Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don't quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!
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 here 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.
147 Comments
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Back during the last Sneerclub blowout I found my reddit account getting psychoanalyzed by twitter rationalists. They were very upset about the Rod Dreher thing.
for some reason this is still hilarious
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
whaaat, do tell
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
It you search sneerclub on twitter you might find it. Apparently the Dreher thing indicates psychopathy (how they play the ‘bullied nerd’ trope again and again is fascinating to me).
gerikson@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Oh god what did Dreher do now? Last I heard he was divorced and living in Budapest.
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I can’t figure out how to edit my post but his dad was also revealed to be a Klan bigwig.
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Tweeting about penises every few days. More seriously: his mental health is way not good and he’s going full woo.
dgerard@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
amazed when it turned out rod dreher's wingnut welfare was ONE single patron funding him for years
so i'm not surprised he's completely fucked now
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
My favorite part was the ex-boyfriend revelations. Also the one picture of twinkRod - he looks like a Lost Boys extra i swear to god.
gerikson@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
OK thanks all for the updates. I was aware of most of them. It’s been quiet around him in the venues I frequent. I’d like to think it’s because most people recognize he’s not well and it’s punching down to make fun of him.
jonhendry@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
He's ensconced in Hungary nursing on Orban's teat and producing flattering nonsense.
dgerard@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
many victim impact statements about the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are harrowing.
some are not quite so harrowing
dgerard@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:
anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?
he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshi's Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius
anyway, he's decided it's time to flip to the non-losing side
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430
(stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)
not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 2y
You sent me down the rabbit hole.
Just fucken lol.
earthquake@lemm.ee · 5 pts · 2y
And, like every other crypto guy, Ryan has pivoted to AI now. His github profile says "Building AI with AI. Founder @artintellica."
https://artintellica.com/ Truly, a website.
dgerard@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
jesus goatfucking christ
TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Strange man posts strange thing.
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
he could have just admitted he couldn't get the ai to draw a dick. Instead, a future without dicks is his idea of a surprising future
dgerard@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
dude's taking non-feminising estrogen u kno
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Those image generators are surprisingly bad at drawing nether regions, it turns into real horror shows quickly. A thing the 'it is so over for real women' incel weirdos don't seem to talk about. (I checked it a while back no idea if it has improved since, but the conclusion was that sex workers can breathe easily (apart from them being fucked by mastercard/visa being run by cryptoprudes, governments going after them, and the general economic downturn driving the demand for sex work down but that is a different issue)).
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
The Lawnmower Man (1992), dir. Brett Leonard
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I know it’s stupid to try really think about this because the idiot was only trying for engagement farming, but what the fuck did they think that image was portraying (that supported their batshit commentary)?? That we’re all gonna become the blue dude from Watchmen, but in copyright-friendly conditions?!
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
petition to have these threads sorted by new by default, if that technology exists
self@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
new might be a good global default for everything local to our instance, given the traffic patterns of our threads. unfortunately it might take some doing to make that the default just for local stuff, without making things janky for folks reading federated content
amazingly, lemmy doesn’t even seem to persist the last sort you’ve selected correctly. which is like easy 10 lines of code to do even in React with Typescript
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
Highlighting the new posts since the last time you visited a thread would be amazing if possible.
gerikson@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Re: Lemmy, some dude (ofc) is trying to start a new "decentralized" Wikipedia, and he touts as a merit that he created Lemmy:
Some would say this is damning with faint praise, others would see it as a warning.
(https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,_the_federated_Wikipedia_Alternative@ibis.wiki)
blakestacey@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
(quickly web-searches for that name)
Oh, she writes for Russia Today.
(snerk) Oh, no, Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake are upset. I can feel the quantum disruption in the morphogenetic field.
cstross@wandering.shop · 5 pts · 2y
@blakestacey Oh dear, George Galloway complaining about negative coverage, how sad, much hardship. (Galloway is an utter shit.) John Pilger had credibility for a critique of US/western foreign policy, but the rest of the listed folks are just cranks.
dgerard@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
now, you may have heard unfortunate rumours that the lemmy devs are a pair of tankies
this is of course shitlib lies spread by revisionists,
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
party like it's 2007
now we know why lemmy dev is so slow
froztbyte@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I can't wait to see what happens as these people slowly learn the consensus problem in this domain
earthquake@lemm.ee · 6 pts · 2y
I've been kind of following development of Sublinks, which hopes to reach parity with Lemmy with more typical web tech so development can go faster/with more contributors, and also so they can pivot to better moderation tools. Maybe it works out, maybe we learn to love the jank.
self@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I’ve been following it too, and hoping it yields a fork with better development priorities (and, frankly, developers) than lemmy, though I’m not at all looking forward to dealing with deploying Java and Go to production
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 2y
once again i'm suggesting matrix room
dgerard@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
a lotta yall still dont get it
AI equity holders can use multiple ZIRP juices on a single AI
so if you have 1 OpenAI and 3 ZIRP juices you can create 3 new AI startups
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
If I came to believe the entire tech scene at this point was all ZIRP grift would I be right?
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
at this point it's the standard analysis, so yes
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
going to choose to believe that ZIRP juices are a previously unreleased Juicero product
swlabr@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
How many victory points is that
hrrrngh@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Yesterday before bed I saw some galaxy-brained takes on PKM (personal knowledge management software) from a 7-day old account, and curiosity took over me. I was not disappointed. (sadly they deleted their account after I woke up: /u/Few-Elephant-2600 if you're bored and have moderator API access)
Link
Honey can you preheat the porn generator?
Maybe you could pair it with this accursed AI of Things Smart Oven. Fun quotes:
Finally, I can experience Windows progress bars when baking potatoes:
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
yet another crypto argument getting run through find/replace
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
This is true, with the important distinction that presumably the next generation of GPUs will produce more calculation per unit of input energy, as opposed to proof-of-work crypto mining, where the coin generation is constant in time, by design.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I'm actually aware of businesses that already do exactly this, usefully
"tickets" is this Ethereum bullshit?
(this leaves me feeling incredibly
??????)this seems like JAQing behaviour?
[ed: once again wearing my Lemmy Ate My Formatting shirt]
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
I'm 99% sure this person eats only gig-work delivered food
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 2y
i think that there's *at least one supercomputing centre in germany that uses waste heat for heating buildings and not only their own
gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io · 6 pts · 2y
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Years ago a friend of mine asked me if I was interested in IoT/smart devices and I said I didn’t want to be locked out of my house if the wifi was out. His reaction indicated to me that he lost some amount of respect for me, and in turn I lost respect for him.
Since then I’ve only really seen IoT stuff in the homes of tech people, everyone else just DGAF. I think AI is following that same trajectory.
PS Years later pretty much the same exchange happened with brain simulated “immortality”, with the same mutual loss of respect.
PPS I currently have some smart lights installed. Once the initial novelty of having a bunch of RGB lights wore off, I pretty much just use them as normal bulbs, except with their brightness turned all the way down.
PPPS I also have some google speakers. None of them are in use.
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
at what point is "large amounts of heat" output considered the part that's the waste?
Do they know that brake discs get hot because they're stopping a car from colliding with a wall?
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
But for electronics basically all heat is excess. Brakes are literally supposed to turn kinetic energy into heat. A GPU is supposed to solve linear equations quickly. The generated heat is because we don't know how to not generate it. If I could power my oven with all the energy waste while playing Crysis I totally would.
Plus, heat of the brakes is also technically waste. Case in point, Formula 1 cars have specially designed systems whose purpose is converting energy dissipated during braking back into battery charge to power the hybrid engine.
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
My point was more about how you decide that the heat is the undesirable outcome compared to whatever the fuck the thing is meant to be doing. Brakes have a very clear purpose at the expense of the heat. GPUs being used as graphics processing units when you’re playing crysis have a very clear purpose to heat output ratio. Ya see wot I mean?
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Yup, now I get the sneer, sorry for not catching on earlier.
To respond in this vein then: at least real art pieces I could burn for fuel...
jonhendry@iosdev.space · 5 pts · 2y
@hrrrngh @dgerard
There’s a company that wants to do this/is doing it with server-based hot water heaters.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Didn't some soviet towns run central heating off power plant waste heat? "Where do you live? OpenAiVille, we get free^M cheaper central heating, but the noise of the severfans running every day and night is deafening."
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 2y
combined heat and power isn't a technology unique to eastern block countries, but surely centralized city planning makes it easier to pump waste heat into municipal heating grid (or out to some chemical works or such). tbh it didn't even occur to me that there are serious cities (population 100k+) that don't have city-owned heating grid, even 50k towns and smaller can have their own CHP plants (tiny one, fits in shipping container or two)
and it's not just some towns no no no. it was implemented everywhere where it was practical. near big cities - these need both power and heat, so okayish coal is shipped to them by rail, burned there and provides both heat and energy. beijing for example runs on 10 or so large CHP plants iirc. near lignite mines - lignite is burned there (does not make sense to ship it anywhere else, too shitty) and nearby town has free heat. where there's neither, either coal was shipped to be burned in heating plants, centralized or individual, or gas was delivered by pipelines also for heating, and energy was delivered from larger centralized facilities. if there's fuckton of energy somehow, like in russian far east with their abundant hydropower, or nothing else is practical, in some places heating was electric
NYC has steam pipelines running around the city, doesn't that use CHP plants?
TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
Anthropic's Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.
swlabr@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
A friend that wants you to have an aggressive brain tumour to make an AI look good is no friend at all
froztbyte@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
There are far too many people in this world who learned both wrong things from the “Pray tell, Mr Babbage” anecdote
Jayjader@jlai.lu · 8 pts · 2y
"But look how convincing [it] sounds!"
.... how did we get to the point where the ai bros are un-ironically telling us, as a selling point, that their shiny toy literally gives false yet convincing-sounding medical diagnoses ?!?!?!
If I were working on Claude and wanted to hype it up, I would not talk about this experiment online or in public. If I were working on Claude and wanted to be responsible towards "the public", I would use this example as a cautionary warning, not to further hype up the tool.
This feels like the slight period at the beginning of the NFT craze when I wasn't yet comfortable dismissing out of hand anyone excited about them, because surely there was a least some useful application that wasn't for scamming people, and surely this many people couldn't all be so deluded about the same idea.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
“Oh, some patient data. Let me quickly casually scan this into the sv datacorp. What’s that…privacy concerns? Naaaaah I changed the filename”
dgerard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
oh lol just made this a post too
titotal@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
Apparently there's a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and... solve cold fusion?
Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.
jonhendry@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
Where are they going to find 500 people in India who are good at solving cold fusion and will do it for pennies.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
Who needs things like "experiments" and "data"? Surely a
chatbotsuperintelligence can extrapolate all of physics from two frames of a video of an apple falling.froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
...... fucking hell that's a few layers of quackery and far-AI promise nuttery all at once
I'm not going to substantively touch on most of those, because by and large I think everyone here gets it
but
'feel' the future.... it's so ... "just vibes, man". petition to crowdfund these poor dipshits some buttplug.io-compatible sex toys or something, give them something else to feel besides vibessc_griffith@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I'll give even odds that he was jacking off while writing that
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I am extremely impressed (and a little concerned) by the fact that lemmy decided that text needs syntax highlighting
swlabr@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
I’ve started noticing what might be described as “filler art” being done by AI. For example, while a local restaurant was being constructed, it had boards up to obscure the goings on with AI art on it- easily distinguished by bad hands, disturbing looking noodles, and amorphous blobs resembling, uh, more morphous blobs. I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to ruin the sanctity of my phone.
Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 7 pts · 2y
this kind of filler art, ai spam, ai porn, ai seo optimized drivel, ai generated fakes, ai propaganda, ai jpegs that are generated cheaply enough that human artists can't get by on these rates, all of these are things that people don't want to make on moral, legal or some other grounds. just like with all of other automation (well there's no physical risk in making pictures). there will be more of it
mii@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
So it was at least accurate advertising on their part.
swlabr@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Pizza that tasted like it was generated by AI tbh
jonhendry@iosdev.space · 7 pts · 2y
@swlabr @mii
Too many fingers?
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I mean I either want no fingers or all the fingers for my pizza
mii@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-bitcoin-halving-really-is-different-this-time/ar-BB1kb6o5
They're turning
Bitcoinssatoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 2y
i wasn't really a sneerclubber before, but i did hang out in r/buttcoin. i remember that this was briefly an alleged thing among cryptobros few months ago, with side effect of making seleccion of bitcoin maxis very angry, and somehow making tx even slower and more expensive
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
has anti aging research actually accomplished anything or is the entire field a grift?
hrrrngh@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
This is tangential, but there's a surprisingly interesting article about penis enlargement from ProPublica. It's sobering to see people who've convinced themselves it must have worked, because it's too horrible to consider whether they actually made things worse. If there are any crazy, invasive age therapies out there, maybe there'd be similar themes.
https://www.propublica.org/article/penis-enlargement-enhancement-procedures-implants
V0ldek@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
Jesus Christ, I'm a penis haver and reading this gives the same sensations as watching people be punched in the balls.
The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.
Also, this fucking quote:
What in the fuck's mercy is this supposed to mean? You're supposed to change its battery every few years? Take it off at night? I have a watch, just, you know, not a Rolex, a normal-person fucking watch, and I can't decipher this. Is there some specific species of brain worm you get when you buy specifically a Rolex watch?
V0ldek@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Bonus
Perfectly placed in the article, you're reading about a horrific predatory industry and then a Brit pops up saying "ah those fookin' yankee wankers, mangling cocks and sending them to me". Just all-round endearing.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Kinda brings a whole new meaning to "overpaid, oversexed and over here"
carlitoscohones@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
I'm now imagining populations of penis havers who scoff at the enlarged ones behaving like the Rolex aficionados who play "spot the fake Rolex" and get into all kinds of watch minutiae. Look at the telltale marks around the base - definitely enlarged, not like my 100% natural model, which comes 2.5 seconds fast per day.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
You can see it's not genuine Penuma since its not leaking puss all over.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
The writer says there's some indication it may literally be a psychiatric condition along the lines of body dysmorphia, and that most people who go through with it are at least average sized but unhealthily preoccupied with their member, consistently reporting feelings of shame and helplessness.
She also says that supposedly the consensus on the evolution of genital size has been quietly moving away from assumptions about giving an edge with inseminatory success and towards them being just for show, as apparently male primates do tend to involve their genitals in threat displays. Which is to say, maybe for some people it's just unusual wiring that manifests as penis related existential angst.
Still, it doesn't mention the extent to which the above is just evo-psych enthusiasts idly theorizing, or if field testing actually showed it's possible to win a showdown with a gorilla by dropping trou and windmilling.
And then there's also the guy who had the procedure done and is super happy about it, except he's now looking at options for enlarging his wife's vaginal canal and entrance as she's been having a rough time of it, and who I'm sure would be found out to be the walking and talking personification of toxic masculinity if you were to give him the time of day.
mountainriver@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Penis enlargement and breast implants can be understood as gender affirming surgery for cis people, it is just an affirmation of the gender assigned at birth. Rather than go to primates I would point to ancient Greece and it's statues to make the point that ideals of gender and bodies shift over time. Greek statues shows as I understand it often an ideal body, which by the norms of its time included a rather small penis. So maybe some male ancient Greeks wished there were treatments to shrink their package?
With gorillas, my understanding is that primates that have very unequal sizes between the sexes has small penises, while its among the primates with roughly equal body size you find larger penises. So akin to plummage, the males showing off of that their bodies can afford to waste resources, and thus presumably is very fit. I am no biologist, but I think this means that if you try to win a domination fight with a gorilla, it may show who is the boss by showing off its physical strength. So not recommended.
gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io · 8 pts · 2y
jonhendry@iosdev.space · 7 pts · 2y
@V0ldek @hrrrngh
Tie it to your wrist with a metal chain?
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
Show it to others as a visual gaudy signal of wealth?
Or to tell time? lifts left testicle "ten" lifts right "thirteen".
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Oh god theres a whole watch ‘community’ and its toxic as fuck.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
"Guys will literally do anything instead of therapy" episode 2137
carlitoscohones@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
Tangential to your tangential - nice to see that the moral compass of McKinsey associates is still true north.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
On a lighter note:
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
CW, if you are male, maybe skip the part where the actual implant procedure is described. Starting with the sentence "With a purple marker,"
m@blat.at · 9 pts · 2y
@gerikson Eh, I grew up in a family of doctors. They'd discuss their workdays at the dinner table. I fear nothing. Let's have a read, see what all the fuss is ab... (turns green, excuses self)
gerikson@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
Someone on Masto thought that the industry had missed a chance to call the procedure "spatchcocking".
blakestacey@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Oh, that's good.
dgerard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
working at an unspecified medical journal over an unspecified period of time
we occasionally had to remind ourselves about appropriate and inappropriate placeholder imagery
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
But then you'll never find out what like a jellyfish surfacing at sea is in reference to.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I'm not even halfway reading this and holy fuck it's grim
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Yeah it is one of those, wish I had not read that stories. Poor guys.
mii@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
There seems to be some legitimate research into the effectiveness of anti-aging compounds like retinol, also they’ve come out with some good advice like wearing sunscreen, drinking enough water, and eating balanced diets to promote skin health which reduces the signs of what we usually associate with aging, if you count that.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 2y
so the actual advice is "don't eat trash less healthy than asbestos"
there are some people claiming that polyphenols, flavins or other pharmalogically mischievous, promiscuous trash like that that is barely soluble in the first place and shredded by liver within minutes after absorption into bloodstream is the Real Secret To Long Life (tm) but it's really proxy for the not-deep-fried-everything diet, or at least that's the impression that i'm getting
one specific strain that boils my piss the most is curcumin peddlers, because they waste everyone's time and it's a part of government-funded altmed disinformation campaign (of India in this case)
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I’m annoyed by seed oilers claiming to have prevented sunburn.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 7 pts · 2y
seed oilers don't even have an interesting conspiracy theory
heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point:
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Think dgerard mentioned last time I talked about it re H+ transhumanism anti aging that it all seems to have stalled.
dgerard@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
none of it ever went anywhere (because these people are clowns who barely understand the thing they claim to be doing) and de Grey got kicked out of the pseudoscience charity he founded for sexual harassment
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I still think about that Alcor stuff.
swlabr@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
I’ve tried various face creams of different levels of prestige and not really noticed a difference, so, no, I guess.
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
I've been hoping to post something about the wild mid-tournament apex legends hacks, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of sourcing beyond the videos of its consequences
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/battle-royale/apex-legends-streamers-warned-to-perform-a-clean-os-reinstall-as-soon-as-possible-after-hacks-during-na-finals-match/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/03/17/massive-apex-legends-hack-disrupts-na-finals-raises-serious-security-questions/?sh=64ecbe236ea0
ebu@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
my pet conspiracy theory is that the two streamers had installed cheats at one point in the past and compromised their systems that way. but i have no evidence to base that on, just seems more plausible to me than "a hacker discovered an RCE in EAC/Apex and used it during a tournament to install game cheats on two people and [appear to] do nothing else"
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/
the website links to a "concept paper" which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that don't add up to much at all
https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105858/https://www.giggleacademy.com/Giggle%20Academy%20v0.4%2020240221.pdf
such as these under "gamification";
or under "completely online"
The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so there's at least some money there (?)
anyway, dodgy af
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
this project intrigues me because we're able to see the brainstorm doc that he believes is shareworthy, combined with a reasonably slick website and a careers page.
There is no open position for a "product designer" or any kind of role that would be interested in concretely working on addressing the clear problem statement in the brainstorm doc. I have to assume there isn't anyone in the group doing that already because they would not let a brainstorm doc be published like that, as if it has any value.
This is what bothers me so much about iterative design culture and the "doing something is better than nothing" mantra. It makes out that identifying the problem/purpose is the assignment, and undermines the REAL design work of coming up with a good response to that purpose.
If this project gets off the ground, they'll start building and they'll hire UX designers and they'll just make something that resembles an online school and focus on making sure it has blockchains and nfts and all that shit, and the whole concept of "design" will be relegated to user acceptance and finding frictions to remove.
At no point will anyone sit down and say "how can we effectively address illiteracy in developing countries" and find out why, what, how, and all the barriers, all the realities, the complexities, the options for means to achieve certain things, all the DESIGN.
Its no different for everything else in tech, they all start from this point where nothing was initially designed beyond throwing together an idea and iterating it into a behemoth that needs an army of staff to groom its hair and clip its toenails. The people given design titles (ux designers, product designers) are not answering to an overarching design or any principled basis for design.
it should also be said that the giggle academy is probably a publicity thing for CZ's character
jonhendry@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
"Children's website launched by inmates" ought to be the end of it.
dgerard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
skibidi toilet, right, but on the blockchain
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I like the character arc of David learning about skibidi toilet and having his entire understanding of the universe pivoted with respect to it.
dgerard@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
TELL ME I'M WRONG
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
my brain latches onto this as "gigglepig" (a la Brooklyn 99), and will accept no other meanings
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
Someone on discord linked me to this AI generated horror-show of a "childrens" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nywBUSaHFgY (I hesitate to give them any more views, Internet Archive says youtube vids take a few days to process though)
Which appears to be a channel of entirely AI generated video paired to children's songs. And it is gosh darn creepy and gross and exploitive and unhealthy.
I hope youtube cracks down on shit like this.
gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io · 7 pts · 2y
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
it's truly a place with one of the longest-standing incentives problem configurations too, I think? I recall people both on- and off-site there complaining about this form of it going back at least 6~8y by now
carlitoscohones@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Behind the Bastards had a few episodes on how AI children's books are on offer at Amazon - also creepy and unhealthy.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-ai-is-coming-for-your-children/id1373812661?i=1000617646703
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Amazingly atrocious. I think this is my favourite https://youtu.be/A26bO26VnKQ
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.
Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304
'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929
This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217
[1] when a notable person in CS dies there's sometimes a black bar under the HN header
self@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
fucking christ. it takes a lot to fuck up my day, but a quick scroll through that thread seeing how quick these vultures (including one notable person who’s the reason why I’m ashamed to talk about my lambda calculus projects) are trying to capitalize on Vernor’s legacy is absolutely doing it
why in the fuck? is the famous sci-fi author with a heavy CS background not notable enough for the standards of the site whose creator is a much less notable self-help author whose CS background is failing to make a working Lisp 3 times and writing programming textbooks nobody reads?
gerikson@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
What made me mad was them referring to the Deep* books as "hard SF". Arguable A Deepness... could be as it's set in the Slow Zone so FTL travel is impossible, but A Fire... is classic space opera.
self@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
right? it’s a weird combination of these folks never engaging with the work they pretend to celebrate and trying to pretend that their AI fantasy will turn real life into a space opera. it’s fucking awful
sinedpick@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
can you please talk more about your lambda calculus projects?
self@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
sure! there was a little bit about it in the first stubsack and I posted a bit more about it in this thread on masto (with some links to papers I’ve been reading too, if you’d like to dig into the details on anything)
overall what I’m working on is a hardware implementation of a Krivine machine, which uses Tromp’s prefix code bitstream representation of binary lambda calculus as its machine language and his monadic IO model to establish a runtime environment. it isn’t likely to be a very efficient machine by anyone’s standard, but I really like working with BLC as a pure (and powerful) form of computational math, and there’s something pleasant about the way it reduces down to a HDL representation (via the Amaranth HDL in this case). there’s a few subprojects I’ve been working on as part of this:
I’ve been working on some of this on paper as a sleep aid for a while, but I’m finally starting on what’s feeling like a solid HDL implementation. let me know if you want more details on any of it! some of the more far off stuff is really just a mental sketch, but writing it out will at least help me figure out what ideas still make sense when they’re explained to someone else
self@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
for anyone who’s fucking lost reading the above (I can’t blame ya), lambda calculus is the mathematical basis behind functional programming. this is a fun introduction. the only things you can do in lambda calculus are define functions, name variables, and apply functions to other functions or variables (which substitutes the variables for whatever they’re being applied to and eliminates the function). that’s all you need to represent every possible computer program, which is amazing
a Krivine machine is a machine for doing what the alligators in that intro are doing, automatically — that is, reducing down lambda functions until they can’t be reduced anymore and produce a final value. that process is computation, so a Krivine machine is a (rather strange) computer
sinedpick@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
I have a scattered interest in lambda calculus too so I'd love to follow this project. Tromp's BLC definitely hits a sweet spot of complexity/size when it comes to describing computation in a way that's deeply satisfying.
Have you looked into interaction nets/other optimal beta-reduction schemes (there's a project out there called HVM)? Probably way too high level for now though. I am fascinated by the possibility of these algorithms making church-representations more asymptotically efficient (or even balanced ternary)
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
exactly! it’s such a cool way to write a program, and it’s so much more satisfying than writing assembly for a von Neumann (or any load/store) machine. have you checked out LambdaLisp? it’s one of my inspirations for this project — it’s amazing that you can build a working Lisp interpreter out of BLC, and understanding how that was done taught me so much about Lisp’s relationship with lambda calculus.
I plan to release my HDL as a collaborative project once I’ve got enough done to share out. currently I’ve got the HDL finished for the combinational circuit that makes bitstream BLC processing efficient with word-oriented memory hardware, and I’m doing debugging on the buffer that grabs words from memory and offsets them if they represent a term that isn’t word-aligned (which is a pretty simple circuit so I’m surprised I’ve managed to implement so many bugs). there’s quite a bit left to go! IO is still a sticking point — I know how I want to do it, but I can’t quite imagine how memory and runtime state will look after the machine reads or writes a bit.
that seems awesome! I really like that it can do auto-parallelization, and I want to check out how it optimizes lambda terms. for now my machine model is a pretty straightforward Krivine machine with some inspiration taken from the Next 700 Krivine Machines paper, which seems likely to yield a machine that can be implemented as circuitry. that paper decomposes Krivine-like machine models down into combinators, which can be seen as opcodes, microinstructions, or (in my case) operations that that need to be performed on memory during a particular machine state.
once I’ve got the basic machine defined, I’d like to come back to something like HVM as a higher performance lambda calculus machine and see what can be adopted. one of their memory invariants in particular (the guarantee that each closure is only used once) maps really well to my mental model of what I imagine a hardware parallel lambda calculus machine would be like
sinedpick@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I found LambdaLisp from your mastodon post and was immediately intrigued. I'm going to try and run it to get a better understanding of how the IO system works, and maybe even cook up my own BLC interpreter to run it! The hardware stuff is definitely out of my depth, but this may be a great chance to learn.
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
that’s a great idea! the only BLC VMs I know of are written in a very obscure style (Tromp’s especially — his first interpreter was an entry into the International Obfuscated C Code Contest and he only posted the (relatively) unobfuscated one later) and I think there’s plenty of room for something written to be more comprehensible. I’m also not aware of any VM that implements
call-ccfrom Krivine’s original paper, which has interesting applications. and of course, all the Krivine machines I know are relatively slow and very memory-inefficient — but there’s low hanging fruit here that can make things better.one thing I might take on is implementing a visual krivine machine — something with a GUI that shows its current state and a graph of all the closures in memory. that would be a big boon for my current work, and I might see if I could graft something like that onto the simulation testbench for my HDL implementation.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
The replies to somebody aggressively (and downvoted) pointing out some of the flaws in Jarts post are bad. Damn.
No you dweeb, they are talking about model collapse, that thing what happens to this 90's tech.
This is both a weird adhom and a god is hiding in the gaps style argument. (While I have some sympathy for this Peter Watts style argument it is incredibly weak (their post history (8) is more of this very weak stuff)).
Edit: forgot to mention what I actually initially wanted to say:
I still think that movie actually is quite hopeful, it shows us a world where the current consumerist society in the USA can remain to exist for 500 years (that is how long he is frozen), and there is nobody invading and taking over when the USA becomes this automated and dumb. We should all hope the future is this hopeful (guess they fixed the climate, and achieved fully automated luxury capitalism (which still sucks)) and non-violent.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Ah damn, Justine has my respect for a bunch of cool and interesting stuff but this is just embarrassing, unless I'm missing some extremely dry satire.
dgerard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Justine Tunney, the literal neoreactionary?
bitofhope@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I had been mercifully spared from her nontechnical opinions until now.
mawhrin@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
she's a fascist.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Yeah I can tell. So much for that respect.
jonhendry@iosdev.space · 7 pts · 2y
@bitofhope @gerikson
She wants/wanted the US government to be replaced with a Silicon Valley CEO.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
That’s how she’s got a lot of people’s respect, with them being unaware of the other shit. There’s some history going way back to OWS, recommendations that people read Moldbug, and other off-colour shit. I don’t have a link handy immediately but it shouldn’t be too hard to find
froztbyte@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
https://www.thedailybeast.com/occupying-the-throne-justine-tunney-neoreactionaries-and-the-new-1
Jayjader@jlai.lu · 4 pts · 2y
Fuck, that's disappointing. I remember being quite impressed with her "a truly universal binary execution format" blog post detailing a way to compile c code into a sort of self-executing portable archive (unless I'm mixing things up - she is the person running justine.lol, is she not?).
Thanks for sharing those articles.
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
oh she's very good technically! also a Nazi
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
just realised that Musk's angry face in the Don Lemon interview is the same face as an angry Skibidi Toilet
dgerard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
if my style isn't ridiculous-ulous-ulous-ulous
swlabr@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
CW: Palestine-Israel.
Something I’ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesn’t really surprise me, but that’s not what I’m commenting on.
One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israel’s use of “AI” in warfare. I’m only going to link one source and I’m not going into it too deeply.
So what I’m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.
To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said it’s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.
*of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 2y
the old thing was use of ai in iron dome, because generally mistaking a civilian target for a rocket is pretty hard given differences in size and speed, and autonomous air defense is a thing that already exists for decades. the ai part comes from predicting if a given rocket will fall on populated area, and pointing radar-guided interceptors to those that do
the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you're doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it's working or not you'd need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage
people at palantir are probably making very detailed notes
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Yeah, and I don’t think they are ever going to be explicit about how their “AI” works.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
"getting rid of sweatshop labor with no replacement would lead to significantly worse conditions … sweatshops should be replaced with liberal markets"
swlabr@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
The path to hell is paved with liberal markets.
dgerard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
also a very big opinion with the rationalists and EAs