corbin @ corbin @awful.systems

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3 yr. ago

These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:

In a universe where all things are transforming all the time it seems pretty fair to ask the question: "What IS IT about humanity that we want to preserve and expand?" If the answer is "23 chromosomes, 2 eyes, 5-6 feet tall, etc" that seems pretty shallow.

Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, we've incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and can't really separate them out at this point. Sure, there's some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that there's already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and there's no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say "cats", but I know plenty of y'all would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and you're not wrong.)

Patreon CEO Jack Comte uploaded a visionary CEO talk about AI and artists and the future. I don't fully understand why they needed an interpretative dance section, or multiple people playing synthesizers, but I guess AI is good for artists, but also bad for artists, but also a big opportunity for artists, but also taking opportunities away from artists, but also? Also lots of bragging about how many millions of followers he has.

As reported by local Wyoming paper Cowboy State Daily, Meta's closed-loop water-cooling system bred a metal-resistant bacterium and now the municipal wastewater system has refused to accept Meta's wastewater. To be crisp, Cupriavidis, which literally means "loves to eat copper" "lives on copper", already was metal-resistant; this wasn't a de novo adaptation. Edit: used wrong root for translation, whoops.

Yet another point in favor of evaporative cooling. Standing water, recycled water, and grey water are too complex to treat as recyclable. Also another point against cheaply-designed rush-built datacenters.

This self-own from the comments is amazing:

Suppose you are a selfish CDT agent, and I am considering whether to hire you to clean my house. Once you're inside my house, you might steal my stuff instead of cleaning my house. Suppose that California Labour Laws require that I pay you up-front and I know I have no chance of getting my money or stuff back.
\ Say your preference order is "Steal" > "Do the job" > "Don't get hired".

This is a racist dog-whistle which attacks ESL housekeepers; this sort of meme's frustratingly common on the West Coast.

The third option is to exit the market. The underlying issue is that, regardless of how much effort one puts into cultivating non-criminal customers, VPN services will appear to attract criminals, and the optics alone is sufficient to dramatically limit and shape the pool of customers. Source: I operated some least-authority encrypted storage (I provably can't read private customer data) from like 2016-2019 and my peer group thought I was facilitating criminals. Ironically, I left that peer group because they wouldn't stop platforming Bitcoiners.

Complementing sibling, consider Google Books. This is where the question first arose: if one puts a book through a scanner, non-destructively, then surely they have made a digital copy of the book? There's the related question: if the scanner destroys the book, then that surely means no copy? The bounds of this were tested with the concept of CDL, which courts did rule against in Hachette v. Internet Archive; they said that CDL is clearly copying. But they also said in HathiTrust that digital preservation is transformative. So preserving is possibly fair but copying is probably infringing; in general one can have a private library but they can't copy it out to other people.

Hopefully it makes a bit more sense from that perspective. Copyright's still stupid as fuck, though. Previously, on Awful, I made a prediction:

I do think that the resulting incentive for model-trainers is not what anybody wants, though; Google Books is still settled and Kadrey didn’t get updated, so model-trainers now merely must purchase second-hand books at market price and digitize them, just like Google has been doing for decades. At worst, this is a business opportunity for a sort of large private library which has pre-digitized its content and sells access for the purpose of training models.

I'm reminded of the aesthetic definition of fascism: an artistic movement is fascist when it has no substance beyond its aesthetic presentation. Most artists want to express some sort of cultural belief, communicating it to their audience. However, fascists do not sincerely endorse any meme whatsoever, because of their need for cultural purity and their inability to establish a rubric by which their national identity cleanly separates from the society which hosts them; rather, a fascist movement predictably sheds memes, one by one, as their usefulness for advancing the movement is overcome by the fascist's revulsion at any sort of cultural sincerity.

Thanks for sharing. This has a lot in common with e.g. hyperborean or tradwife communities, I feel. Not in the specific memes as such, but in the utter lack of sincere existence behind them.

This is tougher than it sounds, at least in the USA. This 2018 law-review article fully works two examples for Pastafarians, focusing on Holy Headgear (pasta strainers, colanders, or salad spinners, worn as hats) and Friday. Their opinion is fairly nuanced because employers are traditionally given a wide range of options for proffering labor to employees without infringing on employee expression. They conclude that the main issue with Pastafarian claims isn't anything to do with the sincerity of religious belief, but the specific nature of asking to never work another Friday again. Fridays are too much of a request, but Holy Headgear is probably fine. The prophet wrote some commentary on this article:

Talking to Mr. Dowdy a bit, I don’t know his exact opinion on whether Pastafarians should be granted allowances to dress as Pirates and take every Friday off of work… I believe the larger point of his article is that courts should not be deciding what is and what is not a True religion and it’s not their place to maintain a list of protected religious activities that are deemed acceptable in the workplace.

Flipping things around, employers have been hesitant to embrace or endorse my Pastafarianism even when I enthusiastically point out e.g. that I can work during the winter solstice. They know that it would lead to requests for religious respect. BTW, somebody's surely gonna be a little snot and say something like "but Pastafarianism isn't a real religion, it's a parody." First, they're missing the point: employers think religious complaints about AI are bullshit, just like they think Pastafarianism is bullshit, which is why they're not predisposed to honor such complaints. Second, they're missing the point: I don't need their permission to eat noodles every Friday, but I do need an employer's permission to not be scheduled to work.

/u/bakkot

Wait, ~bakkot? I knew he was a vibecoder but I didn't know about the SSC/LW connection.

Glitch just wrapped a Youtube series by putting their final episode onto big screens in multiple countries. There's been a lot of media noise about the difficulty of getting films into theaters, and a lot of blaming Glitch, but there's not been any understanding about what Glitch actually did differently that is scaring Hollywood. I think it's that, just like with the Youtubers producing Backrooms and Iron Lung and FNAF, the thing Hollywood misses is the audience demographic. Glitch and other Youtubers are targeting an emerging young-adult audience which wants edgy, gritty, emotionally sincere content that fills the gap between PG-13 and R ratings. To older folks, e.g. Murder Drones is facile cringe, while to tweens (young teens, PG-13 sensibilities) it's too intense and scary. But it's a happy medium for catcher-in-the-rye emo young adults, which is why every second t-shirt sold at Hot Topic has a murder drone on it.

By literally no coincidence, Glitch's next greenlight is a grimdark gritty deconstruction which critiques the dystopia of Disney parks, illustrated by their brand-new 2D animation department, designed by a former Disney showrunner who left because Disney wouldn't let them tell stories aimed at young adults. (Dana Terrace, not Alex Hirsch.) Disney's not the only game in town; Turner previously ran shows by Owen Dennis and Rebecca Sugar while putting pressure on them. Lotta animators with big dreams who have been told "no" by big producers; in particular Lauren Faust supposedly has been waiting for decades for somebody to give her an animation team without creative limits, like Glitch just gave Terrace. (Faust worked on The Iron Giant and animated the character of Sawyer in Cats Don't Dance; the sheer poetry of her career could be enough to transform the industry (again).)

Honestly, I think D'Souza explains the business best:

Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding "so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media," D’Souza says. "What I know from the Gawker litigation, having dealt with not just Hulk Hogan but dozens of other parties who felt like they were aggrieved by the media, is that they actually don’t want a financial remedy. What they want is a moral victory. Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, 'I did not go to Epstein Island.'"

Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.

Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to "sue" journalists by "summoning" them to a "tribunal" staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first "lawsuit", which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D'Souza threw a hissy fit has shuttered everything "temporarily".

Mention "workflow" in a prompt and Claude will dynamically create an orchestration plan that it strictly follows, allowing you to confidently trust that every stage happens in the right order even across 100s of agents.

Previously, on Lobsters, we considered the degree to which Claude Code is configured via hard prompts instead of something more effective. Claude Code also often gets confused about its status in its internal workflow, the one which multiplexes chain-of-thought utterances ("thinking"), user input, and generated output ("confabulated bullshit"). Next time Claude Code source is leaked, I expect that we'll see how poorly it "strictly follows" user-provided workflows, too.

If Schneider had talked to a lawyer before doing half of what he did, he might have accomplished more with less collateral damage. Though it might not have made such "good content."

Congratulations, Mike! You figured out why pranktubers do pranks and post videos of those pranks! It's for clicks and attention and ad money. You're such a smart guy, Mike.

All summaries of this topic are going to get a lot of things wrong because they are legislating too many details. We can simplify this to what actually matters: a pranktuber got a lot of footage of legal First Amendment activity and they are going to use it to simultaneously destroy a mid-sized Lego pawn-shop franchise and extract a settlement from the police department of American Fork, Utah. In the process, they revealed that there is a whisper network of Mormon good old boys who will willingly lie on police reports, escalate situations to violence, abuse the legal system in any way they can to disenfranchise others, and generally don't feel any fealty towards the Constitution or its rule of law. This story is about MLM: Mormon Lego Mafia.

It's been a while since we've heard anything related to books3. Copyright attorney Leonard French has a news update (video) on Nazemian et al v. nVidia. nVidia requested that any mention of Bittorrent be removed; really, they just asked for one sentence to be removed, but the judge thought that it was like "asking to strike paintbrush allegations from a case about dolphin paintings" (sic; I don't have the transcript) and refused. The theory is that nVidia could have argued that they were not contributory infringers and then appealed to Cox v. Sony, where Cox said that it's not their fault that some of their customers are pirates. However, it seems like any sort of Cox appeal is not possible here because the judge recognizes that Bittorrent isn't a dumb network.

If you're anti-copyright like me: Oh look, Cox wasn't a big sweeping get-out-of-trouble card for non-ISPs. I still don't think judges actually understand networks, but this is definitely better than a lack of understanding. If you're one of the pro-copyright-because-anti-AI sickos: nVidia took a big loss here. This was their only shot at keeping their usage of books3, Anna's Archive, and other shadow libraries out of court. Like Anthropic before them in Bartz v. Anthropic, they may have to come to the judge with an offering of a settlement paying a few hundred USD/author to each member of the class. This sucks for the popular authors but might be more cash in hand than the long tail would otherwise receive in royalties.

I'm pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (musl) telling her to go away last week. She's finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she's done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.

Well, that might be the first package that I have to locally pin to a pre-slop commit. Thanks for the heads-up. I've never bothered to implement rsync myself even though the algorithm is documented; maybe this will be the push I need.

Professional money-managers tell themselves that they take this money to make good decisions, but there is no evidence that they are any better at managing money than people in general, and for every manager with ten million dollars who does better than average, these is a manager with ten million dollars who does worse.

Ask your bank. Well, not literally a for-profit bank, but your credit union or other community-owned banking groups will usually employ a team of financial advisors who advise the local whales, big depositors, and small businesses. The fee can be as high as 2%/yr but it's usually going to be closer to the standard 1%/yr. These advisors will be better-aligned than an independent consultant, so they'll give you better advice for around the same price.

I hear that it is slightly cheaper than a Google search from a decade ago. There are better uses of your time.

A prominent cloud engineer had a sizeable subthread where they were skeptical about the entire idea of Quality as something that humans can discern and rank. Through what I presume was a nat 20, I threw a philosophy book at them and they appear to have responded by deleting the worst of their comments, particularly the ones where he admits to quoting chatbots, and deactivating their account. This may be the first time that quoting Pirsig has won an argument, TBH.

This was after a week's vacation caused by a thread that is still too hot to deeplink, where I had multiple comments removed by mods and still won the argument. I am currently once again the second-most-flagged user with like 25 flags in the last month. "The things I do for love."