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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • It is a CIA psyop to prevent revolutionary thought from arising in written media, in that it's a self-inflicted PIP that makes you feel inadequate in your creative writing ability. CIA funding (obviously funneled through NGOs via CIA front USAID) is how it's survived so long with such a stupid name. Of course, now that government spending on the CIA is going down, so is NaNoWriMo. All that's left is for it to be supplanted by some benevolent Chinese competitor that people will say steals your data, or something.

    /s /s /s

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Ok. Full disclosure. When you said “Shad”, I thought you meant a different internet person who is shitty for creating morally degenerate art, so when I read this I thought that they had pivoted to AI and was like, I guess that tracks. But no, different shithead.

    Anyway. Bland and uninspired? All actual art is inspired, just by default. If it were truly bland, you wouldn’t be able to discern anything from it, which is just not the case. So Shad isn’t actually giving a valid opinion, he’s throwing out an insult, just so that he can elevate AI slop.

    Now AI slop, on the other hand, is uninspired and bland. It is uninspired because machines do not have the ability to be inspired. It is bland because it has no intention to be discerned, so contains nothing of substance.

  • Elon Musk merges xAI and Twitter — the new AOL Time Warner
  • Takes:

    1. Ah yes the classic “combine a bunch of worthless things together to magically create value” that caused the financial crisis
    2. Those banks aren’t taking their pounds of flesh fast enough. Maybe they don’t want to cut into Musk’s bloated corpse of a body.
    3. Musk combining two things reminds me of this 16 year old video (CW: scatological humor)
  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Anyone who uses gen AI is my opp, status report:

    • so far every restaurant that I've been to where I noticed AI slop as part of the decor has sucked. One of the ones local to me closed, hooray!
    • IDF: haha look we are Ghibli please send us more machine guns
    • a third thing
  • Musk presses H twice to perform the Nazi salute twice on stage at inauguration.

    No link given because it's all over the news. If you ask for proof you're going to have to eat my ass.

    A lot of people are going to say it wasn't intended as a Nazi salute, and to that, I say: it doesn't matter. Was it a dog whistle? A variation of a Nazi salute from a South African neo-nazi party? Or just the vanilla salute? Such pontification is a waste of time. Fokker is a Nazi; you didn't need to see him salute. To all the regulars here, Musk being a Nazi is just an axiom of his whole deal. I mean, it's not called technofascism for nothing.

    25
    Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”

    > Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.

    31
    Are we going to see prediction markets enter mainstream journalism? Taylor Lorenz says yes

    original link

    “If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”

    11
    In which some researchers draw a spooky picture and spook themselves

    Abstracted abstract: >Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

    I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.

    *

    !

    9
    Gotta pump tuah and dump that thang
    www.independent.co.uk Hawk Tuah girl faces ‘pump and dump’ allegations as crypto coin collapses

    ‘Hawk Tuah Girl’ Haliey Welch launched her own cryptocurrency, only for it to plummet by 90 percent just hours later

    Hawk Tuah girl faces ‘pump and dump’ allegations as crypto coin collapses
    11
    Elon is constructing a texas compound to trap, err, I mean, house his ex wives and children

    Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

    https://archive.is/XwbY0

    3
    Should a man be allowed to sell his soul on the blockchain? (Podcast ep dated 23rd February 2022)

    This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.

    I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.

    John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.

    Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:

    333

    Judge rules that the husband should continue to mine ETH until his rig burns down his house.

    556

    Judge rules that the guy shouldn’t sell his soul, for symbolic reasons.

    Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.

    0
    Playing [Texas’s] energy market has become more profitable than mining bitcoin
    www.economist.com Why Texas Republicans are souring on crypto

    Playing the state’s energy market has become more profitable than mining bitcoin

    Why Texas Republicans are souring on crypto

    > On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

    Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9

    4
    www.euronews.com Microsoft says EU to blame for the world's worst IT outage

    Up to 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by Friday's IT outage after Crowdstrike's antivirus update went awry.

    Microsoft says EU to blame for the world's worst IT outage

    Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.

    I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.

    28
    the-boys.fandom.com VoughtCoin

    VoughtCoin is a cryptocurrency created by Vought International. On December 15, 2022, Vought International announced that VoughtCoin can be used to purchase digital collectible cards of Homelander. Each authentic and non-fungible card be purchased for 777 VoughtCoin. The use of cryptocurrency to pur...

    VoughtCoin

    TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.

    It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.

    11

    Uncritically sharing this article with naive hope. Is this just PR for a game? Probably. Indies deserve as much free press as possible though.

    9
    www.buzzsprout.com "Going Infinite": Michael Lewis Takes On Sam Bankman-Fried - If Books Could Kill

    Peter and Michael discuss Michael Lewis’s bestselling book about the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, a young prodigy whose only flaw was that he dreamed too big.Where to find us: Peter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance...

    "Going Infinite": Michael Lewis Takes On Sam Bankman-Fried - If Books Could Kill

    As is tradition I am sharing this link without having listened yet.

    10
    An AI beauty pageant? Miss me with that Miss AI.
    www.forbes.com World’s First AI Pageant To Judge Winner On Beauty And Social Media Clout

    In a contest sponsored by Fanvue, models and influencers crafted from artificial intelligence can now jockey for the title "Miss AI."

    World’s First AI Pageant To Judge Winner On Beauty And Social Media Clout
    9
    www.buzzsprout.com "The Better Angels of Our Nature" Part 2: Campus Lies, I.Q. Rise & Epstein Ties - If Books Could Kill

    2 Better 2 AngelsSupport us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPodWhere to find us: Peter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Jeffrey Epstein’s Science of SleazePinker’s response to Epstein allegationsHow...

    "The Better Angels of Our Nature" Part 2: Campus Lies, I.Q. Rise & Epstein Ties - If Books Could Kill

    Followup to part 1, which now has a transcript!

    As is tradition, I am posting this link without having listened to it. (too many podcasts)

    15
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SW
    swlabr @awful.systems

    Only Bayes Can Judge Me

    Posts 31
    Comments 1.4K