and next this one that’ll be making waves too
impressive, you got both of those wrong
at least they reached escape velocity!
Pybricks reboots LEGO® MINDSTORMS® for use in the modern classroom. Help us save hundreds of thousands of robots from the e-waste pile!

seen via this
might be a cool thing some here may enjoy contributing to
believe me, I hear ya on that
also why I was reserved in my wording (I am, at best, "armchair enthusiast" level of clued on detailed neuroscience)
it's so damn messy though. here's some concurrent (and/or semi-sequenced branching) thoughts/opinions:
- there's enough people getting high on LLMs (et al) that it is morally and ethically worthwhile to investigate the implications thereof
- it's extremely fucking hard to objectively quantify this
- we should still try
- it seems like there's a hell of a need for funding for the applicable research fields of human study ito figuring out the dynamics of this shit
- ...wow wouldn't it be nice if they got even 3% of the openai grift budget
I was trying so, so, so hard not to make a "Huuj Ayns" (or similar) joke
reasoning models
that’s a shot, everyone drink up
Visions of the promptfan walking into those kind of premium mediocre restaurants came to mind here
preprint, but this looks like it’ll be making a splash soon
I don't have the headspace to sneer it properly at this moment, but this article fucking goes places might even be worthy of its own techtakes post
Shawn Schneider — a 22-year-old who dropped out of his Christian high school, briefly attended community college, dropped out again, and earlier this year founded a marketing platform for generative AI — tells me college is outdated. Skipping it, for him, is as efficient as it is ideological. "It signals DEI," he says. "It signals, basically, woke and compromised institutions. At least in the circles I run in, the sentiment is like they should die."
Schneider says the women from his high school in Idaho were "so much better at doing what the teacher asks, and that was just not what I was good at or what the other masculine guys I knew were good at." He's married with two children, a girl and a boy, which has made him realize that schools should be separated by gender to "make men more manly, and women more feminine."
Meta has reportedly offered compensation packages worth seven to nine figures to dozens of researchers from companies like OpenAI and Google, according to The New York Times, with some already agreeing to join the company.
devil's in the detials/comp structure/yadayada, but fuck damn is it frustrating how this still means that after even a year or two a fair number of the worst people you could ever meet would be set for life
one of the best accessibility-related takes I've seen about it so far was this (via @fasterandworse
definitely not you
ran across this, just quickly wanted to scream infinitely
(as an aside, I've also recently (finally) joined the ACM, and clicking around in that has so far been .... quite the experience. I actually want to make a bigger post about it later on, because it is worth more than a single-comment sneer)
I've been waiting for this. I wish it had happened sooner, before DOGE could do as much damage it did, but better late than never
as I said elsewhere (and have from early around the doge announcement): he was never going to last because orange was never going to felon lead, and felon was never going to settle. and everyone who brought him in did so knowing that, but that was fine for them because they were using him as a useful idiot, as a politically useful wrecking ball who they could dump all blame on later and wash their hands of
DOGE has shown you don't need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government
this tracks with historical fascist power seizures, although ofc updated in the detail of “let felon run wild, then just accept the outcome and use it as a new precedent”. he provided them with a test run of finding just how egregious they could go without pushback (and thus where they need to machinate more)
I am looking forward to Donald screwing over SpaceX or Starlink's government contracts. On the returning end... Elon doesn't have that many ways of properly screwing with Trump, even if he has stockpiled blackmail material I don't think it will be enough to turn MAGA against Trump. Still, I'm somewhat hopeful this will lead to larger infighting between the techbro alt-righters and the Christofascist alt-righters.
overall, same yeah. felon’s long appeared to be comfortable socking for outside influences, so maybe he might go knocking for some more russian/chinese/indian/emirati/whatever war funding, but maaaybe not find some soon enough to prop up his whole house of cards?
(besides, the entire ai craze is begging in the same corners, which maybe is a good thing in this light)
eugenics, saas edition
sigh
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
new yorker profile on moldbug (archive)
(still reading)
(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)
“Pray tell mr Babbage..”
Just ran across this and figured I’d link to people, looks interesting
in the spirit of this post, but from the other side
I have a shitdroid that I can't root because the vendor sucks, but google can go fuck themselves too. combined with that I haven't androided much for about a decade and know nothing about the current ecosystem.. I'm looking for good alternatives to a few things. free/foss preferred but I'm pragmatic over picky - if there's a good paid option I'm willing to consider it
immediate known requirements include contact sync, calendar (more business than personal but either works if it's good). maybe also other things I should know about?
judicuous preference to things that support open protocols and self-hosting (i.e. anything that has to use their service to operate - no go)
tell me about good apps! I know about syncthing and photosync
some of the sub’s friends are holding a conference although they’re still not totally comfortable to go public:
> but buyers are warned that purchases will “require approval”
aww, the poor babies. even with literal nazis in the whitehouse they still feel uncomfortable to spout their weird shit
hopefully if this thing happens at all, someone documents the everliving hell out of every attendee
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
the precision and clarity are astounding
by the time the hilbert curves got there my mouth was hanging open, and it still gets better
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)
What is a Turing machine?It's an abstract model of an algorithmic machine. Although it was not designed to be implemented in real life, some people actually do …
'cuz I definitely do
OpenAI's board is considering plans to restructure the firm to a for-profit business. CTO Mira Murati and two top research execs said they are leaving.

> “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
yeah I completely believe you, weird lady. I too want to vaguely step into the warm embrace of my piles of ill-gotten gold, forgetting about the stressors of how to sell something that doesn’t exist and that you helped claim would be here really soon now. ahhh, bliss..
one’s gotta wonder about the timing of this announcement, right? like come the fuck on
/PRNewswire/ -- K1 Investment Management, LLC ("K1"), one of the largest investors in small-cap enterprise software companies, today announced the completion...

I will say I'm not much of a fan of mysqls but uhhhhh this seems bad
Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike a…

saw this kicking around on the lobsters frontpage
> IBM also includes a DPU for accelerating IO, along with an on-board AI accelerator
ah yes. an AI accelerator. for a chip that goes into a system that'll quite possibly have a lifespan measured in decade-partials. in environments so extremely up to date with the bleeding edge of technology that they are absolutely not losing their programmers to retirement. an AI acceleator for that. makes total sense.
imagine being the poor engineers who had to spec that out, design it, and get it actually existing. nevermind even the awe-inspiringly stunning disregard to reality that it takes for some management fuckhead(s) to have "steered" this
> Funny enough, I asked why IBM had different terminology compared to the rest of the industry. They said IBM came up with the terminology first, and later on the industry adopted different terminology. It was all lighthearted and funny.
ah yes! funny! haha. not at all some weird insular shit from the same company that runs a worlds-apart platform with a control grip so strong it makes larry ellison check if they're infringing on anything actionable...
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.
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.
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes

found this kicking around on one of the feeder sites a few days ago and only got to read it now
kinda neat. it's the sort of thing that you used to find quite a lot with keygens and other things prone to easter eggs, and that I don't really know of being as prevalent in more recent gaming and such
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
There is an unavoidable tension between the aims of decentralization and onboarding everyday users.

there is some strong copium in the article, combined with a total description of having a massive gambling addiction without, y’know, actually realising it’s an addiction
remarkable stuff
People participate in online communities to share experiences and sympathy. AI chatbots that join the conversation can only pretend to offer either.

there are some remarkable instances of bad behaviour in there already, but imagine being the sort of product team that thinks users being gaslit by a chatbot that they couldn’t even consent to choose to use is totes something to deliver without any modification or remark
this time in open letter format! that'll sure do it!
there are "risks", which they are definite about - the risks are not hypothetical, the risks are real! it's totes even had some acknowledgement in other places! totes real defs for sure this time guize
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.
since I haven't touched AP before (and figure other possible contributors may not have either), going to use this post as wayfarer bathroom graffiti
feel free to contribute your own learning and investigation as well