Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 July 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 July 2024
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.
not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, we’re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips
She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now it's nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.
I’m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I can’t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems
I’m too angry to even sneer properly at this. it’s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.
I think some people are from hell
Here is the worst thing I didn't have to read today from a transhumanist:
Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.
.
Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.
Bonus round:
spoiler
What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who can't reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.
This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a 'crime of homelessness' such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt they've just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something.
Catching up on SMBC and finding a quality sneer I'm a little bit surprised I didn't find here sooner.
https://bsky.app/profile/jonpennington.bsky.social/post/3kxqkmezcwe2o
I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. He's older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.
I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called "Yarvinating."
He's the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a "pickoff lord." That is to say, he's the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.
Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, I've got at least one other person who would remember the "Yarvinating" anecdote. I've got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.
I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. We're both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody else's Lex Luthor origin story.
Another bit of tea... He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.
see also https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that "No one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl." Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvin's participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of "touching" his performance.
so what rhymes with Proton getting into AI grifting? you fucking guessed it
Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse [Thomas Claburn, The Register]
Personal opinion: c'mon bubble
Japan supermarket chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in quality service push (South China Morning Post).
Called “Mr Smile”, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude.
It has also been designed with “game” elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.
The company said its goal was to “standardise staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum”.
Thanks I hate it
Press release here: https://www.aeonretail.jp/pdf/240701R_1.pdf or here: https://www.instavr.co.jp/news/aeon-retail-smile-2024-07-01/ (Lots of big words so I didn't try to read it)
InstaVR's English website here: https://www.instavr.co/
Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/
Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can't even buy gift cards at scale.
https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1816925777377788295#m
Yud requires calories for his massive brain.
No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also 'AI' is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)
more on the nsfw side but this is a kinda interesting finding/use of existing tech
Not everyone wants ai for their search tools
Whatever shambling corpse of Toys "R" Us still exists has released "the first OpenAI SORA generated brand commercial."
It looks absolutely dire, particularly in motion, but posters are still falling over themselves to call it "cool" and "exciting" or claim that people "might not notice" that it's complete and utter arse.
Have not read it yet, but seems relevant to our collective interests. NSFW due to NASB. Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip. (A long post about Nick Land).
NASBLOL (I'm not sure this abbreviation will work out): "Investors in anti-Biden cryptocurrencies are getting absolutely destroyed." (Source)
Trump selecting JD Vance has his running mate has led to stuff I know from this venue bleeding into stuff I follow (shamefully) for US politics. Case in point, behold Mencius Moldbug between Richard Hanania and some racist dweeb from Cambridge:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/07/meet-you-at-the-bottom-if-there-really-is-one
https://xcancel.com/jrawson/status/1814232925967089808
The fuck.
Reposting this from the last Stubsack here by request.
Just found out from a screenshot in a tweet that Marc Aandreesen considers Nick Land to be some kind of patron saint of "techno-optimism". Setting aside Land's ugly views about everything... I didn't think optimism was what he was known for. More like grasping, desperate, disgusted embrace of the onward march of capital.
ChatGPT's new search feature hasn't even launched and already its shitting the bed
The sneers are writing themselves
AP takes down CF Vance apologia, not asserting things that they cannot evidence (that Vance did not have sexual relations with that couch)
before: https://archive.is/fXiMc after: https://archive.is/j3aot
This is the journalistic integrity we expect of AP News
after all this time, TIL that Roko pronounces his name "Rocko" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIwJDnej7pg
Regarding that claimed breakthrough about AI winning the International Mathematical Olympiad: a reminder that a proof which hangs together logically is not necessarily a proof that makes sense.
Those formalized proofs are so incredibly ugly, it's amazing. Of course it doesn't much of a sensible indentation, but then there are single proof steps where I have no idea what it's even doing. [...] And then there are nonsense mathematical steps. The solution of problem 2 starts with induction, before introducing any variables. It applies induction to the number 12. And it write 12 as
(10)+2. Then it proceeds to do the whole proof in the base case of the induction, and notices that the induction step is trivial, since the goal is the same as the induction hypothesis (but instead of theassumptiontactic it usescongr 26).Not a sneer, but a mildly interesting open letter:
A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.
The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.
Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.
Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people's work, and the fact a lot of people's work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say "no", the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.
Not a sneer, but still a damn good piece on AI from Brian Merchant:
The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts
(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)
(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)
Let's see how long HN takes to ban yet another literal Nazi.
new EA hangout found, a snip at £3.5m
Libertarian nerds run straight into actual California, not the AI-generated dreamland they imagine
Mercury news: "Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report"
The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience, and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”
HN shows what they think of the 3 people with actual thoughts on the issue by downvoting them to death
I'm not familiar with Indian politics but I'm curious if anyone understands what this site is or what its politics are https://democracycollective.in (I'm just nosy and curious, I saw this pop up out of nowhere)
Though maybe I already have an idea:
Jeremy Keith on the bullshit "privacy sandbox" in chrome and firefox: https://adactio.com/journal/21285
I like Jeremy because he is an OG, but I think his requirement for proof that targeted advertising "works" before the browsers implement these features is off the mark for me. He's an agency guy, a bit like Andy Budd, so they tend to have these really visceral takes about the state of the web but with this skewed perspective of best interests
Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community
https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m
Edit: OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m
pivot-to-ai.com needs a new theme. Blocksy looks really nice - but it doesn't work with WP Dark Mode and caches badly.
Need a 2 column blog theme suiting full short posts on the front page, that plays nice with Dark Mode. Any tips?
Ayo is this real? It'd be fucking wild if it was real
