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
edit: looks like the problem resolved after a few hours
Claims to be against politics in the workplace, takes down rightwing websites anyway
I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week.
FUCKIN
Is there already a term for the extreme opposite of impostor syndrome? Techbro syndrome maybe?
“Techbro syndrome” would be a perfect name for it, honestly.
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn’t take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don’t know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Here’s a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/
As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and … memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm “ran out of time calculating”. How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, that’s the one thing you’re supposed to know!
He will train a neural network on GM games, then memorize the algorithm and compute the moves in his head.
The Rationalists.
Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.
alt text
A screenshot of a tweet by yougov, a uk-based organisation, showing the results of a survey which say
One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams
Include in the screenshot is a response by longwall26,
Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She’d be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know?
lmao, what’s his lesswrong username?
Off topic: if the Culture novels are ever adapted for television, all of the Culture people/ships/etc should have Scottish accents.
This might be one of those “careful what you wish for” scenarios. The neutral outcome might well be that they generate dialog with training data from Scots Wikipedia. Or Scots Grokipedia I guess
@antifuchs @techtakes The Culture won’t be adapted for TV/film without input from Iain’s heirs and his literary executors. Who are all very definitely Scottish and will have Opinions …
Hey, remember Grokipedia?
Its article on Newton’s law of gravity is, like, 50% rendering errors by weight.
I saw (because for some reason grokipedia is now high in google search) that grok calls Roko (from rokos basilisk) pseudo anonymous, but isnt he just using full name and face on twitter? Such a weird small error (and change to the Wikipedia page). Didnt click the link obv.
interesting writeup on detecting ai music (newgrounds bans ai content)
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-moderation/how-to-detect-ai-audio
The Audio Mods are doing God’s work keeping the portal slop-free. Its good to know there’s at least one place where human-made work is still valued.
Just had a conversation about AI where I sent a link to Eddy Burback’s ChatGPT Made Me Delusional video. They clarified that no, it’s only smart people who are more productive with AI since they can filter out all the bad outputs, and only dumb people would suffer all the negative effects. I don’t know what to fucking say.
What you say is something on this note: Oh wow I have this amazing investment opportunity for someone like you, nobody has seen it yet, but with your intelligence and business acumen, we will get rich quick…
Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)
Assuming they have any amount of good faith, I would make the illustration that using AI is like dunning-kruger effect on steroids. It’s especially dangerous when you think know enough, but don’t know enough to know that you don’t.
it sucks when you learn a thing like that about a person. it’s like blowing an efuse: generally one way, not easy to go back without a lot of work, and you may not want to bother
I tried using Fluidsynth only to find that drums don’t work. I looked around on github and found that they are toying with copilot to fix a related issue and that vibe code has already been merged 🙃
AI struggles with simple CRUD apps, but hey let’s see how it does with DSP in C/C++
I’m sure specifics and timing don’t matter. can always tune that efficient later, amirite?!
(although once again a very I am the scream at how rapidly this toxic waste is becoming rampant in the commons :|)
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
Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, they published a deluxe illustrated version of A Feast for Crows which is blatantly obviously “AI” “art”, Like it’s bad generic souless fantasy “art” where you often can’t even recognise which character it’s meant to depict. And now the responsible art director is in damage control mode, claiming that they’d ever use “AI” and unsubtly blaming the hired “artist” (one Jeffrey R. McDonald), even though it takes like 15 seconds to spot that these illustrations are completely inappropriate for the book. It feels like they hired the cheapest they could and didn’t care about anything else than cost-cutting.
And behold, the publisher is on record saying they’d do exactly that:
Mr. Malaviya’s primary goal is growth. After the collapse of the Simon & Schuster deal, it became clear Penguin Random House could not buy its way out of the decline, so much of its growth will have to come organically — by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees … Last year, the company laid off about 60 people and offered voluntary buyouts for longtime employees.
Some of the fan backlash with samples of the “art”, if you must hurt your eyes: thread 1, thread 2.
Other than warped architecture, wonky perspectives, Escherian objects etc., the characters don’t even look like or dress in the colours of the chapters they’re “Illustrating”. Those who know the fandom know how important heraldry is for the series, there’s no sigils in the illustrations and people wear the wrong colours, etc. This is the series were a noblewoman showing up to a party in a green dress rather than black was a declaration of war. Tywin Lannister, famously bald, is depicted in his funeral with long hair and wearing a crown, you know, to illustrate the passage that says he never wore a crown in his life. He also looks identical to King Viserys from the House of the Dragon TV series. His daughter Cersei is shown mourning him with a blue dress, as in the same character whose house colours are red-gold, in the same chapter that states she’s wearing funeral black.
At some point a character has a crucifix on the wall
The silver lining is that the swift fan backlash, even the very unconvincing attempt at denial, are further evidence of how “AI” “art” has firmly established itself as synonymous with bad/lazy/inadequate/cheating the public. Which means actual artists are far from obsolete, If you can draw for real you’ll be in demand whenever someone wants actual quality in anything.
Since we’re never getting Winds of Winter anyway and they’ll have to keep cashing on calendars and guides and new illustrated editions, hopefully the backlash was big enough that they learned their lesson and will pay for actual art next time.
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”?
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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 😶
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.”
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)
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.
