Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 29 September 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 29 September 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:
Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.
Oh, so they publish textbooks.
"They represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste."
🎶 Please allow me to introduce myself 🎶
one of OpenAI’s cofounders wrote some thoroughly unhinged shit about the company’s recent departures
Thank you, guys, for being my team and my co-workers. With each of you, I have collected cool memories — with Barret, when we had a fierce conflict about compute for what later became o1; with Bob, when he reprimanded me for doing a jacuzzi with a coworker; and with Mira, who witnessed my engagement.
Found a good one in the wild
Didn't you know LLM stood for Limited Liability Machine
Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Who’d have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.
Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35T crypto we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.
A lobsters states the following in regard to LLMs being used in medical diagnoses:
If you have very unusual symptoms, for example, there’s a higher chance that the LLM will determine that they are outside of the probability space allowed and replace them with something more common.
Another one opines:
Don’t humans and in particular doctors do precisely that? This may be anecdotal, but I know countless stories of people being misdiagnosed because doctors just assumed the cause to be the most common thing they diagnose. It is not obvious to me that LLMs exhibit this particular misjudgement more than humans. In fact, it is likely that LLMs know rare diseases and symptoms much better than human doctors. LLMs also have way more time to listen and think.
<Babbage about UK parlaimentarians.gif>
Not a sneer, but some truly beautiful karma:
Judge to approve auctions liquidating Alex Jones’ Infowars to help pay Sandy Hook families
Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.
Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.
And now they’re suing him.
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/
a twitter thread by sv ceo where comment section wants to do some recreational union busting, political assassinations and automating away longshoremen (lmao) over checks notes black friday bringing slightly less profit to mass retailers. to which i say, fuck your black friday then
and he says that it'll affect elections? specifically in "don't do anything visible in interest of unions or trump will win" kinda way? what kinda madhouse is this americans explain https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/1836498432510562788#m
Do you think when the Trumps get paperclipped it will look something like this?
I have to go run an errand soon but someone better have posted some commentary about the a16z anime blog post (as seen on the hell site) by the time I get back or I'll be sorely disappointed.
Inventor sez "I locked myself in my apartment for 4 years to build this humanoid". Surprisingly, not a sexbot!
Saw an unexpected Animatrix reference on Twitter today - and from an unrepentant promptfondler, no less:
This ended up starting a lengthy argument with an "AI researcher" (read: promptfondler with delusions of intelligence), which you can read if you wanna torture yourself.
ya know that inane SITUATIONAL AWARENESS paper that the ex-OpenAI guy posted, which is basically a window into what the most fully committed OpenAI doom cultists actually believe?
yeah, Ivanka Trump just tweeted it
But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.
oh boy
Blast from the past, we're kinda behind the times here in Sweden
Hidden crypto mine found in Swedish hospital (link in Swedish)
Was salivating all weekend waiting for this to drop, from Subbarao Kambhampati's group:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved block stacking abilities. It is a straight shot from here to cold fusion! ... unfortunately, there is a minor caveat:
Looks like performance drops like a rock as number of steps required increases...
Not a sneer, but
KendrickEd Zitron just dropped.Its damn good as usual, with Zitron taking aim at the current state of SaaS and tying it into his previous sneers on AI.
I vaguely remember mentioning this AI doomer before, but I ended up seeing him openly stating his support for SB 1047 whilst quote-tweeting a guy talking about OpenAI's current shitshow:
I've had this take multiple times before, but now I feel pretty convinced the "AI doom/AI safety" criti-hype is going to end up being a major double-edged sword for the AI industry.
The industry's publicly and repeatedly hyped up this idea that they're developing something so advanced/so intelligent that it could potentially cause humanity to get turned into paperclips if something went wrong. Whilst they've succeeded in getting a lot of people to buy this idea, they're now facing the problem that people don't trust them to use their supposedly world-ending tech responsibly.
People are "blatantly stealing my work," AI artist complains
When Jason Allen submitted his bombastically named Théâtre D’opéra Spatial to the US Copyright Office, they weren't so easily fooled as the judges back in Colorado. It was decided that the image could not be copyrighted in its entirety because, as an AI-generated image, it lacked the essential element of “human authorship". The office decided that, at best, Allen could copyright specific parts of the piece that he worked on himself in Photoshop.
“The Copyright Office’s refusal to register Theatre D’Opera Spatial has put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work without compensation or credit.” If something about that argument rings strangely familiar, it might be due to the various groups of artists suing the developers of AI image generators for using their work as training data without permission.
Our anti-AI milita will be called "The Artists' Rifles"
Apparently An Post is the last holdout for crypto/AI/NFT synergy??
An Post unveils first AI-generated stamps
An Post has launched two artist-led generative AI-designed stamps featuring crypto technology in a first-ever for Ireland. Designer and AI Artist Kasia Oźmin crafted her visionary interpretation of an imaginary Ireland.
Job interviews by AI avatars are real and happening, apparently https://www.404media.co/ai-avatars-are-doing-job-interviews-now/
a nsfw found in the wild
True believers at Vox' Future Perfect "vertical" let out a hearfelt REEEEEE as Saltman makes the obvious move to secure all the profits
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/374275/openai-just-sold-you-out
Not a sneer, but a pretty solid piece on the slop-nami: Drowning in Slop, by Max Read
Sam Altman says taking psychedelics ‘significantly changed’ his mindset
Altman being a druggie would go some way to explaining his utter disconnect from reality and utter lack of moral fibre
