Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 26 May 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 26 May 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 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.
the voice for OpenAI’s Sky got taken offline because they tried to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for it (she voiced the AI in Her) after she repeatedly told them no (via this mastodon post which links the original NPR article):
A well-respected terminal emulator for the Mac decides to slather on AI sauce, and most users are not happy. But there are others who are outraged that slathering AI sauce onto a product is even seen as a negative. Let's take a break from HN to take a look at the tortured souls on lobste.rs who won't let this aggression stand, man:
https://lobste.rs/s/7aglnr/psa_iterm2_now_has_chatgpt_integration
archive link in case mods decide to nuke it
Personal favs:
This is the sort of hatred and resentment that is uncomfortable to see on a public forum.
Hi, this is the internet, you must be new here.
I’m mostly checked out of here as a result until the mods get it under control.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Edit as a bonus, here's the HN discussion. Same situaton there, the promptfondlers are surprised everyone is mad
It's nice to know we have looped back to the point in history where we casually consider which people should have agency over their reproductive rights. Oh wait, no it's not nice at all, but somehow still totally acceptable and commonplace.
Finally the realization that academia is just an industry producing artifacts (published papers) and not anything as abstract as "science" and "knowledge" gets the tool it deserves
Github - data-to-paper: AI-driven scientific research
I'm sure this will be fine and not cause any issues whatsoever.
reporter: This AI development is a Big Deal™.
me: y tho?
reporter: Oh, I'm so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!
me: y tho?
reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!
me: sorry, y tho?
reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let's not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!
me: begins weeping
reporter: Don't cry! At least we're all in this together, right???
While AI being "in" a computer might sound as obvious as blue being "in" the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an "AI computer", meaning the technology is in-built. It's the company's latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest.
What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven't worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we're the rats. Perhaps there's some comfort in knowing we'll all find out together.
edit: oh no, this is the same author I sneered at for quirkwashing e/acc. nothing personal, I just die a little inside every time I read something like this, and a little death is always better shared!
Scam investigator Coffeezilla is working on the Rabbit AI guy, and he's off to a good start. Most of the other press is about the device not working, while this focuses more on the scammy NFT / crypto past of the founder.
Not a sneer, and as such NSFW, but here is a short hbomberguy style video: I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology, featuring friend of the sneer PrimalPoly, by the talented münecat.
The lumina saga continues. https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about
TL;DR: Lumina guy sent Trevor a mean letter and Trevor has reworded some things to protect against libel. He still stands by the original blog post.
The orange site has some fairly milquetoast opinions.
Kevin Beaumont got access to Copilot+ and hoo boy it’s even stupider than it sounds:
I got ahold of the Copilot+ software.
Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.
It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.
The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.
The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.
so cultish that even the LW comments worry it's cultish - don't worry about my feet bleeding
dunno how to verify any of this, but xooglers who were there for G+ say it absolutely rings true
not much of a sneer but a passing chuckle:
Received: from <snip>.net (unknown [snip]) Subject: ***SPAM*** Binance Distribution of MyEtherWallet (MEW) Airdropmy spamtrap addresses get these every now and then. I'm still amazed that I get that type of subject line in tyol 2024 - spammers are usually far more agile
somehow missed this previously, but: Redhat Chatbot Linux!
Today, Red Hat announced a developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), a foundation model platform to seamlessly develop, test and run best-of-breed, open source Granite generative AI models to power enterprise applications. RHEL AI is based on the InstructLab open source project and combines open source-licensed Granite large language models from IBM Research and InstructLab model alignment tools, based on the LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots) methodology, in an optimized, bootable RHEL image to simplify server deployments.
the "LAB methodology". I wonder if someone broke out the rack and thumbscrews to get a name that tortured
given what I've seen people do to ubuntu-based machines to make their kerases and tensorflows run, combined with redhat's historical trend of extremely bullshit repo pains, I have to wonder what nightmare experience this will result in
the fuck? any of you happened to have seen this?
I don’t know if I’ll get it on my one droid (both because I’ve turned near every setting and tracker and whatnot off in advance, and because ZA - less likely to get shit like that in advance) but loooool
they’re all just shoving this shit into every damn input control
coming soon: mousegpt?
One of my kids is a huge fan of Dog Man by Dav Pilkey. This particular page from The Scarlet Shedder really captures the mood today.
Edit: apologies for potato image quality
[original poster] For which parts do you feel cringe?
[concerned commenter] Replied in PM.
Here's mine.
[original poster] I worked on this VR "game" where you fly through a 4D fractal
(Carlitos follows link)
PROJECT INFORMATION Date: 4th Semester (2017) Time limit: 4 weeks Team size: 3 People Engine: Unity 3D
