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.)
In other news, it appears that Cloudflare has pulled a Crowdstrike
Claims to be against politics in the workplace, takes down rightwing websites anyway
can we print this on shirts and send it to their office(s)?
I guess the main problem is getting reaction shots with the recipients…
I would love this, lmfao
Databricks CEO: “we’ve already achieved AGI fam, the haters just keep moving the goalposts”
WTF are databricks? LLM feces?
I looked it up.
boring answer
the company is a data analytics platform. According to wikipedia they promote the model of a “data lakehouse”, a hydrid of a “data lake” and a “data warehouse”. I don’t know what any of this means
Sneer answer: 100% LLM feces. Databricks puts the anal in analytics
AFAIK data warehouse = regular database data lake = place to keep various files that don’t fit into DB
Data lakehouse aims to integrate these two, I don’t think it’s a totally stupid idea.
Yeah, fair. Wasn’t so much sneering at the idea of data storage, but the “data lakehouse” jumped out at me as a possible fun term to bring up.
So data lake and data warehouse are different words for the giant databases of business data that you can perform analytics on to understand your deep business lore or whatever. I assume that a data lake house is similar to the other two but poorly maintained and inconvenient to access, but with a very nice UI and a boat dock.
I’m pretty sure a data lakehouse is a database where if you insert data in it, it only appears two years later/earlier, and if you try to read from it, all the entries come from two years in the future/past. It’s very prone to predestination issues but can help with finding love
@cityofangelle.bsky.social comments:
HAHAAHHAHAAHHAAA
Anthropic has posted two jobs, both paying $200K+.
FOR WRITERS. (Looks like a policy/comms hybrid.)
ANTHROPIC.
IS WILLING TO PAY HALF A MILLION A YEAR.
FOR WRITERS.
Whatsamatter boys, can’t your plagiarism machine make a compelling case for you?
LOL. LMAO, even.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Maybe they just need to be *really* good at writing prompts.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 ᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏ
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Apparently they’re doing the same with video cutters, offering fairly well paid jobs for people to try and make themselves redundant.
sorry my brain’s already clocked out for the day (/week?), so [insert sneer here]
context is this
Meanwhile, the $800 million Kraken raised across its two recent rounds of financing further solidifies the company’s balance sheet before its planned IPO next year… Prior to the two rounds, Kraken had raised only $27 million in venture capital.
simply a mere 29.6x amplification. perfectly normal. 12000000% in line with the economic market shift between checks notes Less Than A Decade Ago and now
Reeks to me of a mad dash for all-important “exit” on the part of the VC firms who invested. Especially as public-market IPOs have become so rare compared to M&A deals or SPAC bullshit.
Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms
Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation “feature”, guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn’t get him or didn’t deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It’s such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.
Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:
It’s indeed the case that I haven’t been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it’d had Twitter’s options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven’t been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Uh, considering his recent twitter post… this sure is something. Also" “it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience” no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).
Small forum tyrants
From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their “Inkhaven Residency”. Feh.
ooooh photographic matthew embarking upon his f*shtech turn out loud at last?
Maybe? Or maybe they just had the right social connections to sell “blogging residency” as a thing that should be supported for some unspecified amount? I couldn’t find any more details.
Automattic has a budget for sponsoring events https://automattic.com/events/ but a web host based in San Francisco does not sponsor Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, and Gwern by accident.
I wanted to highlight this post from our own @self: https://mas.to/@zzt/115545758401562713
the feeling of launching an unreal tournament 2004 server by telling ucc-bin, the unrealscript compilation environment that knows itself as UnrealOS, to evaluate the editable scripts that made up the core of unreal tournament, its rich web admin interface, and the ecosystem of tools and facilities that make it nicer to host than quake, and remembering that unrealscript and self-hosted servers are both long dead and all this tech is used to make kids gamble in fortnite now
betrayal, that’s it
I hardly ever ran a server, as during the era I lived out in the country and could only get barely-capable rural wireless broadband, but it is galling what Epic threw away, especially now that they’ve memory-holed UT2K3/2K4 off of storefronts like GOG. It was perhaps the first commercial game I remember having a completely seamless cross-platform experience with, including Linux. As long as I had my CD key and the data files handy, it didn’t matter what OS I was installing on, just download the installer and go. I remember provisioning entire LAN parties and having a blast (and then reusing the CD key didn’t matter because we were partying out in the country with no chance of a good online experience anyway). Glad I was able to snag it from GOG before delisting, because I don’t know what happen to my original Mac DVD.
NAS: Found out just now that Simone Veil’s pictures for sad children is back online, and has been for a while now. Her art meant a lot to me when I was reading it. Just letting you all know in case it meant something to you too.
found this sneer-y blog post prompted by some linkedin lunatic posting his “agentic cockpit”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has caused backlash for Activision after AI slop Calling Cards were discovered in-game.
Beyond causing large-scale backlash on Reddit, Twitter and basically everywhere else, its also gotten called out by US Congressman Ro Khanna (also on Twitter).
obligatory: lmao ro khanna
The statistics back up his unease. Buy-now-pay-later services have exploded to 91.5 million users in the United States
with the rapidly checked population number I found (340.1m), that’s 26.9%
…, with 25% using the services to finance their groceries as of earlier this year
perfectly normal, I’m sure nothing can go wrong here. and this won’t be tied in with just the recent SNAP shit, either
what’s the german word for “the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up”?
It’s so weird to see Klarna on that list, because I keep forgetting Klarna is now a huge juggernaut, not the little service that every etailer here in Sweden uses for checkout services
let’s hope that the outcomes of this helps them become a weeeee teensy l’il curious financial service again 😶
Achterbahnschraubeninkrementallösungsaußerplanmäßigedekonstruktionsgefühl
no bolts!
but otherwise? I mean, pretty close.
(yes I did upvote this post)
wasn’t sure if it was “schrauben” or “bolzen” that were used in roller coasters 😁
I’d be lying if I told you I knew! my most interesting interaction with technisch-mechanisch deutsche has been through the lens of shorthand column names in an oracle db (where truncated col name length limit caused applied). no, not kidding. that was an interesting project more ways than one!
(very Choose Your Own Adventure db schema too, and I suspect I’m still among the only in country who have strong knowledge about it today)
it’s worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it’s 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i’ve found, so it’s closer to 34%
from what i understand, american anomaly is that they take debt like that even when not strictly necessary in order to pump up their credit scores which might be useful later, but even then, 9% of population relies on going to loan shark the app in order to get food, absolutely nothing to look at here, move along,
it’s worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it’s 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i’ve found, so it’s closer to 34%
yep, entirely correct. and the numbers will also only reflect for those that are loantakers/account holders (which implies an even smaller number), because only one person needs to take out the bnpl to groceries it up for family support
I just didn’t have the time to dig into the numbers properly this morning when I posted
it’s all bad. just every single fucking part.
And most stats are flying under the radar because the Trump administration has made it impossible to get reliable data on things. But at least we live in a rational market system that optimally allocates resources, so I’m sure the decision-makers will handle this situation wisely and—
Not wanting to be left behind, more established finance companies are racing toward BNPL now, too … What started as a niche checkout option is becoming embedded financial infrastructure.
Morris sees this shift happening everywhere. “When I talk to some of these software companies that are now embedding payments, lending and insurance,” he told me, “and you say, ‘Okay, five years from now, where are you going to make your money?’” the answer surprises even veteran investors like him. “They say, ‘You know what, I think I’m going to make more money in embedded finance than I am in my core software.’”
Continued Morris: “It starts off as a nice little add-on, but when the powers of the marketplace drive down the returns in the core business, it’s often these financing businesses that have the greatest longevity and market power.
“I’ve made a self-licking lollipop so the fun times will never end and I see no way this could ever go wrong.”
what’s the german word for “the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up”?
The word you are looking for is “Tja”.
I was mostly riffing on the Internet Meme of “what’s the german word for…” but you are not wrong
most BNPL loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus, creating what regulators call “phantom debt.” That means other lenders can’t see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.
Only good things can come of this.
right? for like 18~24mo now, the autoplag “boom” and the fucked up neo-credit-arrangements in real estate (again) have been my primary guesses for how this shit is all going to up in vapour
and then suddenly a surprise third entrant!
My clients’ billing systems now send me invoice factoring spam every month, which is basically the same trade as a payday loan or bnpl. I worry how many other freelancers are clicking that button and how this has become so normalized, it’s bad enough out there already, without paying 2.5% per month.
jesus, that seems insidious
and unfortunately I speak enough ghoul that I suspect I know how that’s being sold, too! a way for companies to “manage outflow”? and perhaps a dash of “cultivating a reputable $x base” in there too?
nvm that these intermediation fuckers are going the standard Bridgetroll[0] route too, which is also a problem
[0] - rentseeker
invoice factoring
Is that somewhat new in the US? I recall seeing ads for it here in Sweden for 15 years or more.
For me, I started noticing Taulia spam via a clients SAP last Jan, and Bill.com started doing similar a few months after. I think the new part is that these are now integrated into the platforms, like how Klarna bnpl is directly integrated into the ecom storefronts.
The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher
All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.
Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.
Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled “hallucinations”). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.
They’ve always wanted this, indeed. There’s some comfort to me in the reminder that this year’s layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.
Being really “smart” (along some axis) doesn’t make you succesful or even happy.
I feel like “we’ll just build a world model” is on the same level as saying " I’ll just solve the P vs NP problem."
Not content with forcing AI on anyone and everyone, Apple has forced the lying machines on AI-rejecting writing software Scrivener.
Many of these tools are useful, and don’t use generative AI – that is, AI that creates – but use AI to summarize texts or alter images.
Oh no, has this become the common definition of generative AI? I’m guessing some AI company must have tried to launder the name and make it seem less bad. Both of those examples are clear-cut generative AI.
