Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th December 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th December 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.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ereader/s/ZfP57OEZ8x
E-readers are now getting the AI treatment.
Glad i did not go with these guys when i was e-reader shopping, the lack of gpl sources was enough for me.
Went with a pinenote because the timing was good, and while it has some corners I dont except the debian install to become a ccp mouthpiece 🙃
Oh hey we got all the way to Pacific time without anyone wishing a generic Merry Christmas. May your family's Wi-Fi work for everyone with minimal support required.
Generics greetings and happy <template T>s
it’s the holidays, it’s okay: you don’t have to go near the c++ right now
four thieves collective goes on 38C3 and i groan in anticipation of whatever stupid trick will they pull now https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/ASBXWW/ why they even are there
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.
JFC
go back 200 years before the "gubmint" got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now
before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since
I think there is value in giving people the tools and knowledge to make more involved decisions about their health, but using that sort of libertarian rhetoric in the covid era is at best really fucking irresponsible.
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health.
I have the feeling that they're not a British trans person talking about the NHS, or an American in a red state panicking about dying of sepsis because the baby they wanted so badly miscarried.
why they even are there
(from observation over some years) congress orga more than occasionally fucks up on paradox of tolerance by letting shit like this through
it's been a thing I've noticed and have wanted to actually discuss with some folks, but never really gotten to yet on account of life stuff
there were also the much, much less grey-area instances a couple of years back where they were far too open to a number of abusers (this was around the time the appelbaum shit hit wide daylight), so there is a possibility that the issue runs deeper (in a structural sense, at best; personal sense, at worst) too but I possess insufficient information to know one way or the other what exactly may constitute the problem here
never heard of them before. from skimming their wikipedia, it seems their grift is glossing over the details in the "science" part?
From what I heard: Skimming over science, best practices, risks of contamination, risk of producing horror chemicals, problems of sourcing materials, storing materials, storing the final product etc etc.
Here is a bsky thread from the last time they were in the publics eye (more here if you dont have an account) (the latter articles are clearly working on a diff definition of capitalism than I use so I chose not to be too annoyed with the weird digs about that).
This should be a very big red flag: "Mixæl Swan Laufer worked in mathematics and high energy physics until he decided to use his background in science to tackle problems of global health and human rights." (Ignoring all the other smaller red flags btw, I think I could point one out ever paragraph, if I had not heard about these people before, the final red pill reference would have made me think they were trolling).
i've complained about them previously https://awful.systems/comment/2754222
so openai is claimed to be doing great on the FrontierMath dataset. I've already seen the usual sort of dipshits using this to pump ai on reddit, and here's a post that went to the frontpage on HN:
https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/can-ai-do-maths-yet-thoughts-from-a-mathematician/
(tl;dr only a few problems from the dataset are public but if representative the problems are about 25% survivable by an undergrad; coincidentally this is the % openai says their models are completing.)
this post is by kevin buzzard. he has a let's say not easily beloved personality, but I don't think of him as credulous or grifty, and people in his area regard him as an excellent mathematician.
he points out but I think does not focus enough on how discrediting the secretive nature of the dataset is. the fact that you can't make it public is necessary to run such experiments in a scientifically reasonable way, but also makes it totally impossible to run the experiment in a scientifically reasonable way. an experiment which cannot be examined or reproduced is actually the opposite of science. it's pure grift fuel
If you release the test set, all models magically jump to 87.3% accuracy.
I want someone to take this and run it in a self-feeding loop, I want to see what the limit supremum of AI Imagery looks like
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Habsburg AI
full service plagiarism! bet you we'll see whiteglove variant of it next
ZITRON DROPPED (his last post for the year)
the identity-devouring worldcoin sphere ordered to delete user data by a german data protection office over gdpr noncompliance https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/12/19/german-watchdog-orders-sam-altmans-biometric-id-project-world-to-delete-data
On Thursday, the German data protection authority, the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA), concluded a months-long investigation into World and stated that its identification procedure “entails a number of fundamental data protection risks for a large number of data subjects” that does not comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
“With today’s decision, we are enforcing European fundamental rights standards in favour of data subjects in a technologically demanding and legally highly complex case,” said BayLDA president Michael Will.
is it? it's another fucking crypto scam
They have enough money to make it complex, no matter how simple the underlying issue.
I want to say I appreciate when there's a link to the previous one, as after a week it's nice to see what substacks were posted since.
Put this up about 20 minutes late, so I'm starting off by saying Honey got exposed
I swear to god there was a video I watched about this years ago that already talked about how they don't give you the best coupons and that they hijack affiliate links. I couldn't have made that up in my head.
The most surprising thing to me was that they're owned by PayPal? How can you have any credibility left when you're owned by PayPal, wtf, that should've been the end of them. Oh, no shit, a service owned by PAYPAL is shady and not above-board?? No way man, those paragons of user centrism, PAY-fucking-PAL.
they aren't called paypal mafia for nothing
When I was young I knew people who installed those 'get money for moving your mouse' things (this was a thing around 2000, prob combined with a 'get paid to use your computer' scam. I'm not sure if anybody even remembers this), and they never got a dime. So I always mentally ignore these things as scams. 'it is just free money' is quite the red flag.
Minor gripe with the video 'if they product is free you are likely the product' isn't true imho. You are always also the product, unless they explicitly go out of their way to make it clear you are not the product (and even then you cannot be totally sure). You can't pay your way out of the rot economy. In fact, as you are now a person who spends money, I'd think the value of your data actually goes up. A database filled with data of users who never spend a dime online seems like it would be almost useless to me.
I must have been living under a rock/a different kind of terminally online, because I had only ever heard of Honey through Dan Olson's riposte to Doug Walker's The Wall, which describes Doug Walker delivering "an uncomfortably over-acted ad for online data harvesting scam Honey" (35:43).
Well-known YouTuber Markiplier also went off on Honey back in 2019, and needless to say he felt pretty vindicated:
Wow, I’ve been saying for years that this extension is shady as fuck. Nice to see that it’s getting some attention.
I didn’t expect it to steal affiliate cookies, but that they let you control which codes it “finds” isn’t even a secret, and I thought people know this. But every time I mentioned this on Reddit I was downvoted and called a liar.
As someone who's never even considered interacting with any part of this whole system, this is really funny honestly. It's like a matryoshka of shady business practices.
Making money via stealing commissions from affiliate links, tbf, wasn't the business model I was suspecting from Honey. I always thought they were scamming but I thought it was going to be from selling your browsing data or something similar. Then again, they still might do that.
Holy shit. Managed to never run into them due to sponsorblock but the ways mega corps find ways to extract money out of everyone never ceases to amaze
I remember when the Dark Reader addon was advertising them years ago, they were doing their shit for a pretty long time
