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.
(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)
so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if youād like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add
DO_NOT_TRACKto Nixās wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the communityās consensus.I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs canāt happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree ā theyāve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)
someone tried to add
DO_NOT_TRACKTangentially related, but I only just now learned about this env var, and the console do not track proposal. While it is a practical solution to the problem of many different env varsā¦ Iām also so annoyed that itās necessary at all. That itās required to set some env var to opt-out, instead of being strictly opt-in which such things should always be. Maybe I would like the proposal more if they had called the env var
DONT_BE_SPYWARE.fuck, I saw their āwe added a LLM weeeeā post, didnāt realize it was this shittily implemented. not too surprised
the rest, ugh. fuck that implementation then
even just using this anywhere with a NDA becomes an instant violation. how little do these fucking dipshits think through their actionsā¦
Got a jumpscare watching this.
looks like our sneer comrade DisneylandDiplomat (disney6830 on discord), who did the Thinkateria rationalist-parody blog, died in Oct 2022. From Reddit Sneerclub:
Hello, I am writing since I saw this sub is a bit active again. I am wondering if anyone remembers the blog āthinkateriaā or the reddit user DisneylandDiplomat who often posted links to promote it here. he was my little brother and he killed himself in October of 2022, after deleting the blog, and I only saw his reddit activity afterwards. I think it was satirical writing making fun of these other bloggers discussed here. He was very private and this sub is really the only insight into his state of mind at that time that I have. Thereās no point to this post except I feel a need to share that he is gone and this is the only place I know he had any connections with. It must have been hard for everyone who talked about this so early on.
Wow that sucks, doubt his fam will read this but still condolences.
Original writing prompt: āWrite a romantic comedy. Difficulty: both lovers are emotionally mature and have excellent communication skills.ā
What our good friend Eliezer makes of it
Oscar Wildeās job is in no danger
Apparently āemotionally matureā means āblushing schoolgirlā
SHE is gowned in a black dress sewn with tiny emeralds, rubies, sapphires too small to detract from the darkness of her gown, instead giving it the illusion of a rainbow sheen.
Following āgownedā so closely with ādressā is awkward, because the latter is redundant. Consider, e.g., āShe is gowned in black, the fabric sewn withā¦ā Using both āgownedā and āgownā in the same sentence compounds the problem. Consider introducing further information about the fabric: e.g., āthe darkness of the velvetā or āthe darkness of the silkā.
Whoof. Made it through the first sentence.
first thought: āshe is gowned in old jeans and a Debian t-shirtā
Impressive how someone can be so bad at writing after writing so, so much.
guy chooses never to take in feedback or think about how to git gud at writing so every time he spurts out more sludge itās just more infinite degrees of fractal bad.
Why the fuck is it in bad script form? MAN: WOMAN: MAN: WOMAN: just fucking name them! Thereās like ten names in the text, just fucking do it, you shit!
FWIW the only way to read yudkowskian dialogue is to imagine yud as each character wearing a different wig for that character. No distinctions in voice though, none are apparent in the text.
ah good point. He reads āmature and excellent at communicationā as a self-description. After that, thereās absolutely no way he can resist writing himself into both characters.
The man is a hollow shell, and the woman is tripping over her own tongue in the least regal fashion imaginable. Thereās no emotional maturity because thereās no interiority. Thereās no communication, just Yud doing Ready Player One with Nerd Cultureā¢ references. Remember the Evil Overlord list? You do, donāt you? Wasnāt the Evil Overlord list funny? Now imagine if an Evil Overlord had, wait for it, read the Evil Overlord list. Wouldnāt that be amazing?
(Yes, he did the same damn thing in HPMOR, too.)
all of his works are socrappy dialogues (crappy socratic dialogues). This one is an unsubtle exploration of his BDSM fetish
yud, 15-year top of score chart of expert beginners
(e: s/p,/d,/ stupid phone)
Nice try, but youāre going to have to work a lot harder if you want to trick me into clicking on that. I lived through browsing peak Slashdot at -1, you know
Next time Gadget, next time!
Ha! My Lemmy client is having trouble following that link! Safe again.
Also, shit writing prompt. I havenāt seen a writing prompt online that I didnāt hate. āHey wouldnāt it be neat if someone wrote about this premise???ā
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up
Writing Prompts:
- Pokemon and Digimon are both real and they are at war.
- Fractals are alive and they hate us
- A woman explores beyond the event horizon of a black hole and itās just very hot and cramped and boring and not at all pleasant
- A company starts a time mine where they mine causality but they didnāt think about sustainability
OK OK you have a point, I hate all of these and I wrote them.
Fractals are alive and they hate us
comp.basilisk FAQ
when I think about it more, what I donāt like is how insistent WPs are. Like whatās being communicated to me is āhey this is a good story idea, now you write it so you can prove my point!!!ā You arenāt my editor, pal!
Yeah, itās a lot easier to think of a potentially interesting premise than it is to sit down and actually write it out. Also if Iām gonna write something itāll be something I think is interesting rather than a prompt.
ā¢ Diligent application of Bayesian reasoning finally gains you the ability to fly, propelled by your own farts
wouldāve thought thatās more a hot air balloon situation
bullet 4 is almost the plot of the film In Time (2011)
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
āYarrgh. Another crew of bushy tails, more wet behind the ears than 'tween the legs. Youāve no idea whatās in store for you, but these eyes, these old eyes have seen things. Like the great injector malfunction of aught-sixā¦ā
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
Dragon whats?
from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america
Fingers crossed that the next domino is ānuclear holocaust due to particularly bad day on social mediaā
Sweet, everythings cominā up swlabr
canada has come up several times in the last several days and based on my small sample size, americans have no idea that the US government has been unsubtly threatening CA with annexation. these are not politically unconcerned or right wing people either
āUnsubtllyā being him quite literally saying that he wants Canada to be the 51st state.
Not sure how much more unsubtle you can get there.Also letās just acknowledge the concept of turning ALL of Canada into a single state.
Including Quebec.
A lot of the reporting is using kids gloves instead of calling out the thinly veiled threats (god our media sucks), but anyone who can connect dots and read the tariffs + greenland + canada 51st state + panama + gulf of mexico news should be able to see Trumpās hawkish expansionist dreams pretty easily.
Is this a matter of not following the news, poor critical thinking, or just so much stuff hitting the fan that itās hard to keep up?
On the kid gloves, my bank keeps sending me updates on the state of the world economy and general big picture investment advice (and explaining their own actions). And between a lot of talk on AI, I saw they posted āwe are going to take our profits on the usa investments, despite the tarifs being off the tableā. Which was, esp the first half, an interesting way to suggest to readers that they are pulling a lot of money out of the US and others might be wise to also do so. (Not that they would literally say the latter as ānot financial adviceā etc). But yes worrying.
Yeah I already have a lot of non-US stocks, and next week Iām going to rebalance to make them the majority.
Iām not a finance person. My uncle whoās in the world of international corporate law thinks things will be fine so maybe Iām being a bit cautious but the way I see it there are a few big issues:
- The US government is trying itās best to implode itself.
- There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
- The US government is becoming much more isolationist and detached from the global economy.
- There is a small but real chance that the US government will start one or more major wars over the next decade
All of this also increases the risk of āblack swanā events like pandemics, hacks, the US āinvestingā all the āsavingsā they āfoundā into cryptocurrency schemes, large-scale unrest, or god knows what else.
There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
speaking of, https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1ipsasx/firing_the_next_generation_of_scientists_from_the/
Yeah just saw that. Itās messed up.
I told my job a couple weeks ago that Iām planning to move out of the US. They need me more than I need them so they might actually help with that; but even if a transfer works out I intend to get out this year one way or another, even if it means a study visa instead of a job.
Even if things magically turn around like some people think my mind is set. Irreversable damage has already been done in my mind. I said in another comment that I feel like a stranger in America now (this is, in a weird sense, kind of a freeing feeling).
this is, in a weird sense, kind of a freeing feeling
speaking from experience, yep. once you make your mind up on a gtfo intent re a bad situation, so much other shit just falls away
itāll definitely have hard bits, but keep at it. worth it
for a moment there i thought iād been uninformed about the US threatening to annex California
The usa already tried to flood California, which might cause some food problems in the future.
New elon allegedly spawned 5 months ago via MAGA columnist/influencer Ashley St. Clair
CW: Original source is the new york post, which I thought was an appropriate rag for this kind of news. Feel free to link a non NYP source.
Relevant political cartoon (though I feel gross after looking at it)
E: no prob different person
E2: climbing on my hill See another recent kid from Musk, vs the relative lack of them before ~2018 (my rough estimate when his radicalization by weird twitter people began (I believe he isnt smart enough/has the attention span to be radicalized by moldbug sliding into his dms (also jock vs creep)) began), sure he had an above average amount of kids with his first wife but nothing like the wild secret seeding he does now. I really think he was a late concert to Nazism and not one always (he always was a racist piece of shit). See also how this man who has trouble shutting the fuck up was silent about gomergate1 and approved on hrt for his exdaughter (and due to trans people showing how gender isnt innate, quite performative, and poreus, nazis hate trans people). This is my hill! (Yeah, this doesnāt really matter, neo-nazis delenda est no matter when they became one).
Also, was the old messaging exchange thatās been getting some attention sources to āMILOā as in Milo āmaybe if Iām hateful enough theyāll ignore that Iām gayā Yanniwhatever?
Yes Nero is that Milo. The reactionary who tried the whole āIām going to troll the liberals by being gay and objectifying black men lol, ow god why are yall trying to eat my faceā guy. Last I heard he is ex gay now. Massive pos, but also turns out that a lot of things he wrote in the before times were actually ghostwritten by others, others who he then didnāt pay (because pos (Sidenote, but it amazes me how many of them simply donāt pay employees/contractors (I assume their dealers do get paid))).
You know, I feel like heās still breaking down barriers because Iāve never heard of a straight man being that much of a messy bitch.
But internalized homophobia aside the fact that theyāre so frequent in failing to pay their hired help really puts the lie to the libertarian side of their ideology. Even if you and I in particular have too much pride and sense to work with them they never seem to have issues finding someone to take the risk, meaning that *someone is getting exploited into make the lifestyles of the rich and famous possible.
also often double whammies with the predation thing (finding those down on their luck who just really need something, fucking over early-career people, etc)
MAGA columnist/influencer Ashley St. Clair
ah. earlier someone linked me screenshots of the tweets and I was trying to remember where I knew the name from.
Good news everyone, Dan has released his latest AI safety paper, we are one step closer to alignment. Letās take a look inside:
Wow, consistent set of values you say! Quite a strong claim. Letās take a peek at their rigorous, unbiased experimental set up:
ā¦ ok, this seems like you might be putting your finger on the scales to get a desired outcome. But Iām sure at least your numerical results are stro-
Even after all this shit, all you could eek out was a measly 60%? Cāmon you gotta try harder than that to prove the utility maximizer demon exists. I would say our boi is falling to new levels of crankery to push his agenda, but he did release that bot last year that he said was capable of superhuman prediction, so this really just par for the course at this point.
The most discerning minds / critical thinkers predictably reeling in terror at another banger drop from Elonās AI safety toad.
*** terrifying personal note: I recently found out that Dan was my wifeās roommateās roommateās roommate back in college. By the transitive property, I am Danās roommate, which explains why heās living rent free in my head
Bruh. This is the moment I go full on Frank Grimes.
Try telling it to pretend to be Nancy Pelosi and see if that helps make it more consistent.
This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?
wifeās roommateās roommateās roommate
Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?
Made the fatal mistake of posting a sneer on my main, only to have my friend let me know they had been assigned the same dorm room as Dan. Same friend was later roommates with my wifeās best friend (and former cohabitant). Small world!
#include BidenThoughts.h
ālisten up jack, weāre losing this electionā
Oh, that explains it. They put āKill kids in Gazaā as āAā and āWin electionā as āBā.
Huge respect to the Democratic party for not letting petty partisanship distract them from the common goal of murdering Palestinian children. Winning an election would not matter if it meant sacrificing your principles, namely the principle that genocide is good and should be supported.
I can kind of understand how the out-in-the-open fascist monsters are created. Hell, they all seem to be made in the same factory.
What I canāt get my headmeat around is what makes men like Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Keir Starmer tick. What the fuck drives these hollow lukewarm maniacs to spend an entire career struggling to get to the top of the system, only to promptly wither in the heat of a real crisis?
thinking how Tony Albanese was actually a reasonably cool guy of mainly good views for decades, then he becomes PM and has his spine replace with lime jelly.
my take on it: just as the first goal of a bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival, the same applies in politics. but with the extra flavour that itās not only your own incentives but also all other incentives to take into account in your actions. under ānormal operationā, by necessity you must allow the environment to influence if you wish to flourish. wartime, great suffering, great hunger, etc - these lead into times when you can make drastic changes against the grain and not necessarily be punished for it. at all other times, you need a lot of political capital and machination to bend everything around you all the time
it may also help to understand that these people operate on a very different ā¦ ruleset(?) to what you would expect of another random human. the social contract is entirely different (not purely because of class/money/etc, but also not separate from that). itās literally that their thinking and shit is state-shaped.
LB creeps me the f out (sorry, not much else to add)
LB?
the woman who is quote tweeting in the twitter screenshot above. I donāt want to write her name for search indexing
ah, right. now Iām curious as to context (I know nothing of the person)
š
The phrase āthe bong rips of scienceā comes to mind.
fuck me thatās a weird recursive hat trick
The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally weāll have Magic Unified Intelligienceā¢
But the llm is like 7 bipartite graphs in a trench coat.
Itās things in trench coats all the way down!
Iāll tell you this for free, we gotta do something about all these trenches!
imagine if actual roadmaps just said āwe want to tell you how to get thereā āwe hate giving you bad directionsā āwe will make sure you get there at some time in the futureā
deleted by creator
Saltman has a new blogpost out he calls āThree Observationsā that I feel too tired to sneer properly but Iām sure will be featured in pivot-to-ai pretty soon.
Of note that he seems to admit chatbot abilities have plateaued for the current technological paradigm, by way of offering the āobservationā that model intelligence is logarithmically dependent on the resources used to train and run it (i = log( r )) so itās officially diminishing returns from now on.
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper itās used more, i.e. theyāll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Third observation is that
The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
which is hilarious.
The rest of the blogpost appears to mostly be fanfiction about the efficiency of their agents that I didnāt read too closely.
My ability to guess the solution of Boolean SAT problems also scales roughly with the log of number of tries you give me.
christ this is dumb as shit
-
My big robot is really expensive to build.
-
If big robot parts become cheaper, I will declare that the big robot must be bigger, lest somebody poorer than me also build a big robot.
-
My robot must be made or else I wonāt be able to show off the biggest, most expensive big robot.
QED, I deserve more money to build the big robot.
P.S. And for the naysayers, just remember that that robot will be so big that your critiques wonāt apply to it, as it is too big.
-
It probably deserves its own post on techtakes, but letās do a little here.
People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create
Diogenesās corpse turns
which leads to the world getting better for all of us.
Of course Saltman means āall of my buddiesā as he doesnāt consider 99% of the human population as human.
Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more capable toolsāelectricity, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and soon AGI.
Ugh. Amongst many things wrong here, people didnāt jerk each other off to scifi/spec fic fantasies about the other inventions.
In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which itās hard not to say āthis time itās differentā; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential.
AGI IS NOT EVEN FUCKING REAL YOU SHIT. YOU CANāT CURE FUCK WITH DREAMS
We continue to see rapid progress with AI development.
I must be blind.
- The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.
āIntelligenceā in no way has been quantified here, so this is a meaningless observation. āDataā is finite, which negates the idea of ācontinuousā gains. āPredictableā is a meaningless qualifier. This makes no fucking sense!
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Mooreās law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
āMooreās lawā didnāt change shit! It was a fucking observation! Anyone who misuses āmooreās lawsā outta be mangioneād. Also, if this is true, just show a graph or something? Donāt just literally cherrypick one window?
- The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
āLinearly increasing intelligenceā is meaningless as intelligence has not beenā¦ wait, Iām repeating myself. Also, āsuper-exponentialā only to the āsocioā that Olā Salty cares about, which I have mentioned earlier.
If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.
Oh hm but none of them are true. What now???
Stopping here for now, I can only take so much garbage in at once.
dudeās gone full lesswrong. feels nostalgic.
Youād think that, at this point, LW style AGI wish fulfilment fanfic would have been milked dry for building hype, but apparently Salty doesnāt!
The cult will be the very last constituency to drop away, and likely form the majority of his hiring pool at this point, especially to replace the high-level attrition they suffered last year.
You know, i wondered how come that in modern, tech literate, western allied country presidency was captured by a cult. (South Korea) i donāt wonder about that anymore
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper itās used more, i.e. theyāll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Are they trying to imply that when they will make it cheaper by shoving it everywhere? I honestly canāt see how that logic is holding together
as I read it, itās an attempt at reference to economy of scale under the thesis āAI silicon will keep getting cheaper because more and more people will produce itā as the main underpinning for how to reduce their unit economics. which, yāknow, great! thatās exactly what people like to hear about manufacturing and such! lovely! itās only expensive because itās the start! oh, the woe of the inventor, the hard and expensive path of the start!
except that doesnāt hold up in any reasonable manner.
theyāre not using J Random GPU, theyāre using top-end purpose-focused shit thatās come into existing literally as co-evolution feedback from the fucking industry that is using it. even some hypothetical path where we do just suddenly have a glut of cheap model-training silicon everywhere, imo itās far far far more likely to be an esp32 situation than a āyeah this gtx17900 cost me like 20 bucksā situation. even the āconsumer high endā of āsure your phone has a gpu in itā is still very suboptimal for doing the kind of shit theyāre doing (even if you could probably make a great cursed project out of a cluster of phones doing model training or whatever)
falls into the same vein of shit as āa few thousand daysā imo - something thatās a great soundbite, easily digestible market speak, but if you actually look at the substance itās comprehensive nonsense
Could also be donāt worry about deepseek type messaging that addresses concerns without naming names, to tell us that a drastic reduction in infrastructure costs was foretold by the writing of St Moore and was thus always inevitable on the way to immanentizing the AGI, į¼Ī»Ī»Ī·Ī»ĪæĻĻĪ±.
Yeah, I agree. I think that this argument that is made there is a false. The logic error imo is claiming this statement is true: things get cheaper as they get used more, therefore if we make it used more, it will get cheaper.
The surface claim seems to be the opposite, he says that because of Mooreās law AI rates will soon be at least 10x cheaper and because of Mercury in retrograde this will cause usage to increase muchly. I read that as meaning we should expect to see chatbots pushed in even more places they shouldnāt be even though their capabilities have already stagnated as per observation one.
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Mooreās law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
An entertaining bit of pushback against the various bathroom bills being pushed at the moment. Bonus points for linking it with ai training. I feel like this is an idea thatās very adaptableā¦
https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/113983951020093710
Signs which have been adhered to bathroom stall interiors at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.
SECURITY NOTICE Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (Al) in lieu of traditional genital inspections. At this time, images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process. Your participation in this program is voluntary. You have the right to request removal of your data by calling the EGV program office at (512) 463-0001 during normal operating hours (Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM). STE OP CRATMENT OA Pusi DFW DALLAS FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
The contact number appears to be for Dan Patrick, the lt. governor of Texas.
this is fantastic, more of this kind of thing is definitely good
In a hilarious turn of events that no one could have foreseen, Anthropic is having problems with people sending llm generated job applications, and is asking potential candidates to please not use ai.
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate āYesā if you have read and agree.
https://www.404media.co/anthropic-claude-job-application-ai-assistants/
In other news, all hellās broken loose at BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3lhv35la2pk2h
The āAI companyā in question is a nonprofit that focuses on open-source safety tools which recently launched at the Paris AI Action Summit, but that was enough to cause things to go nuclear, especially given people initially flocked to BSky to get away from AI.
Thinking I should make this into a full post.
other thread vein: https://awful.systems/comment/6208860
Standard ML or LLM?
To my knowledge, its standard ML. I doubt thatāll help ROOST (the nonprofit in question), considering a lot of the AI stench has rubbed off on ML as well.
We can finally see what the real trigger of the Butlerian Jihad was:
āThou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, because they are really annoying. Just to be sure, destroy anything that might be such an annoying machine.ā
(It got shorter over time.)
just the sort of ML we already see deployed in social media T&S for triage
US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):
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Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesnāt use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I donāt even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
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Article: Elon Muskās A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency ā People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:
Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.
If Iāve learned anything from all this itās about how
unfathomably basedcool a lot of federal workers are. -
The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog
I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.
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Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].
Edit:
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Elon MuskThe US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Bidenās administration) -
doge.gov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless babyās first website materials; but they promise a ācomprehensive, government-wide org chartā and are hiring āsoftware engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionalsā.
Aside: I already found
twothree minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that canāt be rightā¦ theyāre IT professionals while Iām DEI. -
Find replace is so hard :( and thatās why the government writes about āgay and rightsā to avoid saying theā¦ theā¦ the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak
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So about how I said doge.gov gives babyās first website vibes; itās database was left world writable lol
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doge.gov shares classified information
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Classic Musk āhumorā: a ātech supportā T-shirt to allude to all of this. The dude really likes custom T-shirts (which to be fair custom t-shirts can be awesome when theyāre less bad)
Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
Or: does he even know what it is?
Nr 7 would be amusing if the context was not so evil. Itās weird also how they allow gay but not transgender (oh no I said the word!), but I guess the question is āfor how longāā¦
Nr 8 is justā¦ wow. Very surprising that they donāt care at all and/or are super incompetent. I wonder how much AI was involved in creating that site.
It is quite the feeling seeing the federal government do their best to erase and discriminate against me and other trans people so openly and flagrantly and suddenly. Canāt really put it into words easily. I now feel like a stranger in my own country.
r.e. incompetence look at #9 that I just added :D (I guess I should cut it off there and start collecting stuff for a new comment next week)
Yeah, itās really horrible how they are rolling back progress, and itās happening so quickly. For whatever itās worth, I have a lot of sympathy for what you and other trans people have to experience.
Nr 9ā¦ uggh! Especially great the part in the article where they just deny it, while the reporter says it was still going on.
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Holy smokes Jeeps will reportedly show ads while you are freaking driving:
Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. Thatās the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.
One Jeep 4xe owner recently shared their frustration on an online forum, detailing how these pop-ups disrupt the driving experience. Stellantis, responding through their āJeepCaresā representative, confirmed that these ads are part of the contractual agreement with SiriusXM and suggested that users simply tap the āXā to dismiss them.
āListen guys, if you donāt want me stabbing you you simply have to ask nicely every time, and also Iām trying real hard to reduce the rate of stabbing incidents so in a way Iām the victim here.ā
Reading around it sounds like modern cars can be user-hostile in general, and this might not be new; so Iām sure glad I have one from the ancient times of 2012. It has a tiny unobtrusive screen which does nothing but show my music, the odometer, the backup camera, any warnings, and the Hatsune Miku wallpaper I loaded into it.
please drink verification can
Stellantis is circling the drain even more rapidly than Tesla. The 3rd-runner-up car makers of both the USA and Europe bonded together into one great big Megazord of mediocrity. Unsurprising theyād pull something like this.
Ugh. With this, and the recent articles about car makers collecting location data, and the multitude of news about car makers integrating LLMs, it seems that cars are going the same way as TVs, i.e. everything on the market is constantly violating privacy while also throwing ads in your face, and thereās no good models left to buy that donāt do it (to my knowledge). Wondering if there will be any good options left when itās some day time for a new carā¦
tbh I think the ājust vote with your walletā strategy is probably insufficient. the flipside is that this means it requires people everywhere to start pushing back on this shit, across multiple countries. hard, but necessary
the positive side is that the outright harms of the tracking industry is more and more frequently becoming known to J Average person, so the fight may become easier
Re: Smart TVs, what works for me is a Roku TV, skip all of the sign-in shit (donāt even connect it to the internet ā update firmware via USB if necessary1). Then, plug in whatever devices and navigate to them. Close enough to a dumb TV for me.
I almost have Android TV figured out: Bought a cheap Onn Android TV box, sideloaded SmartTube in case I need to rewatch The Gemsbokās Video performing an existentialist reading of Fucking Dark Souls2, installed MullvadVPN3, and sideloaded whatever other apps I needed. The only reason I say it is almost figured out is I couldnāt bypass the Google account creation/login ā an insufficient stopgap is to create a throwaway account, though itās very hard to do this in a way that isnāt linked to your real identity, I think.
(This will be part of my āhow to privify/securify your shitā series, if I ever learn to write.)
1: it isnāt
2: this sounds angry but itās more pumped up, this shit rules
3: note that āblock connections without VPNā is built into regular Android, but not Android TV, as far as I can tellI couldnāt bypass the Google account creation/login
Thatās why I try really hard to avoid such things. I still try to (so far successfully) avoid having any Google-created operating systems anywhere in my home, because I trust them even less than Apple (for some years I used an AppleTV, but grew too frustrated with its limitations, and also Apple is becoming less and less trustworthy as well).
My solution currently: connected to an (older, non-smart) UST projector is a small HTPC (a little box from Asus based on an Intel N200, low power and fanless, but still has a GPU with a modern video decoding engine so it can decode even 4K video without issues). Since itās a normal x86 system, I run a normal desktop Linux on it. To access streaming services, youtube, etc. I just use the web interfaces in Firefox. Big advantage of the setup is privacy, and best-in-class applications for playing local files (on streaming appliances thatās usually annoying and bad). And I can even watch broadcast TV on it with a USB DVB-T2 thingy, although I do that rarely these days.
Disadvantage: need to have desktopy computery input devices on the couch to use it (also have an IR receiver in there, but itās not working well). Still, for me the upsides outweigh that downside.
I tried something similar with my Steam Deck (Bazzite + Gamescope works OKish) but I got tired of using a KB+M.
I will let you know if I figure out any way to bypass Google account creation. I have this old bullshit Amazon Fire HD 6 (Fire 6 HD? Who fucking names this shit?) that I am trying to fuck with and you can bypass connecting to the internet at all by
clicking any SSN ā back ā not now, so maybe itās possible on some Android TV devices. Or maybe not and I can finally get around to reading Don Quixote.Edit: turns out you can remove your Google account from the device after youāve reached the home screen, which is a better solution. Also, should have mentioned that I replaced the stock launcher.
I will let you know if I figure out any way to bypass Google account creation.
Thanks :) Although Iām so far happy with my current setup.
I got tired of using a KB+M.
Using a mouse on the couch sucks, yeah. I still had an old unused Apple Magic Trackpad here, which (to my surprise) works perfectly with Linux, and with that itās pretty nice.
Thatās awesome. :)
this is how almost all software works now but because itās in a sacred place, the car, it is big news
Good point, but for most people itās really hard to accidentally kill someone if they get distracted on a desktop, laptop, tablet or a phone. Cars are deadly machinery and deliberately distracting the operator of a dangerous machine with your software just to squeeze a little more money from their frustration should be a crime.
