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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Ah, late stage capitalism at its finest.
From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:
Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.
Oh, so they publish textbooks.
āThey represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste.ā
š¶ Please allow me to introduce myself š¶
now where did I leave my hammer and sickle
āā¦37%ā¦ That means nearly one in fourā¦ā
Eh, no it doesnāt, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.
So youāre saying that theyāve got books worth at least a grand which their owners are literally using to flaunt their wealth?
Iām legally obligated to say stealing is legally and morally wrong buuuuuuuut
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors arenāt getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods ā¦
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
Of course the books are just vapid art books or travel books.
I just learned about this āwonderfulā little item too
@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is āVeblen goodsā: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
āa type of luxury goodā¦ for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.ā
handy to know, ty
āComplimentary Carbon Efficient Deliveryā
Carbon Efficient evenā¦
That means that DHL driver has to take bike instead of car for this one
If there is an elevator in the apartment, the driver has to take the stairs, contractually. Of course people who order that donāt live in high rise apartments where the driver can reach the door, so everybody wins.
Assouline! The gasoline of ass!
just heard a podcast ad for amazon prime saying it causes āinvoluntary deal squealsā followed by a categorization of different kinds of customer grunts and squeals according to product. not making this up
god thatās just really icky
I swear I keep seeing Amazon ads in this same icky dehumanizing ācuteā style, like some of the annoyance-based ads I vaguely remember from when I still had cable TV. is this just what ads become every time a corporation decides you have no other choice? (yes, almost every time)
one of OpenAIās cofounders wrote some thoroughly unhinged shit about the companyās recent departures
Thank you, guys, for being my team and my co-workers. With each of you, I have collected cool memories ā with Barret, when we had a fierce conflict about compute for what later became o1; with Bob, when he reprimanded me for doing a jacuzzi with a coworker; and with Mira, who witnessed my engagement.
I am in awe of the sheer number of GPUsā¦ whose lives ChatGPT has changed.
If it was just this one line, this would be in the top 10 funniest things ever written around genAI. Too bad the rest of the rambling insanity ruins it.
I canāt be the only one reading that super passive aggressively right? āThank you Barret, whom I hated. Bob, for ruining my hot Jacuzzi date. And Mira, for existing.ā
right with you on team passive aggressive.
Fun fact: All of these incidents happened at the same jacuzzi party.
I heard it was the same 50 parties, over and over
(or, well, the same party, x50ā¦)
lmao this is weird as fuck, reminds me of the bullshit Lex Fridman comes up with, I can totally imagine him saying things like this
love a good second paragraph jumpscare
I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.
fuck thatās gross
whereād you find/run across that? canāt tell if itās a normal ad or some gig-site thing or what
Saw it posted on Reddit. Itās apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:
People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.
ah, doman name sounds like itās one of the microwork farms
Ah yes the advertisement which causes T&S people (who have seen some things) to go on long rants on why you should never put pictures of your kids online publically.
Found a good one in the wild
Didnāt you know LLM stood for Limited Liability Machine
Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Whoād have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.
Maybe weāll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. Iāll write on a little piece of paper ā$35T crypto we have no debt.ā Thatās what I like.
The question (which doesnāt matter) now is, does he really understand crypto? Or did he get at the right conclusion because he thinks that everybody else, like him, is just scamming all the time?
Given the kinds of crowds he hangs out with (i.e. mostly other rich people and political elite) is that not an understandable conclusion?
anything that makes yglesias have a bad day is generally a good thing
but it sounds like the orange man understands the crypto market perfectly: the numbers are all made up and everyoneās lying
(at least I think itās that one? one of themās quite the bootlicker. Iām bad at names tho)
I mean there are definitely some brain rotted crypto bros who would buy shares at face value because itās totally gonna go to the moon guys
A lobsters states the following in regard to LLMs being used in medical diagnoses:
If you have very unusual symptoms, for example, thereās a higher chance that the LLM will determine that they are outside of the probability space allowed and replace them with something more common.
Another one opines:
Donāt humans and in particular doctors do precisely that? This may be anecdotal, but I know countless stories of people being misdiagnosed because doctors just assumed the cause to be the most common thing they diagnose. It is not obvious to me that LLMs exhibit this particular misjudgement more than humans. In fact, it is likely that LLMs know rare diseases and symptoms much better than human doctors. LLMs also have way more time to listen and think.
<Babbage about UK parlaimentarians.gif>
nothing hits worse than an able-bodied techbro imagining what medical care must be like for someone who needs it. here, let me save you from the possibility of misdiagnosis by building and mandating the use of the misdiagnosis machine
Also please fill in the obligatory rant about how LLMs donāt actually know any diseases or symptoms. Like, if your training data was collected before 2020 you wouldnāt have a single COVID case, but if you started collecting in 2020 youād have a system that spat out COVID to a disproportionately large fraction of respiratory symptoms (and probably several tummy aches and broken arms too, just for good measure).
Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last weekās thread instead of this one, so letās try again.
Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or heād say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didnāt pay up, so he compared them to cancer.
And now theyāre suing him.
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/
Mullenwegās the same guy who publicly harassed a random transwoman on Tumblr and had a general meltdown to the point where Tumblr staff had to distance himself from him, so Iām not shocked.
(That its Tumblr is the only thing that shocks me - youād think heād have realised its queer-friendly rep was one of the main things going for it)
wait are there non-queer people on Tumblr even??
I mean, itās the same company that didnāt realize that half its traffic was porn, so itās on brand
I mean, itās the same company that didnāt realize that half its traffic was porn, so itās on brand
Granted, Appleās banhammer forced Tumblrās hand on that front (though Tumblrās complete failure on moderation did give Apple that golden opportunity).
(The whole debacle did lead to Newgrounds getting hit by two separate waves of new users - a minor wave in November after the NSFW purges kicked in, then a major wave in December after the porn ban was officially announced. I have nothing more to add, I think it was pretty funny Tumblr shat the bed that hard)
Haha I saw it from new comments view, didnāt check the thread title
lol holy shit, he was barely getting started
shortly after the first posts, he (most likely personally, although remains to be seen) had the trademark usage page updated specifically to take aim at wpengine
and started making his employees do an astroturfing campaign on their private socials
and blocked wpengine from interacting with wordpress.org at all, by both blocking accounts and IPs
dudeās lost it. coming up soon, mass migrations off wordpress?
Sounds like someone under a lot of pressure to raise revenue and not having much success.
Hello Matt this is your lawer speaking
a twitter thread by sv ceo where comment section wants to do some recreational union busting, political assassinations and automating away longshoremen (lmao) over checks notes black friday bringing slightly less profit to mass retailers. to which i say, fuck your black friday then
and he says that itāll affect elections? specifically in ādonāt do anything visible in interest of unions or trump will winā kinda way? what kinda madhouse is this americans explain https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/1836498432510562788#m
fuck your black friday then
the institutionalisation of it is/was also just fucking nuts
and then in recent years itās slowly been creeping out into other countries too, with other vendors in other places aping āblack friday dealsā
I have no mouth and I must scream
Is this the Flexport(?) guy? Theyāre YC funded I believe.
was/is he unusually shitty or notorious for something
dunno really, heās got a lot of threads on HN where hackernews incorrect each other about logistics
I think the dude is just a wonk who happens to have gotten funding
yeah so it seems
Not a sneer, but some truly beautiful karma:
Judge to approve auctions liquidating Alex Jonesā Infowars to help pay Sandy Hook families
I might not be a huge fan of his work, but Iāll take it any day over AI slop. At least itās a creative vision.
You donāt have to agree with someone to recognize that they care.
This was the woman who took over during Sam Altmanās temporary removal as CEO, which weāre pretty sure happened because the AI doom cultists werenāt satisfied that Altman was enough of an AI doom cultist.
Yudkowsky was solidly in favor of her ascension. I take no joy in saying this as someone who wants this AI nonsense to stop soon, but OpenAI is probably better off financially with fewer AI doom cultists in high positions.
Do you think they still say all that bullshit even when theyāre not screenshooting it for twitter? Probably, right
hundo p
Do you think when the Trumps get paperclipped it will look something like this?
