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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025
  • Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It's an AI product.

    frodo.ai on the other hand is currently domain parked. It could be yours for the low low price of $43,911

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025
  • https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-04-23/state-bar-of-california-used-ai-for-exam-questions

    When measured for reliability, the State Bar told The Times, the combined scored multiple-choice questions from all sources — including AI — performed “above the psychometric target of 0.80.”

    "I dunno why you guys are complaining, we measured our exam to be 80% accurate!"

  • China and AGI: A New Yellow Peril and Red Scare
  • I think this article fits here as how this fear mongering reaches government: https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-superintelligence

    Eric Schmidt tells the US government that unfathomable amounts of power need to be spun up ASAP because if the US doesn't make robot god first then:

    If China comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting

    Dedicating the US's entire economic output to scaling corporate LLMs and filling the air with smog would at least have somewhat predictable consequences I suppose.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th April 2025
  • Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.

    For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot

    It's not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. [...] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.

    2 out of 19 found this helpful

    Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.

    I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th April 2025
  • Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it'll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of "oh my gosh what am I even doing", lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I've rejected my homeland in my heart.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th April 2025
  • I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

    My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

    Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy's public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I've been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

    Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th April 2025
  • So in the past week or so a lot of pedestrian crossings in Silicon Valley were "hacked" (probably never changed the default password lol) to make them talk like tech figures.

    Here are a few. Note that these voices are most likely AI generated.

    1. A crosswalk with the voice of Elon Musk
    2. A crosswalk with the voice of Zuck
    3. Elon Musk crosswalk just wants to be friends (second video) also Zuck crosswalk is proud of his work (third video).

    I didn't get to hear any of them in person, however the crosswalk near my place has recently stopped saying "change password" constantly, which I'm happy about.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th April 2025
  • In this case ドドドド or ゴゴゴゴ are both meme sound effects from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure used in dangerous or unnerving scenes. The meaning here would be something like indicating what a menacing aura that hardcore mofo Yud is giving off.

    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/menacing-ゴゴゴゴ

    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-youre-approaching-me-jojo-approach

    https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/10/dodododo.html

    Of course the AI doesn't know this so combined the two to produce ゴゴドゴ which just looks kind of stupid.

  • Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides” [404 Media]
  • My go to source for the fact that LLM chatbots suck at writing reasoned replies is https://chatgpt.com/

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th April 2025
  • Oh gosh I looked up the post and that was a mistake. Actually Mr. Yarvin there is quote tweeting someone who dared, on twitter, to say that the Holocaust was real. The replies (including Yarvin's incorrect & off topic nonsense) being about what you'd expect from twitter nowadays. So much Holocaust denial.

  • Crypto being the solution to the bot problem is the most techbro take I have seen so far.
  • At this point cryptocurrency has a bad enough reputation that they have to try and ease readers into it.

    (insert clown getting dressed meme image here)

    1. It's new digg!
    2. AI is bad (but also sexy and all powerful)
    3. so captchas are hard :(
    4. let's make a real fancy captcha!
    5. With... Zero-Knowledge Proofs :D :D :D :D :D (all non cryptocurrency people flee at this point)
    6. Also like NFTs for products you buy so when you shill them people know you're at least a real person doing so (maybe, kinda, sorta)
    7. So anyway I was thinking if only there was something else as dystopian cool as Sam Altman 様's orb thing and we smeared it across the entire internet
  • Single Pilot Operations — let’s replace airline copilots with AI!
  • Yeah it's called "autopilot"; named after the Tesla technology!

  • Trump’s DOJ will no longer prosecute cryptocurrency fraud
  • Sailor Sega Saturn will no longer buy US based stocks! What a coincidence.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

    "We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."

    This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off

    Holy smokes

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I'm supposed to fill in the blank or something.

  • AGI Escapes Containment; Trump Admin: "Hold My Beer" — Tariff Terathread
  • To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It's a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn't understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

    The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

    This "Cavallo" reference isn't actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

    Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

    Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. [...] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

    Amazing. The government's official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Hey wait a minute we already made that (obvious) joke here on Awful Systems!

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • I've been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it's chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • Do you think he knows that "inspired" and "Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090" are not the same word?

    Edit: oh no I read the replies.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • Don't worry I know (approximately) what I'm getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things don't work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so won't start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but I'm at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.

    weird german

    When my German teacher told me she can't understand Swiss German I thought "haha I'm in danger".

  • Ilya Sutskever's new AI super-intelligence startup raises a billion dollars. Unclear what they actually do.

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-co-founder-sutskevers-new-safety-focused-ai-startup-ssi-raises-1-billion-2024-09-04/

    http://web.archive.org/web/20240904174555/https://ssi.inc/

    I have nothing witty or insightful to say, but figured this probably deserved a post. I flipped a coin between sneerclub and techtakes.

    They aren't interested in anything besides "superintelligence" which strikes me as an optimistic business strategy. If you are "cracked" you can join them:

    > We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.

    23
    www.eurogamer.net Olympics ditched Mario & Sonic series to explore NFTs and esports

    The International Olympics Committee walked away from its partnership with Nintendo and Sega for the long-running Mario…

    Olympics ditched Mario & Sonic series to explore NFTs and esports

    Saw the title and knew I had to post here. Not quite as big of a self-own as Square selling Tomb Raider for a blockchain / AI pivot; but amusing nonetheless.

    > Join the excitement of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 with nWay's officially licensed, commemorative Paris 2024 NFT Digital Pin collection! > > You can claim a legendary or epic pin showcasing the Paris 2024 mascot holding a flag and waving. You can add these digital gems to your collection through Magic Eden’s friendly NFT marketplace as part of Coinbase's Onchain Summer event. Be sure to have an ETH L2 Base-supported wallet to secure yours today!

    Remember when companies let you download wallpapers or something instead of figuring out what the heck an ETH L2 Base-supported wallet is?

    I remember.

    2
    OpenAI vs. Elon Musk 2 - Whoever wins, we lose
    openai.com OpenAI and Elon Musk

    We are dedicated to the OpenAI mission and have pursued it every step of the way.

    OpenAI and Elon Musk

    Follow up to https://awful.systems/post/1109610 (which I need to go read now because I completely overlooked this)

    Now OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk's lawsuit with an email dump containing a bunch of weird nerd startup funding drama: https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk

    Choice quote from OpenAI:

    > As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).

    OpenAI have learned how to redact text properly now though, a pity really.

    6
    Bitconeeect

    OK OK old news I know. But this is a metal cover of a bitconnect speech that I found pretty amusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ-Ayj-ht_I

    8
    openai.com Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

    We’re developing a blueprint for evaluating the risk that a large language model (LLM) could aid someone in creating a biological threat. In an evaluation involving both biology experts and students, we found that GPT-4 provides at most a mild uplift in biological threat creation accuracy. Whil...

    Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

    OpenAI blog post: https://openai.com/research/building-an-early-warning-system-for-llm-aided-biological-threat-creation

    Orange discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39207291

    I don't have any particular section to call out. May post thoughts tomorrow today it's after midnight oh gosh, but wanted to post since I knew ya'll'd be interested in this.

    Terrorists could use autocorrect according to OpenAI! Discuss!

    98
    Buttcoin Classic - Zuckerberg's Music Videos

    #1 We're All Gonna Make It: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0diaVLPrQ

    #2 Ethereum: https://www.facebook.com/randizberg/videos/nobodyme-ok-heres-another-music-video-had-a-blast-on-this-collab-with-hila-the-k/531145045349722/

    #3 Hello This Is Defi: https://twitter.com/randizuckerberg/status/1494416366710910992

    Surgeon General's Warning: watching all of these back to back may make your brain ooze out of your nose.

    1
    Hacker News on Homeschooling quickly veers into transphobia

    Don't mind me I'm just here to silently scream into the void

    Edit: I'm no good at linking to HN apparently, made link more stable.

    10
    sailor_sega_saturn Sailor Sega Saturn @awful.systems

    I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence... Sailor Saturn.

    Posts 7
    Comments 568