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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th May 2025
  • It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025
  • Here’s a pretty good sneer at the writing out of LLMs, with a focus on meaning https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing

    Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters.

    Also, on people:

    I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025
  • Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/

    Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.

  • The Endgame of Edgelord Eschatology - new Emile Torres
  • They insist on putting ever more important things (now it’s our souls and minds! lol and lmao) into ever more complex and failure-prone systems, none of these motherfuckers have built or maintained a computer in decades.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025
  • So many projects and small websites I’m aware of are being overtaxed by shitty LLM scrapers these days, it feels like an intentional attack. I guess the idea of ai can’t fail, it can only be failed; and so its profiteers must sabotage anything that indicates it’s not beneficial/necessary.

  • Nature: Al generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
    www.nature.com AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect - Nature

    Despite efforts to remove overt racial prejudice, language models using artificial intelligence still show covert racism against speakers of African American English that is triggered by features of the dialect.

    AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect - Nature

    Got the pointer to this from Allison Parrish who says it better than I could:

    > it's a very compelling paper, with a super clever methodology, and (i'm paraphrasing/extrapolating) shows that "alignment" strategies like RLHF only work to ensure that it never seems like a white person is saying something overtly racist, rather than addressing the actual prejudice baked into the model.

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    Yet another completely normal use of generative AI: not-obviously-illegal CSAM

    School student tells AI to put 20 other students’ faces on nude pictures, shares them in chat; it takes months for anyone including the school administrators to act because of some extremely, uh, dubious loophole.

    If someone does that in photoshop, it’s a crime; if they do it in AI pretending to be photoshop, it’s somehow not. Gotta love this legal system’s focus on minor technicalities rather than the harm done.

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    Nix project: ban? What ban?
    discourse.nixos.org Should jonringer get his commit bit back?

    Hi, I haven’t read this thread and I don’t really care to read all of it. I’ve always intended to get back into the Nix community after the issues with community management are sorted to my satisfaction. If jonrigner gets his commit bit back, I’m gonna be gone for good. Create whatever future you...

    Should jonringer get his commit bit back?

    They invited that guy back. I do have to admit, I admire his inability to read a room.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AN
    antifuchs @awful.systems
    Posts 4
    Comments 94