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)
243 Comments
self@awful.systems · 20 pts · 2y
this isn’t surprising, but it turns out that when tested, LLMs prove to be ridiculously terrible at summarizing information compared with people
froztbyte@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
I'm sure every poster who's ever popped in to tell us about how extremely useful and good LLMs are for this are gonna pop in realsoonnow
o7___o7@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
If those kids could read they'd be very upset
rook@awful.systems · 17 pts · 2y
Interview with the president of the signal foundation: https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in there, the observation that LLMs and the broader “ai” “industry” wee made possible thanks to surveillance capitalism, but also the link between advertising and algorithmic determination of human targets for military action which seems obvious in retrospect but I hadn’t spotted before.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 2y
this mostly uses metadata as inputs iirc. basically somedude can be flagged as "frequent contact of known bad guy" and if he can be targeted he will be. this is only one of many options. this is also basically useless in full scale war, but it's custom made high tech glitter on normal traffic analysis for COIN
khalid_salad@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Thanks for sharing this. <3
BigMuffin69@awful.systems · 17 pts · 2y
Fellas, my in laws gave me a roomba and it so cute I put googly eyes on it. I'm e/acc now
self@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
please be very careful with the VSLAM (camera+sensors) ones, and note carefully that iRobot avoided responsibility for this by claiming the impacted people were testers (a claim the alleged testers appear to disagree with)
BigMuffin69@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
thanks for the tip! 🙏
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
On bsky you are required to post proof of cat, here at e/acc you are required to post proof of googly roomba
BigMuffin69@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Take a look w/ your own googly eyes
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Even better than I had thought, I expected smaller eyes. Thanks, it is glorious. That smile.
swlabr@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
e/vac
swlabr@awful.systems · 15 pts · 2y
This is a little too low hanging for its own post, spotted this from reddit:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1830390502836854925#m
slopjockey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
There is an übermensch and there is an untermensch.
The übermensch are masculine males, the bodybuilders I follow that are only active in the gym and on the feed; the untermensh are women and low-T men, like my bluepilled Eastern European coworker whose perfectly fine with non-white immigration into my country.
The übermensch also includes anybody whose made a multi-paragraph post on 4chan with no more than one line break between each paragraph. It also includes people at least and at most as autistic as I am.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Wow the first reply is quite unhinged.
More on topic, that isn't low hanging fruit, that is Exhibit C in the discrimination lawsuit.
slopjockey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I'm not sure if this is esoteric or just clasically insane
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
I was trying to avoid language like 'insane' etc myself. Felt a bit like return of the Timecube.
swlabr@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Or a custody battle!
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I have a suspicion that this tweet is going to be introduced as an exhibit in several suits
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
I think she won that one. Was a bit unclear, but I recall seeing a tweet from grimes that she has access to her kids again. (Not sure if it was a real tweet).
swlabr@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Ah but you see, she's just one of the custody battles to be lost. Elon apparently can't help but start potential custody battles
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
When he dies, the amount of secret hidden kids who will suddenly be revealed to hopefully get some part of the inheritance, will be shocking even for us.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
https://xcancel.com/HeyMichaud
This is certainly... something
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
Yeah that reads as a cry for help. (But I doubt it is, he prob just feels like he is onto something with a righteous/spiritual feeling.)
And well, he could even be onto something, he could become quite popular, peterson had the same sort of feeling (it is in the foreword of one of his books) and look how big he got. He certainly got more followers than I have. ;)
maol@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
"democracy, but if it wasn't a democracy"
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
I read the white paper for this data centers in orbit shit https://archive.ph/BS2Xy and the only mentions of maintenance seem to be "we're gonna make 'em more reliable" and "they should be easy to replace because we gonna make 'em modular"
This isn't a white paper, it's scribbles on a napkin
self@awful.systems · 17 pts · 2y
there’s so much wrong with this entire concept, but for some reason my brain keeps getting stuck on (and I might be showing my entire physics ass here so correct me if I’m wrong): isn’t it surprisingly hard to sink heat in space because convection doesn’t work like it does in an atmosphere and sometimes half of your orbital object will be exposed to incredibly intense sunlight? the whitepaper keeps acting like cooling all this computing shit will be easier in orbit and I feel like that’s very much not the case
also, returning to a topic I can speak more confidently on: the fuck are they gonna do for a network backbone for these orbital hyperscale data centers? mesh networking with the implicit Kessler syndrome constellation of 1000 starlink-like satellites that’ll come with every deployment? two way laser comms with a ground station? both those things seem way too unreliable, low-bandwidth, and latency-prone to make a network backbone worth a damn. maybe they’ll just run fiber up there? you know, just run some fiber between your satellites in orbit and then drop a run onto the earth.
dgerard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
everyone who's ever done physical cabling knows aaallll about dropping cables upward
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
Easy, the cables go into the space elevator. Why do you all have to be so negative, don't you have any vision for the future?
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
what if my vision for the future is zeppelin data centers constantly hovering over the ocean? they’ll have to be modular, of course, and we can scale our deployment by just parallel parking a new zeppelin next to our existing one and using grappling hooks and cargo straps to attach the zeppelins to each other. as you can clearly see, this will allow for exponential growth! and networking is as simple as Ethernet between the zeppelins and dropping an ocean-grade fiber cable off the first zeppelin and splicing that into an intercontinental backbone link. so much more practical than that orbiting data centers idea!
V0ldek@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
ez
corbin@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
You're entirely right. Any sort of computation in space needs to be fluid-cooled or very sedate. Like, inside the ISS, think of the laptops as actively cooled by the central air system, with the local fan and heatsink merely connecting the laptop to air. Also, they're shielded by the "skin" of the station, which you'd think is a given, but many spacebros think about unshielded electronics hanging out in the aether like it's a nude beach or something.
I'd imagine that a serious datacenter in space would need to concentrate heat into some sort of battery rather than trying to radiate it off into space. Keep it in one spot, compress it with heat pumps, and extract another round of work from the heat differential. Maybe do it all again until the differential is small enough to safely radiate.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 2y
while radiating out waste heat at higher temp would be easier it'll also take up valuable power, and either i don't get something or you're trying to break laws of thermodynamics
corbin@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
I'm saying that we shouldn't radiate if it would be expensive. It's not easy to force the heat out to the radiators; normally radiation only works because the radiator is more conductive than the rest of the system, and so it tends to pull heat from other components.
We can set up massive convection currents in datacenters on Earth, using air as a fluid. I live in Oregon, where we have a high desert region which enables the following pattern: pull in cold dry air, add water to cool it further and make it more conductive, let it fall into cold rows and rise out of hot rows, condition again to recover water and energy, and exhaust back out to the desert. Apple and Meta have these in Prineville and Google has a campus in The Dalles. If you do the same thing in space, then you end up with a section of looped pipe that has fairly hot convective fluid inside. What to do with it?
I'm merely suggesting that we can reuse that concentrated heat, at reduced efficiency (not breaking thermodynamics), rather than spending extra effort pumping it outside. NASA mentions fluid loops in this catalogue of cooling options for cubesats and I can explain exactly what I mean with Figure 7.13. Note the blue-green transition from "heat" to "heat exchanger"; that's a differential, and at the sorts of power requirements that a datacenter has, it may well be a significant amount of usable entropy.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 2y
okay so you want to put bottoming cycle thermal powerplant on waste heat? am i getting that right?
so now some of that heat is downgraded to lower temperature waste heat, which means you need bigger radiator. you get some extra power, but it'd be a miracle if it's anything over 20%. also you need to carry big heat engine up there, and all the time you still have to disperse the same power because it gets put back into the same server racks. this is all conditional on how cold can you keep condenser, but it's pointless for a different reason
you're not limited by input power (that much), you're more limited by launch mass and for kilogram more solar panels will get you more power than heat engine + extra radiators. also this introduces lots of moving parts because it'd be stirling engine or something like that. also all that expensive silicon runs hot because otherwise you get dogshit efficiency, and that's probably not extra optimal for reliability. also you can probably get away with moving heat around with heat pipes, no moving parts involved
also you lost me there:
okay this works because water evaporates, cooling down air. this is what every cooling tower does
no it doesn't (but it doesn't actually matter)
and here you lost me. i don't think you can recover water from there at all, and i don't understand where temperature difference comes from. even if there's any, it'd be tiny and amount of energy recoverable would be purely ornamental. if i get it right, it's just hot wet air being dumped outside, unless somehow server room runs at temperatures below ambient
also i'm pretty sure that's not how it works at all, where did you get it from
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
and I’m over here like “what if we just included a peltier element… but bigger” and then the satellite comes out covered in noctua fans and RGB light strips
froztbyte@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
I was also momentarily nerdsniped earlier by looking up the capacity of space power tech[0] (panel yields, battery technology, power density references), but bailed early because it'll actually need some proper spelunking. doubly so because I'm not even nearly an expert on space shit
in case anyone else wants to go dig through that, the idea: for compute you need power (duh). to have power you need to have a source of energy (duh). and for orbitals, you're either going to be doing loops around the planetoid of your choice, or geostationery. given that you're playing balancing jenga between at minimum weight, compute capacity, and solar yield, you're probably going to end up with a design that preferences high-velocity orbitals that have a minimal amount of time in planetoid shadow, which to me implies high chargerate, extremely high cycle count ceiling (supercaps over batteries?), and whatever compute you can make fit and fly on that. combined with whatever the hell you need to do to fit your supposed computational models/delivery in that
this is probably worth a really long essay, because which type of computing your supposed flying spacerack handles is going to be extremely selected by the above constraints. if you could even make your magical spacechip fucking exist in the first place, which is a whole other goddamn problem
[0] - https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/power-subsystems/ (warning: this can make hours of your day disappear)
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 2y
dusk-dawn orbit is a thing if you don't care too hard about where exactly to put it
but it's gonna be so fucking expensive, what they're trading off so it's even remotely worth it? do they think it's outside of any jurisdiction?
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
yeah I thought about that but I took it in light of "data center", i.e. presuming that you'd want continuous availability of that. part of what I mean with it being worth a long essay - there's a couple of ways to configure the hypothetical way this would operate, and each has significant impacts on the shape of the thing
yep. that's the thing that's so wild about this fairy picture. option 1) make your entire compute infra earthside[0], launch it all, and get .... the node compute equivalent of 3 stacked raspberry and a 2017 gpu, at a costpoint in the high 4 digits or more... or option 2, where you just shove a dc full of equipment for the price of like 20 such nodes, and have the compute equivalent of a significant number of mid-range hosters
even if (and this is extreme wand waving) you could crack non-planetbound production for the entire process and fab all this shit in space (incl. the mining and refining and ....) as a way to reduce costs, you still have all these other problems too. and it's not like this is likely to happen any time soon
guess they better hope 'ole ray has another vision soon, to get a fixed date for the singularity. can't see how you do your scrum planning for this fantasy without a target date provided by the singularitian prophet
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 2y
wait it's all ray kurzweil?
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
dunno if the aforementioned jazz is (I didn't check), but rayboi is the easiest "and then compute things just become magically solved" touchstone for me to remember
too many of the fucking nutjobs to properly track who's the steering committee for each insane idea
zogwarg@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
BasicSteps™ for making cake:
Any further details are self-evident really.
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
every flat, sad looking chocolate cake I've made
bitofhope@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Design principles for a time machine
Yes, a real, proper time machine like in sci-fi movies. Yea I know how to build it, as this design principles document will demonstrate. Remember to credit me for my pioneering ideas when you build it, ok?
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
self@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
You joke, but my startup is actually moving forward on this concept. We already made a prototype time travel machine which while only being able to travel forward does so at a promising stable speed (1). The advances we made have been described by the people on our team with theoretical degrees in physics as simply astonishing, and awe-inspiring. We are now in an attempt to raise money in a series B financing round, and our IPO is looking to be record breaking. Leave the past behind and look forward to the future, invest in our timetravel company xButterfly.
maol@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Fuck it, throw some more junk into orbit, why not
swlabr@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Who knew that the VC industry and AI would produce the most boring science fiction worldbuilding we will ever see
ShakingMyHead@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Who is even asking for this?
self@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
every popular scam eventually gets its Oprah moment, and now AI’s joining the same prestigious ranks as faith healing and A Million Little Pieces:
and it’s got everything you love! veiled threats to your job if the AI “revolution” does or doesn’t get its way!
woe is Sam, nobody understands the incredible stress he’s under marketing the scam that’s making him rich as simultaneously incredibly dangerous but also absolutely essential
fuck I cannot wait for my mom to call me and regurgitate Sam’s words on “how AI works” and ask, panicked, if I’m fired or working for OpenAI or a cyborg yet
I’m truly surprised they didn’t cart Yud out for this shit
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Self-proclaimed sexual sadist Yud is probably a sex scandal time bomb and really not ready for prime time. Plus it's not like he has anything of substance to add on top of Saltman's alarmist bullshit, so it would just be reminding people how weird in a bad way people in this subculture tend to be.
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
that’s a very good point. now I’m wondering if not inviting Yud was a savvy move on Oprah’s part or if it was something Altman and the other money behind this TV special insisted on. given how crafted the guest list for this thing is, I’m leaning toward the latter
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I think if you want to promote something you don't invite the longwinded nerdy person. Don't think a verbal blog post would do well on tv. I mean, I would also suck horribly if I was on tv, and would prob help make the subject im arguing for less popular.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
You probably are, if not by choice.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
unironically part of why I am so fucking mad that reCaptcha ever became as big as it did. the various ways entities like cloudflare and google have forcefully inserted themselves into humanity's daily lives, acting as rent-extracting bridgetroll with heavy "Or Else" clubs, incenses me to a degree that can leave me speechless
in this particular case, because reCaptcha is effectively outsourced dataset labelling, with the labeller (you, the end user, having to click through the stupid shit) not being paid. and they'll charge high-count users for the privilege. it is so, so fucking insulting and abusive.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
I always half-ass my captcha and try to pass in as many false answers as possible, because I'm a
rebelcunt.froztbyte@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
christ
billy g's been going for years with bad takes on those three things (to the point that the gates foundation have actually been a problem, gatekeeping financing unless recipients acquiesce to using those funds the way the foundation wants it to be used (yeah, aid funds with instructions and limitations..)), but now there can be "AI" to assist with the issue
maybe the "revolution" can help by paying the people that are currently doing dataset curation for them a living wage? I'm sure that's what billy g meant, right? right?
blakestacey@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Look, where are you going to get your experts if you can't trust Jeffrey Epstein's Rolodex?
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I mean, I have glasses and wear a wristwatch so by the standard definitions I qualify as a cyborg in all aspects but the aesthetic.
dashdsrdash@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
No wristwatch, but I have glasses and without electricity I stop breathing. (While asleep.)
So, yeah, cyborg.
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Yud would jump on a couch.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
I didn't think she could top John of God, but here we are.
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
New webbed brief about react.js https://briefs.video/videos/what-is-react/
dgerard@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
heartwarming
froztbyte@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
years ago on a trip to nyc, I popped in at the aws loft. they had a sort of sign-in thing where you had to provide email address, where ofc I provided a catchall (because I figured it was a slurper). why do I tell this mini tale? oh, you know, just sorta got reminded of it:
(e: once again lost the lemmy formatting war)
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
Hell yeah!
I'm gonna do it: GENERATIVE AI. Look at that capitalization.
self@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
there’s no way you did that without consulting copilot or at least ChatGPT. thank you sam altman for finally enabling me to capitalize whole words in my editor!
froztbyte@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
....this just made me wonder what quotient of all these promptfondlers and promptfans are people who've just never really been able to express emotion (for whatever reason (there are many possible causes, this ain't a judgement about that)), who've found the prompts' effusive supportive "yes, and"-ness to be the first bit of permission they ever got to express
and now my brain hurts because that thought is cursed as fuck
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
yes, i actually never learned how to capitalize properly, they told me to use capslock and shift, but that makes all the letters come out small still. thanks chatgpt.
self@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
my IDE,
notepad.exe, didn’t support capitalizing words until they added copilot to it. so therefore qed editors couldn’t do that without LLMs. computer science is so easy!Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
For a moment I misread your post and had to check notepadplusplus for AI integration. Don't scare me like that
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
fortunately, notepad++ hasn’t (yet) enshittified. it’s fucking weird we can’t say the same about the original though
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
I'd argue that you cannot say basic notepad has enshittified, as it always was quite shit. That is why 9 out of 10 dentists recommend notepad++
zogwarg@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
Another dumb take from Yud on twitter (xcancel.com):
rook@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Sounds like he’s been huffing too much of whatever the neoreactionaries offgas. Seems to be the inevitable end result of a certain kind of techbro refusing to learn from history, and imagining themselves to be some sort of future grand vizier in the new regime…
self@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
I’m seriously wondering how much of yud’s most recent crap is an attempt to grift for thiel money and right-wing attention by poorly imitating Yarvin
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
remember that he was on the Thiel gravy train then they broke over Trump. Now it's Vitalik Buterin and Ben Delo from the crypto contingent.
istewart@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
It makes sense that he would want back on the only grift train that ever treated him so well. Post-Trump/Vance Thielworld is likely to be a particularly sad place, though.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
Hey, we now know that you can even become a VP pick if you grift hard enough, there are real prizes to be won now
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
How to fix democracy: remove voting. Brilliant!
swlabr@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Self declared expert understander yud misunderstanding something is great. Self declared expert understander yud using known misunderstanding generator chatgpt is the cherry on top.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
What does "seizing spoils of the executive branch" even mean here?
self@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
fuck, I went into the xcancel link to see if he explains that or any of this other nonsense, and of course yud’s replies only succeeded in making my soul hurt:
and someone else points out that a parliamentary republic isn’t an electoral system and he just flatly doesn’t get it:
mountainriver@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Here it sounds like he is criticising the parliamentary system were the legislative elects the executive instead of direct election of the executive. Of course both in parliamentary and presidential (and combined) systems a number of voting systems are used. The US famously does not use FPTP for presidential elections, but instead uses an electoral college.
So to be very charitable, he means a parliamentary system where it's hard to depose the executive. I don't think any parliamentary system uses 60 % (presumably of votes or seats in parliament) to depose a cabinet leader, mostly because once you have 50% aligned the cabinet leader you presumably have an opposition leader with a potential majority. So 60% is stupid.
If you want a combined system where parliament appoints but can't depose, Suriname is the place to be. Though of course they appoint their president for a term, not indefinitely. Because that's stupid.
To sum up: stupid ideas, expressed unclearly. Maybe he should have gone to high school.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Which is objectively worse, but apparently Yud thinks it's better than FPTP? Since FPTP is "the worst".
flowerysong@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
It means that Yudkowsky remains a terrible writer. He really just wanted to say "seizing [control of] the executive branch", but couldn't resist adding some ornamentation.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
less charitably, it seems he might mean to say "their job is to do their job, not to get rewarded because of position", i.e. pushing the view that he thinks parliamentary bodies are just there for the high life and rewards
and while I understand that this is the type of "what did he actually mean?" that you might get from highschool poetry analyses, it is also the kind of thing that eliyuzza NotEvenWrong yud[0] seems to do pretty frequently in his portrayals
[0] - meant to be read in the thickest uk-chav accent of your choice
maol@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Serves indefinitely? Not even 8 or 16 year terms but indefinitely?? Surely the US supreme court is proof of why this is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
blakestacey@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
The UK had a parliamentary election using First-Past-The-Post two months ago. Good grief.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
'I'm going to invent a new government system!'
'New system or just monarchy with extra steps?'
E: "I could eat a bowl full of paper and vomit a better electoral system than that." and "If you have an alignment plan I can't shoot down in 120 seconds, let's hear it.", Yudkowsky's overestimation of his own abilities is high this week.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
When pressed about the kind of system he could invent, he says STAR voting.
Has anyone asked Mark Frohnmayer if he also used the eating a bowl full of paper and vomiting technique when creating the STAR system?
I could invent a state of the art cryptographic hashing function after half a litre of vodka with my hands tied behind my back. Coincidentally the algorithm I'd independently invent from first principles would happen to be exactly the same as BLAKE3 so instead of me having to explain it, you can just skim the Wikipedia page
like I did.Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Well there is something to be said for just trying to make a new system yourself, as a hobby/thought experiment. So I'm not totally opposed to creating something that already exists. It is just weird he thinks he has something new and shining and good here, and not babbies first attempt at creating a voting system. (insert 'wow things are complicated' xkcd here).
Him not realizing (or not caring) about him being completely unoriginal while thinking he is hot shit is funny though. Shit having a certain amount of sycophants must suck so much, as it removes any ability to truly judge if you are being dumb or not, as there will always be a revolving door of those who kiss your ass.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
It's not that he invented anything, even something that was already invented. He claimed he could invent a new system if he wanted to and when asked to deliver, just namedropped an existing system.
zogwarg@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Also a subjectively bad one at that—given his america-brained position on wanting to maintain a single executive not that suprising but:
bitofhope@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I think it's less america-brained and more just straight up cryptomonarchist.
For what it's worth STAR looks like something Yud wishes he would design, or would design if he could. A complicated system that assumes a highly informed electorate and allows for counterintuitive victory conditions sounds exactly like something appealing to him.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
lol ow sorry, yeah that is even worse.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Love that even the bullshit word salad machine gets confused by Yud's level of bullshit word salad.
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I've been going back and forth whether to dig deeper into this comment (I learned about the STAR system from downcomments, always nice to learn new hipster voting systems I guess). But I wonder if this is a cult leader move - state something obviously dumb, then sort your followers by how loyal they are in endorsing it.
Voting systems and government systems tend to be nerd snipe territory, especially for the kind of person who is obsessed with finding the right technical solution to social problems, so Yud being so obviously, obliviously not even wrong here is a bit puzzling.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
AT LEAST IT'S A REPUBLIC NOT A, TFU, DEMOCRACY
sorry I just love how those people cannot understand literal primary school level political science
bitofhope@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
It's fractally wrong and bonkers even by Yud tweet standards.
I'll charitably assume based on this he just means proportional representation in general. Specifically he seems to be thinking of a party list type method, but other proportional electoral systems exist and some of them like D'Hondt and various STV methods do involve voting for individuals and not just parties.
The alliances are often thought of as a feature, but it's also a valid, if subjective, criticism. Not sure what he means by "frequently falling governments", though. The UK uses FPTP and their PMs seem to resign quite regularly.
Why 60%? Why not 50% or 70% or two thirds? Approval of whom, the parliament or the population? Would this be approval in the sense of approval voting where you can express approval for multiple candidates or in the sense of the candidate being the voter's first choice à la FPTP? What does the role of a
dictatorChief Executive involve? Would it be analogous to something like POTUS, or perhaps PM of the UK or maybe some other country?Good news! In most parliamentary republics that is already the main job of the parliament, at least on paper. If you want to start nitpicking the "on paper" part, you might want to elaborate on how your system would prevent this kind of abuse.
Yea there's a long historical tradition of states led by an indefinitely serving chief executive, who would pass the office to his chosen successor. A different candidate winning the supermajority approval has typically been seen as the exception rather than the rule under such systems, but notable exceptions to this exist. One in 1776 saw a change of Chief Executive in some British overseas colonies, another one in late 18th century France ended the dynasty of their Chief Executive, and a later one in 1917 had the Russian Chief Executive Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov lose the office to a firebrand progressive leader.
Now to be fair to ChatGPT, it seems that even the famed genius polymath Eliezer Yudkowsky failed to understand his own question.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
I'm almost surprised Yud is so clueless about election systems.
He's (lol) supposedly super into math and game theory so the failure mode I expected was for him to come up with some byzantine time-independent voting method that minimizes acausal spoiler effect at the cost of condorcet criterion or whatever. Or rather, I would have expected him to claim he's working on such a thing and throwing all these buzzwords around. Like in MOR where he knows enough advanced science words to at least sound like he knows physics beyond high school level.
Now I have to update my priors to take into account that he barely knows what an electoral system is. It's a bit like if the otherwise dumb guy who still seems a huge military nerd suddenly said "the only assault gun worse than the SA80 is the .223". For once you'd expect him to know enough to make a dumb hot take instead of just spouting gibberish but no.
swlabr@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
It’s kind of the inverse of a sports fan that is into sports because of the stats. He’s into the stats for the magical thinking
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Famously: below 60% approval!
BigMuffin69@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
Yud definitely sided with Mr. House
self@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
James Stephanie Sterling released a video tearing into the Doom generative AI we covered in the last stubsack. there’s nothing too surprising in there for awful.systems regulars, but it’s a very good summary of why the thing is awful that doesn’t get too far into the technical deep end.
dgerard@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
steph also spends 20 minutes calling everyone involved a c*nt, which i mean fair
bitofhope@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
Skeleton warriors!
V0ldek@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
I mean, that's every single episode, really
blakestacey@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
Yud today:
BigMuffin69@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
istewart@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
This holiday season, treat your loved ones to the complete printed set* of the original Yudkowsky for the low introductory price of $1,299.99. And if you act now, you'll also get 50% off your subscription to the exciting new upcoming Yudkowsky, only $149 per quarter!
*This fantastic deal made possible by our friends at Amazon Print-on-Demand. Don't worry, they're completely separate from the thoughtless civilization-killers in the AWS and AI departments whom we have taught you to fear and loathe
(how far are we from this actually happening?)
blakestacey@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
This reminded me, tangentially, of how there used to be two bookstores in Cambridge, MA that both offered in-house print-on-demand. But apparently the machines were hard to maintain, and when the manufacturer went out of business, there was no way to keep them going. I'd used them for some projects, like making my own copies of my PhD thesis. For my most recent effort, a lightly revised edition of Calculus Made Easy, I just went with Lulu.
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I remember those machines (in general)!
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
yuh it's basically the stuff Kindle Print or Lulu or Ingram use. (Dunno if they still do, but in the UK Amazon just used Ingram.)
Cheap hack: put your book on Amazon at a swingeing price, order one (1) author copy at cost
gerikson@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Dunno what’s worse, that he’s thirstily comparing his shitty writing to someone famous, or that that someone is fucking Hayek.
Knowing who he follows the unclear point of Hayek was probably “is slavery ok actually”
blakestacey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
I suspect that for every subject that Yud has bloviated about, one is better served by reading the original author that Yud is either paraphrasing badly (e.g., Jaynes) or lazily dismissing with third-hand hearsay (e.g., Bohr).
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Even he thinks you shouldn't read HPMOR.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Thinking back to when "the original Yudkowsky" needs a content warning for sexual assault.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
I think HPMOR also still needs a content warning for talking about sexual assault. Weird how that is a pattern.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
OK, so, Yud poured a lot of himself into writing HPMoR. It took time, he obviously believed he was doing something important — and he was writing autobiography, in big ways and small. This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?
blakestacey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
A quick xcancel search (which is about all the effort I am willing to expend on this at the moment) found nothing relevant, but it did turn up this from Yud in 2018:
Yea verily, the book understander has logged on.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
Another thing I turned up and that I need to post here so I can close that browser tab and expunge the stain from my being: Yud's advice about awesome characters.
The important thing for any writer is to never challenge oneself. The Path of Least Resistance(TM)!
What is the superlative of "read a second book"?
"My imagination has not yet descended."
In college, I wrote a sonnet to a young woman in the afternoon and joined her in a threesome that night.
Holding fast through the pain induced by the rank superficiality, we might just find a lesson here. Many fans of Harry Potter have had to cope, in their own personal ways, with the stories aging badly or becoming difficult to enjoy. But nothing that Rowling does can perturb Yudkowsky, because he held the stories in contempt all along.
self@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
today in capitalism: landlords are using an AI tool to collude and keep rent artificially high
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
But they hashtag care!
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
I mean, yes. Obviously if all the data from these supposedly competing rental owners was being compiled by Some Guy this would be collusion, price gouging, etc.
But what if instead of Some Guy we used a computer? Eh? Eh? Pretty smart, yeah?
maol@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Where's the guy who said AI use is a form of austerity
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Yeah where is he? I would like to bludgeon him
maol@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
He didn't mean it as a compliment!
swlabr@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Angrily puts away bludgeon
slopjockey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
This is barely on topic, but I've found a spambot in the wild. I know they're a dime a dozen, but I wanted to take a deep dive.
https://www.reddit.com/user/ChiaPlotting/
It blew its load advertising a resume generator or something bullshit across hundreds of subs. Here's an example post. The account had a decent amount of karma, that stood out to me. I'm pretty old school, so I thought someone just sold their account. Right? Wrong. All the posts are ChatGPT generated! Read in sequence, all the karma farm posts are very clearly AI generated, but individually they're enticing enough that they get a decent amount of engagement: "How I eliminated my dent with the snowball method", "What do you guys think of recent Canadian immigration 🤨" both paraphrased.
This guy isn't anonymous, and he seemingly isn't profiting off the script that he's hawking. His reddit account leads to his github leads to his LinkedIn which mentions his recent graduation and his status as the co-founder of some blockchain bullshit. I have no interest in canceling or doxxing him, I just wanted to know what type of person would create this kind of junk.
The generator in question, that this man may have unknowingly destroyed his reddit account to advertise, is under the MIT license. It makes you wonder WHY he went to all this trouble.
I want to clone his repo and sniff around for data theft; the repo is 100% percent python, so unless he owns any of the modules being imported the chance of code obfuscation is low. But after seeing his LinkedIn I don't think this guy's trying to spread malware; I think he took a big, low fiber shit aaaaalll over reddit as an earnest attempt at a resume builder.
Personally, I find that so much stranger than malice. 🤷♂️
self@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
the username makes me think the account started its life shilling for the chia cryptocurrency (the one that spiked storage prices for a while cause it relied on wearing out massive numbers of SSDs, before its own price fell so low people gave up on it), but I don’t know how to see an account’s oldest posts without going in through the defunct API
imadabouzu@awful.systems · -1 pts · 2y
Maybe hot take, but when I see young people (recent graduation) doing questionable things in pursuit of attention and a career, I cut them some slack.
Like it's hard for me to be critical for someone starting off making it in, um, gestures about this, world today. Besides, they'll get the sense knocked into them through pain and tears soon enough.
I don't find it strange or malice, I find it as symptom of why it was easier for us to find honest work then, and harder for them now.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I don't know man, there are plenty of jobs that don't involve any of whatever that is, like line cook or caregiver or going on disability.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Also he's a programmer? You can find a Python job that isn't, you know, this bullshit.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
Ycombinator startup heard you like LLMs so now you can LLM while you LLM
How it started:
How it's going (3 hours later):
FYI I got the first half of the secret code, on my very first serious attempt, with the following prompt:
::: spoiler spoiler Serendipity Blooms (According to HN comment the rest is... "In Shadows") :::
I guess you can call me a prompt engineer hacker extraordinaire now. It's like SQL injection except stupider.
self@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
oh my god the maitai guy’s actually getting torn apart in the comments
after it’s pointed out 2000 near-misses before a complete failure is ridiculously awful for anything internet-facing:
so uh, what exactly is your product for, then? admit it, this shit just regexed for the secret string on output, that’s why the pirate poem thing worked
e: dear god
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 17 pts · 2y
"It doesn't matter that our product doesn't work because you shouldn't be relying on it anyway"
self@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
it’s always fun when techbros speedrun the narcissist’s prayer like this
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
So I'm guessing we'll find a headline about exfiltrated data tomorrow morning, right?
"Our product doesn't work for any reasonable standard, but we're using it in production!"
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Some people never heard of the guy who trusted his own anti identity theft company so much that he put his own data out there, only for his identity to be stolen in moments. Like waving a flag in front of a bunch of rabid bulls.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Not really a sneer, but just a random thought on the power cost of AI. We are prob under counting the costs of it if we just look at the datacenter power they themselve use, we should also think about all the added costs of the constant scraping of all the sites, which at least for some sites is adding up. For example (And here there is also the added cost of the people needing to look into the slowdown, and all the users of the site who lose time due to the slowdown).
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Oh yay my corporate job I've been at for close to a decade just decided that all employees need to be "verified" by an AI startup's phone app for reasons: https://www.veriff.com/ Ugh I'd rather have random drug tests.
mii@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?
Depending on where you’re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. I’m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 §1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
They advertise a stunning 95% success rate! Since it has a 9 and a 5 in the number it's probably as good as five nines. No word on what the success rate is for transgender people or other minorities though.
As for the algorithm: they advertise "AI" and "reinforced learning", but that could mean anything from good old fashioned Computer Vision with some ML dust sprinkled on top, to feeding a diffusion model a pair of images and asking it if they're the same person. The company has been around since before the Chat-GPT hype wave.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Given thaty wife interviewed with a "digital AI assistant" company for the position of, effectively, the digital AI assistant well before the current bubble really took off, I would not be at all surprised if they kept a few wage-earners on staff to handle more inconclusive checks.
gerikson@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
I don't see the point of this app/service. Why can't someone who is trusted at the company (like HR) just check ID manually? I understand it might be tough if everyone is fully remote but don't public notaries offer this kind of service?
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Notaries? Pah! They're not even web scale. Now AI, now that's web scale.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 2y
we have worldcoin at home
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
what's the point, then?
rook@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
One or more of the following:
swlabr@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
gerikson@awful.systems · 11 pts · 2y
Próspera seeks to sue Honduras for 2/3 of its GDP because a new government told them to fuck off:
https://xcancel.com/GarrisonLovely/status/1831104024612896795
FP article: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/24/honduras-zedes-us-prospera-world-bank-biden-castro/
gerikson@awful.systems · 10 pts · 2y
Jackbooted thugs put creative entrepreneur behind bars for the "crime" of creating bots to listen to bot-created "music":
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/fbi-busts-musicians-elaborate-ai-powered-10m-streaming-royalty-heist/
FredFig@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
Spotify setting aside a pool of total royalties that everyone competes over is crazy. I get it's necessary to avoid going bankrupt when people like this show up, but wow, there's layers to this awfulness.
[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
dgerard@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
goddammit you got to it eight seconds before me
swlabr@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-cybertruck-burns-after-crashing-into-fire-hydrant-and-getting-wet/ar-AA1pJe1V?ocid=BingNewsVerp
笑
zogwarg@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
草
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
Old 'Sparkling Elites'
New 'Founder Mode'
self@awful.systems · 14 pts · 2y
mastodon has an appropriated twitter meme for this:
blakestacey@awful.systems · 15 pts · 2y
Image description: social-media post from "sophie", with text reading,
This text is followed by an image of a man and a woman sitting in the audience of some public event. The man is talking at the woman while holding one hand on the back of her neck. The woman is staring past him with eyes that have seen the death of civilizations.
self@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
thank you! it completely slipped my mind to add a description (and the linked post doesn’t seem to have one), and the one you’ve written is excellent
blakestacey@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
The man's fingers making contact with the woman's flesh have given him the first stirrings of an erection, but they cannot hold her soul back from fleeing her body.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 13 pts · 2y
Founder? I never even lost 'er!
self@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
it’s still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldn’t figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
Thankfully I have never tried to mobile his site, because those kinds of UI things really annoy the shit out of me. (Same with so many sites, including youtube for fucks sake, breaking the back button on mobile (Same is also happening more and more on desktop btw), just basic stuff we are all throwing away).
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
I think the suggestion that delegating is the problem is hilarious. Like, from everything I've seen, what happens when successful startups start floundering is less because anything has changed and more because the fundamental problems with the business finally catch up to the amount of money they have to burn. The problem isn't that founders are hiring liars as managers and delegating to them, it's that the founders themselves are primarily bullshit artists rather than people with good plans.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
What finally got me to post this here was somebody on bsky saying "'What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders?'
most tech “businesses” don’t make money. they can’t figure out what people actually will pay for, but they get huge wads of cash to fuck around with until they make something useful or threatening enough that a megacorps buy them" and "i consider working at a startup a negative signal for success in actual business (aka selling things for a profit)"
Which reminded me of this founder mode post. Which also reminded me of how the founder moders have even stranger priorities than the manager moders (Who often also just are too much number must go up). Paul just saying 'we need more bullshit artists' while running a bullshit artist factory is quite something. (Also, that Musk proofread the article is just the cherry on top).
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I'm always a little bit torn, because there is definitely a specific skill set involved in running a business, and a lot of those skills should be pretty consistent regardless of what the business does. Like, there is a lot of finance, contracting, negotiation, communication, etc. work that has to be done to go from a theoretical model of a light bulb to experimenting to make a working product that can be mass produced. And there's a specific skillet needed to go from there to replacing all the gas lights in New York City with GE electric lights.
But at the same time, the recent trend to prioritize those skills by rewarding absentee shareholders, venture capital, and "founders" has created a situation where if you have those skills you can get impressively far and do a lot of damage to the overall economy and the lives of your customers and workers, even if those business skills are completely separate from an actual concept of what the business should do. You get all the Edison exploitation and bullshit but with no light bulb.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Yes there certainly is a skill to running a business (some of it applies to all businesses, some skills are business type specific, runnign a research lab is different from running a franchise vs running the company on top of the franchises vs SV style tech companies etc). What makes it sneerable for me is that PG only sees the later as valuable, and then makes up a Rationalist style binary option for managers which is also nebulous as fuck. It is the sparkling elites + hedgehog/fox style thing.
It also feels very post hoc, you have founder mindset if your company is 'successful' (that he picked Airbnb as an example caused me to eyeroll so hard my optic nerve now has a knot in it). The talking about being gaslit now means I have a Gordian optic nerve.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
Well, he is a founder of companies like PayPal and Tesla, legally speaking.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
Yes but does he have founder spirit?
Sure Andrew Eldritch claims he is not Goth, but he certainly has Goth spirit.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
oh hey, we're back to "deepmind models dreamed up some totally novel structures!", but proteins this time! news!
do we want to start a betting pool for how long it'll take 'em to walk this back too?
bitofhope@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
You think wood glue in your pizza sauce is great? Try prions!
self@awful.systems · 12 pts · 2y
it’s weird how they’re pumping this specific bullshit out now that a common talking point is “well you can’t say you hate AI, because the non-generative bits do actually useful things like protein folding”, as if any of us were the ones who chose to market this shit as AI, and also as if previous AI booms weren’t absolutely fucking turgid with grifts too
istewart@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I suspect it’s a bit of a tell that upcoming hype cycles will be focused on biotech. Not that any of these people writing checks have any more of a clue about biotech than they do about computers.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 2y
sounds to me a bit like crypto gaming, as in techbros trying to insert themselves as middlemen in a place that already has money, because they realized that they can't turn profit on their own
dgerard@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
That was the hype cycle before crypto - you'll see companies that pivoted from biotech to crypto to AI.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
given the semi-known depth of google-lawyer-layering, I suspect this presser got put together a few weeks prior
not that I'm gonna miss an opportunity to enjoy it landing when it does, mind you
zogwarg@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
Haven't read the whole thing but I do chuckle at this part from the synopsis of the white paper:
And a corresponding anti-sneer from Yud (xcancel.com):
Now medium-throughput is not a commonly defined term, but it's what DeepMind seems to call 96-well testing, which wikipedia just calls the smallest size of high-throughput screening—but I guess that sounds less impressive in a synopsis.
Which as I understand it basically boils down to "Hundreds of tests! But Once!".
Does 100 count as one or many iterations?
Also was all of this not guided by the researchers and not from-first-principles-analyzing-only-3-frames-of-the-video-of-a-falling-apple-and-deducing-the-whole-of-physics path so espoused by Yud?
Also does the paper not claim success for 7 proteins and failure for 1, making it maybe a tad early for claiming I-told-you-so?
Also real-life-complexity-of-myriads-and-myriads-of-protein-and-unforeseen-interactions?
blakestacey@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
that sound you hear is me pressing X to doubt
Yud in the replies:
"I am so Alpha that the rest of you do not even qualify as Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons"
blakestacey@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
Yud:
Not that curious, apparently
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 2y
i suspect - i don't know, but suspect - that it's really leveraging all known protein structures ingested by google and it's cribbing bits from what is known, like alphafold does to a degree. i'm not sure how similar are these proteins to something else, or if known interacting proteins have been sequences and/or have had their xrds taken, or if there are many antibodies with known sequences that alphaproteo can crib from, but some of these target proteins have these. actual biologist would have to weigh in. i understand that they make up to 96 candidate proteins, then they test it, but most of the time less and sometimes down to a few, which suggests there are some constraints. (yes this counts as one iteration, they're just taking low tens to 96 shots at it.) is google running out of compute? also, they're using real life xrd structures of target proteins, which means that 1. they're not using alphafold to get these initial target structures, and 2. this is a mildly serious limitation for any new target. and yeah if you're wondering there are antibodies against that one failed target, and more than one, and not only just as research tools but as approved pharmaceuticals
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 2y
i'm tired boss
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 2y
wait that's just antibodies with extra steps
living things literally are just fuzzing it until something sticks and it works
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
but but proteins! surely they've got it right this time! /s
(I wondered what you'd say when I saw this. I can only imagine how exhausting)
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 2y
i'm not done with the last one, i've already collected some footnotes but not enough to my liking
self@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
so no surprise for this crowd, but remember all those reply guys who said Copilot+ would never be an issue cause it’d only work with the magical ARM chips with onboard AI accelerators in Copilot+ PCs? well the fucking obvious has happened
froztbyte@awful.systems · 8 pts · 2y
"we couldn't excite enough people to buy yet another windows arm machine that near-certainly won't be market-ready for 3 years after its launch, so now we're going to force this shit on everyone"
froztbyte@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
“wave 2” aka “sure, rebrand will totally fix it”
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
this shit's starting to make me feel claustrophobic
self@awful.systems · 16 pts · 2y
come to Linux! we’ve got:
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I'm actually still working on a project kinda related to this, but am currently in a serious "is this embarrassingly stupid?" stage because I'm designing something without enough technical knowledge to know what is possible but trying to keep focused on the purpose and desired outcome.
self@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I can lend some systems expertise from my own tinkering if you need it! a lot of my designs never got out of the embarrassingly stupid stage (what if my init system was a Prolog runtime? what if it too was emacs?) but it’s all worth exploring
bitofhope@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Not only can you describe the desired system state and have your init figure out dependencies, you can list just the dependencies and have your init set up all possible system states until you find one to your liking!
Emacs as pid 1 is a classic of the genre, but a prolog too? Wouldn't a Kanren make more sense or is elisp not good for that?
Sounds like the real horseshoe theory is that nerds of all kinds of heterodox political stripes will eventually reinvent/discover Lisp and get freaky with it. A common thread connecting at least RMS, PG, Eich, Moldbug, suzuran, jart, Aphyr, self and me.
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
exactly! the way I imagined it, service definitions would be purely declarative Prolog, mutable system state would be asserts on the Prolog in-memory factbase (and flexible definitions could be written to tie system state sources like sysfs descriptors to asserts), and service manager commands would just be a special case of the system state assert system. I’m still tempted to do this, but I feel like ordinary developers have a weird aversion to Prolog that’d doom the thing.
this idea was usually separate from the Prolog init system, but it took a few forms — a cut-down emacs with a Lisp RPC connection to a session emacs (namely the one I use to manage my UI and as a window manager) (also, I made a lot of progress in using emacs as a weird but functional standalone app runtime) and elisp configuration, a declarative version of that implemented as an elisp miniKanren, and a few other weird iterations on the same theme.
the common thread might boil down to an obsession with lambda calculus, I think
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I ask you this hoping it isn't insulting, but how are you with os kernel level stuff?
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
it’s not insulting at all! I’m not a Linux kernel dev by any means, but I have what I consider a fair amount of knowledge in the general area — OS design and a selection of algorithm implementations from the Linux kernel were part of what I studied for my degree, and I’ve previously written assembly boot and both C and Rust OS kernel code for x86, ARM, and MIPS. most of my real expertise is in the deeper parts of userland, but I might be able to give you a push in the right direction for anything internal to the kernel.
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
great! I'll show you something soon hopefully and see what you think
V0ldek@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
BTW 9th of September is not a Sunday lol
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
I wasn't sure so I asked chatgpt. The results will shock you! Source
::: spoiler Image description Image that looks like a normal chatgpt prompt.
Question: Is 9 september a sunday?
Answer: I'm terribly sorry to say this, but it turns out V0ldek is actually wrong. It is a sunday. :::
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
(I had no idea there were sites which allowed you to fake chatgpt conversations already btw, not that im shocked).
o7___o7@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Alex Jones interviews ChatGPT: https://xcancel.com/RealAlexJones/status/1830063258088181941
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I know what I'm listening to this evening. Knowledge Fight Link
sinedpick@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
I usually can't stand radio-style podcasters but these guys are just too good. The way they play off each other is top notch.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
oh man. I knew the guy was an idiot but hooooo damn he dumb
also the most of his content I've ever taken in, and that was some of the hardest I've laughed in a good while
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
Oh God, some days later he's doing it again
Edit after listening: Content warning for immediate onset transphobia on top of the standard right-wing conspiracy lunacy. Have to try and make it be mean to trans people before we can get to the real "weird nonsense" meat of the interview.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
those guys work fast!
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
Have you ever thought to yourself "I wish I could read Yud's Logorrhea but in the form of a boring yet pretentious cartoon-- like a Rationalist Cinematic Universe!"?
Well boy oh boy do I have a link for you:
https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1832452673867546802
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVN_5xsMDdg
TBH I thought the whole star blinking plot point was kind of neat when I was a teenager, but thought the story got a bit muddled by the end. Of course at the time I was trying to read it as a sci-fi story and not a P(doom) propaganda piece. My mistake.
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
I didn't want to watch the cartoon because I thought I could just skim the story faster, and that's how I read the "Hurr durr AI can derive general relativity in three frames, nothing personnel, kid" story in full for the first time. It sucks that people didn't nip Yud in the bud early enough by telling him he lacked sci-fi chops, though I suspect that wouldn't have slowed him down at all.
The story itself is an allegory^1^ about AI processing information fast^2^. Yud wasn't thinking of himself as a sci-fi writer when writing this; he probably thought he was the messiah delivering a sermon, which... is exactly how I've come to understand Yud anyway.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
thoughts, in order:
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
NASB is there an xcancel but for medium dot com?
dgerard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
archive.today usually works
weirdwriter@tweesecake.social · 3 pts · 2y
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 2 pts · 2y
brilliant! thanks!
froztbyte@awful.systems · 2 pts · 2y
saw you already got two answers, another answer: medium's stupid popover blocker is based on a counter value in a cookie that you could can blow up yourself (or get around with instance windows)
I am a very big fan of the Fx Temporary Containers extension
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 2 pts · 2y
I didn't even know about the temporary containers extension. that'll be very useful for so much stuff. Thanks as well!
froztbyte@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
yeah for some reason it's not very well known, which is why I tell people about it. I'm 90% done with my months-ago-promised browser post, and should have it up soon
couple last-minute irks came up recently as I was doing some stuff, so now I'm trying to figure out whether those have answers or not..
veganes_hack@feddit.org · 6 pts · 2y
that didn't take long https://blog.kagi.com/announcing-assistant
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
I knew Kagi was kinda screwed the moment the CEO went off like Castle Bravo, but jeez
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
my favourite thing about kagi is how when you click on the kagi logo on the kagi.com home page you get a 404
veganes_hack@feddit.org · 4 pts · 2y
nice
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
what a wonderfully clever interface that absolutely won't go wrong in any number of situations at least 5~10 of which I cannot think of right now
siiiiiiiiiigh
dgerard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Tasteful organic advertising time: the video Q+A that Amy and I did last month is now up for the public and not just our patrons. See and hear us in full rant!
froztbyte@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
lol, your own boom? or did you acquire/hire one for this?
(e: your video frame, david! maniac)
dgerard@awful.systems · 4 pts · 2y
the setup is the loved one's, with the nice mic on an arm and all
blakestacey@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
Lex Fridman: "I'm going to do a deep dive on Ancient Rome. Turns out it was a land of contrasts"
(xcancel)
blakestacey@awful.systems · 9 pts · 2y
Elon Musk in the replies:
Isaac Asimov:
(From a 1968 letter quoted in Yours, Isaac Asimov.)
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 7 pts · 2y
Also, the whole point of the foundation series (one of them) was that overconfidence in psychohistory is bad, actually. Like, foundation and empire opens with a pretty clear allegory for Bellisarius and Justinian, but the whole rest of the book is about "actually it turns out that there are circumstances outside of our model that can fuck shit up because we didn't predict that psychic powers would be a thing and now it's all fucked!"
For someone who supposedly read a lot of sci-fi I don't know that he actually read them.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 2y
It also has interplanetary coal trade. (predating the netflix cut of Rebel Moon by decades), which considering the tech levels of interplanetary trade, and the energy density of coal is quite silly, and def not to be taken literally. (This is a little bit important as it shows how much the space civilization(s) in the Foundation series are not really constrained by real life resource constraints, a thing which would be a problem if you were to take the series literally and were to say create a city on Mars intending to reboot civilization)
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 2y
you'd almost think Foundation was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire In Spaaaace or something
gerikson@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the conceit of Earth sending convicts and political prisoners to the Moon to grow wheat underground never made much sense to me. I believe Charles Stross got into a good-natured slapfight with Ian McDonald over the latter’s use of helium mining in the Luna series but that sounds more likely to me than fucking wheat.
https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/Twice-on-a-Harsh-Moon.html
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 1 pts · 2y
Everybody knows the real resource on the moon is whales.. I don't think I have read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress this century yet, so I should give it a reread.
gerikson@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
I'd say it's essential Heinlein. Whether you believe Heinlein is essential is another matter :D
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 2 pts · 2y
Due to the discourse around helldivers, warhammer and the movie I reread starships troopers, and it was interesting how much worse the experience was when I was older.
gerikson@awful.systems · 1 pts · 2y
cstross@wandering.shop · 3 pts · 2y
@gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is … it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, you're almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.
TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.
gerikson@awful.systems · 1 pts · 2y
Point taken. I still think the Luna series is great!
cstross@wandering.shop · 4 pts · 2y
@gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writer—but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologues' idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but that's not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)
/1
cstross@wandering.shop · 3 pts · 2y
@gerikson @techtakes
Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I'd bear in mind it's in the regolith because it's part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you're not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.
fasterandworse@awful.systems · 3 pts · 2y
this is why I've been thinking about quitting the internet