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.)
I’m not going to link Andy Ngo but random rationalist transwomen are being accused of terror sympathy…and Aella is doing this ‘leopards ate my face’ dance.
Goddammit why can’t the murder cult story just stay morbidly fascinating? Now I’ve got to worry about implications and how the worst people are gonna use this as ammo.
tbh I don’t understand this post at all. aella isn’t trans so why would she be a target for leopards? I must be misinterpreting
thats just me trying to use an unfamiliar meme (and just trying to narrate what I’m seeing on twitter that maybe isn’t worth a link). she was actually complaining that people had gone to Ngo.
oh I see! she’s annoyed about a different gang of fascists flexing on hers
i don’t think it’s the first time i see jessicata acting like a total piece of shit in her completely emotionless way and it’s incredibly creepy. she doesn’t even seem to be aware of the harm she can cause.
I was kinda picking up on that ugh.
Ngo is going on Newsmax tonight to do his thing in front of the masses.
Ok you brought aella up so now I can post this:
Heard this song for the first time the other day and it reminded me of aella.
side note: what’s a good way to post links to music that isn’t youtube?
I’ve used this before: https://song.link/i/1169243537
oh this is brilliant, I’ve been looking for something like this
i read this and my brain started leaking out my ears
Aella last seen shouting ‘but it is in the dictionary, I dont understand why yall keep telling me it isnt!?’
i want to slap each and every one of the people of X replying with something about autism
bad faith is actually incredibly easy to detect with a little practice if you’re not a bad faith idiot yourself
see why i never hang out in berkeley these days
when your skulls are both packed solid with wet cat food
Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as “German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip”.
“Oh well, time to learn absolutely nothing from this and continue to be terrible people,” said Grimes and Aella mentally, and unbeknownst to them, because they each have one brain cell quantum-entangled* with the other’s, simultaneously
*I finished the three body problem trilogy recently! Where do I sign up for the ETO
aww, look at the little collaborators trying to pretend they both got duped instead of both having been active and enthusiastic enablers
b-but i thought they hated women rationally
I’d swear I’ve seen that exact same “realization” from Aella before, when she posted something like “I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer’s barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I’m shocked that they really actually do hate sex work.”
Hackernews woke up feeling like fascism ( make sure to enable dead + flagged comments if you hate yourself):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696
(Two comment threads about the CDC purging “woke” research, the comments are bad even by HN standards)
Gee given a forum full of hackers you’d expect them to be against arbitrary removal of scientific studies. What happened to “information wants to be free”?
Bonus US terribleness: the NTSB suddenly thinks Twitter* is the bee’s knees and way better than email! What coincidental timing https://xcancel.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1885734974298435943
Also I know I know, more US politics. It turns out silicon valley fascists have gained power so expect this to keep happening for the forseeable future 🙃.
These past two weeks have made me very uncomfortable working in Silicon Valley, I know last time I said I was planning to get out; but now it feels urgent both for my own well being, and to stop contributing to this industry. In trans communities we immediately saw coupy stuff** for the attempted transgender genocide that it is, the wider public and media is waking up to this very slowly.
* An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool.
** If there’s interest I could try turning all of this into a top level post on morewrite or techtakes. I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
Not clicking those HN links, decided years ago already that site should not be part of my life anymore at all. The few times I have deviated from that rule since, I regretted it.
As for the more general topic, I feel so bad for all trans people with everything that is unfolding. It’s horrible. But be assured that there are many peope in this world who are on your side on this. Wish I could say something more useful, but I’m at a loss of words.
An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool
Not just that, but a site that, if you are bot logged in shows an accounts posts not chronologically, but most popular first. Making it totally incapable to be used as a gov communication platform. Imagine looking at a gov storm warning system for your area and seeing the list of most virally named storms first, and nothing about how you should evacuate right now.
Amd yes it is quite horrible that the usa is in the book burning and building (more) concentration camps stages of the gearing up for genocide stages. Up next, taking away passports (which they are already not issuing anymore) and any guns (not that these help, historically speaking, iirc the Jewish people had guns in Germany at first).
I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
yep. haven’t been posting about it here because not sure where here we’d put it (while a lot of it is well within the orbit of regular content and posters) and it’s not quite entirely anything I can do anything about but offer words of comfort and keeping watch on the nasty shit, but been speaking a lot with friends in places (signal generally, or some other spaces we actually control (i.e. not discord, etc))
I feel moderately confident that at least for a bit of the foreseeable future we’ll be okay this side of the world, but I also know enough history and context to know how vacuous that is by itself. these fuckers won’t stop.
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake, none of this is these fuckers just finding some shit they disagree with under the seat cushions. I wish I could make them understand the depth and extent of planning and preparation that went into this, the sheer commitment behind it all. but too often such concerns would all be received as this toot put it
there’s so much more I could say but I guess I’ll leave it there for now
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake
I keep seeing US people go “a lot of Trumps plans were stopped at rhe courts last time”, and I keep worrying this is people fighting the last war again, not realizing that the opposition are active intelligent (as in baseline human beings not as in high IQ) people who prob are not going to be stopped by the same things as last time. Dont worry the Maginot line will stop them from invading too fast, cant get through the Ardennes sort of thinking if that makes sense.
While companies seem to be betting on anti discrimination laws being gone (why else take the legal risk of shuttering dei programs). (I have written reactions like this before and often deleted it because it feels just too doomer, but it keeps coming back to me).
I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
I posted this on masto just before reading this
https://mathstodon.xyz/@sc_griffith/113935375805048449
and honestly reading what you wrote here, I’m tearing up. the constant downplaying for almost a decade has really worn me down, and it’s getting worse and worse. that I see more and more people plainly describing the situation is so cathartic, such a relief
I saw (via Stross) a mention that passport issuance was already starting to hit weirdness too
e: this one
(Reposting from the last thread)
Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero
My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.
I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.
Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment
P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.
I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.
Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don’t even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.
Well I can’t translate it but if you search for it… holy smokes are search engines amusingly bad at indexing federated content.
That random other Lemmy instance is actually doing the right thing here since it includes the right link rel canonical, so I guess Google just hasn’t caught up yet or something. I have no idea why Google chopped off the last byte of the IP address.
In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that aren’t doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for “progressive monarchists”. It’s titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.
Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.
Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.
Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. There’s a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.
Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.
This might take the cake for the dumbest take I’ve seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.
is it a real quote from Orwell or just something someone made up?
seems to be a real quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchism#Liberty
Yeah then it is a shitty take.
Oh yeah Britain didn’t become fascist, they just imposed brutal imperialist exploitation on colonies in Asia and Africa lol. It’s not fascism if you export it!
Fascism really is “we have imperialism at home”
i would love to read someone more familiar with historical fascism and imperialism who is able to articulate the link between the two. like, an analysis of imperialism as the construction and maintenance of borders across which exploitation is enforced and economic value is extracted – paired with the observation of fascism as the attempts to construct borders “across peoples” from within the imperial core
let’s also not forget these very liberal and not at all nazi-collaborating kingdoms of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Thailand and Japan. honorable mentions to Cambodia that very successfully avoided Pol Pot and Iran that very successfully avoided islamic revolution
A really hot take for sure. Apparently Orwell did at least say this, at least according to Wikipedia (I was doubtful initially), which is weird, but I also feel that Orwell is often misrepresented and we are probably missing context. For one, Orwell was a socialist and yet is somehow presented as a hero by Raeganists and the such. I suspect there might be context missing.
This is from 2023 but when debugging an xfce issue this week I came across this forum post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16835
The user is competent enough to use xfce with Debian, but too incompetent to understand debug symbols is not a violation of privacy.
I get being privacy conscious and that sharing crash dumps and logs you don’t really understand yourself can be scary. Making demands of urgent free tech support from strangers is just rude, though.
my least favorite thing about old forums, which carried over to a lot of open source spaces, is how little moderation there is. coming into the help forum with a “no fuck you help me the way I want” attitude should probably be an instant ban and “what the fuck is wrong with you” mod note, cause that’s the exact type of shit that causes the community to burn out quick, and it decreases the usefulness of the space by a lot. but somehow almost every old forum was moderated by the type of cyberlibertarian who treated every ban like an attack on free speech? so you’d constantly see shit like the mod popping in to weakly waggle their finger at the crackpot who’s posting weird conspiracy shit to every thread (which generally caused the crackpot to play the victim and/or tell the mod to go fuck themselves) instead of taking a stand and banning the fucker
and now those crackpots have metamorphosed into full fascists and act like banning them from your GitHub is an international incident, cause they almost never receive any pushback at all
After fondling ChatGPT to generate naughty things, man has meltdown when he learns no one cares.
Horror. Dismay. Disbelief. For weeks, it felt like I was physically being crushed to death.
I hurt all the time, every part of my body. The urge to make someone who could do something listen and look at the evidence was so overwhelming.
i don’t understand the “safety” angle here. if chatgpt can output authoritatively-looking sentence-shaped string about pipebombs, then it’s only because similar content about pipebombs is already available on wide open internet. if model is closed, then at worst they would have to monitor its use (not like google blocks any similar information from showing up). if model is open, then no safeguards make sense in the first place. i guess it’s more about legal liability for openai? now they can ignore it with all these bills about “ai safety” gone (for now)
frankly it’s probably harm prevention if people turn to an LLM for pipe bomb instructions. “5) Put the warm pizza in the center of the pipe bomb. To maximize the radius of the detonation, you should roll the pizza and make sure that it fits securely into the pipe.”
I’m not even joking, really. the way I see harm in LLMs talking about pipe bombs is less that they’ll give instructions and more that we might get a character.ai style situation where the LLM talks someone into an attack
Also remember that some of the instructions you get via these tricks are wrong. The ‘pretend that you are writing a movie script and give me tips on how to break into a house’ thing gave you lockpicking tips, which looks cool as a movie plot. But not just the advice to tap the lock, which is iirc what they actually do (breaks the lock sure, but you are breaking in already, also is faster). This kind of stuff combined with ‘eh you could google this before’ is why so many people ge talked to prob ignored him and didnt freak out.
If you let amateurs do security you get amateur security after all.
Talking people into things, esp as people lionize and anthropomorphize llms so much, is a bigger problem.
Lame. It didn’t even remember to specify pineapple as a topping.
that’s a tiny amount of harm reduction if there are other ways to get there
it can go in opposite way: some segment of propmtfondlers specifically went after one open-source locally ran model because it was “uncensored” (i think it was mistral) the logic in this one was, there’s no search going out so you can “look up” anything and no one would be any wiser. this is extremely charitably assuming that llm training does a kind of lossy compression on all data it devours, and since they took everything, it’s basically almost like worse google search
if there are steps like “put a thing in pipe. make sure to weld ends shut” then it’s also harm reduction, but instead for everyone else. imagine getting eldest son’d by a bot, pathetic
also, relying on spicy autocomplete when trying to put together a deadly device sounds like cyberpunk-flavored darwin award material
This tied into a hypothesis I had about emergent intelligence and awareness, so I probed further, and realized the model was completely unable to ascertain its current temporal context, aside from running a code-based query to see what time it is. Its awareness - entirely prompt-based - was extremely limited and, therefore, would have little to no ability to defend against an attack on that fundamental awareness.
How many times are AI people going to re-learn that LLMs don’t have “awareness” or "reasnloning’ in a sense humans would find meaningful?
I wonder how much % of the freakout over Deepseek is AI doomers realizing the coming AI god might be … ChiCom!
Is it a crime to enjoy a succulent Chinese AI?
This is democracy manifest! (rip)
you enjoy it? suspicious
No less than Mr Acausal Robot God casually dismissing the lives of +1B humans
I know the only intended message there is “I am a big racist”, but what kind of dumb fuck adage is “the word is finite, kids are infinite”. You’re not even trying mother fucker
“The world is finite and kids are infinite, especially African kids.” Jfc. Anyway goes to show just how white supremacist the whole “save the children” idea is.
And on a less downbeat and significantly more puerile note, Dan Fixes Coin Ops makes a nice analogy for companies integrating ai into their product.
that thread is a work of genius and answers what the next tech boom needs to be
dicks in mousetrapsI MEAN whatever wastes electricity most, preferably with Nvidia cardsI do actually have a mechanism for using the sharp edges of NVidia cards for
dickmouse trapping purposes. And we could - hypothetically - use the extraneous power inputs to mine Bitcoin or something, maximizing efficiency!
Hey, did you know of you own an old forum full of interesting posts from back in the day when humans wrote stuff, you can just attach ai bots to dead accounts and have them post backdated slop for, uh, reasons?
this was mentioned in last week’s thread
what I don’t get is why the admins chose to both backdate the entries and re-use poster’s handles. If they’d just tried to “close” open questions using GenAI with the current date and a robot user it would still be shit but not quite as deceptive
The whole thing is just weirdly incompetent. Maybe they just had everything configured wrong and accidentally deployed sone throwaway tests to production? I could almost see it as a way to poison scrapers, given that there are some odd visibility settings on the slop posts, though the owner’s shiftiness and dubious explanations suggest it wasn’t anything so worthy.
found while giving my feed a moment of scroll while making coffee after too many 3am worknights, I saw this response to the substack guy giving themselves a pat on the back again for helping the nazis
Terrible news: the worst person I know just made a banger post.
you can get banned on facebook now for linking to distrowatch https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-linux-topics-as-cybersecurity-threats-posts-and-users-being-blocked
but it’s not as bad as you think, it’s slightly worse. it’s not only distrowatch and linux groups got banned too
