Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 31 March 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 31 March 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? 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.
In the comments to a submission about a private company trying to design a new supersonic airliner(!) this gem appears
Can we get LLMs to design the engine?
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39793848 if you have showdead)
The rest of the comments range from the realistic (it's hard to design an airliner, and the market for fast ones is not big) over the inevitable Elon-fluffing (SpaceX is just like an airliner, duh!) to the above insanity.
Can we get LLMs to design the engine?
I’m actually at a loss of words for this. What the actual fuck …
From here. The article is pretty interesting, though.
“AI is jet planes for the mind,”
incredibly polluting?
We eventually figure out that the don't need to be that fast and make slower models?
Or, the doors will fall off if you let the finance people run it?
Or a place for strangers to use computers to inspect your private parts? Right, def that one.
Larger expenses in a month than earnings in a year. AI going great. Capitalism going great.
automated narcissism maintenance machines. maybe if we can heavenban the promptfans into a room with just their roided clippies, they'll be happier for it
He claimed a new, faster version of the Stable Diffusion image generator released earlier this month could generate “200 cats with hats per second.”
Pointless. The set of any type of funny cat picture on the Internet is already infinite.
The Financial Times reported Friday that the company made $5.4 million of revenue in February, against $8 million in costs. Several sources said there are ongoing concerns about making payroll for the roughly 150 remaining employees. Leadership roles have gone vacant for months amid the disarray, leaving the company increasingly directionless.
"... the AI-ristocrats!"
a lesswrong: Modern Transformers are AGI, and Human-Level
Modern NLP systems can do most things you would want an AI to do, at some basic level of competence.
For example, drawing mutant rodent dicks of unusual size
you know
it's worth trying to get jon oliver's attention on this shit
"this shit" being the examplar majestic rodent penises, and maybe also the causal source. sorta. might be able to spend some minutes on that
tasty tasty dead dove, yum yum
The sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried is humbling. I remember researching his rise to power many years ago, with some care, over a few weeks. Listened to a lot of his interviews, etc. I remember feeling deeply impressed, almost saddened by my own relative inferiority. I thought he was very cool. I really did. I thought he was a legitimate genius, bold, independently-minded, and admirably risk-tolerant: A paragon of contemporary, accelerated, cultural and technological entrepreneurship. His initial rise to power was the kind that often makes me wonder "What is wrong with me? Why can I not be smarter, sharper, bolder, and more successful with my own projects?" Since I admired him, I know that I am in no way above him; I could have very well made all of the same mistakes he made, if I had been given the power that he accrued. "There go I but for the grace of God," as they say. Ultimately, you never know what someone is really doing and you never know what will happen to them. You just cannot know whether someone's life and work are enviable until after they have died. With his sentencing today, I am at present just as awestruck as when I learned about his rise to power, but in the exact opposite direction—the envy I felt toward him I now feel toward my own life, and I'm beyond grateful to have achieved such tremendous success compared to him. If comparison is all too often the thief of joy, for the same reason it can also be a multiplier of gratitude and humility. I pray for Sam Bankman-Fried.
.
you'll be pleased to know that Justin used to think SBF was the smartest man inna worl', but now he realises that he himself is
Guy who was previously featured here for championing the merits of dropping the n-word when meeting new (white) people in order to judge them worthy had an extensive twitter rant about how scott alexander may be an actual prophet, while quote-twitting another similarly afflicted person.
If you bother, which I barely did, this is what you're in for:
Trace says Scott has given up his will to power. but it's not a giveaway, it's a trade: if you don't seek power you retain the ability to seek unpolluted truth. here's this tradeoff explained by Curtis Yarvin, another reluctant prophet, whom Scott has definitely read:
Man I do NOT fuck with TracingWoodgrains. I assume that most of the people who interact with Hannania - and his ilk of wordy r9k robots and reply guys - is a a crypto-reactionary. But I think Tracey just really really likes tweeting and culture war fence straddling? Somehow it's still obnoxious.
Scott Alexander is one of the most gifted and prolific writers of our day—compelling and strikingly original on any number of topics.
An assessment of a writer's skill, with no regards to prose. This is what happens when the only text you consume come from techie microbloggers
ex-cultist goes "these fucking people"
Courtesy of r/programmingcirclejerkHe seems to have the same amount of brain cells as a GPT at least.
Fucking Hetzner:
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/112161019007879382
i am deeply disappointed and annoyed
also billing cycle is 1 April lolollllllll
also where does one find a webhost that's any better? hetzner are great otherwise (a proper company, not a personal project), I used to strongly recommend them.
also they hate crypto
AWS: you will pay. also, shit works. also, you get customer service.
Azure: you're running Windows, you hate yourself, probably both
Google: you have transcended beyond such earthly requirements as "customer service" or "functions that don't get deprecated in three years"
Hetzner: you run a herd of carefully groomed pets and not cattle
OVH: wot is dis "uptime" ov which u speek
Oracle: lol
Some Guy LLC: I would rather sign up with OracleOVH is Some Guy LLC At Scale
and Google Cloud is Some Guy LLC At Scale At Scale
fuck sakes this is aggravatingly disappointing to see from them
I'd been a bit sour already because of the power and IP pricing pushes, but I know the former is bc putin. the latter fucking sucks, it's aggressive and feels like trying to get additional revenue for nothing (although I haven't compared RIPE pricing to see if this feeling bears out (and even then, fucking hello? fucking RIPE going on continual price ballooning is some other fucking shit too. but I digress...))
but what the fuck at this. I've had hetzner boxes with other people's shitty php getting content injected and growing coinminers and shit, and none of that has ever had a response like "you need to get rid of that domain/customer". it's had the usual temp-IP-blackhole crap (which I get)
note that this instance is also on hetzner (cause I was also fairly happy with them til now, other than a bit of missing functionality), so suggestions of reasonably-priced alternatives that don’t suck and will let us run NixOS are appreciated
though I might need a bit of convincing if those alternatives take the form of “OVH doesn’t suck now” or “go ahead and put your human flesh near Larry Ellison”
i really really hope Hetzner can get their shit together here because this is a fucking pain to even think about. I got shit to do ya know.
every BOFH thinks they could do their own AWS with gaffer tape and paperclips. i actually thought "oh i could just" and then had to whack myself on the head with a newspaper and say NO
i have not the time any more for Some Guy LLC and especially not for being Some Guy LLC, there is good reason to go with the inhuman corporate behemoth and it's because i'm tiiiiired
you will always need your bofh skills in good order and a bugout bag of last night's fresh backups to hand, but given that one can camp out on Inhuman Corporate Behemoth for years
there's comp sci experiments and then there's services, but services are work and if i wanted to work i'd get a job
Update: Hetzner gives a non-apology that does not address the actual systemic issue
holy fuck hetzner what in the fuck are you doing. please stop having the lowest tier of the abuse team try to trick the woem.men admin into accepting the shit non-apology legal drafted as a way to try and head off a lawsuit. nobody cares that your PR department got inconvenienced by the strong public response to this (in fact, it’s a good thing)
go and very publicly commit to making policy changes that’ll protect LGBTQ+ folks or fuck off. shit in a way that’ll be legally expensive and embarrassing if you don’t follow through or get off the fucking pot. having your low-level IT staff pretend you’re Some Guy LLC is a bad fucking look. we all know the guy whose only job is to send threatening emails and press the “close account” button doesn’t have any power to do anything of substance. why in fuck is that guy still in the woem.men admin’s inbox making demands?
Courts to Elon suing to protect Twitter's honour: fuck off (PDF). And fuck off a second time (PDF).
SBF sentence gets announced this week. Over/under on 15/45/75 years?
I'm guessing the prosecutor gets something like the 45-50 they were asking for. Madoff got 150 years, though.
(excuse the ignorance, haven't been following this close enough on account of spoons)
40-50y req from prosecutor, wat - what's the story there? were they unsure they could secure more if they asked for[0]? is there some kind of fuckery around max sentencing because of charge class?
[0] as in: since sbf was declared guilty, the sentencing is going to happen regardless, but the value of assigned years is variable, and the assigned value could be below prosecutor request for $legalsystem reasons?[1] [1] I am not a US legal system enjoyer, so I don't have comprehensive knowledge on the minutae of that demented clusterfuck operates
Buttcoin "miners" literally burning trash. Sponsored by a state who apparently have learned nothing from its 200+ years of environmental destruction.
A Stronghold spokesperson said in a statement that its operations actually clean up land and water in the area by using waste coal left behind by historic coal production in the region.
cryptobro going full on "it's free real estate" without thinking twice why it's waste in the first place
Idk if this even meets the lowest-quality bar, but I just saw something on Reddit's Buttcoin sub, and the fact that this is a real headline is making me question my sanity. The future of finance, everyone.
And the AI-generated image is the cherry on top.
Decrypt has been trying a desperate pivot to AI, and even essayed a few LK-99 pieces in superconductors' two weeks
Aah, the smell of second-tier dipshits fomo-farming on meme stocks by people who likely absolutely insist they “were there for the critical r/wsb moments”, such a unique aroma
one hour forty five minutes of Mars Review of Books contributors discussing culture
uncut purestrain abyss, could kill a newbie sneer in one minute thirty or less
Awful at a technical level, tedious at a textual level, overall baffling that there is an audience for this. Everyone seems at times politely humoring to openly bored. The least interesting conversation happening at the worst party you've ever been to.
Please regard this video as a performance of No Exit.
have these Dork Enlightenment fuckwits gone so whacko they've wrapped around to the other side of conspiracies and myths?!
Transhumanism descended from Fyodorov's Cosmism, the Ineffectual Dork Web is shot through with whatever batshit Jordan Peterson is on, LessWrong can't tell that Christopher Langan is a kook....
I’d call this the Desert Bus of sneering material, but that’d be terribly unfair to Desert Bus
ah thank you for this one!
The Atlantic's biggest anti-DEI proponent just wrote an article on the memoir of a writer on the fringe of the IDW. He was actually one of the guys I had in mind when I suggested the stubstack weekly.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/rob-henderson-memoir-yale-troubled/677620/
In case you're unfamiliar with Rob Henderson - and you probably are - he's an orphan who climbed his way out of poverty, made it to Yale and now tweets about wokie cosmopolitans victim communists, the family unit, and the heritabilty of IQ.
Fantastically enough he's also a big proponent of the success sequence? One his commenters suggests that he may have the causality of the sequence reversed, and Henderson says...
His whole square-peg-round-hole shtick is based on glazing hereditarianism while simultaneously purporting conservative values on personal responsibility. He also has countless podcasts with Richard "it's cruel that we let the 85-iq blacks believe they're capable of self-actualization" Hannania; on paper you'd think that an orphan would be repulsed by Hannania's love for setting societal expectations of success based on demographic, but I guess Henderson's cool with all the lesser orphans ending up janitors at best as long as they have a highschool degree and no bastards. It's just good luck that he ended up with a high enough iq to make it to Yale, too bad about the other kids but there's nothing you can do 🤷♂️.
At the end if the day Henderson is just like every modern right wing ideologue. Just post after post of personal grievances masquerading as social critque; each one unexamined and subtlety incompatible with one another
Here's the article I had in mind. His argument is that we should bless the proles with shame (the high iqs will naturally grow towards success), and shy away from "conferring" status; there'd be no point since the low-iqs wouldn't maintain their societal positions, and intervention beyond stable homes and a clean environment barely raise iq anyway.
I used to think that the libertarianism was the most sociopathic mainstream ideology...
