Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
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.)
An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it's much worse:
https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/
[Do not post} Insults, including those about [...] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
You can see the full diff from last version if you click "Jan 8, 2025" and yeah it's a doozy.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn't really concentrate on work. It's hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn't dunking on them for it.
On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.
* or indeed simply having a gender and I'm not sure fascists know how to use words right.
Zuck wants to get back to his roots
It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here's what we're going to do: [...] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.
the worst Nix project has finally been announced: behold crypto NixOS
I’m starting a paradigm shifting, open and new human / computer interface system that is global, multi device and privacy focused.
[…]
DISCLAIMER: You are not my exit liquidity, I have the best performing long term spot crypto portfolio in the world - I’m a early adopter with 100% hit rate on geniuses. So, I don’t have to work, I’m not building this to become rich. I want to build something paradigm changing - truly mind-blowing, because now we have the tech and I’m annoyed how computer work. It is a lot of work, but it will reward us all.
my “this isn’t a grift and I’m not a grifter” disclaimer is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer. but speaking of prompting, what goes with crypto?
ChatGPT-1o thinks, after some reinforced asking, that the MC of such a coin can reach 300-1000M; I think it could easily go higher - it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was. Or dump phone to smart phone. It will just span devices and span users while keeping the data under control and of companies.
of course. after some reinforced asking, gpt told me you’re all haters if you don’t think I’m as important as Xerox PARC!
there’s lots more in the OP to sneer at, but here’s the worst part of the thread:
Mod note: I’m glad to see doubt and scepticism about crypto-based claims. However, that point has now been made; please avoid any further posts in that vein to avoid a pile-on dunkfest, and leave the thread for any potential on-topic discussion.
thanks for nothing as usual NixOS discourse!
e: via mastodon, archive
Just want to share this great term & definition "hyperkludge" coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)
Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this
manifesto found after the shootingoped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI
[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty
When the very first thing you say about a character is that they "have money in crypto", you may already be doing it wrong
Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets
Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won't work for some reason.
we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it
no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you're probably guessing low
"The Publisher of the Journal "Nature" Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work", by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:
Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated "Media Kits" to summarize and promote their research.
In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will "maximize the impact" of their research, saying the $49 package will return "high-quality" outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher's sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.
Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing "AI" is so tiring. Not suprising, but still... ugh. Claims of AI in everything.
My favourite so far: USB controller with "AI enhancements" because... uuh... if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that's why "AI" is in the marketing for the USB controller...?
My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:
You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you're selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ
(From the comments for "The average rationalist IQ is about 122".)
Does anyone else get tired of "read documentation and edit this text file to configure your app" Unix shit? I have no problem with the underlying configuration being a text-file (makes for a straightforward API), but do I really need to navigate to https://mpv.io/manual/master/#configuration-files and go through the rigamarole of figuring out which options I need to edit/include[0] because I misplaced (read:
sudo rm -rf /) my config file?
[0]: And there is always so much implicit bullshit. "By default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable
summon_octopus_guyis unset." It's a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?For a fun 20 minutes or so, I recommend going through the recent enron “revival”. (It’s all satire)
Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.
The New Antitrust is so goddamn meta, deep writing from the 2025 authors
Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers
disclaimer
(not a claim made by linked OP)
LessWrongers find cool reception for translated HPMOR copies sent to Russia's highest IQ youth
Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”
Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1
Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.
WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp
It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.
(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)
please excuse me while I infinitely recursively scream into the void
Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications
(this shit has been getting airtime at a couple of different networking conferences, and it's all as ridiculous and pointless as you'd blindly guess)