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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google’s AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):
Also on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:
Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers
Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours
Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)
I tried this a couple of times and got a few “AI summary not available” replies
Ed: heh
The phrase “any pork in a swarm” is an idiom, likely meant to be interpreted figuratively. It’s not a literal reference to a swarm of bees or other animals containing pork. The most likely interpretation is that it is being used to describe a situation or group where someone is secretly taking advantage of resources, opportunities, or power for their own benefit, often in a way that is not transparent or ethical. It implies that individuals within a larger group are actively participating in corruption or exploitation.
Generative AI is experimental.
NOT THE (PORK-FILLED) BEES!
The link opened up another google search with the same query, tho without the AI summary.
image of a google search result description
Query: “a bear fries bacon meaning”
AI summary:
The phrase “a bear fries bacon” is a play on the saying “a cat dreams of fish” which is a whimsical way to express a craving. In this case, the “bear” and “bacon” are just random pairings. It’s not meant to be a literal description of a bear cooking bacon. It’s a fun, nonsensical phrase that people may use to express an unusual or unexpected thought or craving, according to Google Search.
It really aggressively tries to match it up to something with similar keywords and structure, which is kind of interesting in its own right. It pattern-matched every variant I could come up with for “when all you have is…” for example.
Honestly it’s kind of an interesting question and limitation for this kind of LLM. How should you respond when someone asks about an idiom neither of you know? The answer is really contextual. Sometimes it’s better to try and help them piece together what it means, other times it’s more important to acknowledge that this isn’t actually a common expression or to try and provide accurate sourcing. The LLM, of course, has none of that context and because the patterns it replicates don’t allow expressions of uncertainty or digressions it can’t actually do both.
Show HN: AI Paying with Bitcoin and Lightning – A Working Demo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770953
@o7___o7 @BlueMonday1984 hey cool they made something that absolutely nobody wants or will ever use
A service that gives a bullshit engine unsupervised access to the irreversible-transaction machine? What could possibly go wrong?
Otoh, this does open up the potential for a headline like ‘Chatgpt sanctioned for using stolen cryptocurrency assets.’
ChatGPT finally achieved profitability due to unintended money laundering at unprecedented scale.
pic of tweet reply taken from r/ArtistHate. Reminded me of Saltman’s Oppenheimer tweet. Link to original tweet
image/tweet description
Original tweet, by @mark_k:
Forget “Black Mirror”, we need WHITE MIRROR
An optimistic sci-fi show about cool technology and hot it relates to society.
Attached to the original tweet are two images, side-to-side.
On the left/leading side is (presumably) a real promo poster for the newest black mirror season. It is an extreme close-up of the side of a person’s face; only one eye, part of the respective eyebrow, and a section of hair are visible. Their head is tilted ninety degrees upwards, with the one visible eye glazed over in a cloudy white. Attached to their temple is a circular device with a smiling face design, tilted 45 degrees to the left. Said device is a reference to the many neural interface devices seen throughout the series. The device itself is mostly shrouded in shadow, likely indicating the dark tone for which Black Mirror is known. Below the device are three lines of text: “Plug back in”/“A Netflix Series”/“Black Mirror”
On the right side is an LLM generated imitation of the first poster. It appears to be a woman’s 3/4 profile, looking up at 45 degrees. She is smiling, and her eyes are clear. A device is attached to her face, but not on her temple, instead it’s about halfway between her ear and the tip of her smile, roughly outside where her upper molars would be. The device is lit up and smiling, the smile aligned vertically. There are also three lines of text below the device, reading: “Stay connected”/“A Netflix Series”/“Black Mirror”
Reply to the tweet, by @realfuzzylegend:
I am always fascinated by how tech bros do not understand art. like at all. they don’t understand the purpose of creative expression.
oppenheimer teaches all of us that even if you specifically learn arcane knowledge to devise a nazi-burning machine, you can still get fucked over by a nazi that chose to do office politics and propaganda instead
about cool technology and how it relates to society
My dude I’ve got bad news for you about what Black Mirror is about.
Vacant, glassy-eyed, plastic-skinned, stamped with a smiley face… “optimistic”
I mean, if the smiley were aligned properly, it would be a poster for a horror story about enforced happiness and mandatory beauty standards. (E.g., “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” from the famously subtle Twilight Zone.) With the smiley as it is, it’s just incompetent.
“The man in the glowing rectangle is Mark Kretschmann, a technology enthusiast who has grown out of touch with all but the most venal human emotions. Mark is a leveller, in that he wants to drag all people down to his. But as Mark is about to discover, there’s no way to engineer a prompt for a map out of… the Twilight Zone.”
I mean, it feels like there’s definitely something in the concept of a Where Is Everybody style of episode where Mark has to navigate a world where dead internet theory has hit the real world and all around him are bots badly imitating workers trying to serve bots badly imitating customers in order to please bots badly imitating managers so that bots badly imitating cops don’t drag them to robot jail
We have that already, it’s called ads.
need to see those proposed community notes
Why are all the stories about the torment nexus we’re constructing so depressing?
Hmm, hmm. This is a tricky one.
exploitation-offshorer “Nick Huber” (@sweatystartup) finds that the leopards will, in fact, also eat his face. but still takes it as a fine opportunity to pitch his exploitation:
(I guess at least his account name is directionally accurate? indicates willingness to induce sweatshops…)
tweet 1
I was pro tariffs.
Until about 30 of our clients at Somewhere dot com cancelled searches over the past three weeks. Hiring freezes all over the place.
Hit me in the pocket book already.
REMOVE TARIFFS.
tweet 2
By the way:
If you want to hire folks internationally for 80% less than US employees, check out somewhere[.]com or send me a DM for a discount.
Is that the tomato scale guy?
looks to be! thanks, I’d seen that before and remember the incident, but I’m beyond abysmal at names
(this is a problem to solve, I know)
This might be tangential/way off-topic and more MoreWrite material than stub, but anyhoo:
Acronym-based misinformation campaigns I would like to seed:
- Internet debate clubs should start using “ASMR” to mean “A steel man risk”
- Opus dei, the absolutely real sect of the catholic church most famous for being the villains in the fiction IP “the Da Vinci Code”, is in fact the DEI branch of the catholic church.
- The company KFC has been commissioned by the Chinese Government to use FLG in its marketing, standing for “finger licking good” to drop Fa Lun Gong in search rankings for FLG.
If I think of more I’ll post them.
LMFAO, best known for “Party Rock Anthem”, is actually a failed leftist yodaist sect, standing for the warning “Leopards, my face, ate off”
took me 3 tries to read “yodaist” correctly (brain kept going s/d/g/ which, well…)
I thought of the old sneerclub/ssc poster (def not a regular on the former, while a former regular on the latter) yodatsracist
Personally id not use disinformation as a tool. It is what got us into this mess, and you are also helping the actual goal of the flooding the zone with misinformation tactic. People stop believing in things.
Ok, that’s fair enough. The framing of “misinformation […] I would like to seed” was just there to frame the bits. I don’t really want these bits to take off.
Allright, let me put my ‘warnings for young demonologists’ guidebook to the side. ;).
@swlabr @Soyweiser too late
for the betterment of muddled waters, I suggest a secondary meaning for
opus dei- a WIP codec that the xiph group hasn’t really released yet, because they’re not sure it fully enough mutes maga voices
Semi-OT: Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:
This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut’n’pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don’t get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else’s summary, “just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets”.
I opened the site for it and browsed a bit, my first thought being something like “christ, the worst of glamper festivals”, shortly after followed by “god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED”
then, bottom of the “music & performances” page:
Europe’s answer to TED
gnnnnnnngh
god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED
Burning man portrayed famously by Anna Gunn
Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.
Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:
- No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
- The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.
The only one I’ve met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don’t travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven’t heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that’s worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the “a gig’s a gig” principle.
I did read one of Carlo’s pop sci books back in the day, was a nice read. Iirc he’s like one of the dudes all in on loop quantum gravity. Bet you’d know more about this than I do 😅
Cursed bizzaro bonaroo
‘nightmare blunt roration’ as people say. See the greyzone is also present.
as in the tankies? i don’t see blumenthal in there
ah okay, it’s been a while since they were relevant
grayzone, the: low quality disinformation source constantly praising putin and assad while downplaying their warcrimes and amplifying conspiracy theories favourable to these two. not to be confused with greyzone, a wagner group associated telegram channel
Ah my bad, i always mess the spelling of gray/grey up.
weirder thing is that blumenthal (american) uses british spelling, and russians (where british english was taught more commonly when it was relevant for them? i think?) used american spelling
I’m glad that messing it up is at least common.
Search engines also must wonder why I’m so interested in couches and coaches because I know which word I mean, I don’t always know how it is spelled. There prob is a nice mnemonic involving Vance and Waltz I could think off that would help me with that problem however.
“Philosophy & Music” are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.
Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.
Corbyn is, like, famously bad at recognising bad faith fascist signalling, so it doesn’t not make sense.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
He is busy being 93 fucking years old, lol
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
They probably couldn’t get Bernie.
If Penrose followed his trajectory from 30 years ago, he is now a radical anti AGI person but because he thinks human minds work on quantum effects.
“Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’”
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3lne5zqaxyc2c
the associated “date” video is so multi-dimensionally cringe it had me reaching for numpy
I’m sure whoever put money into that venture will see dramatically amazing returns, now there’s a founder that will not take the money and run.
Sorry annoyed rant incoming, have no other place to put it in a normal way. Has nothing to do with out regular subjects, feel free to ignore. I just needed to scream into the void
Saw Lazerpig released a ‘culture war’ video (content warning for anybody who wants to look it up), in which he is doing a ‘both sides should listen to each other’ stick. (yeah, I know). In which he includes a bit on how Daryl Davis (the anti KKK guy) was called a white supremacist by antifa. Which was news to me, I never heard anybody near anti-facism call him that (but yeah filter bubbles). (I have hear a lot of people say they he gives KKK/racist members a shield to get back into respectability without doing the actual work, get lesser jail time, and that his work is only temporary and the places where he got rid of the KKK they just came back later). So I was annoyed that Lazer’talk to both sides’Pig didn’t actually talk to anybody involved in antifa. But it got worse, as far as I can tell the event his is talking about took place in 2019, they protested against the alt-right being there, who according to event organizer Tim Pool(posted mostly for the picture) were not there. Other organizers are this guy (note the tweet about Jimmy concepts, as we talked about that fool more on that below in other threads. The myth thing he organizes also just tweets transphobia (funny thing, they started this org because of ‘Zeitgeist: The Movie’, aaaaa)), and a third guy who I didn’t find any social media profile off. (Source for the organizers. Exactly the type of shit antifa says Daryls naively helps (Don’t get me wrong, him convincing individual members is good, I just don’t think he is without flaws (for example, the people he follows on twitter)). Do some research lazerpig, obv they didn’t protest Daryl, they protested the other guys there, and Daryl got caught in the crossfire because he knows about the KKK, not the alt right. (the far right loved it, their ‘they called Daryl a nazi’ articles are all over the place). The racists nowadays don’t don the hood, they wear the frog, and pretend to be hated by the KKK while planning marches with them.
(Posting it here because I had to get it off my chest (and it got worse the more I looked into it), and due to how the video is framed if I were to comment this people wouldn’t listen to me and claim that I’m doing exactly what the video is claiming is bad about ‘the left’).
Yeah that was a bit of a rough one, and I say that as someone who at this point needs to admit that I enjoy multi-hour video essays as a genre. The “Ent” framing is also kind of awkward because the whole point of that bit of LotR was that even though the ents didn’t want to go to war the war came to them just the same.
Though to be fair I think I already started doubting his sourcing when it turned out that that Moskva maintenance leak was a fake.
There is more than just the war came to them. The Ents are wrong in their ‘nobody is there for us’ assessment. (like the modern day ‘Entlike’ people), the Wizards were in fact there for them, that is why the betrayal of Saruman hits so hard. A wizard should know better, aka a wizard should be there for them to protect their neutrality, aka the wizards respected their desires to be left alone. I assume Gandalf, Radagast, and the blue man group didn’t try to recruit them on purpose. Also the Elves gave them the gift of speech ‘the cure to dumbness’, in fact in the previous war the area the Entwives lived was razed by Sauron. One of the powers of lord of the rings is that not all people speak with wisdom, but they always speak their truth. Treebeard spoke the truth the Ents believed, but they were not wise (a pattern often repeated in things various people say, as Bret Devereaux mentions here). (They could be read as the Dutch/Belgians in a lot of ways, even if they according to Tolkien were a Macbeth reference). Which all fits back into Lazerpig, yes you are an Ent, but it isn’t a positive thing, and the lack of selfawareness of what this Entness means is why your vid is so rough.
Being an Ent is like being like a Libertarian,
deadly afraid of bears, “like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”(E: hahah) But think his heart is in the right place, he clearly has done more for Ukraine than any of us here I assume, just that the anti-antifa part of the video shows a lot of repeating rightwing sources uncritically (like the BLM in 2020 vs the statues shit in 2017 fuckup, time goes the other way dude, and there wasn’t a unite the left rally). And the weird US style confusing the democrats/the left/antifa as one big block. EtcAnd yes, longer videos are fine, I use them a lot when im doing repetitive tasks which do not require my full cognitive load. Does mean you sometimes miss things, but that happens. It is entertainment anyway. And hey he is right on the Ent part in an other way, over 2 hours, with another hour on the cutting room floor, all to conclude that hobbits are not orcs.
Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn’t actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the “both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming” take was still a blow.
Yeah, of course I didn’t expect him to be totally on my side, even if he mostly has his heart in the right place. (with a few exceptions, like the downplaying of the nazis in azov (granted, Ukranian anarchists did ask if people could focus less on them as the nazis there are not the main problem right now, which is a different take than ‘the nazis are not real’, more a militant neo-nazis we can deal with, but the Russian state we cannot etc), and the ‘harsher punishment for crimes’ shit). I had hoped for more. I had hoped my comment written around the mental health break point, would end up to be a total egg on my face, react before watching the whole video gotcha mistake on my part. Sadly it was not (also why I don’t go into the various issues the vid had after that point, even if the repeatedly shows his intention were good, just he is an Ent), but imagine if it was, imagine him going at the end, 'ow correction yeah the Daryl thing, turns out that was Tim Pool, did yall notice how much you went along with my framing? Do you get it now? Sadly it was not.
I believe you!
Thanks, not that I really needed to be believed, I was just really annoyed that he does this whole thing about how the right does all kinds of things and then still falls into their trap.
He then says ‘politically I’m an Ent’ which is very funny, as I used that in a negative way here before. Apart from that his heart is somewhat in the right place, clearly he isn’t a bigot (so I’m not cancelling the pig, im just going 'oof that was a particularly bad take in a bit of an iffy but well intended video. He will become really insufferable if somebody ever introduces him to grey tribe style Rationalism)
You’ll accept my belief and like it, dammit! /s
Ow I liked it, the thanks was genuine.
I saw in passing a claim that investors (or rather gamblers) are fleeing the dollar for safer assets such as “gold and Bitcoin”.
Gold might be true, the ancient relic is up against the dollar, but Bitcoin!? Someone tell me that isn’t true and it’s just coinfondlers trying to hype it, in order to steer stupid capital their way.
Quick check suggests that Bitcoin is indeed up over the last couple of days, but at time of posting is down YTD. Any dumb money going into Bitcoin to hedge against USD chicanery is replacing the money that came out of it in response to the overall economic disaster still in progress, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a “flight to safety” as much as a “morons returning their still-on-fire hands to the hot stove”
Ed: also all the usual disclaimers about liquidity, stable coins, manipulation, etc. apply just as strongly as they do for any other discussion of the Bitcoin spot price.
Isnt the money in volume in bitcoin quite low reportedly? I figure the exchanges can track that, but not sure if they release that data, which should show if this is real at all
@David Gerard could probably throw the actual numbers and sources at us to back it up. I don’t really have the background to put the numbers in context and have largely trusted his and others’ reporting on the subject, but my understanding is that especially if you consider the volume of actual USD liquidity rather than trusting Tether and other stablecoins to actually be backed then it’s truly dire. Even if you take the numbers at face value, however, I don’t think there’s nearly enough depth in the order book to absorb a meaningful amount of sell pressure at current prices.
when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop
@yellowcake @mountainriver, the cause of the money machine? Are you sure about that?
@yellowcake @mountainriver All it needs is a bigger fool.
Inside baseball, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but LW is crowing over a legal loss for RationalWiki
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW5tjMmTqsoRa6zrd/pablo-s-shortform?commentId=wB9jcCPrXzNCLCQXL
They link to a TracingWoodgrain(!) tweet which is basically just a screenshot of a talk page
https://xcancel.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1913717061626347642
I don’t know the significance of this, if any. I don’t recognize the names of any of the plaintiffs(?) in the screenshot, so I find it a bit amusing that probably the only google juice they had were RW.
An lesswrong:
countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.
uh-huh
An different lesswrong:
LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.
Christ on a futa dick
when people do stuff like dismissing x-risk because their top Google search result pointed them at RationalWiki, what exactly was the proper non-free-speech-limiting solution to this problem?
How can we leverage the monopoly of violence of the state to promote our religious views?
Christ on a futa dick
He is risen!
The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:
We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We’ll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.
Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for “ban evasion”. Dunno what that’s about.
Ah that is a bit sad, I often link to Rationalwiki as it properly documents several far right people. (no idea about the people listed here, never heard of them). And seeing people defend/use the twg article is a bit sad. But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already. Anyway, typical Rationalism rationalization bullshit.
E: seems the problem is that RW is in a SLAPP suits allowed state and has little money. Of course the anti-RW people will use this loss to claim that RW is actually defamatory.
But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already
Yeah, I didn’t write at truly Rationalist length about it, but I did spend longer than was healthy.
Yeah, that was quite a good post btw. I snicked again at the ‘new sources of porn’ and ‘James Somerton plagiarized.’ bits after seeing your link.
Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the “residential proxy” services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.
Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I’m dropping it here:
I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.
Going off-topic a bit - there’s a new expose on Limited Run Games, and its a doozy
who?
TL;DR: They’re a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.
Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.
I had no idea thanks!
Dan Olson finds that “AI overviews” are not as constant as the northern star.
The phrase “don’t eat things that are made of glass” is a metaphorical one. It’s often used to describe something that is difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous, often referring to facing difficult tasks or situations with potential negative outcomes.
But also,
The phrase “don’t eat things made of glass” is a literal warning against ingesting glass, as it is not intended for consumption and can cause serious harm. Glass is a hard, non-organic material that can easily break and cause cuts, damage to the digestive tract, and other injuries if swallowed.
Olson says,
Fantastic technology, glad society spent a trillion dollars on this instead of sidewalks.
Hat tip to the AI bro in the comments willfully misunderstanding why he sees so much “sexualized schoolgirl trash” from human artists. Both in the sense of “illustrators take commissions from horny strangers who are one of the most consistent sources of actual income and one imperilled by genAI” and in the sense of “my dude in the modern internet if you’re seeing it that frequently it’s because the algorithms have decided you’re into that shit.”
Thank god for wikipedia and other wikis, may they live long and prosper.
Semi-OT: A coalition of record corps is trying to sue the Internet Archive out of existence
