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)
lol fandom could have been even worse
data moat
Thatās just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.
ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:
- The etymology of āmoatā is that it comes from the word āmotteā. I will not elaborate.
- Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castleās defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
- Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle
Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.
Anyway, this has been MoatFactsā¢ļø. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*
In this context, āmoatā is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo
idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to āopenā castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs
that said itās not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe itās not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv
I will internalise this for the next time data moats come up!
imagine how they could have monetized it
Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game
iirc they had tools to import data from other wikis into theirs, but not tools to export.
they have the MediaWiki database dumps, which are XML so you can do anything with them!! *
* the actual page text is a single field
fig. 1: how awful.systems works
In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this
Ted_Danson_choosing_between_clam_chowder_fountain_and_bees_with_teeth.webm
Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, itās even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didnāt help.
Very serious people at HN at it again:
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someoneās personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like āsexual harassment is not a real crimeā or āwe shouldnāt give our employees raises because otherwise theyāll soon demand infinite payā or āthereās no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isnāt going to damage the reputation of the organization I leadā youāre a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.
Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someoneās personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
What do these people think leadership is?
No, obviously opinions like
- āif my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epsteinās teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consentedā,
- āstealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most itās supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fineā,
- āI donāt believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? Itās conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.1 What if you lie about who is dying?ā,
- āOvertly sexualizing āparodyā ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there isā,
- āItās fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so itās basically proprietary, right?ā,
- ā
You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>ā,
are in the same category as āI think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgustingā when it comes to evaluating someoneās aptitude as a leader.
I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I donāt want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that Iād be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.
1: Itās conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out itās conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).
Especially leadership of a political organization thatās basically just there to turn his opinions into code and publish his essays.
Something to which they, and people like them, are entitled
I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didnāt know how much of a fool RMS was. : āRMS did not believe in providing raises ā prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.ā (It gets worse btw).
Top level comment at time of posting:
āThis might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSRā¦ā
???
No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.
the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.
of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epsteinās victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasnāt underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around
I donāt think anything in the report is new, is it? Isnāt this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.
Nice to have it all in one place though.
Thereās a little bit of new stuff in there, but itās all just corroborating the old or relatively minor. Still, itās a lot in one place.
(Rationally) āIf thereās grass on the field play ballā
that personās inability to spell millennia makes me irrationally angry, and the rest of it is even fucking worse
okay, Iāve changed my mind, Iām in favour of spacex now. so that we can cheaply airlock these fucking pieces of shit.
š¶ Tryna strike a chord and its probably A minorrrrrrrrrrr
(seriously, what the fuck HN)
Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.
Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!
Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slopā¦ blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designsā¦ noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these āAIā generators canāt leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I donāt know for sure, and maybe Iām doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuffā¦
Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with āart things made by actual humansā, but I guess that certainty is outdated now.
This sucks so much. I donāt want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never knowā¦ How can trust be restored?
Iāve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images āgreeblesā after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.
Itās funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now theyāre everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.
Sadly I think the only way to trust you are not getting a lot of AI art is by starting to follow a lot of artists you like on social media. Just going to a site which sells things seems a bit risky atm.
Muskās twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer
the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because youāve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isnāt a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
given how oddly specific āapplication auth protocolā is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone elseās OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when theyāre asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends
have implemented jwt (used the library, first in the company)
so uh, they keep self-fellating on Twitter about how they invented their own CAD program over the objections of the haters
here it is, itās an extremely thin wrapper around the typescript version of manifold with live reloading on changes. note that not only is manifold already a CAD library, they already have a web-based editor that reloads the model on code changes, and kacheās live reloading is just
nodemon. the server part looks like itās barely modified from a code example. the renderer is just three.js grabbed from a CDN.itās so weird they didnāt take the necessary 2 weeks to learn how to write the CAD parts of the CAD system they made!
hackers and builders (both in the a16z definition of) are some of the fucking worst things out there today
builder (derogatory)
founder mode (derogatory)
founder mode derogatory? [flagged]
Marc the Builder employs many elite code ninjas who are experts at prompting ChatGPT for npm commands
chatgpt: for people who donāt want to be gaslit only by bad cli tools
the absolute worst type of coworker from my cubicle days: heard about a technology at a conference, decided they invented it
Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And thatās not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.
Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.
(MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)
I almost want to go Twitter diving to see if kache has the requisite unhinged rant about how universities are only making quantum physics hard to get money/because of woke or whatever
e: holy shit I already regret this
yeah, 3b1b animations can take you through all of undergrad math in probably a month if it all existed and you used anki
We could bottle this arrogance and sell it as an emetic.
And besides, we all know that mathematics videos peaked with the Angle Dance.
as one of many people here who has undergone undergrad math, i reckon a month of youtube and anki might not be enough for even intro to linear algebra. Iām even saying this as someone who skipped all lectures and crammed before all the tests.
yeah donāt do it to yourself. I forget how I originally noticed this weirdo, it may have been through amolitor99ās continuous anthropology safari of TPOT freaks. Speaking of which, somebody needs to get that guy over here
i have tried occasionally but will try again
dammit now Iām going to have to look at twitter
tpot fresh on my mind, too. just yesterday i was telling someone about how one of the people semi in that cluster had me going š¤Ø and then had to explain a little about some of the highlights of tpot
oh, cool, they also claim to be a twitter engineer. thatās probably telling too (if true)
i see your twitter engineer and i raise you elite promptfondler
thereās more
or you could use something like qrencode that already is a thing and pipe it to image viewer of your choice
yeah which might it be
heās also lying box understander
(idk why these screenshots get stretched to entire width available sometimes and sometimes they donāt)
thereās a lot of this
we had these since manhattan project. sit tf down
i think we have different standards on being coherent
- I donāt know Matt Mullenweg, but Iām afraid to ask
- I love the nonsensical misleading QR code onliner, conflictingly using both
echo "<URL>" |and mac-onlygetoutput("pbpaste")(yuck). - It is famously easy to maintain a job and mental well-being when you have no stable home and few sets of clothes! Famously you donāt need a registered address to open a bank account, and you donāt need a bank account to get a registered address!
- I guess you could run the GPU for 1000 years.
- One needs to learn that interpolation = confabulation = useless bullshit.
or you could use something like qrencode that already is a thing and pipe it to image viewer of your choice
(my bad, I actually just looked at the images earlier, missed that you said that)
finding and looking up information you need effectively is a skill that is both very useful and i donāt think itās taught explicitly, itās a byproduct of being taught how to do research more generally. slapping a lying box in its place is not a substitute
but what if the lying box smiled at me and made me feel good about myself, surely that means itās trustworthy right?
jesus christ
(wipes away a single tear)
Beautiful, man, just beautiful
i stared into abyss again and he canāt grasp why flywheels for energy storage donāt work while trying to make happen a startup that sells hardware
āqm and fluid dynamics are easyā lol
Oh. He retweets Cremieux.
whoaā¦on second thought, maybe this dude is having a manic episode or something? yeesh!
This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.
twitter gonā have nothinā left but the cranks
Just guys like that and guys like this
kache miss
and hitting all the Ls
I need to look up what auth protocols this guy has worked on so I can stay away from them.
conversely, it might be a rich vein of toctou
Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didnāt not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script
As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.
New pair of Tweets from Zitron just dropped:
I also put out a lengthy post about AIās future on MoreWrite - go and read it, its pretty cool
Boo! Hiss! Bring Saltman back out! I want unhinged conspiracy theories, damnit.
It feels like this is supposed to be the entrenchment, right? Like, the AGI narrative got these companies and products out into the world and into the public consciousness by promising revolutionary change, and now this fallback position is where we start treating the things that have changed (for the worse) as fair accompli and stop whining. But as Ed says, I donāt think the technology itself is capable of sustaining even that bar.
Like, for all that social media helped usher in surveillance capitalism and other postmodern psychoses, it did so largely by providing a valuable platform for people to connect in new ways, even if those ways are ultimately limited and come with a lot of external costs. Uber came into being because providing an app-based interface and a new coat of paint on the taxi industry hit on a legitimate market. I donāt think I could have told you how to get a cab in the city I grew up in before Uber, but itās often the most convenient way to get somewhere in that particular hell of suburban sprawl unless you want to drive yourself. And of course it did so by introducing an economic model that exploits the absolute shit out of basically everyone involved.
In both cases, the thing that people didnāt like was external or secondary to the thing people did like. But with LLMs, it seems like the thing people most dislike is also the main output of the system. People donāt like AI art, they donāt like interacting with chatbots in basically anywhere, and the confabulation problems undercut their utility for anything where correlation to the real world actually matters, leaving them somewhere between hilariously and dangerously inept at many of the functions theyāre still being pitched for.
Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.
As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
The first clause of the opening line, and weāve already hit a ācitation neededā.
He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize āscience, technology, and the economyā.
You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.
After he started rambling about his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, it was obvious his brain was cooked.
As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
Arrow of time and all that, innit? And God help me, I actually read part of the post as well as the discussion comments where the prompt fondlers were lamenting that all it takes is one rogue ai code to end the world because it will āoptimize against you!ā I assume Evil GPT is constructing anti matter bombs using ingredients it finds under the kitchen sink.
This is just straight-up gossip, but why not:
Tegmark used to go around polling physicists at conferences about which interpretation of quantum mechanics they prefer. A colleague of mine said that they were sitting near Tegmark and saw him fudging the numbers in his notes ā erasing the non-Many Worlds tallies from those who said they supported Many Worlds as well as others, IIRC.
A tally mark that has been shifted unethically in order to win a nerd fight is now called a tegmark.
Bless. You know Iām here for the hot goss.
According to the Wikipedia article on Bellās theorem, the physicist Tsung-Dao Lee ācame close toā inventing it independently. Word from people who would know is that he actually got it, deriving a no-go theorem for local hidden variables that was basically the same as the one Feynman gave much later. But the only documentation for this is in e-mails that have never been published, so nobody can fix the Wikipedia page.
Babe wake up, new missing email scandal just dropped
I remember he went on julia galefās podcast to talk about the MUH and she was like ābut what does that meanā and simple questions like that and he flailed, it was painful to hear
The first image in that second link is perhaps the most incoherent political cartoon Iāve ever seen. Why is Uncle Sam as played by Angry Jeff Bridges wearing the Chinese flag as a cape??
Like Vitalik Buterin creating eth because he was mad his op WoW char got nerfed, we now have more gamers lore. J D Vance played a Yawgmothās Bargain deck.
the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over
We cannot allow a dark ritual gap.
āO Cent O Pence (R)ā is an anagram for āNecropotenceā
Trump is clearly campaigning on the critically overlooked black draw engine platform, possibly to spite blue voters.
Edit: āOne Percent Co.ā was right there! Itās all coming together now!
brb, ran out of red cord.
Molly White reports on Kamala Harrisās recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.
VP Harrisās press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.
Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected
[ā¦]
Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.
More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.
Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.
āregulationā here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly donāt live in a sensible world.
Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.
who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto
Me, a nuclear engineer reading about āGoogle restarting six nuclear power plantsā
lol, lmao even
Future headline: āGoogle quietly shuts down six nuclear power plantsā
Zitronās given commentary on PC Gamerās publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:
Heās also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valleyās worst excesses. I donāt have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.
this is one hell of a hat trick
only needs a quantum chapter somewhere in there for bonus scoring roundā¦
God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together todayās buzzwords to print money.
This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.
the upside of it listing a pile of author names: one can go look up their published works, and add them to crank trackers if necessary (seems likely)
the ToC is some fantastical fucking nonsense
apparently those qualcomm NPUs (the āAI assistā chips in the copilot(?) laptops) arenāt very good
The what in the what now?
What a terrible day to tech.
(yes this post is a creative attempt at generating alt text for my image).
Thus leading to this sneer on HN. Iām quoting it in entirety; click through for Poeās Law responses.
I was telling someone this and they gave me link to a laptop with higher battery life and better performance than my own, but I kept explaining to them that the feature I cared most about was die size. They couldnāt understand it so I just had to leave them alone. Non-technical people donāt get it. Die size is what I care about. Itās a critical feature and so many mainstream companies are missing out on my money because they wonāt optimize die size. Disgusting.
gonna have to ship this person a 20d100 kit. maybe custom woodgrain? show some thought, yāknow
wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?
non processing units
inference-tasks focused coprocessor
cope rocessor
hang on I have another.
NPU? More like, N-Pee-eeeww!!
Over on /r/politics, there are several users clamoring for someone to feed the 1900 page independent counsel report into an LLM, which is an interesting instance of second-order laziness.
They also seem convinced that NotebookLLM is incapable of confabulation which is hilarious and sad. Could it be sneaky advertising?
