latest Pivot to AI propaganda to r/betteroffline, where it currently has around 560 votes. This upset and confused a great many prompt enthusiasts in the comments, which goes to show that a kicked dog yelps.
ITT: new synonym for promptfondler: “brain cuck”
Found a high quality sneer of OpenAI from Los Angeles Review of Books: Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities
Unstoppable IP enforcers meet unmovable slop generator?
Plus, the authors currently suing OpenAI have gotten their hands on emails and internal Slack messages discussing their deletion of the LibGen dataset - a development which opens the company up to much higher damages and sanctions from the court for destroying evidence.
Still think it is wild they used the libgen dataset(s) and basically gotten away with it apart from some minor damages only for US publishers (who actually registered their copyright). Even more so as my provider blocks libgen etc.
wild article about content scraping nonprofit common crawl
tl;dr they’ve been faking deleting data upon request (in ways that I find very funny) and their head is noxious even for a tech bro
also is it just me or does SV have a particular gift for perverting the nonprofit concept
He said that Common Crawl is “making an earnest effort” to remove content but that the file format in which Common Crawl stores its archives is meant “to be immutable. You can’t delete anything from it.”
makes me wonder if it’s some crypto hangover
In 2023, he sent a letter urging the U.S. Copyright Office not “to hinder the development of intelligent machines” and included two illustrations of robots reading books.
cheerleaders for creepiest weirdos in sv try to deflect criticism by becoming impossible to parody
sv does have for some time a peculiar understanding of this and also some other terms, like “consent”, “ownership”, “privacy”, “safety”,
Anyone knows who’s (presumably) Tor from the “Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities” Youtube channel and what’s up with his ideological commitments? Somebody recommended me this video on some Wikipedia grifter, I was enjoying it until suddenly (ca. 23:20 ) he name-drops Scott Alexander as “a writer whom I’m a big fan of”. I thought, should somebody tell him. Then I looked up and the guy has an entire video on subtypes of rationalists, so he knows, and chose to present as a fan anyway. Huh. However as far as a cursory glance goes the channel doesn’t look to bat for, you know, “human biodiversity”. (I haven’t watched the rat video because I don’t want to ruin my week)
The rat video starts with him proclaiming that in rationalism he “found his people”, that was the point where I bailed.
Big Yud posts another “banger”[1], and for once the target audience isn’t impressed:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3q8uu2k6AfaLAupvL/the-tale-of-the-top-tier-intellect#comments
I skimmed it. It’s terrible. It’s a long-winded parable about some middling chess player who’s convinced he’s actually good, and a Socratic strawman in the form of a young woman who needles him.
Contains such Austean gems as this
If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington – measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation – it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
In the end, both strawmen are killed by AI-controlled mosquito drones, leaving everyone else feeling relieved .
Commenters seem miffed that Yud isn’t cleaning up his act and writing more coherently so as to warn the world of Big Bad AI, but apparently he just can’t help himself.
[1] if by banger you mean a long, tedious turd. 42 minute read!
Some juicy extracts:
Soon enough then the appointed day came to pass, that Mr. Assi began playing some of the town’s players, defeating them all without exception. Mr. Assi did sometimes let some of the youngest children take a piece or two, of his, and get very excited about that, but he did not go so far as to let them win. It wasn’t even so much that Mr. Assi had his pride, although he did, but that he also had his honesty; Mr. Assi would have felt bad about deceiving anyone in that way, even a child, almost as if children were people.
Yud: “Woe is me, a child who was lied to!”
Tessa sighed performatively. “It really is a classic midwit trap, Mr. Humman, to be smart enough to spout out words about possible complications, until you’ve counterargued any truth you don’t want to hear. But not smart enough to know how to think through those complications, and see how the unpleasant truth is true anyways, after all the realistic details are taken into account.” […] “Why, of course it’s the same,” said Mr. Humman. “You’d know that for yourself, if you were a top-tier chess-player. The thing you’re not realizing, young lady, is that no matter how many fancy words you use, they won’t be as complicated as real reality, which is infinitely complicated. And therefore, all these things you are saying, which are less than infinitely complicated, must be wrong.”
Your flaw dear Yud isn’t that your thoughts cannot out-compete the complexity of reality, it’s that it’s a new complexity untethered from the original. Retorts to you wild sci-fi speculations are just minor complications brought by midwits, you very often get the science critically wrong, but expect to still be taken seriously! (One might say you share a lot of Humman misquoting and misapplying “econ 101”. )
“Look, Mr. Humman. You may not be the best chess-player in the world, but you are above average. [… Blah blah IQ blah blah …] You ought to be smart enough to understand this idea.”
Funilly enough the very best chess players like Nakamura or Carlsen will readily call themselves dumbasses outside of chess.
“Well, by coincidence, that is sort of the topic of the book I’m reading now,” said Tessa. “It’s about Artificial Intelligence – artificial super-intelligence, rather. The authors say that if anyone on Earth builds anything like that, everyone everywhere will die. All at the same time, they obviously mean. And that book is a few years old, now! I’m a little worried about all the things the news is saying, about AI and AI companies, and I think everyone else should be a little worried too.”
Of course this a meandering plug to his book!
“The authors don’t mean it as a joke, and I don’t think everyone dying is actually funny,” said the woman, allowing just enough emotion into her voice to make it clear that the early death of her and her family and everyone she knew was not a socially acceptable thing to find funny. “Why is it obviously wrong?”
They aren’t laughing at everyone dying, they’re laughing at you. I would be more charitable with you if the religion you cultivate was not so dangerous, most of your anguish is self-inflicted.
“So there’s no sense in which you’re smarter than a squirrel?” she said. “Because by default, any vaguely plausible sequence of words that sounds it can prove that machine superintelligence can’t possibly be smarter than a human, will prove too much, and will also argue that a human can’t be smarter than a squirrel.”
Importantly you often portray ASI as being able to manipulate humans into doing any number of random shit, and you have an unhealthy association of intelligence with manipulation. I’m quite certain I couldn’t get at squirrel to do anything I wanted.
"You’re not worried about how an ASI […] beyond what humans have in the way of vision and hearing and spatial visualization of 3D rotating shapes.
Is that… an incel shape-rotator reference?
If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington – measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation – it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
How do you write like this? How do you pick a normal joking observation and then add more words to make it worse?
One commenter cites von Neumann’s minimax theorem to argue that there is an “inexploitable” strategy for chess, and then another commenter starts talking about the well-ordering theorem.
Of course, all of that is irrelevant because chess is a finite, sequential, perfect-information game.
First comment: “the world is bottlenecked by people who just don’t get the simple and obvious fact that we should sort everyone by IQ and decide their future with it”
No, the world is bottlenecked by idiots who treat everything as an optimization problem.
@sinedpick @awful.systems @gerikson @awful.systems
The world is hamstrung by people who only believe there is one kind of intelligence, it can be measured linearly, and it is the sole determinant of human value.
The Venn diagram of these people and closet eugenicists looks like a circle if you squint at it.
42 minute read
Maybe if you’re a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in “Skewers”, Washington, vs. “Forks”, Washington, as made famous by Twilight.
Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yud’s stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!
My summary:
Part 1. A chess player, “Mr. Humman”, plays a match against “Mr. Assi” and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, “Socratessa”, or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are “Mr. Chimzee” and “Mr. Neumann”.
Both “Humman” and “Socratessa” are strawmen. “Socratessa” is described as thus:
One of the less polite young ladies of the town, whom some might have called a troll,
Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:
“Oh, my dear young lady,” Mr. Humman said, quite kindly as was his habit when talking to pretty women potentially inside his self-assessed strike zone
I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so here’s what I’ll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that it’s completely transparent that Yud doesn’t want you to like this guy. Yud’s methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I don’t like this character, but not because of Yud’s intent.
Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. That’s it. It’s unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another.
The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yud’s whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
Yeah, after establishing a deeply tortured chess metaphor and beating it to death and beyond, Yud proceeds to just straight-up bitching about how nobody is taking his book seriously. It just fucking keeps going even as it dips into the most pathetic and hateful eugenics part of their whole ideology because of course it does.
“Outsiders aren’t agreeing with me. I must return to the cult and torture my flock with more sermons.” type shit
eugenics
Yes, the bit about John von Neumann sounds like he is stuck in the 1990s: “there must be a gene for everything!” not today “wow genomes are vast interconnected systems and individual genes get turned on and off by environmental factors and interventions often have the reverse effect we expect.” Scott Alexander write an essay admiring the Hungarian physics geniuses and tutoring.
yud’s scientific model is aristotlean, i.e. he thinks of things he thinks should be true, then rejects counter-evidence with a bayesian cudgel or claims of academic conspiracy. So yeah genes are feature flags, why wouldnt they be (and eugenics is just SRE ig)
The dumb strawman protagonist is called “Mr. Humman” and the ASI villain is called “Mr. Assi”. I don’t think any parody writer trying to make fun of rationalist writing could come up with something this bad.
The funniest comment is the one pointing out how Eliezer screws up so many basic facts about chess that even an amateur player can see all the problems. Now, if only the commenter looked around a little further and realized that Eliezer is bullshitting about everything else as well.
Let’s not forget that the socratic strawwoman is named “Socratessa”
More wiki drama: Jimbo tries to both sides the gaza genocide
NotAwfulTech and AwfulTech converged with some ffmpeg drama on twitter over the past few days starting here and still ongoing. This is about an AI generated security report by Google’s “Big Sleep” (with no corresponding Google authored fix, AI or otherwise). Hackernews discussed it here. Looking at ffmpeg’s security page there have been around 24 bigsleep reports fixed.
ffmpeg pointed out a lot of stuff along the lines of:
- They are volunteers
- They have not enough money
- Certain companies that do use ffmpeg and file security reports also have a lot of money
- Certain ffmpeg developers are willing to enter consulting roles for companies in exchange for money
- Their product has no warranty
- Reviewing LLM generated security bugs royally sucks
- They’re really just in this for the video codecs moreso than treating every single Use-After-Free bug as a drop-everything emergency
- Making the first 20 frames of certain Rebel Assault videos slightly more accurate is awesome
- Think it could be more secure? Patches welcome.
- They did fix the security report
- They do take security reports seriously
- You should not run ffmpeg “in production” if you don’t know what you’re doing.
All very reasonable points but with the reactions to their tweets you’d think they had proposed killing puppies or something.
A lot of people seem to forget this part of open source software licenses:
BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW
Or that venerable old C code will have memory safety issues for that matter.
It’s weird that people are freaking out about some UAFs in a C library. This should really be dealt with in enterprise environments via sandboxing / filesystem containers / aslr / control flow integrity / non-executable memory enforcement / only compiling the codecs you need… and oh gee a lot of those improvements could be upstreamed!
For a moment there I was worried that ffmpeg had turned fash.
Anyway, amazing job ffmpeg, great responses. No notes
The ffmpeg social media maintainer is an Elon fan so when he purchased Twitter and made foolish remarks about rewriting it all in C and how only hardcore programmers are cool that write C/assembly they quickly jumped on it.
https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/1598655873097912320
Ya maybe it’s a way to attract more contributors or donation money. Felt a bit weird after Elon was shitting on all the people who built Twitter and firing them.
🙃🙃🙃
🙃🙃🙃
Watching another rationalist type on twitter become addicted to meth. You guys weren’t joking.
(no idea who - just going by the subtweets).
Like a complete fucking idiot, I paid for two years of protonmail right before discovering they are fascists. I would like to move to another provider. I have until August. I have been considering Forward Email. Anyone have thoughts on this provider or recommendations?
Im very very happy on Fastmail. They are sensible people who offer mainly email (and calendar stuff) with no overpromises. Their servers are hosted in the USA tho, so that may affect your choice.
Fuuuuuuck. Thanks for the info but i hate it ):
I’m in the same boat. From what I’ve read I am planning on migrating to tuta when it runs out.
haven’t seen them before, but a short tour around their infra/systems providers isn’t particularly exciting - depending on both your threat model and what-you-want in a vendor
some parts/pages do provide some detail in encouraging depth, but I’d have to do a much more full review to give you a good answer
there’s been a couple of “where email” threads over the last year, tuta’s still one of the top options on that but you can check the threads if you want to see some of the other promising options
I am using posteo.de. They are good but I dislike that they have no option for using your own domain which makes switching provider really annoying. If I had to choose a provider again I would probably go with mailbox.org.
apologies for just linking to my own bsky post but I’m lazy: https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3m4qjnkeyls23
tl;dr I’ve gotten a bit suspicious that “AI users will be genocided” posts on reddit are a nazi op
not outside of the fascist playbook to claim that they are the real victims. The example that comes to mind is the myth of white genocide, but also literally any fascist rhetoric is like that.
It’s well trodden ground to say that genAI usage and support for genAI resonates with populist/reactionary/fascist themes in that it inherently devalues and dehumanises, and it promotes anti-intellectualism. If you can be replaced by AI, what worth do you have? And why think if the AI can do it for you?
So, of course this stuff being echoed in spaces where the majority are ignorant to the nazi tilt. They can’t and don’t understand fascism on a structural level, they can only identify it when it’s trains and gas chambers.
It’s been a while since I used Reddit. Is the thesis that subscribers to ChatGPT will be rounded up and killed? By whom? For what stated reason? It sounds like a weird inversion of victimhood, considering the number of GenAI user (even if they’re just casual users) and the massive money and hype around GenAI by companies and way too many govs.
@gerikson @techtakes It’s classic DARVO gaslighting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
frankly that’s the most detailed I’ve seen it get. usually it’s more like this
jfc
curious, that art style in that reply strongly matches the image I saw on this toot drifting by in my timeline earlier
I haven’t touched image generators and idk how different their products are, if at all. but I think of this as the default AI “illustrated” style. very low on detail outside of the objects of focus, heavy line work, flat, rounded, muted colors
muted colors
A lot of it looks like it was pissed on.
this is weird. My first thought is that it’s just another vector of normalization for the idea that people who are afraid of and Post about genocide or other forms of discriminatory violence are not to be taken seriously. By putting a variety of insane victimhood appropriating subcultures into the internet milieu, it allows people to ignore what’s happening (and what may be about to happen) in the real world, where groups of people actually are subject to fascistic violence.
Probably one part normalisation, one part AI supporters throwing tantrums when people don’t treat them like the specialiest little geniuses they believe they are. These people have incredibly fragile egos, after all.
That is my thought as well. It’s like the “you call everyone you disagree with a Nazi” argument from the 90s and 00s - discrediting attempts to call out fascist and genocidal ideas creates a lot of cover for those ideas to spread without being appropriately checked. It helps create a situation where serious and respectable people can keep arguing that things aren’t that bad all the way until they get pushed onto a cattle car.
Checked back on the smoldering dumpster fire that is Framework today.
Linux Community Ambassadors Tommi and Fraxinas have jumped ship, sneering the company’s fash turn on the way out.
I just saw this. I sent an email to Framework a few days ago asking if they would delete my account and letting them know this was the reason.
Boss at new job just told me we’re going all-in on AI and I need to take a core role in the project
They want to give LLMs access to our wildly insecure mass of SQL servers filled with numeric data
Security a non factor
😂🔫
Sounds like the thing to do is to say yes boss, get Baldur Bjarnason’s book on business risks and talk to legal, then discover some concerns that just need the boss’ sign-off in writing.
Heartbreaking: I work in the cesspool called the Indian tech industry
They will stonewall me and move forward regardless. I’m going to do what I can, raise a stink and polish my CV
Thoughts / notes on Nostr? A local on a tech site is pushing it semi-hard, and I just remember it being mentioned in the same breath as Bluesky back in the day. It ticks a lot of techfash boxes - decentralized, “uncensorable”, has Bitcoin’s stupid Lightning protocol built in.
fuck nostr. flere and fullsquare covered the details well tho
nostr neatly covers all obsessions of dorsey. it’s literally fash-tech (original dev, fiatjaf, is a right-wing nutjob; and current development is driven by alex gleason of the truth dot social fame), deliberately designed to be impossible to moderate (“censorship-resilient”); the place is full of fascists, promptfondlers and crypto dudes.
gleason is also responsible for soapbox, which is pleroma frontend (or maybe fork?) used as far as i know exclusively by nazis (which also makes defederation easier)
did you also see the FUTO shit? it’s getting Red String On Corkboard bad to track all these fuckers
I tried making one a few years back, maybe time to update it.
https://nfultz.github.io/murderboard/wpc-murderboard.htm
(arrow keys to scroll)
exploding-heads, openly trumpist lemmy instance, fucked off there when admin got bored of baiting normal people, make of that what you will
flashback: even back then handful of regulars objected that nostr is packed with cryptobros and spam, so it’s like that for 2y minimum
Jack Dorsey seems to like throwing money at it:
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has endorsed and financially supported the development of Nostr by donating approximately $250,000 worth of Bitcoin to the developers of the project in 2023, as well as a $10 million cash donation to a Nostr development collective in 2025.
