self @ self @awful.systems

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most of the dedicated Niantic (Pokemon Go, Ingress) game players I know figured the company was using their positioning data and phone sensors to help make better navigational algorithms. well surprise, it’s worse than that: they’re doing a generative AI model that looks to me like it’s tuned specifically for surveillance and warfare (though Niantic is of course just saying this kind of model can be used for robots… seagull meme, “what are the robots for, fucker? why are you being so vague about who’s asking for this type of model?”)

another absolutely fucked thing about the gotcha interview is, they never stop at just one. if you somehow read the interviewer’s mind and asspull the expected (not “correct”, mind you) answer, they’ll just go “huh” and instantly pivot to a different instant-fail gotcha. the point of the gotcha interview isn’t candidate selection; the point is that the asshole interviewer has power over the candidate, and can easily use gotchas to fabricate technical-sounding reasons for rejecting suitable candidates they personally just don’t like.

shit like this is one reason our industry is full of fucking assholes; they select for their own by any practical means. it’s reminiscent of those rigged, impossible “literacy tests” they used to give voters in the south (that is, the southern US), where almost every question was a gotcha designed so that a poll worker could exclude Black voters at effectively their own discretion, complete with a bullshit paper trail in case anyone questioned the process.

(also, how many of these assholes send candidates down a rabbit hole wasting time answering questions unrelated to the position when they don’t get the gotcha right? I swear that’s happened to me more than once, and I can only imagine it’s so nobody asks why most of the interviews are so short)

I start every new day by screaming this is the remix, as required by law

I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

I’m betting there are some juicy logs of something like this happening in the C++ Alliance Slack’s secret #unfiltered channel, given that its typical content allegedly consists of abuse directed towards marginalized people, coordination of harassment and misinformation on community platforms, and various other fash shit. it’s weird that a Slack so closely associated with the “professional and respectful” ISO C++ committee would host two (including the diet version, #on-topic) of what are essentially chan-style trolling channels for people who think they’re adults on an official Slack. maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising, since one committee member felt comfortable posting an extensive, unhinged COVID conspiracy rant on the WG21 mailing list — with a community like that, it’s just a matter of time before the assholes in charge go mask-off.

and for anyone who hasn’t read the article yet, the above isn’t even the worst shit you’ll learn about, it’s a fucking rollercoaster (and there are some details alluded to that you’ll only pick up on a second reading too)

We’re sure phrases like “novel types of debt structures” won’t give you flashbacks to the 2008 financial crisis.

I feel like John taking the Soy Sauce for the first time and knowing how many people are gonna explode

It is the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series

oh damn, I just gave the (fun but absolute mess of a) movie another watch and was wondering if they ever wrote more stories in the series — I knew they wrote a sequel to John Dies at the End, but I lost track of it after that. it looks like I’ve got a few books to pick up!

how are you this fucking mid?

In fact, they’re getting plenty of free publicity for using AI to make it thanks to articles like these

good thing there’s no such thing as bad publicity, otherwise this shit would be fucking embarrassing

I hereby vow to be extremely firm and extremely realistic

finally my pyramid scheme is coming to fruition

sneerchain, coming soon to an awful system near you

fucking… maybe if I edit it in nobody will notice

maybe they’ll pay even more for the director’s cut

what kind of leftist would I be if I didn’t?

no part of me is surprised that every famous FOSS personality has a ridiculously bad age of consent take, but it is a real fucking problem that this keeps happening

The funniest part was probably them blaming anime avatars for trans people.

holy fuck, I’ve seen anti-trans accounts on mastodon spew this same shit and I’m kind of surprised it’s a wider conservative conspiracy theory and not something local to mastodon

just kidding the funniest part was the guy calling trans people the “priest class” of urbanism

leftists don’t go to church on Sundays, they just trans themselves and then bikeshed about bike sheds

a lot of projects with crypto ties have been doing this kind of hedge — they now emphasize data sovereignty instead of web3, decentralization, and other poisoned buzzwords, but they never really answer why crypto assholes would invest in a company if not to do crypto asshole shit when the time is right

fuck yes, why wasn’t my college this cool? all I got was an AI elective taught by a guy whose proudest achievement was having the only remaining Genera license on campus

this is leftist infighting between Mondayists and Tomorrow-Evaporists and I won’t allow it in this space

all the replies anthropomorphizing the LLM cause it generated something creepy and they don’t know why aren’t surprising, but for some reason this one really pisses me off:

I just checked out the conversation and it looks legit. So weird. I cannot imagine why it would generate a completion like this. Tell your brother to buy a lottery ticket.

an LLM generating absolute garbage that happens to be abusive in some way is a lottery ticket event, is it? I had no idea lottery wins happened that fucking frequently

I can’t stop, it’s like eating potato chips, and as a firm realist. I’d like to point out two things.

There are two sides: the anti-corpo leftists who eat Pringles, and the hyper “where do we sign” neo liberals who prefer doritos.

I am a firm realist. I’d like to point out two things.

There are two sides: the anti-corpo leftists of Del Taco, and the hyper “where do we sign” neo liberals of Taco Bell.

Del Taco Leftists are sure Taco Bell will literally just evaporate tomorrow, and the neo liberals are sure that the secret menu has already happened and will be revealed for Taco Tuesday.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Taco Bell literally cannot evaporate, and they are also probably struggling to design a burrito that doesn’t fucking suck. They will probably find ways to distract you with churro bites instead, as a reasonable fast food chain would.