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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • self@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    so mozilla decided to take the piss while begging for $10 donations:

    We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet and take on irresponsible tech companies. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide are making donations. And when each one of us contributes what we can, all those donations add up fast.

    With the rise of AI and continued threats to online privacy, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet.

    the rise of AI you say! wow that sounds awful, itā€™s so good Mozilla isnā€™t very recently notorious for pushing that exact thing on their users without their consent alongside other privacy-violating changes. what a responsible tech company!

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      upside of this: theyā€™ll get told why theyā€™re not getting many of those $10 donations

      downside of that (rejection): that could be exactly what one of the ghouls-in-chief there need to push some or other bullshit

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        the ability of Mozillaā€™s executives and PMs to ignore public outcry is incredible, but not exactly unexpected from a thoroughly corrupt non-profit

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet with the browser we barely maintain and take on irresponsible tech companies that pay us vast sums of money. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide havenā€™t realized weā€™re a charity racket dressed up as a browser who will spend all your money on AI and questionable browser plugins. And when each one of us contributes what we can, we can waste the money all the faster!

      With the rise of AI (youā€™re welcome, by the way, for the MDN AI assistant) and continued threats to online privacy like question like integrating a Mr. Robot Ad into firefox without proper code review, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And marks supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in such a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet in any way we know how ā€“ except by improving our browser of course that would be silly.

      (Iā€™m feeling extra cynical today)

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        Gaslighting? What are you talking about? Thereā€™s no such thing as gaslighting. Maybe youā€™re going crazy

  • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    This quote flashbanged me a little

    When you describe your symptoms to a doctor, and that doctor needs to form a diagnosis on what disease or ailment that is, thatā€™s a next word prediction task. When choosing appropriate treatment options for said ailment, thatā€™s also a next word prediction task.

    From this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1fkn0aw/chatgpt_is_still_very_far_away_from_making_a/lnx8k9l/

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Instead of improving LLMs, they are working backwards to prove that all other things are actually word prediction tasks. It is so annoying and also quite dumb. No chemisty isnā€™t like coding/legos. The law isnā€™t invalid because it doesnā€™t have gold fringes and you use magical words.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      None of these fucking goblins have learned that analogies arenā€™t equivalences!!! They break down!!! Auuuuuuugggggaaaaaaarghhhh!!!

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      The problem is that there could be any number of possible next words, and the available results suggest that the appropriate context isnā€™t covered in the statistical relationships between prior words for anything but the most trivial of tasks i.e. automating the writing and parsing of emails that nobody ever wanted to read in the first place.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      This is just standard promptfondler false equivalence: ā€œwhen people (including me) speak, they just select the next most likely token, just like an LLMā€

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    Today in you canā€™t make this stuff up: SpaceX invades Cards Against Humanityā€™s crowdfunded southern border plot of land.

    Article (Ars Technica) Lawsuit with pictures (PDF)

    Reddit Comment with CAHā€™s email to backers

    The above Ars Technica article also lead me to this broader article (reuters) about SpaceXā€™s operations in Texas. I found these two sentences particularly unpleasant:

    County commissioners have sought to rechristen Boca Chica, the coastal village where Johnson remains a rare holdout, with the Musk-endorsed name of Starbase.

    At some point, former SpaceX employees and locals told Reuters, Starbase workers took down a Boca Chica sign identifying their village. They said workers also removed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon revered by the predominantly Mexican-American residents who long lived in the area.

    Reading all of this also somehow makes Elon Muskā€™s anti-immigrant tweets feel even worse to me than they already were.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      Damn, 3 hours late to the party. Despite my disdain for their game, i can only recall enjoying CAHā€™s liberal antics.

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        CAH is definitely a game you only play with people youā€™ve known your whole life, isnā€™t it?

        Once played with randoms at a hacker con and almost died of embarrassment.

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      Considering the style of humor they have and Musk tries to show, I do wonder how hurt Musk is over all this. And only a matter of time before his sycophants create ā€˜CAH is dyingā€™ graphs and animal meme images with testicles.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      I look forward to the ā€˜but we often disagreedā€™ non-apologies. With absolute lack of self reflection on how this helped push Sailer/Unz into the positions they are now. If we even get that.

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        Pinker: looking through my photo album where Iā€™m with people like Krauss and Epstein, shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with them

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      Who could have predicted that liberalism would lead into scientific racism and then everything else that follows (mostly fascism)???

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        Surely ā€œscientificā€ is giving them far too much credit? I recall previously sneering at some quotes about skull sizes, including something like women keep bonking their heads?

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          I believe the term is not so much meant to convey properties of science upon them as to describe the particular strain of racist shitbaggery (which dresses itself in appears-science, much like what happens in/with scientism)

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            Oh, definitely. For clarity my intention was to riff off them and increase levels of disrespect towards racists. In hindsight, the question format doesnā€™t quite convey that.

    • ahopefullycuterrobot@awful.systems
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      Iā€™m mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.

      Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. Heā€™s been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think heā€™s even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, Iā€™m curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.

      Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But Iā€™ve never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.

      Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since Iā€™m pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I havenā€™t seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonaldā€™s another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evanā€™s account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesnā€™t emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsOP
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        Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I havenā€™t pored over everything heā€™s blogged and microblogged, he hasnā€™t sent up red flags that I recall. E.g., here he is in 2009:

        Oh, Kay. Greg Mankiw looks at a graph showing that children of high-income families do better on tests, and suggests that itā€™s largely about inherited talent: smart people make lots of money, and also have smart kids.

        But, you know, thereā€™s lots of evidence that thereā€™s more to it than that. For example: students with low test scores from high-income families are slightly more likely to finish college than students with high test scores from low-income families.

        Itā€™s comforting to think that we live in a meritocracy. But we donā€™t.

        And in 2014:

        There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.ā€™s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that heā€™s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what heā€™s talking about.

        So itā€™s comical, in a way, to see [Paul] Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a ā€œculture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.ā€ He was, he says, simply being ā€œinarticulate.ā€ How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars ā€” people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

        I suppose itā€™s possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.

        • ahopefullycuterrobot@awful.systems
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          The Wikipedia article on the Human Biodiversity Institute cites the term human biodiversity as becoming a euphemism for racism sometime in the late 90s and Marksā€™ book is from 1995, so there was apparently a pretty quick turnover. Which makes me wonder if hijacking or if independent invention. The article has a lot of sources, so I might mine them to see if thereā€™s a detailed timeline.

  • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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    Every few years there is some new CS fad that people try to trick me into doing research in ā€” ā€œalgorithmsā€ (my actual area), then quantum, then blockchain, then AI.

    Wish this bubble would just fucking pop already.

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    Behind the Bastards is starting a series about Yarvin today. Always appreciate it when they wander into our bailiwick!

  • Mii@awful.systems
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    Follow up for this post from the other day.

    Our DSO now greenlit the stupid Copilot integration because ā€œMicrosoft said itā€™s okayā€ (of course they did), and he also was on some stupid AI convention yesterday and whatever fucking happened there, heā€™s become a complete AI bro and is now preaching the Gospel of Altman that everyone whoā€™s not using AI will be obsolete in few years and we need to ADAPT OR DIE. Itā€™s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

    He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT even though just a week ago he was hating on people who did that. I sat with my fucking mouth open in that meeting and people asked me whether Iā€™m okay (Iā€™m not).

    I need to get another job ASAP or I will go clinically insane.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT

      He is the data security breach.

      E: Dropped a T. But hey, at least chatgpt uses SSL to communicate, so the databreach is now constrained to the ChatGPT trainingdata. So it isnā€™t that bad.

    • self@awful.systems
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      Iā€™m so sorry. the tech industry is shockingly good at finding people who are susceptible to conversion like your CEO and DSO and subjecting them to intense propaganda that unfortunately tends to work. for someone lower in the company like your DSO, thatā€™s a conference where theyā€™ll be subjected to induction techniques cribbed from cults and MLM schemes. I donā€™t know what they do to the executives ā€” I imagine it involves a variety of expensive favors, high levels of intoxication, and a variant of the same techniques yud used ā€” but it works instantly and produces someone who canā€™t be convinced theyā€™ve been fed a lie until it ends up indisputably losing them a ton of money

      • Mii@awful.systems
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        Yeah, I assume thatā€™s exactly what happened when CEO went to Silicon Valley to talk to ā€œimportant peopleā€. Despite being on a course to save money before, he dumped tens of thousands into AI infrastructure which hasnā€™t delivered anything so far and is suddenly very happy with sending people to AI workshops and conferences.

        But Iā€™m only half-surprised. Heā€™s somewhat known for making weird decisions after talking to people who want to sell him something. This time itā€™s gonna be totally different, of course.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          The ā€œimportant peopleā€ line is a huge part of how the grift works and makes tech media partially responsible. Legitimizing the grift rather than criticizing it makes it easy for sales folks to push ā€œthe next big thing.ā€ And after all, donā€™t you want to be an important person?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      Itā€™s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

      I have realized working at a corporation that a lot of employees will just mindlessly regurgitate the company message. And not in a ā€œI guess this is what we have to work onā€ way, but as if it replaced whatever worldview they had previously.

      Not quite sure what to make of this TBH.

  • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    A lemmy-specific coiner today: https://awful.systems/post/2417754

    The dilema of charging the users and a solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse

    First, there will be a blockchain. There will be these cryptocurrencies:

    This guy is speaking like he is in Genesis 1

    I guess it would be better that only the instances can own instance-specific coins.

    You guess alright? You mean that you have no idea what youā€™re saying.

    if a user on lemmy.ee want to post on lemmy.world, then lemmy.ee have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world

    What will this solve? If 2 people respond to each otherā€™s comments, the instance with the most valuable coin will win. What does that have to do with who caused the interaction?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      Yes crypto instances, please all implement this and ā€œdisallowā€ everyone else from interacting with you! I promise weā€™ll be sad and not secretly happy and that youā€™ll make lots of money from people wanting to interact with you.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      if a user on lemmy.ee want to post on lemmy.world, then lemmy.ee have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world

      Note that you donā€™t need cryptocurrencies for this. I think Jaron Lanier talked about an idea like this ages ago, before people tried to put cryptocurrencies into everything.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 post 6 comments joined 3 months ago, ā€œiā€™m naive to cryptoā€ ā€œI want to host an instance that serves as a competitive alternative to Facebook/Threads/X to the users in my country,ā€

      yeah he doesnā€™t even have to charge for interacting with him iā€™ll avoid him without it

  • flizzo@awful.systems
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    Orange site on pager bombs in Lebanon:

    If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, letā€™s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.

    It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      so according to @liveuamap, the backstory here is that this is to get his name out of news about the WildBerries shooting in Moscow - where a battle for corporate control came down to gunshots - because he was backing one of the sides

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    Despite Soatak explicitely warning users that posting his latest rant[1] to the more popular tech aggregators would lead to loss of karma and/or public ridicule, someone did just that on lobsters and provoked this mask-slippage[2]. (comment is in three paras, which I will subcomment on below)

    Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasnā€™t been for at least a decade. As far as I can tell, itā€™s a meme that is exclusively kept alive by our detractors.

    This is the Rationalist version of the village worthy complaining that everyone keeps bringing up that one time he fucked a goat.

    Also, ā€œthis sure looks like a religion to meā€ can be - and is - argued about any human social activity. Iā€™m quite happy to see rationality in the company of, say, feminism and climate change.

    Sure, ā€œreligionā€ is on a sliding scale, but Big Yud-flavored Rationality ticks more of the boxes on the ā€œReligion or notā€ checklist than feminism or climate change. In fact, treating the latter as a religion is often a way to denigrate them, and never used in good faith.

    Finally, of course, it is very much not just rationalists who believe that AI represents an existential risk. We just got there twenty years early.

    Citation very much needed, bub.


    [1] https://soatok.blog/2024/09/18/the-continued-trajectory-of-idiocy-in-the-tech-industry/

    [2] link and username witheld to protect the guilty. Suffice to say that They Are On My List.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk

      But you should, yall created an idea which some people do take seriously and it is causing them mental harm. In fact, Yud took it so seriously in a way that shows that he either beliefs in potential acausal blackmail himself, or that enough people in the community believe it that the idea would cause harm.

      A community he created to help people think better. Which now has a mental minefield somewhere but because they want to look sane to outsiders now people donā€™t talk about it. (And also pretend that now mentally exploded people donā€™t exist). This is bad.

      I get that we put them in a no-win situation, either take their own ideas seriously enough to talk about acausal blackmail. And then either help people by disproving the idea, or help people by going ā€˜this part of our totally Rational way of thinking is actually toxic and radioactive and you should keep away from it (A bit like Hegel am I right(*))ā€™. Which makes them look a bit silly for taking it seriously (of which you could say who cares?), or a bit openly culty if they go with the secret knowledge route. Or they could pretend it never happened and never was a big deal and isnā€™t a big deal in an attempt to not look silly. Of course, we know what happened, and that it still is causing harm to a small group of (proto)-Rationalists. This option makes them look insecure, potentially dangerous, and weak to social pressure.

      That they do the last one, while have also written a lot about acausal trading, which just shows they donā€™t take their own ideas that seriously. Or if it is an open secret to not talk openly about acausal trade due to acausal blackmail it is just more cult signs. You have to reach level 10 before they teach you about lord Xeno type stuff.

      Anyway, I assume this is a bit of a problem for all communal worldbuilding projects, eventually somebody introduces a few ideas which have far reaching consequences for the roleplay but which people rather not have included. It gets worse when the non-larping outside then notices you and the first reaction is to pretend larping isnā€™t that important for your group because the incident was a bit embarrassing. Own the lightning bolt tennis ball, it is fine. (**)

      *: I actually donā€™t know enough about philosophy to know if this joke is correct, so apologies if Hegel is not hated.

      **: I admit, this joke was all a bit forced.

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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      Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasnā€™t been for at least a decade.

      Sure, but that doesnā€™t change that the head EA guy wrote an OP-Ed for Time magazine that a nuclear holocaust is preferable to a world that has GPT-5 in it.

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          Finally, of course, it is very much not just rationalists who believe that AI represents an existential risk. We just got there twenty years early.

          This one?

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk

      except the ones still getting upset over it, but if we deny their existence as hard as possible they wonā€™t be there

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        The reference to the Basilisk was literally one sentence and not central to the post at all, but this big-R Rationalist couldnā€™t resist on singling it out and loudly proclaiming itā€™s not relevant anymore. The mā€™lady doth protest too much.

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    What are the chances thatā€“somewhere deep in the bowels of Clearwater, FLā€“some poor soul has been ordered to develop an AI replicant of L. Ron Hubbard?

    There is a substantial corpus.

    • self@awful.systems
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      the only worthwhile use of LLMs: endlessly prompting the L Ron Hubbard chatbot with Battlefield Earth reviews as a form of acausal torture

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      Theyā€™ve had enough problems with the guy who claimed to be the reincarnation of LRH.

      I reckon Miscavige wouldnā€™t want a robo-LRH as it could challenge his power within the organization.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      If youā€™re against unrestricted genAI then youā€™re also transphobic

      What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because thatā€™s absurd.

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        3 months ago

        Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing ā€œAIā€ means youā€™re classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. Iā€™m going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that youā€™re a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Considering how much the AI hype feels like the cryptocurrency hype, during which every joke you made had already been seriously used to make a coin and been pumped and dumped already, I wouldnā€™t be surprised at all.

      • Mii@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Oh, I wonder if they are referring to this shit, where somone came to r/lgbt fishing for compliments for the picture theyā€™d asked Clippy for, and were completely clowned on by the entire community, which then led to another subreddit full of promptfans claiming that artists are transphobic because they didnā€™t like a generated image which had a trans flag in it.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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          3 months ago

          remembering the NFT grifter who loudly asserted that if you werenā€™t into NFTs then you must be a transphobe

          (it was Fucking Thorne)

          • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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            3 months ago

            fondly remembering replying to these types of people with screenshots from the wikipedia page on affinity fraud. they really hated that

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      I suspect itā€™ll land somewhere above ā€œhalitosisā€ but below ā€œwearing black socks with crocsā€

    • self@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      convenience xcancel link

      fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole ā€œyou canā€™t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do itā€ openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, theyā€™ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I canā€™t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        3 months ago

        who is the investor who pushed Mozilla this hard? where the fuck is this coming from?

        all their hiring is AI too

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          havenā€™t really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is ā€œnot enough counter-friction leftā€. foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing

          I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago

          not that the above guess eliminates the thing youā€™re pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the ā€œwhy has this suddenly accelerated so muchā€ angle

          • self@awful.systems
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            3 months ago

            I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago

            remember when bringing up Mozillaā€™s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?

            my personal theory for why itā€™s accelerating so much is, their board might be doing a Sears[1]. theyā€™re inventing ways to make Mozilla bankrupt because thereā€™s profit in it, and that profit window might be closing rapidly with the antitrust actions against Google coming up. this is all based on vibes though, Iā€™m the polar opposite of an accountant

            [1] see also, doing a Red Lobster. no, endless shrimp isnā€™t why theyā€™re going bankrupt, why in fuck would it be, of course itā€™s capitalists

            • blakestacey@awful.systemsOP
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              3 months ago

              For some reason, the news of Red Lobsterā€™s bankruptcy seems like a long time ago. I would have sworn that I read this story about it before the solar eclipse.

              Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insiderā€™s Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurantā€”the worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobsterā€™s property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, youā€™re in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past monthā€”some of whom were laid off without any notice last weekā€”what I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and bussers whoā€™ve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain thatā€™s been drifting out to sea for some time. [ā€¦] ā€œYou had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,ā€ Josie said. ā€œI would get screamed at.ā€ She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: ā€œIt tops any customer service experience Iā€™ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.ā€

              • self@awful.systems
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                3 months ago

                Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.

                I dated someone who worked at Red Lobster, and that absolutely checks out. the number of people whoā€™d come in hoping to grift free shit and take it out on the servers when they didnā€™t get it (or would try and get someone fired so they could get free shit, depending on the night) was astounding

            • froztbyte@awful.systems
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              3 months ago

              remember when bringing up Mozillaā€™s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?

              yup. absolutely nuts shit. I know thereā€™s often a lament to lack of nuance in contemporary internet but god damn if there isnā€™t also a massive shortage of critical thinking skills and the ability to engage with criticism well