Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!
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.
Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and "just asking questions". As if I didn't hate this clown enough.
(For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They're praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They're so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament's far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There's no leeway. They're literal card-carrying national socialists.)
This fucking thread on HN right now.
OP is an enlightened freelance webdeveloper who is very scared about ghosts from their computer.
"I find myself in a unique position here, as my diverse background and experiences have given me a perspective that allows me to see the potential impact of AI more clearly than large parts of the society I'm living in"
Another poster is also very scared about ghosts from the computer and converted their entire net-worth into NVidia shares. Now that they are heavily invested in a company deeply entangled with ghosts from the computer the apocalypse basically has to happen. After all it couldn't be that they overreacted.
CW:
spoiler
Dongs, Blood and Thunder, Victory at Sea, Child birth, Scented Candles
So yeah...remember that manly Roko post from last week where he manplained how much men don't need women? Oglaf did it first.
This is Roko's ideal future; Roko's Modern Life, if you like.
(NSFW)
https://www.oglaf.com/dark-miasma/ (part 1 of 24 lol)
https://www.oglaf.com/burningjewels/
But nature finds a way:
(Well, this goes some way to explaining "AI" "art")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40631663
Orange site post with a bunch of people saying burnout is a learning experience and that its okay to be perpetually depressed because it makes you more disruptive.
I don't have anything clever to say about this.
At last, a compelling reason to use Chat-GPT: https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1801360053045497942
iterm2 update, moving the shit out of the core application (like it probably should've been in the first place):
3.5.1 This release adds some safety valves to eliminate the risk of private information leaving the terminal via the AI endpoints. While an API key and explicit user action were always needed to use AI features, some users asked for an impenetrable firewall for safety and regulatory purposes. To that end, there are three relevant changes: 1. Code that communicates with AI providers such as OpenAI has been moved into a plugin that you must install separately. Enterprise system admins can block bundle id com.googlecode.iterm2.iTermAI to prevent it from being installed in the first place. See here for details: https://iterm2.com/ai-plugin.html 2. In addition, you must manually enable AI features in Settings. Doing so requires admin access. 3. Enterprise administrators who wish to disable iTerm2's AI access may set the user default GenerativeAIAllowed to False in their MDM systems.still never received a reply email from the author to my mail. wonder what they think/have learned of this experience tho
shitty 4k upscales, coming soon for a favourite film near you! (via kottke)
New AdamSomething about tech bros reinventing the train but worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5M7Oq1PCz4
Rare moment of clarity on EA forum: the fuck are we giving $100k to a video game for
i ran the NVidia CEO's press conference through my ChatGPT based translator and it came out "lol this is gonna bomb in two quarters but holy shit it's fun while it lasts and i can def get a few scheduled insider sales done, now where's the coke"
Lawrence Lessig falls victim to the siren song of the blarney engines. Also, lol cnn
Many people refer to concerns about the technology as a question of “AI safety.” That’s a terrible term to describe the risks that many people in the field are deeply concerned about. Some of the leading AI researchers, including Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio and Sir Geoffrey Hinton, the computer expert and neuroscientist sometimes referred to as “the godfather of AI,” fear the possibility of runaway systems creating not just “safety risks,” but catastrophic harm.
And while the average person can’t imagine how anyone could lose control of a computer (“just unplug the damn thing!”), we should also recognize that we don’t actually understand the systems that these experts fear.
Companies operating in the field of AGI — artificial general intelligence, which broadly speaking refers to the theoretical AI research attempting to create software with human-like intelligence, including the ability to perform tasks that it is not trained or developed for — are among the least regulated, inherently dangerous companies in America today. There is no agency that has legal authority to monitor how the companies develop their technology or the precautions they are taking.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/opinions/artificial-intelligence-risks-chat-gpt-lessig/index.html
bit of a combo-sneer this morning
CNBC put out an article uncritically repeating yet another round of lieboy pulling the exact same shit. I don't recognize the authors immediately, not sure if they're typical bootlickers or not
openai is going in hard, hiring ex-NSA person that was appointed by the walking talk racist mop (via dan gillmor). for the .... safety role! ah yes, I'm sure we'll all be so very surprised by this attempt consolidation of power.
https://zhukeepa.substack.com/p/ai-alignment-and-the-distributed
This came across the dash and well…
I kinda want to go read the old Singularity fic and enjoy any Zeerust that pops up.
looks like perplexity misbehaves in a way that’d allow them to hide
quick whois on the ip from that log snippet says ec2, so they’re probably doing scaleout via dynamic instances (I’ve been wondering about this for a variety of the services)
full fucking parasitical, again and again
