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.)
when your skulls are both packed solid with wet cat food
aww, look at the little collaborators trying to pretend they both got duped instead of both having been active and enthusiastic enablers
Hackernews woke up feeling like fascism ( make sure to enable dead + flagged comments if you hate yourself):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696
(Two comment threads about the CDC purging āwokeā research, the comments are bad even by HN standards)
Gee given a forum full of hackers youād expect them to be against arbitrary removal of scientific studies. What happened to āinformation wants to be freeā?
Bonus US terribleness: the NTSB suddenly thinks Twitter* is the beeās knees and way better than email! What coincidental timing https://xcancel.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1885734974298435943
Also I know I know, more US politics. It turns out silicon valley fascists have gained power so expect this to keep happening for the forseeable future š.
These past two weeks have made me very uncomfortable working in Silicon Valley, I know last time I said I was planning to get out; but now it feels urgent both for my own well being, and to stop contributing to this industry. In trans communities we immediately saw coupy stuff** for the attempted transgender genocide that it is, the wider public and media is waking up to this very slowly.
* An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool.
** If thereās interest I could try turning all of this into a top level post on morewrite or techtakes. Iāve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but itās extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool
Not just that, but a site that, if you are bot logged in shows an accounts posts not chronologically, but most popular first. Making it totally incapable to be used as a gov communication platform. Imagine looking at a gov storm warning system for your area and seeing the list of most virally named storms first, and nothing about how you should evacuate right now.
Amd yes it is quite horrible that the usa is in the book burning and building (more) concentration camps stages of the gearing up for genocide stages. Up next, taking away passports (which they are already not issuing anymore) and any guns (not that these help, historically speaking, iirc the Jewish people had guns in Germany at first).
Not clicking those HN links, decided years ago already that site should not be part of my life anymore at all. The few times I have deviated from that rule since, I regretted it.
As for the more general topic, I feel so bad for all trans people with everything that is unfolding. Itās horrible. But be assured that there are many peope in this world who are on your side on this. Wish I could say something more useful, but Iām at a loss of words.
Iāve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but itās extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
yep. havenāt been posting about it here because not sure where here weād put it (while a lot of it is well within the orbit of regular content and posters) and itās not quite entirely anything I can do anything about but offer words of comfort and keeping watch on the nasty shit, but been speaking a lot with friends in places (signal generally, or some other spaces we actually control (i.e. not discord, etc))
I feel moderately confident that at least for a bit of the foreseeable future weāll be okay this side of the world, but I also know enough history and context to know how vacuous that is by itself. these fuckers wonāt stop.
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake, none of this is these fuckers just finding some shit they disagree with under the seat cushions. I wish I could make them understand the depth and extent of planning and preparation that went into this, the sheer commitment behind it all. but too often such concerns would all be received as this toot put it
thereās so much more I could say but I guess Iāll leave it there for now
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake
I keep seeing US people go āa lot of Trumps plans were stopped at rhe courts last timeā, and I keep worrying this is people fighting the last war again, not realizing that the opposition are active intelligent (as in baseline human beings not as in high IQ) people who prob are not going to be stopped by the same things as last time. Dont worry the Maginot line will stop them from invading too fast, cant get through the Ardennes sort of thinking if that makes sense.
While companies seem to be betting on anti discrimination laws being gone (why else take the legal risk of shuttering dei programs). (I have written reactions like this before and often deleted it because it feels just too doomer, but it keeps coming back to me).
I saw (via Stross) a mention that passport issuance was already starting to hit weirdness too
e: this one
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT5MX8jK9tHiBM5NK/re-taste
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of ān.
No it doesnāt, you fools, you absolute rubes
If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.
wat
Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.
Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd
Aaaah my eyes
The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.
This future doesnāt have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.
I mean, we tried the whole āfuck yeah grids fuck local geographyā thing. That was fucking Le Corbusier and friendsā whole deal. And it created dead cities and/or places in cities that people hated to live in.
Hexagons are great, would love to see some hexagon based city plans. Especially if they have designed for walkability and public transport!
Heck yeah walkability!
Also note how the author said the city transcends geography, as if geography was something useless or to be overcome by an advanced civilization (except for a bunch of artsy folks tucked away in a corner I guess?). But humans need variety. I would get so antsy if I lived in a perfect grid city with nothing out of order (or even a perfect hexagon city, no offense hexagons). There need to be paths and trails and rivers. There need to be trees and mountains in the distance.
Yeah weird thing to eliminate from a city, or weird thing to see without context. Basically: Wrongers try and envision a better world without deleting the parts of human experience that make it meaningful or worthwhile challenge (impossible)
But think of how high the number can go!
The ideal wronger future after all is a simulation where human experience is deleted altogether!
https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1882927003508359242
Eliezer Yudkowsky says he would like to be a post-human some day, but the way to get there is by experimenting on augmenting biological intelligence through adult gene therapy targeting the human brain with suicide volunteers who may end up schizophrenic rather than taking a āleap of deathā into unconstrained AI development
(found via flipping through LW for sneerable posts/comments)
Am I reading this right? Is he suggesting doing experiments on the suicidally depressed?
L. Ron Hubbard says new āhigh-voltageā e-meters set to enter testing with Sea Org volunteers, possibly capable of purging body thetans at an unlimited rate
Some light uplifting news amid *gestures at everything*. I saw this a minute ago from the guy who runs TheCodingHorror and co-founded Stack Overflow and Discourse: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ifd3ys/im_giving_away_half_my_wealth_to_make_the/
No EA stuff! $1M each going to eight great charities and non-profits as far as I can tell: Childrenās Hunger Fund, First Generation Investors, Global Refuge, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, PEN America, The Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood, and Team Rubicon. (from The Trevor Projectās blog post)
Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.
I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (donāt judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenbergās summary claims it was written in the 21st century. Thereās actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.
Given that itās in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. Itās also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesnāt really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.
Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.
* maybe the '70s give or take but Iām not a professional date guesser
Is there anything written up anywhere about these AI book summaries? I know they were doing āAIā audiobooks.
It definitely has that old sci-fi weirdness to it, but the earliest edition Iām seeing on goodreads was in '03.
The file metadata of the oldest copy on the gutenberg webserver says 2003 ā and the document itself says Gutenberg created it in 2003 and published it in 2005 (whatever that means, maybe they were delaying ebook releases to ensure a steady stream)
Anyway this 2003 copy had their public domain boilerplate; it was described as a book in the public domain.
There are indeed a lot of websites about this, but none with any more information that Project Gutenberg so Iām guessing they all trace back to the Gutenberg release. Probably youād have to find some physical information about it in an actual library to trace it further.
But Iām not like a professional book researcher or anything, thatās just my opinion!
That is indeed troubling, casts a shadow on Project Gutenbergās judgement. Now I wonder how long until Wikipedia falls too :( Gosh, I miss being excited about new tech. Now new tech is just making things worse.
About that book, so it is more āgood badā instead of ābad badā? Maybe Iāll take a look, some light/weird reading might be better than doomscrolling (and these days thereās so much doom to scroll).
I donāt remember (reading it was a bit like a fever dream) but thereās a non-zero chance it has racist vibes in parts you have been warned.
But oh so quotable:
We have been treating the trees on a ten mile radius with an anti-flammatory solution for several years as well, and it is quite impossible to set them on fire.
Okay thanks for the heads-up, I will give it a try. The āNote to the readerā it starts with is already pretty wildā¦ (unless thatās just part of the fiction. Edit: I assume itās part of the fiction)
Edit: okayā¦ a few pages in, I donāt think I can do thisā¦ not my thing.
Ick.
Days since tech bro tried to reinvent religion so they could javascript faster: 0. We have sold the 1 sign and donated the money.
on a side note I found out what āagileā is a few months ago and I think Iād rather go back to working retail than do the little morning circlejerk thing. dehumanizing
Rituals can be good, but yeah, agile standup meetings are not the good kind. Luckily I donāt have them dailyā¦ several times a week is already draining enough. If they were daily, I would just burn out. And the standups are IMO not even the worst part of agileā¦
deepseek goes wild https://www.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/1iehx5f/what_the_fuck/
I have to keep reminding myself that this is the technology that they all claim will soon do all our work, our arts, our science, everything.
73 might be overrepresented because itās used by radioamateurs as a signoff. you can see it in old forums in comment footers as 73 [callsign]
oh well done, youāve gone and made logorrhea a feature
these chatbots are billed by token, so it only makes sense
youād think that $200+ entertainment would be better
People have worked out how to cram DeepSeek onto a Raspberry Pi
Anyways, hereās a quasi-related sidenote:
Part of me suspects DeepSeek is gonna quickly carve out a good chunk of the market for itself - for SaaS services looking for spicy autocomplete or a slop generator to bolt on to their products, DeepSeekās high efficiency gives them a way to do it that doesnāt immediately blow a massive hole in their finances.
Oh no itās more US politics.
So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since itās the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAAās email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.
Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.
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Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial
You have my sympathy! Is the worst part that you have to review the slop or its general presence at all?
Asking because at my workplace it will be allowed soon, and some coworkers are unfortunately looking forward to it, and Iām horrified, especially by the thought of having to do code review thenā¦
Itās more the latter. I canāt really stop anyone from using it, and playing the game of ācan you tell if this snippet of code was LLMedā is a fools errand, so I have to choose to ignore that part of it. Testing de-risks bad code, but there is never enough testingā¦ well, thereās only so much I can do within my pay grade.
Iāve since asked this person to stop talking about their copilot usage, so this issue has been resolved, for now.
I have added your coworker to the list of people I will imagine being tortured in the future. Im no robotgod but it is the best I can do.
that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up
that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subjectā¦
lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)
user HardboiledHack
also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex
iām sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people
the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW
from http://joliverconroy.net/
I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.
by āaboutā, he means āforā
Iām a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: oliver.conroy@theguardian.com.
Iām also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Ziziansā beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.
I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.
Thanks very much.
iāve also warned over at the old place
No nibbles here.
Do the Zizians fit in the ārationalist/EA/risk communityā? Gosh and golly gee.
Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the ānarcissism of small differencesā than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.
From what Iāve been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. Iām not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Rokoās Basilisk being a concern.
However, I do think that the unfolding of this story presents an object lesson in why āalways escalate to the maxā is a wildly stupid idea. It turns out that even when you have guns (metaphorical or otherwise) and a complete disregard for the consequences of failure the average group of citizens is still at a decided disadvantage to the state at higher points on the escalation ladder.
You misunderstand, they escalate to the max to keep themselves (including selves in parallel dimensions or far future simulations) from being blackmailed by future super intelligent beings, not to survive shootouts with border patrol agents.
I am fairly certain Yud had said something very close to that effect in reference to preventing blackmail from the basilisk, even though he tries to no-true-scotchman zizians wrt his functional decision ātheoryā these days.
