- 2 Posts
- 48 Comments
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Nate Graham doubles down on sloppificationEnglish
2·4 days agoWell now I’m very confused. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing particularly special about ‘töten’, and its object is accusative. So why should it be dative in this… uh, case?
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Nate Graham doubles down on sloppificationEnglish
7·4 days agoI think this perplexes us because we’re tying ourselves in knots trying to rephrase it that it might be deemed more ‘mature’. But that is missing the point: bringing up the concerns of the users at all is just a fundamentally immature remark.
We, the developers, are the adults in the room, and we want to slop it. So fuck off.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Nate Graham doubles down on sloppificationEnglish
16·4 days ago
So that’s a “yes”
Also, are the very powerful and sophisticated tools in the room with us now?
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
4·6 days agoI don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
11·6 days agohttps://wandering.shop/@xgranade/117311487400030196
Techbro: should we do the fascist thing y/n?
Community: no you should not do a fascism
Techbro: woah this got heated, locked
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•"Proposed KDE LLM guidelines" is now officially lockedEnglish
295·7 days agoI don’t get the fuss here. The KDE LLM policy is essentially the same as the Linux kernel.
Psssst! Slop in the kernel is also bad
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
10·8 days agoIt’s our favourite word:
Nuance! The world needs nuance!
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
11·8 days agoit’s solved Navier-Stokes
This phrasing is obvious nonsense, but surely Scott should know better??
Oh yeah, I solved the Navier-Stokes equations. Check it out: u = 0.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
5·9 days agoIn this day and age, if I see someone talking about major life decisions in terms of +/-EV, I turn on my heel and walk away rapidly.
What if someone is taking a photo at a wedding, but the scene metering is a bit off, so they apply a +1 EV bias to bring the shadows into view and wash out the background?
(in photography land, EV is ‘exposure value’)
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
10·9 days agoNot spite, but some secret other thing completely indistinguishable from spite.
Does he really think he’s the only person in the universe so special as to have some sort of principle motivating a spiteful act? All the NPCs in the world just randomly harm themselves with zero rationale whatsoever?
Smashing that toy and bragging about it actually proves to the robot god that Eliezer won’t be blackmailed, checkmate causists
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
4·9 days agoFor a while I’ve said that people moaning about ‘Luddites’ really just wish they could have some child labour going on. Nice of him to just outright say it:
[the machines being smashed] “replaced the scarce and expensive factors, the skilled artisans, by relatively cheap and abundant factors, unskilled manual labor of men, women, and children.” The Luddites treated this as an outrage.
An outrage! Oh, my monocle!
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
8·10 days agotheir equivalent of a NACL
I can only infer you mean some sort of salt circle to keep the AGI demons at bay.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
5·10 days agoThe ‘sex cult’ framing really seems to be catching on. Of course, none of the eugenics comes up.
Keep spreading the good sneer, everyone! There are still horrors to detail!
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
3·11 days agoHaha, check out this comment from the other Sneer Club:
They had me till the part near the end where they say doing an LLM slowdown is like banning medical research and if you don’t like it you are literally an ‘enemy of humanity’.
Like is this accelarationists doing sneer entryism? What’s happening?
Also the thread could’ve used a nod towards the pervasiveness of eugenics in the ratsphere but I guess that’s not the audience segyges’s going for.
edit: A distressing number of replies to that doing the opposite of sneering slop 😔 edit2: … which could in itself be construed as sneer entryism
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
9·11 days agoBut don’t forget the infinitely bad outcome of delaying the uncountable emulated superbeings by one second
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
7·12 days agoSoftware programmers: At last we have created the Milkshake Duck from classic internet shitpost “Do Not Create the Milkshake Duck”
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
4·12 days agoYeah, pretty much. I think Marginalia is explicitly not trying to be the search engine, but rather to surface some of the more-neglected corners of the internet. So it won’t function as a complete substitute for another.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
6·13 days agoMy non-helpful answer is to resign myself to accepting that whatever I was searching for isn’t that important.
More practically, finding human-written work is the thing that https://marginalia-search.com/ excels at, although you might have to scroll a bit to find a relevant result.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•What would it take? A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDEEnglish
17·13 days agoPersonal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user
Source: well I wouldn’t have much of a talk if it weren’t true so I really really hope that it is


I see they’re still offering free copies “For US Kindle readers, while supplies last.” Perhaps they’re not that popular 🤔 (per this lesswrong, there were 1000 on offer)
edit: you know… if they were really serious about the doom and gloom, wouldn’t they just offer free ebooks to literally anybody? Would their site not just have a prominent link to a PDF of all the important things we need to know to navigate this tumultuous time? Beyond the core doomer audience, I’m not really sure who the target market is for “The survival of literally everybody is at stake and action is needed now, please give me $20 to learn how”