Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
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 youāre not being negative enough
I was reading David and Amyās stuff on energy costs of AI and ended up skimming the MSFT āenvironment sustainability reportā andā¦ god
Like I donāt even know how to satirise this. Help me sneer pros, for I am too depressed to make fun of this.
Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.
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 itās not that great but hereās my attempt at the sneer you asked for:
āAdditionally, 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
Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN
Like a century of science: yeah weāre pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. Thereās 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
When [muskās new] supercomputer gets to full capacity, the local utility says itās going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity ā enough to power 100,000 homes per year.
The locals might get ornery about this, and Iād be willing to make the trip to help.
There are some steam turbine power plants (like coal-fired) (on smaller side) with power output like that
I have thought about this guy every day since I saw this post
If only all my snark could elicit such absurd perfection.
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.
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).
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its āreasoningā 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, itās not really clear.
Canāt wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that donāt 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.
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 doesnāt 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
Would there ever be a way to tell that they didnāt just feed the answers into the training data?
Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)
2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling
- Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously
- Development of āSchrƶdingerās Ledgerā prototype, allowing superposition of financial states
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
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, weāre still on schedule for that I guess
Somebody played cookie clicker.
I have to admit that I wasnāt expecting LinkedIn to become a wretched hive of āquantumā bullshit, but hey, here we are.
Tangentially: Schrƶdinger is a one-man argument for not naming ideas after people.
you left the best one:
First successful experiments in ātemporal arbitrageā using quantum prediction models
not only they know about ātemporal arbitrage experimentsā but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment
Frankly, it just didnāt stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.
I told one of my college professors Iād been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said ācan I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use itā and without thinking I said āwhy would I use chat-gpt? Itās rubbishā and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.
This was after heād said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.
found a quality sneer in the wild https://mander.xyz/post/17910623
From the reactions:
āWith enough garbage the model will become sentientā
āI 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. āHoly shit, I think therefore I am!ā
diminish humans and humanity
AKA tell on themselves
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) āif you think thatās bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections š±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.
quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isnāt 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.
mustāve been another company then which i got confused with the name
Good thing you have tons of examples.
Right?
e: youāll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steveās other posts are about
I wonder if he got standard ML and LLM confused. (I did hear there was some usage of LLM/ML to help with some documentation stuff I think on a riskybusiness podcast, but I would have to relisten for the details. It could also just have been promotional stuff, while they are not actually using it).
Poor DeiSteve, it always sucks when you have a decades old username which suddenly takes up political meaning.
ācreated: 51 days agoā
Oh no.
Standard ML the programming language or standard as in conventional and ML as in machine learning?
Machine learning.
E: Turns out the DEI guy might have been right btw. https://www.rapid7.com/about/press-releases/rapid7s-ai-engine-supercharges-security-operations-with-generative-ai/ if by generative AI they mean a LLM.
And from their blog: https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2023/11/29/rapid7-takes-next-step-in-ai-innovation-with-new-ai-powered-threat-detections/ so there could be a chance the āI used to work thereā person didnāt know everything going on in Rapid7. āRapid7 Has Been an AI Innovator for Decadesā
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 donāt think Lemmyās federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but itās probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed
awfulās probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and theyāre 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 canāt unlearn
and with that warning delivered, yāall may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late itās a gateway drug
regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. APās identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/
(e: good lord I was out of it when I wrote this post)
the original post is fucking amazing
here in the future, nothing fucking works
.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 wasnāt some old post. Nope 9/11 2024. Buffer overflow + lapsed domains.
Fuck it, weāre going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.
you have no idea how much Iāve been tempted to do UUCP
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.
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, Iām pretty happy to continue thinking that weāll never get off this rock proper within the olā lifespan
You could build a whole library of articles like this: hereās one from early last year
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¦
(Edit: I based parts of this post on misremembered/misinterpreted tweet from musk, so reader beware, Iām 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 donāt waste time common good.
@Soyweiser Youāre assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it canāt and it wonāt. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Marsāextended duration in space, rememberāin time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you donāt need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)
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this isnāt surprising, but now itās confirmed: in addition to the environmental damage generative AI does by operating, and in spite of all attempts to greenwash it and present it as somehow a solution to climate change, of course Microsoftās been pushing very hard for the oil and gas industry to use generative AI to maximize resource exploitation and production (via Timnit Gebru)
tbh i donāt see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works itās gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesnāt care, because theyāre selling shovels so it doesnāt matter if their shit doesnāt work as long as someoneās buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where thereās already some money
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
Pay no attention to the three LLMs stacked together behind the curtain!
Please, no sneers till a few weeks have passed, we are still in the gratitude for magical intelligence from the sky period.
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
You just might be a techbro if youāre worth billions and still canāt resist mouthing off on Xhitter.
Mouthing off in a way that makes me go āow 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, Iām at least happy that Rick Gomez will make a passable Sam Altman (No idea why that blog didnāt use a normal picture of Sam, but they decided to put Sam and Rick in the teleporter))
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
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
Late response but cool song recommendation :)
haha yeah itās quite fun
This person is as correct as they are committed to the vibes. Great sneer.
The terms, concerningly, donāt give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be āunable to fully delete or de-identifyā user data due to ātechnicalā or āother 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.
remember all the fucking rubes saying Protonās LLM wasnāt 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 itās 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 buttonās purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)
Why do I get the feeling weāre gonna see a colossal tech crash
is this the bad place?
Yes.
@self I wonder what āpopular demandā and āoverwhelming 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 donāt encounter a lot of pro-AI views.
itās not just you ā I can dig up the posts if youāre 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 itās just the same people doing that again, except this time thereās no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over
@self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Protonās users to be exactly the type of person whoās against this. But of course itās easy to fudge with numbers.
I would expect most of Protonās users to be exactly the type of person whoās against this
thatās very true! unfortunately, weāve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Protonās board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too ā thatās why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)
weāre 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 Protonās 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 theyāre doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; itās a shame theyāre 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 didnāt do the numbers they hoped for, or itās a sign that Protonās otherwise compromised.
@self Itās probably the same folks who wanted the Bitcoin wallet.
from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that arenāt, although thereās not really anyone with feature match on some of protonās features afaik
I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and theyāve promised (for what thatās worth) they donāt have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I canāt 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 weāre able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isnāt gpg or anything like it ā imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming theyāre not the same person) to use that kind of thing)
@froztbyte
I forgot Iām 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 Iāll prioritize moving to a self managed domain to make swapping provider easier in future.
Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.
Its worse for me - Iāve got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, Iām not using them for anything particularly important.
wtf is a posteo
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@weirdwriter @froztbyte itās posteo.net
Posteo is from Germany and theyāre 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 itās 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. Theyāre presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.
Posteo is from Germany
Thatās significantly less comforting than Protonās Switzerland. Itās in 14 Eyes after all.
Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but itās still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. Itās also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So Iām not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond āmarketingā.
One to keep an eye onā¦ you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an āadd 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 āai 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.
