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.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ereader/s/ZfP57OEZ8x
E-readers are now getting the AI treatment.
Oh hey we got all the way to Pacific time without anyone wishing a generic Merry Christmas. May your familyās Wi-Fi work for everyone with minimal support required.
four thieves collective goes on 38C3 and i groan in anticipation of whatever stupid trick will they pull now https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/ASBXWW/ why they even are there
why they even are there
(from observation over some years) congress orga more than occasionally fucks up on paradox of tolerance by letting shit like this through
itās been a thing Iāve noticed and have wanted to actually discuss with some folks, but never really gotten to yet on account of life stuff
there were also the much, much less grey-area instances a couple of years back where they were far too open to a number of abusers (this was around the time the appelbaum shit hit wide daylight), so there is a possibility that the issue runs deeper (in a structural sense, at best; personal sense, at worst) too but I possess insufficient information to know one way or the other what exactly may constitute the problem here
I donāt wanna pull national stereotypes here but arenāt Germans really quite open about stuff like homeopathy? ābe your own pharmacistā sounds like right up that alley
Theres a long rich history of German alt med. also (postwar) witch trials, if I can find the book I read on all this Iāll try to post.
Edit: think it was this one https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/128/2/1015/7204469?login=false
I havenāt really got enough information about that side of it, the details I have to go on are mostly about things particularly around the values CCC has tried to hold/build (and even there I am absolutely not intimately familiar, for reasons of distance and exposure and such)
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.
JFC
go back 200 years before the āgubmintā got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now
before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health.
I have the feeling that theyāre not a British trans person talking about the NHS, or an American in a red state panicking about dying of sepsis because the baby they wanted so badly miscarried.
maybe itās more of a take acceptable for americans
The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. āRaw milkā pushers are cut from the same cloth.
idk what went wrong there but village industry of altmed clinics seems to be an actual thing, and from what i understand itās apparently legal in some of red states
never heard of them before. from skimming their wikipedia, it seems their grift is glossing over the details in the āscienceā part?
iāve complained about them previously https://awful.systems/comment/2754222
From what I heard: Skimming over science, best practices, risks of contamination, risk of producing horror chemicals, problems of sourcing materials, storing materials, storing the final product etc etc.
Here is a bsky thread from the last time they were in the publics eye (more here if you dont have an account) (the latter articles are clearly working on a diff definition of capitalism than I use so I chose not to be too annoyed with the weird digs about that).
This should be a very big red flag: āMixƦl Swan Laufer worked in mathematics and high energy physics until he decided to use his background in science to tackle problems of global health and human rights.ā (Ignoring all the other smaller red flags btw, I think I could point one out ever paragraph, if I had not heard about these people before, the final red pill reference would have made me think they were trolling).
interesting read, thanks. the red pill reference also had me rolling my eyes. i guess itās more virtue signalling than actually making a change.
It is a bit weird, it has very high EA vibes to me, started and did some good (epipen in 2017 vs EAs malaria nets), but end up to have some crazy plan for which the other things are more of a smokescreen for their real plans (an easy bake chemical oven make chems at home kit vs EAs stopping our lord and saviour the robotgod) using rethoric aimed at a specific subgroup (2000-2010 anarchist libertarian hackers vs nerdy altruists)
E: I really wonder if they were influenced by the dr sleepless series from the disgraced warren ellis, and the stuff around that.
so openai claims to be doing great on the FrontierMath dataset. Iāve already seen the usual sort of dipshits using this to pump ai on reddit, and hereās a post that went to the frontpage on HN:
https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/can-ai-do-maths-yet-thoughts-from-a-mathematician/
(tl;dr only a few problems from the dataset are public but if representative the problems are about 25% survivable by an undergrad; coincidentally this is the % openai says their models are completing.)
this post is by kevin buzzard. he has a letās say not easily beloved personality, but I donāt think of him as credulous or grifty, and people in his area regard him as an excellent mathematician.
he points out but I think does not focus enough on how discrediting the secretive nature of the dataset is. the fact that you canāt make it public is necessary to run such experiments in a scientifically reasonable way, but also makes it totally impossible to run the experiment in a scientifically reasonable way. an experiment which cannot be examined or reproduced is actually the opposite of science. itās pure grift fuel
If you release the test set, all models magically jump to 87.3% accuracy.
I want someone to take this and run it in a self-feeding loop, I want to see what the limit supremum of AI Imagery looks like
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Habsburg AI
Do you want agi basilisk anime girls because this is how you get agi basilisk anime girls
Honestly itās either that or some rosewattasttone level translation errors which sounds like a pretty good risk to take for me.
full service plagiarism! bet you weāll see whiteglove variant of it next
Past a certain point itās easier for people to cut the genAI out of the picture and just actually draw the shit theyāre being asked for rather than badger the machine into creating something satisfactory, at which point irony will be well and truly dead.
yep, have made the same critique. the way people āovercommitā on this is a fascinating interplay of sunk cost fallacy combined with some other shit
deleted by creator
ZITRON DROPPED (his last post for the year)
the identity-devouring worldcoin sphere ordered to delete user data by a german data protection office over gdpr noncompliance https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/12/19/german-watchdog-orders-sam-altmans-biometric-id-project-world-to-delete-data
On Thursday, the German data protection authority, the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA), concluded a months-long investigation into World and stated that its identification procedure āentails a number of fundamental data protection risks for a large number of data subjectsā that does not comply with the European Unionās General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
āWith todayās decision, we are enforcing European fundamental rights standards in favour of data subjects in a technologically demanding and legally highly complex case,ā said BayLDA president Michael Will.
is it? itās another fucking crypto scam
They have enough money to make it complex, no matter how simple the underlying issue.
wizz for coading! chapter 17 is out
I want to say I appreciate when thereās a link to the previous one, as after a week itās nice to see what substacks were posted since.
Put this up about 20 minutes late, so Iām starting off by saying Honey got exposed
I swear to god there was a video I watched about this years ago that already talked about how they donāt give you the best coupons and that they hijack affiliate links. I couldnāt have made that up in my head.
The most surprising thing to me was that theyāre owned by PayPal? How can you have any credibility left when youāre owned by PayPal, wtf, that shouldāve been the end of them. Oh, no shit, a service owned by PAYPAL is shady and not above-board?? No way man, those paragons of user centrism, PAY-fucking-PAL.
they arenāt called paypal mafia for nothing
When I was young I knew people who installed those āget money for moving your mouseā things (this was a thing around 2000, prob combined with a āget paid to use your computerā scam. Iām not sure if anybody even remembers this), and they never got a dime. So I always mentally ignore these things as scams. āit is just free moneyā is quite the red flag.
Minor gripe with the video āif they product is free you are likely the productā isnāt true imho. You are always also the product, unless they explicitly go out of their way to make it clear you are not the product (and even then you cannot be totally sure). You canāt pay your way out of the rot economy. In fact, as you are now a person who spends money, Iād think the value of your data actually goes up. A database filled with data of users who never spend a dime online seems like it would be almost useless to me.
I must have been living under a rock/a different kind of terminally online, because I had only ever heard of Honey through Dan Olsonās riposte to Doug Walkerās The Wall, which describes Doug Walker delivering āan uncomfortably over-acted ad for online data harvesting scam Honeyā (35:43).
Well-known YouTuber Markiplier also went off on Honey back in 2019, and needless to say he felt pretty vindicated:
Wow, Iāve been saying for years that this extension is shady as fuck. Nice to see that itās getting some attention.
I didnāt expect it to steal affiliate cookies, but that they let you control which codes it āfindsā isnāt even a secret, and I thought people know this. But every time I mentioned this on Reddit I was downvoted and called a liar.
As someone whoās never even considered interacting with any part of this whole system, this is really funny honestly. Itās like a matryoshka of shady business practices.
Making money via stealing commissions from affiliate links, tbf, wasnāt the business model I was suspecting from Honey. I always thought they were scamming but I thought it was going to be from selling your browsing data or something similar. Then again, they still might do that.
Holy shit. Managed to never run into them due to sponsorblock but the ways mega corps find ways to extract money out of everyone never ceases to amaze
I remember when the Dark Reader addon was advertising them years ago, they were doing their shit for a pretty long time
