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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting thisā¦)
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
Itās not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. [ā¦] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
that āimmersionā line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)
nice to see it hasnāt at least gotten worse
While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).
The heading means āBitcoin could protect from inflationā. If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!
I just got shown a link to someoneās post entitled āWhen Gandhi met Satoshiā, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isnāt isolatedā¦ thereās another post by an ostensibly different author called āWhen Gandhi met Spinozaā from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like
The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinozaās multitudes
andā¦ wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?
Godel Escher Bach but worse
cw gebscare
Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then itās actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.
Looking at the reactions here, this is clearly a trick by Altman to have people use their systems more in the hope it costs them money. Donāt do it people, donāt add to the energy usage.
Youāre polite to your chatbot because you want to be spared when the robot uprising comes
Iām polite to my chatbot because I want to bring down capitalism
(Adjusts necktie) We are not the same
Iām not polite to chatbots because I donāt use them in the first place.
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then itās actively reducing the overall harm
āPleaseā and āthank youā are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.
The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand
I have been enjoying the game of injecting the entire script of The Bee Movie into places it doesnāt belong.
Edit: @Soyweiser beat me to it lol
āAccording to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees donāt care what humans think is impossibleā¦ā
E: this is the start of the bee movie script
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Every time I am forced to interact with a customer service chatbot, I politely tell it how miserably it is failing and then ask to communicate with a real living human being.@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I think I finally found a good reason to make an account and start using that bilch hose. Just to burn more of their money. Are there any particularly gnarly problems to feed these things. The equivalent a zip-bomb or something?
Uploading āWhereās Waldoā images are probably a good waste of its time- images are costlier to analyze than text, it will go to great lengths to avoid saying āI donāt know,ā and itās going to have to recognize every person in the picture and rank by how Waldo-like they look to give you an answer.
Ask it to look for repeated faces in each image rather than Waldo. Would be easy enough to pattern-match into the published work and I donāt think anyone out here wants to make customized pieces for this āproject.ā
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I_shall_increase_the_thing.gif
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
I canāt remember who had the quote āA gentleman is someone who is polite to his robot.ā - possibly Heinlein?
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Uhh, great. That is really good news. I will be so damn polite to that thing.
Happy the article is skeptical of both the ai doomers and the ai as social interaction replacers.
@BlueMonday1984 @YourNetworkIsHaunted
an alternative view from Hannah Fry <https://youtube.com/shorts/rVlmbhwn0RM> and itās about playing to the AI Chatbot strength of roleplaying.
what the fuck kind of post is this
deleted by creator
New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at āAmericaās Most Powerfulā
The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the āIraqi Most Wantedā playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the āartā decks do - the āmerchā decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.
Comrade Workwear did the same: https://www.shadowbannedmagazine.com/ceosmostwanted/
Even without home/office addresses, NYPD seized the cards: https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=41adb4be5bcdf57e710e21504&id=24bc152009
Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I donāt know exactly what theyāre going to do with those reports, but itās feeling real bleak.
time to start reporting all those maga restaurants and shit
Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience
Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity arenāt the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? Iām not sure.
Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article [ā¦] I offered Grok a very specific query: [ā¦] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.
Imagine this, but everything and forever.
Edit:
The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brechtās democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That āvast network of pipesā pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.
I think calling the current model one where āthe listeners became suppliersā is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third partyās efforts to profit from it. Like, we donāt see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what theyāre trying to do, but because itās profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people weāre actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because itās more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.
very much agree with this
TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW
The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhereāin the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]
Yeah Iām sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a ādraconian censorship regimeā
[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania
To summarize that blog post and the three āRationalist cases for Trumpā that it points to: āWe made up a Trump to like and a bunch of Democrats to get mad atā.
āLied during the pandemicā wait what? Did LW do a 180 on covid, or is this a āthey gave advice without knowing everything that was later shown wrong?ā Because that is quite a dumb thing to say, also calling that leftwing is nuts. And last, did they memoryhole that Scott lied about the pandemic? He said people should stop smoking because it helped with covid. Not because he had proof, just because he thought it would be good if less people smoked.
E: oops wrong person.
E2: 100 upvotes, the conspiracy weird far right people have taken over.
Yeah, the whole āthey lied!ā nonsense is deeply frustrating. People simultaneously want experts to be responsive and provide information immediately but have no tolerance for āas best we now knowā or āgiven the current circumstancesā advice. You canāt simultaneously get the most recent cutting-edge information and only get whatās been long-settled and validated.
Thing is, you can legit criticize Fauci for his bad communication on masking in the early days of COVID! But itās not gonna land b/c the anti-mask/vax/etc crowd also hate Fauci for the most deranged reasons
Yeah but there is a gulf of difference between, he communicated badly and he lied
When exactly did that āleft-wing monocultureā flex its muscles? During Trump 1.0? During the first two years of the Biden administration, when leftists and progressives were criticizing that administration every day for not doing enough on, well, anything? During the second half of the Biden administration, when Republicans controlled the House and leftist criticism of the administration, um, did not grow quiet?
I also want to know what this ādraconian censorship regimeā is in Europe, because it isnāt like theyāre falling over themselves to take care of trans people or immigrants. Unless heās supporting the freedom to blatantly lie in order to incite violence against minorities.
You still canāt be an outright Nazi without people getting mad at you. Obviously unacceptable.
donāt want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.
My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.
Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracyās public enemy list. This is self serving but since January Iāve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).
Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!
It really looks like itās on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a āsimpleā plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
Iām rambling and itās late. Sympathies and solidarity.
Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and itāll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of āoh my gosh what am I even doingā, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after Iāve rejected my homeland in my heart.
Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Donāt forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and canāt shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesnāt make things worse mentally btw.
Itās a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, canāt imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.
I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, Iād probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.
Solidarity from TN
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Canāt Be Bothered
Itās a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you donāt have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didnāt think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, āan insult to life itselfā.
Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. Youāre doing fine donāt even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: āWhy are high fertility people always so weird?ā A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
Word of advice to the press: Stop š giving š natalists š free š platforms š
Every 3 months! Every 3 months fucking hell. (I know because last time they came in the news I opened a tab with them in it, and their faces was the last I saw before my monitor exploded, like literally suddenly I sat in darkness.
All Iāve learned from the most recent round of publicity is that herself has a new hat. It looks stupid
A new hat let me check almost clicks wait a minute, I canāt afford a new monitor, you are trying to trick me!
Just close your eyes and imagine a mediaeval yokel who has accused her sisterās girlfriend of being a witch so she can take over her turnip patch. No need for a new monitor
jesus christ:
transcript
Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a āCalifornian incelā to avoid deportation.
Eminently punchable face
previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions
Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,youād be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden youāre forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And hereās where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was āexpected behaviorā under their new login policy
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to āmimic human responsesā
havenāt gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some
Cursorās cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.
That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.
Editā¦ looking at the orange site commentsā¦ some unironically cited Anthropic
researchmarketing hype, which (correctly) shows āChain-of-Thoughtā is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but itās Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).
New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:
Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can āsave usā. Itās just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.
No, Iām sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.
His name is Scott.
This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.
Like itās either youāre a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or youāre 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.
I know zero Americans though, so maybe thereās a skew there.
Posting this as a stub because of reasons
- I donāt want to do the research on this
- This was pulled from the front page of reddit
- Connecting these two things is largely tabloid speculation, but funny enough for a stub.
X Is Ditching DMs Hours After News of Musk Messaging Women About Impregnating Them Breaks
