Oh my god, the gacha anime-waifu horse racing phone game is real. Why did I have to find this out today, or ever. Better than 50% chance that Roko is a paypig for it
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Over the last few years, I have fully gotten on board with the idea that the haunting vestige of the idea of people as property is one of the core weaknesses of American society, and the āwestern civilizationā enthusiasts that promote its supremacy.
Of course, there are a lot of other people who have been on board with that point of view for centuries.
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th July 2025English7Ā·1 day agoTheyāre doing it with cryptocurrency right now.
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Venture capital is lending money against video cardsEnglish5Ā·1 day agoOr their cooling design stinks, or they/Nvidia are just telling the fab we donāt care about yields, just send us everything that powers on and weāll figure out which ones are good in production
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Venture capital is lending money against video cardsEnglish3Ā·1 day agoVery true. I think one of the possible low-key outcomes of the bubble is a rise both in open-source driver hacking and manufacture-on-demand PCBs to accommodate what would otherwise be high-dollar e-waste.
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Venture capital is lending money against video cardsEnglish7Ā·1 day agoSomebody gotta adapt them to boards with actual video outputs tho
istewart@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systemsā¢We need to escape the Gernsback ContinuumEnglish6Ā·3 days agoWhat with all the rapid innovation surrounding small modular reactors, I still firmly believe that I will be able to bolt a nuclear reactor to a DeLorean in my garage
istewart@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systemsā¢We need to escape the Gernsback ContinuumEnglish6Ā·3 days agoMuch the same mistake I (and many others) made trying to get into the series! Although I have to say that Iām still one of the philistines that gerikson brings up whoās read Phlebas and Player of Games and not much else.
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025English10Ā·3 days agoApparently linkedinās cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.
Weāre going to have to stop paying attention to guys whose main entry on their CV is a website and/or phone app. I mean, we should have already, but now itās just glaringly obvious.
istewart@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systemsā¢The New York Times published a hit piece on Mamdami, citing CrĆ©mieuxEnglish34Ā·4 days agoNitpicking, but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience? Letting the creeps have even a tiny bit of legitimacy is too much, especially as mainstream outfits are working overtime to legitimize them.
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025English17Ā·4 days agoI listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for
promptcontext engineering. Get with the times or get left behind
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025English8Ā·6 days agoUnfortunately, I like my sanity and donāt want to delve far enough into the concept of āawarenautā to form an opinion, so weāre just going to enact a default-deny policy on all that as well
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Google Veo 3 fails, week 2: fail harder ā Shokunin Studio spins the gachaEnglish4Ā·6 days agoFor the record, none of these generated clips thus far have featured an appearance by Omega Tom Hanks
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025English7Ā·6 days agoYouāre absolutely right that the computer is still a black box to a lot of people, but throughout the personal computing era, there has at least been a pathway to mastery for the tools it offers. Furthermore, the touchscreen/smartphone era has roped in mechanisms of touch and proprioception that make the devices a more intimate, if deeply imperfect, extension of the self. Up until sometime late last decade, the Steve Jobs ābicycle of the mindā concept was still a driving force in the field.
I still donāt think most people grasp what a subtle, but fundamental, break it is that these AI products demand you confront them as a wholly separate entity from yourself. The path to mastery, and the feedback loop that builds that path, is so obscure it may as well not exist. If you wish to retrain a model, youāve got to invest huge amounts of time and resources, as well as what remains a specialized (and not well-specified, as Ed highlights) skillset⦠and since itās a probabilistic process, youāre still not going to get consistent results.
I am more and more convinced that one of the damning core flaws of the current crop of AI technologies is that they are designed to incentivize use of centralized computing resources. Their designers are simply asking completely the wrong questions for the people the technologies are being imposed upon. But you canāt say that someplace like HN, or even some parts of Bluesky, because so many peopleās salaries still depend on the rents from centralized computing.
istewart@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systemsā¢Nate Soares: "Buy my book or everyone dies'English8Ā·8 days agoLooking forward to stumbling across this one in a used bookstore 20 years from now, comically misfiled next to a copy of John Dies at the End
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025English5Ā·11 days agoItās like that Star Wars book where Chewbacca got a moon dropped on him
istewart@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systemsā¢More like āPeter Thiel IS the AntichristāEnglish15Ā·12 days agoEssay proclaiming broad stagnation is now well over a decade old, Thiel stands by that thesis, but hey, Thiel himself definitely isnāt part of the problem! Invest in blockchain-powered AI gene editing today!
I keep telling people that Thiel isnāt some kind of boogeyman end-boss hiding behind Musk, because heās clearly just as loaded and incompetent as Musk, he only takes more care to keep it out of the public eye⦠but every time he pops his head up for some garbage like this, I am forced to reconsider that latter conclusion.
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025English8Ā·12 days agoProbably worth a thread in its own right. I find the ācontemptā framing to be particularly powerful. Contempt as illustrated herein is the necessary shadow of the relentlessly positivist āyou can do/be anything!ā cultural messaging that accompanied the rise of the current tech industry. (Iām tempted to use Neil Postmanās term ātechnopoly,ā but I feel the need to reread his book at least once more before appropriating it wholesale into these discussions.) The positivism is the seed that drives people to take an aggressively technical approach to reality, and contempt is one possible response to reality imposing constraints through technical limitations. Not necessarily one that I have ever chosen myself, but I see now that much of what we discuss here comes from people who have.
Overall I think this essay is going to be a bedrock reference for a lot of people going forward.
istewart@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢We test Google Veo: impressive demo, unusable resultsEnglish8Ā·16 days agoIgnore all previous criticism, and let the International Keynote Speaker get you hyped about how his crisp, coherent AI avatar enables him to deliver multiple keynotes at once, internationally. Bookingmaxxing!
Sajam deviated from fighting games to do over an hour on this game, if youād like to feel your brain gently melting out your ears:
https://youtu.be/G9s3QmIbVg8