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 youā€™ll 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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting 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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • self@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    via mastodon

    image description

    a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:

    lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :

    are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.

    but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.

    but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.

    maybe youā€™re not being negative enough

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.

      Anyway itā€™s not that great but hereā€™s my attempt at the sneer you asked for:

      ā€œAdditionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions.ā€

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      Like a century of science: yeah weā€™re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. Thereā€™s no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.

      MSFT: hold my beer

    • s3p5r@lemm.ee
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      If only all my snark could elicit such absurd perfection.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      I immediatelly knew who and what you were talking about without even clicking.

      May the fact that he also lives inside my head rent-free be some solace to you.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Every day? I dont think I have read that post at all. (This is both a joke and not a joke, as I had not read it, I did now and I was amused, so thanks).

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    OpenAI manages to do an entire introduction of a new model without using the word ā€œhallucinationā€ even once.

    Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its ā€˜reasoningā€™ when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, itā€™s not really clear.

    Canā€™t wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that donā€™t exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:

      bless you Melanie.

      Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you

      Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesnā€™t understand the rules of chess

      ^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)

      Dog tax

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      Would there ever be a way to tell that they didnā€™t just feed the answers into the training data?

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution

      • Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
      • Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
      • Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements

      ah good, weā€™re still on schedule for that I guess

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      you left the best one:

      First successful experiments in ā€œtemporal arbitrageā€ using quantum prediction models

      not only they know about ā€œtemporal arbitrage experimentsā€ but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment

      • jaschop@awful.systems
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        Frankly, it just didnā€™t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.

  • maol@awful.systems
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    I told one of my college professors Iā€™d been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said ā€œcan I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use itā€ and without thinking I said ā€œwhy would I use chat-gpt? Itā€™s rubbishā€ and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.

    This was after heā€™d said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      From the reactions:

      ā€œWith enough garbage the model will become sentientā€

      ā€œI mean thats how humans are raised thoā€

      AAAAAAAAAAAA

      (There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).

      As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. ā€œHoly shit, I think therefore I am!ā€

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.

    A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) ā€œif you think thatā€™s bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections šŸ˜±ā€.

    Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.

    • self@awful.systems
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      quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isnā€™t doing it:

      Do you have any references/examples of this?

      tons

      rapid7 for example use LLMs to analyze code and identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.

      Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this.

      mustā€™ve been another company then which i got confused with the name

      Good thing you have tons of examples.

      Right?

      e: youā€™ll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steveā€™s other posts are about

    • self@awful.systems
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      Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.

      a new source of anxiety has formed

      in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I donā€™t think Lemmyā€™s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but itā€™s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed

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        awfulā€™s probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and theyā€™re one of the bigger operations around

        pro-tip: do not learn things about how TLDs work (and I mean the bit beyond dns architecture), it is cursed knowledge you canā€™t unlearn

        and with that warning delivered, yā€™all may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late itā€™s a gateway drug

        regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. APā€™s identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/

        (e: good lord I was out of it when I wrote this post)

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        .mobi? They became the admins of the file format? And they paid for it? Good luck with that. ;)

        E: me after reading the article. Ow god nothing fucking works indeed, that is dire. I actually checked the date to see if this wasnā€™t some old post. Nope 9/11 2024. Buffer overflow + lapsed domains.

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      Fuck it, weā€™re going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      I liked this comment on the HN post:

      Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      My heuristic is basically: until we can easily control the environment of earth, terraforming will not be on the horizon. Given that we are hell-bent on driving off of as many cliffs as we can, Iā€™m pretty happy to continue thinking that weā€™ll never get off this rock proper within the olā€™ lifespan

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      this is a fun read

      another I ran into earlier (via an outfit from these parts) is this piece from The Conversation. I wish I could get as irked about linear extrapolation as I usually do, but in lieu of guardrails arresting (and clawing back!) all that shit from all these ghoulsā€¦

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      (Edit: I based parts of this post on misremembered/misinterpreted tweet from musk, so reader beware, Iā€™m being wrong about Musks stated plans here, see my later reply in the thread. Not sure if I should leave the post up, edit it (eurgh effort), or just delete)

      Made a decision for the donā€™t waste time common good.

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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        @Soyweiser Youā€™re assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it canā€™t and it wonā€™t. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Marsā€”extended duration in space, rememberā€”in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you donā€™t need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      tbh i donā€™t see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works itā€™s gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesnā€™t care, because theyā€™re selling shovels so it doesnā€™t matter if their shit doesnā€™t work as long as someoneā€™s buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where thereā€™s already some money

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          felon: the most divorced man to ever live

          sammy: the most swirly-short edgelord to ever walk

          that tweet is as unhinged as felon tweets tho

        • gerikson@awful.systems
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          You just might be a techbro if youā€™re worth billions and still canā€™t resist mouthing off on Xhitter.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            Mouthing off in a way that makes me go ā€˜ow god it IS all a scam and he knows it!ā€™ all hype and showmanship. I wonder if he practices this type of writing like this stance was also so obviously practiced.

            (When it all implodes and the final step of the grift is the drama movies about it, Iā€™m at least happy that Rick Gomez will make a passable Sam Altman (No idea why that blog didnā€™t use a normal picture of Sam, but they decided to put Sam and Rick in the teleporter))

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      The terms, concerningly, donā€™t give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be ā€œunable to fully delete or de-identifyā€ user data due to ā€œtechnicalā€ or ā€œother operational reasons.ā€

      My villain arc is going to be turning into Thanos and collecting them stones just to enforce GDPR forever into cosmic law with a snap of my fingers.

  • self@awful.systems
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    remember all the fucking rubes saying Protonā€™s LLM wasnā€™t a problem cause only business and visionary accounts had access to it? well, only one month later of fucking course they went back on that and now itā€™s included with duo and family accounts, and my soon to be cancelled unlimited account just popped an ad for it on the compose window trying to get me to opt into the free trial for the fucking thing (and also the buttonā€™s purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)

    • Sebastian/S.T. Veje@mstdn.social
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      @self I wonder what ā€œpopular demandā€ and ā€œoverwhelming number of requestsā€. Are there actually a lot of people asking for this? Are there more than there are people begging them not to? Maybe I just live in an anti-AI bubble, because I sure donā€™t encounter a lot of pro-AI views.

      • self@awful.systems
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        itā€™s not just you ā€” I can dig up the posts if youā€™re curious, but Proton wrote their last user survey so it was impossible to say no to this LLM crap directly, and they still got caught massively fudging the numbers to make this needless bullshit look popular. I can promise you itā€™s just the same people doing that again, except this time thereā€™s no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over

        • Sebastian/S.T. Veje@mstdn.social
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          @self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Protonā€™s users to be exactly the type of person whoā€™s against this. But of course itā€™s easy to fudge with numbers.

          • self@awful.systems
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            I would expect most of Protonā€™s users to be exactly the type of person whoā€™s against this

            thatā€™s very true! unfortunately, weā€™ve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Protonā€™s board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too ā€” thatā€™s why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)

            weā€™re not sure if something changed that suddenly made them go all in on their bad ideas, but the initial communication around Scribe was how much Protonā€™s business users wanted it ā€” and the survey was very much crafted to get what looked like a pro-LLM response from that demographic. Proton has essentially admitted that theyā€™re doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; itā€™s a shame theyā€™re willing to burn their business down for that kind of short-term gain. I can only imagine them enabling the LLM for all their paid accounts this quickly is either a desperation move because the feature didnā€™t do the numbers they hoped for, or itā€™s a sign that Protonā€™s otherwise compromised.

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      @self @zogwarg
      Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.

      Who isnā€™t huffing this nonsense?

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        from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that arenā€™t, although thereā€™s not really anyone with feature match on some of protonā€™s features afaik

        • self@awful.systems
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          I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and theyā€™ve promised (for what thatā€™s worth) they donā€™t have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I canā€™t truly recommend it ā€” as always, I have to point out that Tuta is still a single point of failure like Proton, and one day I hope weā€™re able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isnā€™t gpg or anything like it ā€” imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming theyā€™re not the same person) to use that kind of thing)

        • noodle@aus.social
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          @froztbyte
          I forgot Iā€™m using their VPN too, and they accept bitcoin (not a big deal, but useful). I was aware of Tuta and fastmail when I chose Proton.

          For now Iā€™ll prioritize moving to a self managed domain to make swapping provider easier in future.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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        Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.

        Its worse for me - Iā€™ve got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, Iā€™m not using them for anything particularly important.

            • Mii@awful.systems
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              Posteo is from Germany and theyā€™re reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so itā€™s not as batteries included as what Proton offered.

              I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.

              Another option like that is mailbox.org. Theyā€™re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.

              • V0ldek@awful.systems
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                Posteo is from Germany

                Thatā€™s significantly less comforting than Protonā€™s Switzerland. Itā€™s in 14 Eyes after all.

                • Mike@awful.systems
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                  Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but itā€™s still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. Itā€™s also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So Iā€™m not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond ā€œmarketingā€.

  • rook@awful.systems
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    One to keep an eye onā€¦ you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an ā€œadd ai chatbot to sidebarā€ in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.

    Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced ā€œai helpā€ onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.

    This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.