Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.
I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
They’re about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts
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Cloud Engineers
Cloud-to-Butt comes full circle
Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.
Michael Burry is one of the investors who is shorting big tech. (Business Insider - paywalled Substack). I just invest much less in the USA than its 60% share of the global stock market, and less than 40% of that in big tech.
A CSU spokesperson confirmed to EdSource on Wednesday that the university will pay $13 million a year for three years to provide systemwide access to its more than 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. The previous 18-month subscription cost $17 million and expires at the end of June.
Are we so locked in we’re going to put up with a 10% price hike? Couldn’t be bothered to get a new vendor with a better deal, or use the Google one they are also paying for, or just use the free one? This is where the tuition increases are going, this is how we want to spend our taxes? :(
new odium symposium episode (at the link and on all platforms). we talk to professor of africana studies danielle procope bell about her recent paper “‘Pick-Me’ Black women: tactical patriarchal femininity in the Black manosphere.”
The abstract of her paper sounds interesting:
This essay analyzes anti-feminist (“Pick-Me”) Black women content creators on YouTube who exist within the Black manosphere—online spaces populated by Black men who support Black patriarchal dominance. These “Pick-Me” content creators use what I term “tactical patriarchal femininity” to attract the financial provision of an economically stable Black man and to derive income from sympathetic viewers.
Tactical patriarchal femininity is an elaborate, all-consuming embodied performance that is as much about emotion work as it is about exuding conventional attractiveness and behavior that is aligned with traditional femininity. Tactical patriarchal femininity exists to combat the matrices of oppression created by capitalism, white supremacy, and institutional patriarchy. Anti-feminist Black women work in reaction to the misogynoirist material realities that victimize Black women.
I thought this interview with Prof. Michael I. Jordan was worth listening to, he’s bringing down the hype a bit: Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria).
our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because she’s the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. https://justine.lol/animus/
by “culture wars” she means she’s a fucking nazi
This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.
hmm, looking at the text you link it says “your past statements in Twitter” first. could it be they found out you’re a fucking nazi
The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.
“This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you. You couldn’t have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately cares
I have been helpless with giggles for five fuckin’ minutes.
Prometheus a technologist? No he was a social media user.
"prometheus: hot take,
the greek gods: no give that back"
https://modmad.tumblr.com/post/758625466711228416
Also you do care just not in the way she hopes.
she badly underestimates my capacities as a hater
i don’t think she should be allowed to say “the ghetto.” doesn’t matter whether it’s problematic when someone else says it, she definitely doesn’t get to
Why doesn’t she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person he’d love to donate some Thiel bucks to.
don’t give them ideas
He probably hates trans people.
Does not seem uncommon under a subset of very privileged white gay men. So not shocked if Thiel does.
yikes
I never heard of Justine Tunney before but she has a Wikipedia page.
damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvin’s R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i don’t even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing
by her own admission, most of the work that went into it was deciding whether or not she should have one.
Deleted, but the archive remembers
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.
<close tab>
Speaking of HN, here’s the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875
btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they don’t assume it’s because she’s a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she can’t fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.
There’s fold in them comments:
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.
Ha ha no it’s because she went fash, you credulous dork
Friedrich Nietzche has been a disaster for the human species.
It is now 404-ing; an archive copy is available here.
I’m pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (
musl) telling her to go away last week. She’s finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she’s done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.From the linked post:
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.
Fuuuuck off
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.
This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newton’s televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).
I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won’t be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.
Grifting off the United States’ escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.
Thats a trap if I ever saw it.
Gestural Bayesianism!
I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I’ve come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that I’m a good person, it would underflow a double.
Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.
Send more tech billionaires to space, more often, for longer: https://web.archive.org/web/20220117205028/https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/we-dont-know-why-but-being-in-space-causes-us-to-destroy-our-blood/
I’m at a bar trying to watch the Knicks, and there’s someone 2 seats over from me very loudly talking to their date about AI with a lot of LessWrong-coded talking points. For the love of Jalen Bronson just let me watch the fucking game
I’m surprised that the religious fanatics (protestant) haven’t turned on AI yet. The ones around these parts think that UFOs and pokemon cards are satanic, so the Californian lying machine that tells kids to kill themselves wouldn’t be much of a reach.
Can I interest you in a video titled “Mike Adams Joins Alex Jones to Discuss AI World Simulations, Digital Gods & the Data Center Takeover”? It has an AI-generated thumbnail, yet the title sounds anti-AI, and I’m not going to watch it to find out which way it goes. I’m just assuming it leans toward whatever direction will pay them the most, which is possibly also why we haven’t heard much protestation.
Generally conspiracy theorists aren’t interested in actual things that cause real problems, I think. Air polution and global warming being deliberate decisions by elites who don’t care about killing millions, for example. It has to be some wild take like Pokémon child sacrifice or something, so you get to feel like you spotted the secret truth.
But if you want to see some actual apocalyptic conspiracy against “AI”, as in it is literally the manifestation of the body of the Beast and the voice of demons etc., check out Paul Kingsnorth’s substack. This is a burned-out environmental activist who radicalised anti-immigration with Brexit, started pushing a narrative of hobbit pastoralism as a justification for racism, and converted to Christianity with that fervour you only find in converts.
He sounds like a fun guy to talk to at parties! /s
If I had a nickel for every time I got ambushed at a party by a surprise right-wing shoeless guy…
I find it helps to remember that when it comes to conspiracy theorists, most of the absurd stuff (eg Flat Earth) is downstream of the really important belief (eg millenarian Christianity). Essentially, start from the high-level ideology/political/religious beliefs, decide what would have to be true about the world to justify them, and let confirmation bias take care of the details.
Trump likes AI and they like Trump too much to dislike something he likes.
Grim but likely true
Some of them think it’s demonic but I guess there’s a conflict of interest since big tech is supporting the Republicans.
It owns the libs though, that’s usually enough
Women unreliable? GTFO
Congratulations bb you’re a bog standard misogynistic
Love how one of the top qualities for women is “feminine”. I can’t imagine one of my friends being asked about me and just saying uh she’s a woman I guess. A real womanly woman. She-woman. Girl
A detailed look at what kind of slop code is being added to rsync and how exactly slop codes does, allegedly, “tests”. Somehow it’s just what I expected and worse than I thought.
OK sysadmin question: how can I “pin” a last-known good version in apt?
https://wiki.debian.org/AptConfiguration#Using_pinning
Beware that down the line you may run into resolution issues (but hopefully the situation is resolved by then)
If you ignore the AI images (not sure how much of an excuse ‘it was a joke’ is but whatever) an interesting take on AI shit from an economic perspective: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
The rsync slop-code scandal (mentioned here earlier) has now blown up in rsync’s github issues tab. And of course on the orange site.
@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984
> OP’s language seems as if it belongs to someone who trains their children that gender and sex are different and sincerely hopes his son will play with dolls
Says Mx. keysmash username, as if it was a bad thing 🧐The manager of the store says:
“Stop. You know nothing. You have baked 0 bread loaves by hand. No one has ever depended on your bread. You are a finger-wagging “they put dog poo in my bread” type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of baking homemade bread from scratch at home without poo. You can’t ship bread, can’t adapt, can’t even realize that a bread shop is not the place for this kind of attitude.”dogshit bread is the future, so you better get over it.
The “C is too hard for the AI so have the AI rewrite it in Rust” take is just so galaxy-brained.
I strongly suspect there are an uncomfortably large number of Rust enthusiasts who tacitly assume that all the type-checking/borrow-checking/object lifetime tracking are primarily enabling features for AI coding.
i have already seen ai enthusiasts make quite clear that they imagine the purpose of formal theorem verification is to act as a bolt on for llms
I want to believe that’s next-level trolling. It’s too funny to be true.
This was from last year but I forgot about, but this article allegedly about a survey conducted by MIRI and Stanford University on a bunch of AI experts about timelines, which is definitely entirely AI generated since said survey straight up doesn’t exist (I didn’t find anything like it when I did some searches) and it quotes a person who doesn’t work for MIRI
the website title being “ai blogs ai” kinda gives it away
