if you’re considering pasting the output of an LLM into this thread in order to fail to make a point: reconsider
I knew you were a lying promptfondler the instant you came into the thread, but I didn’t expect you to start acting like a gymbro trying to justify their black market steroid habit. new type of AI booster unlocked!
now fuck off
can we agree that 90% of the problem with cigarettes are capitalism and not the actual smoking?
after all, the genie is out of the bottle. you can’t destroy them, there are tobacco plants grown at home. even if you ban them, you’ll still have people hand-rolling cigarettes.
it’s fucking weird how I only hear about open source LLMs when someone tries to make this exact point. I’d say it’s because the open source LLMs fucking suck, but that’d imply that the commercial ones don’t. none of this horseshit has a use case.
this one was definitely my pleasure
“how can you fools not see that Wikipedia’s utterly inaccurate summary LLM is exactly like digital art, 3D art, and CGI, which are all the same thing and are/were universally hated(???)” is a take that only gets more wild the more you think on it too, and that’s one they’ve been pulling out for at least two years
I didn’t catch much else from their posts, cause it’s almost all smarm and absolutely no substance, but fortunately they formatted it like paragraph soup so it slid right off my eyeballs anyway
why would anyone want to play as an attractive Puerto Rican when peak sexiness has already been achieved
image description: it’s trevor! his character design brief was almost definitely “rick sanchez but on meth” and he’s aged about as well as a character. do you think GTA 6 will have a paid musk cameo too?
god I looked at your post history and it’s just all this. 2 years of AI boosterism while cosplaying as a leftist, but the costume keeps slipping
are you not exhausted? you keep posting paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs but you’re still just a cosplay leftist arguing for the taste of the boot. don’t you get tired of being like this?
holy shit I’m upgrading you to a site-wide ban
so many paragraphs and my eyes don’t want any of them
Hinton? hey I have a pretty good post summarizing what’s wrong with Hinton, oh wait it was you two weeks ago
what are we doing here
you want to know what e/acc is? it’s when some fucker comes and makes the stupidest posts imaginable about LLMs and tries their best to sound like a recycled chan meme cause they think that’ll give them a pass
bye bye e/acc
some experts genuinely do claim it as a possibility
zero experts claim this. you’re falling for a grift. specifically,
i keep using Claude as an example because of the thorough welfare evaluation that was done on it
asking the LLM about “its mental state” is part of a very old con dating back to mechanical Turks playing chess and horses that do math. of course the LLM generated some interesting sentences when prompted about its internal state — it was trained on appropriated copies of every piece of fiction in existence, including world-class works of sci-fi (with sentient AIs and everything!), and it was tuned to generate “interesting” (see: profitable, and there’s nothing more profitable than a con with enough marks) responses. that’s why the others keep mentioning pareidolia — the only intelligence in the loop is the reader assigning meaning to the slop they’re reading, and if you step out of that role, it really does become clear that what you’re reading is absolute slop.
s i don’t really think there’s any harm in thinking about the possibility under certain circumstances. I don’t think Yud is being genuine in this though he’s not exactly a Michael Levin mind philosopher he just wants to score points by implying it has agency
you don’t think there’s any harm in thinking about the possibility, but all Yud does is create harm by grifting people who buy into that possibility. Yud’s Rationalist cult is the original driving force behind the people telling you LLMs must be sentient. do you understand that?
Like it has atleast the same amount of value as like letting an insect out instead of killing it
that insect won’t go on to consume so much energy and water and make so much pollution it creates an environmental crisis. the insect doesn’t exist as a product of the exploitation of third-world laborers or of artists and writers whose work was plagiarized. the insect isn’t a stupid fucking product of capitalism designed to maximize exploitation. I don’t acknowledge the utterly slim possibility that the insect might be or do any of the previous, because ignoring events with a near-zero probability of occurring is part of how I avoid looking like a god damn clown.
you say you acknowledge the harms done by LLMs, but I’m not seeing it.
centrism will kill us all, exhibit [imagine an integer overflow joke here, I’m tired]:
i won’t say that claude is conscious but i won’t say that it isn’t either and its always better to air on the side of caution
the chance that Claude is conscious is zero. it’s goofy as fuck to pretend otherwise.
claims that LLMs, in spite of all known theories of computer science and information theory, are conscious, should be treated like any other pseudoscience being pushed by grifters: systemically dangerous, for very obvious reasons. we don’t entertain the idea that cryptocurrencies are anything but a grift because doing so puts innocent people at significant financial risk and helps amplify the environmental damage caused by cryptocurrencies. likewise, we don’t entertain the idea of a conscious LLM “just in case” because doing so puts real, disadvantaged people at significant risk.
if you don’t understand that you don’t under any circumstances “just gotta hand it to” the grifters pretending their pet AI projects are conscious, why in fuck are you here pretending to sneer at Yud?
schizoposting
fuck off with this
even if its wise imo to try not to be abusive to AI’s just incase
describe the “incase” to me. either you care about the imaginary harm done to LLMs by being “abusive” much more than you care about the documented harms done to people in the process of training and operating said LLMs (by grifters who swear their models will be sentient any day now), or you think the Basilisk is gonna get you. which is it?
no problem at all! I don’t think the duplicate’s too much of an issue, and this way the article gets more circulation on both Mastodon and Lemmy.
E: ah, this is from mastodon. I don’t know how federation etc. works.
yep! any mastodon post whose first line looks like a subject line and which tags the community is treated by Lemmy as a new thread in that community. now, you might think that’s an awful mechanism in that it’s very hard to get right on purpose but very easy to accidentally activate if you’re linking and properly citing an article in the format that’s most natural on mastodon. and you’d be correct!
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
congrats, that’s awesome news!
it’s not pseudoscience unless it’s from the “literally studying ghosts” region of crankery, otherwise it’s just sparkling… actually I don’t know what your point is with all this
I agree, you are fucking done. good job showing up 12 days late to the thread expecting strangers to humor your weird fucking obsession with using LLMs for something existing software does better
imagine if you read the article at all instead of posting 6 paragraphs about an impossible game you’re fantasizing about, that LLMs do nothing to enable because they’re stochastic chatbots and don’t understand game systems (just like you!)
pretty much same! I’ve heard good things about some of the games published under Sony, and their umbrella as a publisher still includes excellent studios whose previous games I have very good memories of. but… I just can’t swing the price for a PS5, it really doesn’t feel worth it just for a few games, and I’m not a huge fan of the hardware design. they also seem to have fumbled PSVR2, and I was a big fan of the indie VR scene and how accessible it was on the PSVR1. on top of everything else, I feel like I’ve gotten by far more mileage out of open platforms than I have from any modern console — so for me, just like you, most Sony releases are invisible unless they’re the ones that bomb
welcome to gibberish.awful.systems, a platform for long-form writing and blogging hosted on awful.systems and running on WriteFreely. thi...
we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.
this is somewhat of a bigger update, and it's the product of a few things that have been in progress for a while:
email should be working again as of a couple months ago. good news: our old provider was, ahem, mildly inflating our usage to get us off their free plan, so this part of our infrastructure is going to cost a lot less than anticipated.
backups
we now have a restic-based system for distributed backups, thanks to a solid recommendation from @froztbyte@awful.systems. this will make us a lot more resilient to the possibility of having our host evaporate out from under us, and make other disaster scenarios much less lethal.
writefreely
I used some of the spare capacity on our staging instance to spin up a new WriteFreely instance where we can post long-form articles and other stuff that's more suitable for a blog. post your gibberish at gibberish.awful.systems! contact me if you'd like an invite link; WriteFreely instances are particularly vulnerable to being turned into platforms for spam and nothing else, so we're keeping this small-scale for instance regulars for now.
alongside all the ordinary WriteFreely stuff (partial federation, a ton of jank), our instance has a special feature: if you have an account, you can make a PR on this repository and once it's merged, gibberish will automatically pull its frontend files from that repo and redeploy WriteFreely. currently this is only for the frontend, but there's a lot you can do with that -- check out the templates, pages, less, and static directories on the repo to see what gets pulled. check it out if you see some jank you want to fix! (also it's the only way to get WriteFreely to host images as part of a post, no I'm not kidding)
what's next?
next up, I plan to turn off Hetzner's backups for awful.systems and use that budget to expand the node's storage by 100GB, which should increase the monthly bill by around 2.50 euros. I want to go this route to expand our instance's storage instead of using an object store like S3 or B2 because using block storage makes us more resilient to Hetzner or Backblaze evaporating or ending our service, and because it's relatively easy to undo this decision if it proves not to scale, but very hard to go from using object storage back to generic block storage.
after that, it'll be about time to carefully upgrade to the current version of Lemmy, and to get our fork (Philthy) in a better state for contributions.
as always, see our infrastructure deployment flake for more documentation and details on how all of the above works.
this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:
> This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.
fucking masterful
an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol
Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.
this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
>Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
>I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
>The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
we’ve exceeded the usage tier for our email sending API today (and they kindly didn’t email me to tell me that was the case until we were 300% over), so email notifications might be a bit spotty/non-working for a little bit. I’m working on figuring out what we should migrate to — I’m leaning towards AWS SES as by far the cheapest option, though I’m no Amazon fan and I’m open to other options as long as they’ve got an option to send with SMTP
After raising $200 million from investors, Humane has only sold $9 million worth of products and has received $1 million in returned products.
after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:
> Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.
it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:
>Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.
AI shovelmaker Nvidia has been looking into making its own AI models. To that end, it’s been vacuuming up YouTube videos like nobody’s business. According to leaked internal communications obtained…
Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.
as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning
here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:
>Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company. > >A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.
The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.
so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:
>Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. > >Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.
does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.
here’s some more banal shit:
>We find there are three kinds of politicians: > >Those who support Little Tech. We support them. > >Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them. > >Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.
I find there are three kinds of politicians:
- those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
- those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
- those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
it can’t be overstated how important the Nix evaluator is to the Nix ecosystem; it implements the Nix language and package manager, maintains the store, has a hand in the low-level workings of every Nix tool, and is the focus of the push by Eelco and friends to commercialize Nix and keep it appealing to military-industrial interests.
all of the above is why I joined the Aux CLI SIG, which focuses on maintaining a fork of the Nix evaluator for the Aux ecosystem. but just now I saw the announcement for Lix, a Nix evaluator fork that focuses on modernizing the codebase (including gradually replacing C++ with Rust), maintaining correctness (something the upstream evaluator has been notoriously struggling with lately), and doing right by its community. I found myself nodding along to their description of the project and feeling something I haven’t felt since I read the open letter — I’m finally feeling excited for the future of the technology behind Nix.
I have no idea if Lix will become Aux’s chosen evaluator fork, though the Aux CLI SIG can help determine that collectively (and I’ll have many more details on Aux in a post later tonight). here’s what’s truly exciting though: by following Lix’s install steps and pulling auxpkgs-unstable, we can have a package ecosystem and NixOS fork that’s completely independent of the Nix community, and we can have it right now. I’m so excited by that news that I’m going to spin up a host just to give Lix+auxpkgs a try later tonight.
here’s the Aux thread about Lix; so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.
this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.
even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.
The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. Th...
who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do
reply with features and bug fixes you'd like to see in Philthy, the lemmy fork that runs on this instance. no guarantees I'll get to any of them soon, but particularly low-hanging fruit and well-liked features can be prioritized.
the awful.systems server cluster runs on an open infrastructure based on NixOS and Nix flakes, and though it desperately needs cleanup in some places, it's still a pretty good example of how to use a Nix flake to deploy NixOS in production. feel free to browse the repo and ask any questions about how it works, or about Nix in general!
also, if I get hit by a bus, this can be used to redeploy awful.systems elsewhere. an existing admin who isn't in the hospital or the grave can import a database backup and get back up and running!
and as always, contributions are welcome.
An archival site for the posts from r/SneerClub, generated from a static data snapshot
the r/SneerClub archive at awful.systems is welcoming contributors. it's a statically-generated site (from this set of archived posts in JSON format) that uses a unique, high-performance Nix-based static site generation system. the current site desperately needs a new stylesheet (especially on mobile), but one area where I really need advice or contributions is the dataset.
currently, the SneerClub archives only pull in data from the bdfr set, which I generated using Bulk Downloader for Reddit right before Reddit killed its API, but I'd love to merge the SneerClub_comments.jsonl and SneerClub_submissions.jsonl files into the data we're using to generate the site, since those have older data from ArchiveTeam. unfortunately, that data set is in a complete different format from the BDFR data. any advice for tools or techniques to merge those two data sets into one (or offers to contribute a merge script) is greatly appreciated.
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home.
the software we use to run awful.systems, which @dgerard@awful.systems suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors.
like upstream Lemmy, this consists of a Rust backend and a Typescript+React frontend. contributions to both are welcome; use this thread to discuss ideas and collaborate.
here's some contribution ideas off the top of my head (but all reasonable contributions are welcome):
- (frontend & backend) actually rebrand to Philthy, to prevent confusion between us and upstream Lemmy
- (frontend & backend) rewrite
README.mdto emphasize that this is a fork - (frontend) make the page header and footer more configurable; remove various links that aren't relevant to awful.systems
- (backend) delete posts from Mastodon when they're deleted on our end
- (frontend & backend) implement The Firehose, a big admin-only list of the posts and content leaving our instance
- (frontend & backend, ongoing) merge in changes from upstream Lemmy if there are features you wish our instance had
or make suggestions in this thread!
one major blocker preventing folks from contributing to Lemmy-related development I've seen is that a lot of people don't know Rust. if that's the case, I can offer the following:
- the Lemmy codebase is the worst possible place to learn Rust, but I'd love to start a thread for Rust tutorials and shared learning. it's honestly an excellent language in its own right, so I'd love to teach folks about it even if they don't end up contributing to Philthy.
- if you're good with React and/or Typescript and the feature you want to implement has a backend component, I don't mind handling the backend portion if I'm able.
this is a non-toxic place to collaborate on projects (programming, design, art, or otherwise) and share information; effectively, it's the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. this community has been in the planning phase for a long time, but the xz backdoor recently emphasized how severe the toxicity problem in existing open source communities is, and how important it is that we have a place to collaborate that isn't controlled by toxic personalities or corporate interests.
FreeAssembly is starting its existence as a Lemmy community that enables collaboration on externally-hosted projects, but that doesn't necessarily need to be its final form. as we figure out the needs of this community, we can grow to service needs like code hosting and design collaboration. for now, we recommend hosting code on software forges like Codeberg (and we recommend avoiding github if possible, though it's well-understood that this isn't easy for established projects). we also want to explore the best options for designers and artists to collaborate without making them dependent on large corporate infrastructure.
there are some expectations around posting to FreeAssembly. see the sidebar for details.
Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.
(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)
surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive
even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down
we’re seeing a bit of spam come in from lemmy.world. if you happen to see any (and a lot of it seems to be in DMs), make sure to flag it. that’ll let both us and the originating instance’s mods know. if we get a bunch of reports and it seems like lemmy.world isn’t cleaning things up properly, we’ll take further steps to limit the amount of spam we get
Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.
its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too
