Feel like you want to sneer about something but you donā€™t quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!

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, thereā€™s no quota here 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.

    • Jayjader@jlai.lu
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      1 year ago

      ā€œBut look how convincing [it] sounds!ā€

      ā€¦ how did we get to the point where the ai bros are un-ironically telling us, as a selling point, that their shiny toy literally gives false yet convincing-sounding medical diagnoses ?!?!?!

      If I were working on Claude and wanted to hype it up, I would not talk about this experiment online or in public. If I were working on Claude and wanted to be responsible towards ā€œthe publicā€, I would use this example as a cautionary warning, not to further hype up the tool.

      This feels like the slight period at the beginning of the NFT craze when I wasnā€™t yet comfortable dismissing out of hand anyone excited about them, because surely there was a least some useful application that wasnā€™t for scamming people, and surely this many people couldnā€™t all be so deluded about the same idea.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      ā€œOh, some patient data. Let me quickly casually scan this into the sv datacorp. Whatā€™s thatā€¦privacy concerns? Naaaaah I changed the filenameā€

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      A friend that wants you to have an aggressive brain tumour to make an AI look good is no friend at all

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        There are far too many people in this world who learned both wrong things from the ā€œPray tell, Mr Babbageā€ anecdote

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.

    Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304

    'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929

    This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217


    [1] when a notable person in CS dies thereā€™s sometimes a black bar under the HN header

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      Ah damn, Justine has my respect for a bunch of cool and interesting stuff but this is just embarrassing, unless Iā€™m missing some extremely dry satire.

    • self@awful.systems
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      fucking christ. it takes a lot to fuck up my day, but a quick scroll through that thread seeing how quick these vultures (including one notable person whoā€™s the reason why Iā€™m ashamed to talk about my lambda calculus projects) are trying to capitalize on Vernorā€™s legacy is absolutely doing it

      HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied.

      why in the fuck? is the famous sci-fi author with a heavy CS background not notable enough for the standards of the site whose creator is a much less notable self-help author whose CS background is failing to make a working Lisp 3 times and writing programming textbooks nobody reads?

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        What made me mad was them referring to the Deep* books as ā€œhard SFā€. Arguable A Deepnessā€¦ could be as itā€™s set in the Slow Zone so FTL travel is impossible, but A Fireā€¦ is classic space opera.

        • self@awful.systems
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          right? itā€™s a weird combination of these folks never engaging with the work they pretend to celebrate and trying to pretend that their AI fantasy will turn real life into a space opera. itā€™s fucking awful

        • self@awful.systems
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          sure! there was a little bit about it in the first stubsack and I posted a bit more about it in this thread on masto (with some links to papers Iā€™ve been reading too, if youā€™d like to dig into the details on anything)

          overall what Iā€™m working on is a hardware implementation of a Krivine machine, which uses Trompā€™s prefix code bitstream representation of binary lambda calculus as its machine language and his monadic IO model to establish a runtime environment. it isnā€™t likely to be a very efficient machine by anyoneā€™s standard, but I really like working with BLC as a pure (and powerful) form of computational math, and thereā€™s something pleasant about the way it reduces down to a HDL representation (via the Amaranth HDL in this case). thereā€™s a few subprojects Iā€™ve been working on as part of this:

          • the basic HDL implementation targeting open source FPGA synthesis and simulation
          • a hardware closure allocator and garbage collector
          • an assembler to convert lambda calculus expressions into their binary form (which starts to resemble ML with a bunch of high level capabilities, with very little code either in the assembler or in ROM on the device ā€” thatā€™s one part of what makes the work interesting)
          • a lazy version (Krivine machines are call-by-name, which is almost there, and the missing pieces needed for lazy evaluation look a lot like a processor cache but with more structure)
          • I have the intuition that the complete Krivine machine will be fairly light on FPGA resources, so Iā€™d like to see how many I can synthesize onto one core with parallelism primitives, FIFOs, and routing included
          • lambda calculus machines can do arithmetic and high-level logic without an ALU, which is neat but extremely inefficient. I have some basic plans sketched up for an arithmetic unit thatā€™d allow for a much more cycle and memory efficient representation of integers and strings, and a way to derive closures from them

          Iā€™ve been working on some of this on paper as a sleep aid for a while, but Iā€™m finally starting on whatā€™s feeling like a solid HDL implementation. let me know if you want more details on any of it! some of the more far off stuff is really just a mental sketch, but writing it out will at least help me figure out what ideas still make sense when theyā€™re explained to someone else

          • self@awful.systems
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            for anyone whoā€™s fucking lost reading the above (I canā€™t blame ya), lambda calculus is the mathematical basis behind functional programming. this is a fun introduction. the only things you can do in lambda calculus are define functions, name variables, and apply functions to other functions or variables (which substitutes the variables for whatever theyā€™re being applied to and eliminates the function). thatā€™s all you need to represent every possible computer program, which is amazing

            a Krivine machine is a machine for doing what the alligators in that intro are doing, automatically ā€” that is, reducing down lambda functions until they canā€™t be reduced anymore and produce a final value. that process is computation, so a Krivine machine is a (rather strange) computer

          • sinedpick@awful.systems
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            I have a scattered interest in lambda calculus too so Iā€™d love to follow this project. Trompā€™s BLC definitely hits a sweet spot of complexity/size when it comes to describing computation in a way thatā€™s deeply satisfying.

            Have you looked into interaction nets/other optimal beta-reduction schemes (thereā€™s a project out there called HVM)? Probably way too high level for now though. I am fascinated by the possibility of these algorithms making church-representations more asymptotically efficient (or even balanced ternary)

            • self@awful.systems
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              I have a scattered interest in lambda calculus too so Iā€™d love to follow this project. Trompā€™s BLC definitely hits a sweet spot of complexity/size when it comes to describing computation in a way thatā€™s deeply satisfying.

              exactly! itā€™s such a cool way to write a program, and itā€™s so much more satisfying than writing assembly for a von Neumann (or any load/store) machine. have you checked out LambdaLisp? itā€™s one of my inspirations for this project ā€” itā€™s amazing that you can build a working Lisp interpreter out of BLC, and understanding how that was done taught me so much about Lispā€™s relationship with lambda calculus.

              I plan to release my HDL as a collaborative project once Iā€™ve got enough done to share out. currently Iā€™ve got the HDL finished for the combinational circuit that makes bitstream BLC processing efficient with word-oriented memory hardware, and Iā€™m doing debugging on the buffer that grabs words from memory and offsets them if they represent a term that isnā€™t word-aligned (which is a pretty simple circuit so Iā€™m surprised Iā€™ve managed to implement so many bugs). thereā€™s quite a bit left to go! IO is still a sticking point ā€” I know how I want to do it, but I canā€™t quite imagine how memory and runtime state will look after the machine reads or writes a bit.

              Have you looked into interaction nets/other optimal beta-reduction schemes (thereā€™s a project out there called HVM)?

              that seems awesome! I really like that it can do auto-parallelization, and I want to check out how it optimizes lambda terms. for now my machine model is a pretty straightforward Krivine machine with some inspiration taken from the Next 700 Krivine Machines paper, which seems likely to yield a machine that can be implemented as circuitry. that paper decomposes Krivine-like machine models down into combinators, which can be seen as opcodes, microinstructions, or (in my case) operations that that need to be performed on memory during a particular machine state.

              once Iā€™ve got the basic machine defined, Iā€™d like to come back to something like HVM as a higher performance lambda calculus machine and see what can be adopted. one of their memory invariants in particular (the guarantee that each closure is only used once) maps really well to my mental model of what I imagine a hardware parallel lambda calculus machine would be like

              • sinedpick@awful.systems
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                I found LambdaLisp from your mastodon post and was immediately intrigued. Iā€™m going to try and run it to get a better understanding of how the IO system works, and maybe even cook up my own BLC interpreter to run it! The hardware stuff is definitely out of my depth, but this may be a great chance to learn.

                • self@awful.systems
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                  thatā€™s a great idea! the only BLC VMs I know of are written in a very obscure style (Trompā€™s especially ā€” his first interpreter was an entry into the International Obfuscated C Code Contest and he only posted the (relatively) unobfuscated one later) and I think thereā€™s plenty of room for something written to be more comprehensible. Iā€™m also not aware of any VM that implements call-cc from Krivineā€™s original paper, which has interesting applications. and of course, all the Krivine machines I know are relatively slow and very memory-inefficient ā€” but thereā€™s low hanging fruit here that can make things better.

                  one thing I might take on is implementing a visual krivine machine ā€” something with a GUI that shows its current state and a graph of all the closures in memory. that would be a big boon for my current work, and I might see if I could graft something like that onto the simulation testbench for my HDL implementation.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      The replies to somebody aggressively (and downvoted) pointing out some of the flaws in Jarts post are bad. Damn.

      an LLM cannot be used to create a better LLM

      By that logic most humans are also not intelligent.

      No you dweeb, they are talking about model collapse, that thing what happens to this 90ā€™s tech.

      Oh, it doesnā€™t work? Thatā€™s because ITā€™S NOT INTELLIGENT.

      Ok, letā€™s run this test of ā€œreal intelligenceā€ on you. We eagerly await to see your model. Should be a piece of cake.

      This is both a weird adhom and a god is hiding in the gaps style argument. (While I have some sympathy for this Peter Watts style argument it is incredibly weak (their post history (8) is more of this very weak stuff)).

      Edit: forgot to mention what I actually initially wanted to say:

      Idiocracy

      I still think that movie actually is quite hopeful, it shows us a world where the current consumerist society in the USA can remain to exist for 500 years (that is how long he is frozen), and there is nobody invading and taking over when the USA becomes this automated and dumb. We should all hope the future is this hopeful (guess they fixed the climate, and achieved fully automated luxury capitalism (which still sucks)) and non-violent.

    • self@awful.systems
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      new might be a good global default for everything local to our instance, given the traffic patterns of our threads. unfortunately it might take some doing to make that the default just for local stuff, without making things janky for folks reading federated content

      amazingly, lemmy doesnā€™t even seem to persist the last sort youā€™ve selected correctly. which is like easy 10 lines of code to do even in React with Typescript

      • earthquake@lemm.ee
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        Iā€™ve been kind of following development of Sublinks, which hopes to reach parity with Lemmy with more typical web tech so development can go faster/with more contributors, and also so they can pivot to better moderation tools. Maybe it works out, maybe we learn to love the jank.

        • self@awful.systems
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          Iā€™ve been following it too, and hoping it yields a fork with better development priorities (and, frankly, developers) than lemmy, though Iā€™m not at all looking forward to dealing with deploying Java and Go to production

      • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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        given the traffic patterns of our threads

        Highlighting the new posts since the last time you visited a thread would be amazing if possible.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        Re: Lemmy, some dude (ofc) is trying to start a new ā€œdecentralizedā€ Wikipedia, and he touts as a merit that he created Lemmy:

        I have worked on Lemmy for the past four years, bringing it from a prototype to a fully functional Reddit alternative.

        Some would say this is damning with faint praise, others would see it as a warning.

        (https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,[email protected])

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
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          These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.

          (quickly web-searches for that name)

          Oh, she writes for Russia Today.

          Authors and public figures in fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics (including Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Gary Null, John Pilger, and George Galloway) have complained of persistent negative coverage on Wikipedia despite the siteā€™s vaunted neutrality and the promise that ā€œBiographies of Living Personsā€ are held to the highest standard.

          (snerk) Oh, no, Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake are upset. I can feel the quantum disruption in the morphogenetic field.

          • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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            @blakestacey Oh dear, George Galloway complaining about negative coverage, how sad, much hardship. (Galloway is an utter shit.) John Pilger had credibility for a critique of US/western foreign policy, but the rest of the listed folks are just cranks.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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            now, you may have heard unfortunate rumours that the lemmy devs are a pair of tankies

            this is of course shitlib lies spread by revisionists,

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            I canā€™t wait to see what happens as these people slowly learn the consensus problem in this domain

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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    extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:

    anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?

    he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshiā€™s Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius

    anyway, heā€™s decided itā€™s time to flip to the non-losing side

    https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735

    https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430

    (stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)

    not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      You sent me down the rabbit hole.

      ā€¦as for whatā€™s right for you, I dunno. The one major downside of fullnode is that there is only one developer working on it, though I think that once I move the project to redditā€™s github and announce that ā€œreddit is making a walletā€ we will have many more eyes and developers on the project.

      Just fucken lol.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    CW: Palestine-Israel.

    Something Iā€™ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesnā€™t really surprise me, but thatā€™s not what Iā€™m commenting on.

    One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israelā€™s use of ā€œAIā€ in warfare. Iā€™m only going to link one source and Iā€™m not going into it too deeply.

    So what Iā€™m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.

    To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said itā€™s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.

    *of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      the old thing was use of ai in iron dome, because generally mistaking a civilian target for a rocket is pretty hard given differences in size and speed, and autonomous air defense is a thing that already exists for decades. the ai part comes from predicting if a given rocket will fall on populated area, and pointing radar-guided interceptors to those that do

      the new thing, well nobody can tell you that youā€™re doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether itā€™s working or not youā€™d need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage

      people at palantir are probably making very detailed notes

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        the new thing, well nobody can tell you that youā€™re doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether itā€™s working or not youā€™d need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage

        Yeah, and I donā€™t think they are ever going to be explicit about how their ā€œAIā€ works.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    Iā€™ve started noticing what might be described as ā€œfiller artā€ being done by AI. For example, while a local restaurant was being constructed, it had boards up to obscure the goings on with AI art on it- easily distinguished by bad hands, disturbing looking noodles, and amorphous blobs resembling, uh, more morphous blobs. I didnā€™t take any photos because I didnā€™t want to ruin the sanctity of my phone.

    Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      this kind of filler art, ai spam, ai porn, ai seo optimized drivel, ai generated fakes, ai propaganda, ai jpegs that are generated cheaply enough that human artists canā€™t get by on these rates, all of these are things that people donā€™t want to make on moral, legal or some other grounds. just like with all of other automation (well thereā€™s no physical risk in making pictures). there will be more of it

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.

      So it was at least accurate advertising on their part.

    • Steve@awful.systems
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      he could have just admitted he couldnā€™t get the ai to draw a dick. Instead, a future without dicks is his idea of a surprising future

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        Those image generators are surprisingly bad at drawing nether regions, it turns into real horror shows quickly. A thing the ā€˜it is so over for real womenā€™ incel weirdos donā€™t seem to talk about. (I checked it a while back no idea if it has improved since, but the conclusion was that sex workers can breathe easily (apart from them being fucked by mastercard/visa being run by cryptoprudes, governments going after them, and the general economic downturn driving the demand for sex work down but that is a different issue)).

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      I know itā€™s stupid to try really think about this because the idiot was only trying for engagement farming, but what the fuck did they think that image was portraying (that supported their batshit commentary)?? That weā€™re all gonna become the blue dude from Watchmen, but in copyright-friendly conditions?!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Think dgerard mentioned last time I talked about it re H+ transhumanism anti aging that it all seems to have stalled.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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        none of it ever went anywhere (because these people are clowns who barely understand the thing they claim to be doing) and de Grey got kicked out of the pseudoscience charity he founded for sexual harassment

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      There seems to be some legitimate research into the effectiveness of anti-aging compounds like retinol, also theyā€™ve come out with some good advice like wearing sunscreen, drinking enough water, and eating balanced diets to promote skin health which reduces the signs of what we usually associate with aging, if you count that.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        so the actual advice is ā€œdonā€™t eat trash less healthy than asbestosā€

        there are some people claiming that polyphenols, flavins or other pharmalogically mischievous, promiscuous trash like that that is barely soluble in the first place and shredded by liver within minutes after absorption into bloodstream is the Real Secret To Long Life ā„¢ but itā€™s really proxy for the not-deep-fried-everything diet, or at least thatā€™s the impression that iā€™m getting

        one specific strain that boils my piss the most is curcumin peddlers, because they waste everyoneā€™s time and itā€™s a part of government-funded altmed disinformation campaign (of India in this case)

          • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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            seed oilers donā€™t even have an interesting conspiracy theory

            heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point:

            The furor over seed oils has gotten so intense that on Aug. 15, Andrew Tate couldnā€™t help but mock people about it: ā€œSEED OILS SEED OILS OMG SEED OILS OMG FUCKING OMG SEED OILS FUCK FUCK OMG FUCK,ā€ he tweeted. ā€œI can tell you losers have never had real enemies. Youā€™re afraid of sunflowers. You legit wonā€™t shut up about it.ā€

    • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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      This is tangential, but thereā€™s a surprisingly interesting article about penis enlargement from ProPublica. Itā€™s sobering to see people whoā€™ve convinced themselves it must have worked, because itā€™s too horrible to consider whether they actually made things worse. If there are any crazy, invasive age therapies out there, maybe thereā€™d be similar themes.

      https://www.propublica.org/article/penis-enlargement-enhancement-procedures-implants

      • carlitoscohones@awful.systems
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        Tangential to your tangential - nice to see that the moral compass of McKinsey associates is still true north.

        By the end of the year, Elist was doing roughly 60 Penuma procedures a month, and his oldest son, Jonathan, left a job at McKinsey to become the CEO of International Medical Devices, as they called their family firm.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        Jesus Christ, Iā€™m a penis haver and reading this gives the same sensations as watching people be punched in the balls.

        The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.

        Also, this fucking quote:

        You have to treat your penis like a Rolex.

        What in the fuckā€™s mercy is this supposed to mean? Youā€™re supposed to change its battery every few years? Take it off at night? I have a watch, just, you know, not a Rolex, a normal-person fucking watch, and I canā€™t decipher this. Is there some specific species of brain worm you get when you buy specifically a Rolex watch?

        • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.

          The writer says thereā€™s some indication it may literally be a psychiatric condition along the lines of body dysmorphia, and that most people who go through with it are at least average sized but unhealthily preoccupied with their member, consistently reporting feelings of shame and helplessness.

          She also says that supposedly the consensus on the evolution of genital size has been quietly moving away from assumptions about giving an edge with inseminatory success and towards them being just for show, as apparently male primates do tend to involve their genitals in threat displays. Which is to say, maybe for some people itā€™s just unusual wiring that manifests as penis related existential angst.

          Still, it doesnā€™t mention the extent to which the above is just evo-psych enthusiasts idly theorizing, or if field testing actually showed itā€™s possible to win a showdown with a gorilla by dropping trou and windmilling.

          And then thereā€™s also the guy who had the procedure done and is super happy about it, except heā€™s now looking at options for enlarging his wifeā€™s vaginal canal and entrance as sheā€™s been having a rough time of it, and who Iā€™m sure would be found out to be the walking and talking personification of toxic masculinity if you were to give him the time of day.

          • mountainriver@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            Penis enlargement and breast implants can be understood as gender affirming surgery for cis people, it is just an affirmation of the gender assigned at birth. Rather than go to primates I would point to ancient Greece and itā€™s statues to make the point that ideals of gender and bodies shift over time. Greek statues shows as I understand it often an ideal body, which by the norms of its time included a rather small penis. So maybe some male ancient Greeks wished there were treatments to shrink their package?

            With gorillas, my understanding is that primates that have very unequal sizes between the sexes has small penises, while its among the primates with roughly equal body size you find larger penises. So akin to plummage, the males showing off of that their bodies can afford to waste resources, and thus presumably is very fit. I am no biologist, but I think this means that if you try to win a domination fight with a gorilla, it may show who is the boss by showing off its physical strength. So not recommended.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            Show it to others as a visual gaudy signal of wealth?

            Or to tell time? lifts left testicle ā€œtenā€ lifts right ā€œthirteenā€.

        • carlitoscohones@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          Iā€™m now imagining populations of penis havers who scoff at the enlarged ones behaving like the Rolex aficionados who play ā€œspot the fake Rolexā€ and get into all kinds of watch minutiae. Look at the telltale marks around the base - definitely enlarged, not like my 100% natural model, which comes 2.5 seconds fast per day.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          Bonus

          Gordon Muir, a urologist in London, said that heā€™s been taking out Penumas ā€œall the way across the bloody pond.ā€

          Perfectly placed in the article, youā€™re reading about a horrific predatory industry and then a Brit pops up saying ā€œah those fookinā€™ yankee wankers, mangling cocks and sending them to meā€. Just all-round endearing.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        On a lighter note:

        [Dr. Penile Implants] has also been named as a defendant in product liability lawsuits regarding inflatable penile prosthesis brought by plaintiffs Dick Glass and Semen Brodsky.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        CW, if you are male, maybe skip the part where the actual implant procedure is described. Starting with the sentence ā€œWith a purple marker,ā€

        • Mike Knell@blat.at
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          @gerikson Eh, I grew up in a family of doctors. Theyā€™d discuss their workdays at the dinner table. I fear nothing. Letā€™s have a read, see what all the fuss is abā€¦ (turns green, excuses self)

          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            Someone on Masto thought that the industry had missed a chance to call the procedure ā€œspatchcockingā€.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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            working at an unspecified medical journal over an unspecified period of time

            we occasionally had to remind ourselves about appropriate and inappropriate placeholder imagery

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Iā€™ve tried various face creams of different levels of prestige and not really noticed a difference, so, no, I guess.

  • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    Back during the last Sneerclub blowout I found my reddit account getting psychoanalyzed by twitter rationalists. They were very upset about the Rod Dreher thing.

    for some reason this is still hilarious

      • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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        It you search sneerclub on twitter you might find it. Apparently the Dreher thing indicates psychopathy (how they play the ā€˜bullied nerdā€™ trope again and again is fascinating to me).

          • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            Tweeting about penises every few days. More seriously: his mental health is way not good and heā€™s going full woo.

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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              1 year ago

              amazed when it turned out rod dreherā€™s wingnut welfare was ONE single patron funding him for years

              so iā€™m not surprised heā€™s completely fucked now

              • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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                1 year ago

                My favorite part was the ex-boyfriend revelations. Also the one picture of twinkRod - he looks like a Lost Boys extra i swear to god.

                • gerikson@awful.systems
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                  1 year ago

                  OK thanks all for the updates. I was aware of most of them. Itā€™s been quiet around him in the venues I frequent. Iā€™d like to think itā€™s because most people recognize heā€™s not well and itā€™s punching down to make fun of him.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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    1 year ago

    a lotta yall still dont get it

    AI equity holders can use multiple ZIRP juices on a single AI

    so if you have 1 OpenAI and 3 ZIRP juices you can create 3 new AI startups

  • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    Yesterday before bed I saw some galaxy-brained takes on PKM (personal knowledge management software) from a 7-day old account, and curiosity took over me. I was not disappointed. (sadly they deleted their account after I woke up: /u/Few-Elephant-2600 if youā€™re bored and have moderator API access)

    Link

    Since GPUs continuously generate large amounts of waste heat during AI training, could electric/GPU stoves utilize this unused thermal energy resource through on-demand tickets as distributed networks instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove? What are the scientific challenges?

    Honey can you preheat the porn generator?

    Maybe you could pair it with this accursed AI of Things Smart Oven. Fun quotes:

    ā€œUsers arenā€™t aware of any of the ovenā€™s learning processes,ā€

    Ovens that learn from one another

    Finally, I can experience Windows progress bars when baking potatoes:

    The predictive model updates the remaining baking time every 30 seconds

    • Steve@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      at what point is ā€œlarge amounts of heatā€ output considered the part thatā€™s the waste?

      Do they know that brake discs get hot because theyā€™re stopping a car from colliding with a wall?

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        But for electronics basically all heat is excess. Brakes are literally supposed to turn kinetic energy into heat. A GPU is supposed to solve linear equations quickly. The generated heat is because we donā€™t know how to not generate it. If I could power my oven with all the energy waste while playing Crysis I totally would.

        Plus, heat of the brakes is also technically waste. Case in point, Formula 1 cars have specially designed systems whose purpose is converting energy dissipated during braking back into battery charge to power the hybrid engine.

        • Steve@awful.systems
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          My point was more about how you decide that the heat is the undesirable outcome compared to whatever the fuck the thing is meant to be doing. Brakes have a very clear purpose at the expense of the heat. GPUs being used as graphics processing units when youā€™re playing crysis have a very clear purpose to heat output ratio. Ya see wot I mean?

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            Yup, now I get the sneer, sorry for not catching on earlier.

            To respond in this vein then: at least real art pieces I could burn for fuelā€¦

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        1 year ago

        This is true, with the important distinction that presumably the next generation of GPUs will produce more calculation per unit of input energy, as opposed to proof-of-work crypto mining, where the coin generation is constant in time, by design.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      Since GPUs continuously generate large amounts of waste heat during AI training, could electric/GPU stoves utilize this unused thermal energy resource

      Iā€™m actually aware of businesses that already do exactly this, usefully

      through on-demand tickets as distributed networks

      ā€œticketsā€ is this Ethereum bullshit?

      instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?

      • Citizens Donā€™t Need To Cook
      • Not a citizen? Get fucked scrub.

      (this leaves me feeling incredibly ??????)

      What are the scientific challenges?

      this seems like JAQing behaviour?

      [ed: once again wearing my Lemmy Ate My Formatting shirt]

      • Steve@awful.systems
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        instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?

        Iā€™m 99% sure this person eats only gig-work delivered food

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Didnā€™t some soviet towns run central heating off power plant waste heat? ā€œWhere do you live? OpenAiVille, we get free^M cheaper central heating, but the noise of the severfans running every day and night is deafening.ā€

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        combined heat and power isnā€™t a technology unique to eastern block countries, but surely centralized city planning makes it easier to pump waste heat into municipal heating grid (or out to some chemical works or such). tbh it didnā€™t even occur to me that there are serious cities (population 100k+) that donā€™t have city-owned heating grid, even 50k towns and smaller can have their own CHP plants (tiny one, fits in shipping container or two)

        and itā€™s not just some towns no no no. it was implemented everywhere where it was practical. near big cities - these need both power and heat, so okayish coal is shipped to them by rail, burned there and provides both heat and energy. beijing for example runs on 10 or so large CHP plants iirc. near lignite mines - lignite is burned there (does not make sense to ship it anywhere else, too shitty) and nearby town has free heat. where thereā€™s neither, either coal was shipped to be burned in heating plants, centralized or individual, or gas was delivered by pipelines also for heating, and energy was delivered from larger centralized facilities. if thereā€™s fuckton of energy somehow, like in russian far east with their abundant hydropower, or nothing else is practical, in some places heating was electric

        NYC has steam pipelines running around the city, doesnā€™t that use CHP plants?

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      i think that thereā€™s *at least one supercomputing centre in germany that uses waste heat for heating buildings and not only their own

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      my pet conspiracy theory is that the two streamers had installed cheats at one point in the past and compromised their systems that way. but i have no evidence to base that on, just seems more plausible to me than ā€œa hacker discovered an RCE in EAC/Apex and used it during a tournament to install game cheats on two people and [appear to] do nothing elseā€

  • Steve@awful.systems
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    CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/

    the website links to a ā€œconcept paperā€ which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that donā€™t add up to much at all

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105858/https://www.giggleacademy.com/Giggle Academy v0.4 20240221.pdf

    such as these under ā€œgamificationā€;

    Badges (NFTs), points, scores, rankings, etc.

    Early education (elementary school levels) are easier to gamify. High school subjects become more difficult as the subject becomes more complex. Hopefully by then, the kids have developed enough learning habits to sustain their on-going learning.

    or under ā€œcompletely onlineā€

    There are some drawbacks to the online approach, such as lack of peer support, group learning, etc. We wonā€™t be able to solve all problems. We will try to address some of these issues in later iterations.

    Use AI & automation

    Scalable

    The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so thereā€™s at least some money there (?)

    anyway, dodgy af

    • Steve@awful.systems
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      this project intrigues me because weā€™re able to see the brainstorm doc that he believes is shareworthy, combined with a reasonably slick website and a careers page.

      There is no open position for a ā€œproduct designerā€ or any kind of role that would be interested in concretely working on addressing the clear problem statement in the brainstorm doc. I have to assume there isnā€™t anyone in the group doing that already because they would not let a brainstorm doc be published like that, as if it has any value.

      This is what bothers me so much about iterative design culture and the ā€œdoing something is better than nothingā€ mantra. It makes out that identifying the problem/purpose is the assignment, and undermines the REAL design work of coming up with a good response to that purpose.

      If this project gets off the ground, theyā€™ll start building and theyā€™ll hire UX designers and theyā€™ll just make something that resembles an online school and focus on making sure it has blockchains and nfts and all that shit, and the whole concept of ā€œdesignā€ will be relegated to user acceptance and finding frictions to remove.

      At no point will anyone sit down and say ā€œhow can we effectively address illiteracy in developing countriesā€ and find out why, what, how, and all the barriers, all the realities, the complexities, the options for means to achieve certain things, all the DESIGN.

      Its no different for everything else in tech, they all start from this point where nothing was initially designed beyond throwing together an idea and iterating it into a behemoth that needs an army of staff to groom its hair and clip its toenails. The people given design titles (ux designers, product designers) are not answering to an overarching design or any principled basis for design.

      it should also be said that the giggle academy is probably a publicity thing for CZā€™s character

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Giggle Academy (from prison?)

      my brain latches onto this as ā€œgigglepigā€ (a la Brooklyn 99), and will accept no other meanings

  • Mii@awful.systems
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    Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-bitcoin-halving-really-is-different-this-time/ar-BB1kb6o5

    The halving will occur at block height 840,000 (a count of how many blocks have been hashed to the blockchain), and already people are predicting that will be the most valuable block to be mined to date. This is related to the point above: Ordinals works by assigning serial numbers to individual satoshis (or sats, the smallest denomination of BTC), which turns a fungible asset like bitcoin into something with provenance, identity and scarcity.

    Tristan, the founder of Ordiscan.com, which tracks Ordinals projects, predicts that collectors of these ā€œrare satsā€ could value the data in block 840,000 at $50 million dollars. Under the ā€œRodarmor Rarityā€ system, which assigns value to Bitcoin protocol events like difficulty adjustments and halvings, the first satoshi in the block alone could be worth upwards of $1 million, he wrote in a blog post.

    Theyā€™re turning Bitcoins satoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      i wasnā€™t really a sneerclubber before, but i did hang out in r/buttcoin. i remember that this was briefly an alleged thing among cryptobros few months ago, with side effect of making seleccion of bitcoin maxis very angry, and somehow making tx even slower and more expensive

  • titotal@awful.systems
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    Apparently thereā€™s a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve andā€¦ solve cold fusion?

    James: You can just ā€˜feelā€™ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. Youā€™re literally going to ask it to ā€˜solve cold fusionā€™ and walk away for 6 months.

    ā€¦

    Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ā€˜solve cold fusionā€™ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?

    Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.

    • jonhendry@awful.systems
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      Where are they going to find 500 people in India who are good at solving cold fusion and will do it for pennies.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      James: You can just ā€˜feelā€™ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent.

      ā€¦ fucking hell thatā€™s a few layers of quackery and far-AI promise nuttery all at once

      Iā€™m not going to substantively touch on most of those, because by and large I think everyone here gets it

      but 'feel' the futureā€¦ itā€™s so ā€¦ ā€œjust vibes, manā€. petition to crowdfund these poor dipshits some buttplug.io-compatible sex toys or something, give them something else to feel besides vibes

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      Who needs things like ā€œexperimentsā€ and ā€œdataā€? Surely a chatbot superintelligence can extrapolate all of physics from two frames of a video of an apple falling.