Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
What in the sweet fuck happened here, does this count as vandalism?
Fix0red
None of those are well defined āproblemsā. An entire applied research field is not a āproblemā akin to other items on this list lik P vs NP.
Thank you for your service o7
To be clear, I canāt edit Wikipedia to save my life. Editor in this case was Elestrophe.
On this topic Iāve been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?
nope, youāve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense theyāve been crashing the instance repeatedly.
when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki
i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine
I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but itās also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasnāt even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.
Just a heads-up, I tried reading up on Iocaine and the project website is giving me the madlibs nonsense version on my phoneās browser, so I hope the version youāre planning to enable here isnāt quite as aggressive (the making.awful link is currently working for me).
Between this and Cloudflareās geolocation provider no longer saying my IPv6 address block is in Russia, Iām hopeful that my browsing experience might ever so slightly improve for a bit.
making is running the version of the configuration I intend to deploy, so if it works for you there it should (hopefully) work in prod too
is one of the source texts for the markov chain text generator our old favorite Harry Potter fan-fic?
oh you fucking know it
also all 3 parts of Das Kapital and the full text of My Immortal
Markov chains to bind the basilisk
lemmy.ml by way of hexbearās technology comm: The Economist is pushing phrenology. Everything old is new again!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38830374
[ā¦]
EDIT: Apparently based off something published by fucking Yale:
Reminds me of the ātech-bro invents revolutionary new personal transport solution: a train!ā meme, but with racism. Iāll be over in the angry dome.
What does it tell about a scientist that they see a wide world of mysteries to dive into and the research topic they pick is āare we maybe missing out on a way we could justify discriminating against people for their innate characteristics?ā
āFor people without access to credit, that could be a blessingā fuck off no one is this naive.
I remember back before I realized just how full of shit Siskind was I used to buy into some of the narrative re: ācredentialismā so I understand the way theyāre trying to sell it here. But even extending far more benefit than mere doubt can justify weāre still looking at yet another case of trying to create a (pseudo)scientific solution to a socially constructed problem. Like, if the problem is that bosses and owners are trying to find the best candidate we donāt need new and exciting ways to discriminate; they could just actually invest in a process for doing that, but trying to actually solve that problem would inconvenience the owning/managing classes and doesnāt create opportunities to further entrench racial biases in the system. Clearly using an AI-powered version of the punchline for āhow racist were the old timesā commentary is better.
That fuckerās going on the bitinā list.
Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.
Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raidersā themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!
Not a scream just a nice thing people might enjoy. Somebody made a funny comic about what we all are thinking about
Random screenshot which I found particularly funny (Zijn rant klopt):
Image description
Two people talking to each other, one a bald heavily bespectacled man in the distance, and the other a well dressed skullfaced man with a big mustache. Conversation goes as follows:
āIt could be the work of the French!ā
āOr the Dutchā
āCould even be the British!ā
āFilthy pseudo German apes, The Dutch!ā
āThe Russā¦ā
āScum of the earth marsh dwelling Dutchā
You flatter me, I havenāt thought about any shit as cool as this in a while.
you know, if those ASML folks in dutchland werenāt quite so busy what with their EUV lasers and all that, we might not be in quite this same pickle right now,
Geweldig!
I was told repeatedly growing up that they like Canadians over there because of the whole liberation thing. Is this true?
Yes we do. Lot of Canadians gave their lives for our liberation. (not just Canadians, which is why the Trump admin removing the sign about the Black Americans at the American WW2 burial ground here has not gone over well, but also the French gave a heroic defense of Zeeland at the start of the war, and the Brits, and the Polish (they got the blame for the failure of market garden for some stupid reasons, but they jumped late even when the operation wasnāt going well, after being stalled due to the weather)).
Just saw this post on DHH, itās really good: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
If youāre not careful, one day you will wake up and find that youāve pushed away every person who ever disagreed with you.
David Hamburger-Helper
Stupid chatbots marketed at gullible christians arenāt new,
The app Text With Jesus uses artificial intelligence and chatbots to offer spiritual guidance to users who are looking to connect with a higher power.
bit this is certainly an unusual USP:
Premium users can also converse with Satan.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/tech/religious-chatbot-apps/4302361/
(via parker molloyās bluesky)
The satan thing makes a certain kind of sense. Probably catering to a bunch of different flavours of repressed: grindr republicans, covenant eyes users, speaking-in-tongues enthusiasts, etc.
The Alex Jones set makes fighting with satanists trying to seduce you to darkness look real fun and satisfying, but for some reason they only seem to approach high-profile assholes who lie about everything and never ordinary Christians! Thankfully we now have LLMs to fill the gap.
Iām being shuffled sideways into a software architecture role at work, presumably because my whiteboard output is valued more than my code š and I thought Iād try and find out what the rest of the world thought that meant.
Turns out thereās almost no way of telling anymore, because the internet is filled with genai listicles on random subjects, some of which even have the same goddamn title. Finding anything from the beforetimes basically involves searching reddit and hoping for the best.
Anyway, I eventually found some non-obviously-ai-generated work and books, and it turns out that even before llms flooded the zone with shit no-one knew what software architecture was, and the people who opined on it were basically in the business of creating bespoke hammers and declaring everything else to be the specific kind of nails that they were best at smashing.
Guess Iāll be expensing a nice set of rainbow whiteboard markers for my personal use, and making it up as I go along.
The zone has indeed always been flooded, especially since its a title that collides with āintegration architectā and other similar titles whose jobs are completely different. That being said, itās a title Iāve held before, and I really enjoyed the work I got to do. My perspective will be a little skewed here because I specifically do security architecture work, which is mostly consulting-style āhey come look at this design we made is it bad?ā rather than developing systems from scratch, but hereās my take:
Architecture is mostly about systems thinking-- youāre not as responsible for whether each individual feature, service, component etc is implemented exactly to spec or perfectly correctly, but you are responsible for understanding how theyāll fit together, what parts are dangerous and DO need extra attention, and catching features/design elements early on that need to be cut because theyāre impossible or create tons of unneeded tech debt. Speaking of tech debt, making the call about where its okay to have a component be awful and hacky, versus where v1 absolutely still needs to be bulletproof probably falls into the purvey of architecture work too. Youāre also probably the person who will end up creating the system diagrams and at least the skeleton of the internal docs for your system, because youāre responsible for making sure people who interact with it understand its limitations as well.
I think the reason so much of the advice on this sort of work is bad or nonexistent is that when you try to boil the above down to a set of concrete practices or checklists, they get utterly massive, because so much of the work (in my experience) is knowing what NOT to focus on, where you can get away with really general abstractions, etc, while still being technically capable enough to dive into the parts that really do deserve the attention.
In addition to the nice markers and whiteboard, Iād plug getting comfortable with some sort of diagramming software, if you arenāt already. Thereās tons of options, theyāre all pretty much Fine IMO.
For reading, Iād suggest at least checking out the first few chapters of Engineering A Safer World , as it definitely had a big influence on how I practice architecture.
Guess Iāll be expensing a nice set of rainbow whiteboard markers for my personal use, and making it up as I go along.
Congratulations, you figured it out! Read Clean Architecture and then ignore the parts you donāt like and youāll make it
Ugh OK I have to vent:
Iām getting pushed into more of a design role because oops my company accidentally fired or drove away all of a team of a dozen people except for me after forgetting for a few years that the code I work on is actually mission critical.
I do my best at designing stuff and delegating the implementation to my coworkers. Itās not one of my strengths but thereās enough technical debt from when I was solo-maintaining everything for a few years that I know what needs improving and how to improve it.
But none of my coworkers are domain experts, they havenāt been given enough free time for me to train them into domain experts, thereās only one of me, and the higher ups are continuously surprised that stuff is going so slow. Itās frustrating for everyone involved.
I actually wouldnāt mind architecture or design work in better circumstances since I love to chat with people; but it feels like my employer has put me in an impossible position. At the moment Iām just trying to hang in there for some health insurance reasons; but in a few years I plan to leave for greener pastures where I can go a day without hearing the word āagenticā.
A fact-generative AI, you say? https://aphyr.com/posts/398-the-future-of-fact-checking-is-lies-i-guess
TIHI
I reiterate the hope that AI slop, will eventually push us towards better sourcing of resources/articles as a society going forwards, but yikes in the meantime.
Fresh from the presses: OpenAI loses song lyrics copyright case in German court
GEMA (weird german authorsā rights management organisation) is suing OpenAI over replication of song lyrics among other stuff, seeking a license deal. Judge rules that whatever the fuck OpenAI does behind the scenes is irrelevant, if it can replicate lyrics exactly thatās unlawful replication.
One of GEMAās lawyers expects the case to be groundbreaking in europe, since the applicable rules are harmonized.
I cannot believe I am rooting for GEMA. What a weird world this has become.
A lesswronger wrote an blog post about avoiding being overly deferential, using Eliezer as an example of someone that gets overly deferred to. Of course, they canāt resist glazing him, even in the context of an blog post on not being too deferential:
Yudkowsky, being the best strategic thinker on the topic of existential risk from AGI
Another lesswronger pushes back on that and is highly upvoted (even among the doomers that think Eliezer is a genius, most of them still think he screwed up in inadvertently helping LLM companies get to where they are): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jzy5qqRuqA9iY7Jxu/the-problem-of-graceful-deference-1?commentId=MSAkbpgWLsXAiRN6w
The OP gets mad because this is off topic from what they wanted to talk about (they still donāt acknowledge the irony).
A few days later they write an entire post, ostensibly about communication norms, but actually aimed at slamming the person that went off topic: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJ89ffXrKfDyuHBzg/the-charge-of-the-hobby-horse
And of course the person they are slamming comes back in for another round of drama: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJ89ffXrKfDyuHBzg/the-charge-of-the-hobby-horse?commentId=s4GPm9tNmG6AvAAjo
No big point to this, just a microcosm of lesswrongers being blind to irony, sucking up to Eliezer, and using long winded posts about meta-norms and communication as a means of fighting out their petty forum drama. (At least us sneerclubers are direct and come out and say what we mean on the rare occasions we have beef among ourselves.)
AI researcher and known epstein associate Joscha Bach comes up several times in the latest epstein email dump. And itās uh, not good. Greatest hits include: scientific racism, bigotry freestyling about the neoteny principle, climate fascism and managed decline of āundesirable groupsā juxtaposed immediately with opining about the emotional influence of 5 visits to buchenwald. You know, just very cool stuff:
Also appearing is friend of the pod and OpenAI board member Larry Summers!
The emails have Summers reporting to Epstein about his attempts to date a Harvard economics student & to hit on her during a seminar she was giving.
https://bsky.app/profile/econmarshall.bsky.social/post/3m5p6dgmagb2a
To quote myself: Larry Summers was one of the few people Iāve ever met where a casual conversation made me want to take a shower immediately afterward. I crashed a Harvard social event when a friend was an undergrad there and I was a student at MIT, in order to get the free food, and he was there to do glad-handing in his role as university president. I had a sharp discomfort response at the lizard-brain level ā a deep part of me going on the alert, signaling āthis man is not to be trustedā in the way one might sense that there is rotten meat nearby.
I still say that the term āscientific racismā gives these fuckos too much credit. Iāve been saying ānumberwang racismā instead.
true, usually i put that term in scare quotes to emphasize its fraudulence
I always thought he had some weird pro trumpy (āanti wokeā) takes. Colour me shocked.
Gerard and Torres get namedropped in the same breath as Ziz as people who have done damage to the rationalist movement from within
LMAOU congrats David.
whatās the
u?French, perhaps.
š«š· En passant š„
I doubt Iām the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI āpopā music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or donāt, I aināt your dad).
tangent: Iāve seen people using this Bubblegum Slop (BS for short) in their social media stories. My guess is that fb/insta has started suggesting you use their slop instead of using music licensed from spotify, or something.
Via Reddit!SneerClub: āInvestorsā ādumb transhumanist ideasā setting back neurotech progress, say expertsā
Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology at McGill, said: āRich people who are fascinated with these dumb transhumanist ideasā are muddying public understanding of the potential of neurotechnology. āNeuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.ā
Fun article.
Altman, though quieter on the subject, has blogged about the impending āmergeā between humans and machines ā which he suggested would either through genetic engineering or plugging āan electrode into the brainā.
Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something thatās even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.
Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something thatās even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.
I think he exists in the tension between rationalism/transhumanism and what he can get away with selling to the public, and that necessarily means his schtick appears dumber and more incoherent. Heās essentially got two major groups heās trying to manipulate simultaneously; true believers and those who have yet to be persuaded. As he runs out of hype on the public-facing side, itās suddenly a desperate scramble to keep the true believers that make up the bulk of his workforce on board. Hence his pivot to marketing his latest and by far most important product: publicly traded shares in OpenAI.
Apropos of nothing, L. Ron Hubbard died in a dingy trailer in Creston. Ever been to Creston? Itās a long ways from Hollywood.
Pretty sure this brand of cyborg fantasizing is quite popular in mainstream rationalism, unless youāre reading something more creative in this than superbabies, brain uploading and HDMI to visual nerve for undetectable on-demand pornography.
āGenetic engineering to merge with machinesā is both a stream of words with negative meaning and something I donāt think he could come up with on his own, like the solar system sized dyson sphere or the lab leak stuff. He just strikes me as too incurious to have come across the concepts he mashes together on his own.
Simplest explanation I guess is heās just deliberately joeroganing the CEO thing and thatās about as deep as it goes.
āGenetic engineering to merge with machinesā is both a stream of words with negative meaning
Iron-compatible osteoblasts that build bio-steel! Synapses with silicon, no, make that graphene neurotransmitter filters in the gap! Cāmon, Sam, hire me and we can technobabble so much harder than this!
I must insist on cash payment, though. No stock options. And I prefer to be paid weekly.
āWhat if we figure out DNA well enough that we could edit a babby to grow NAND gate cells and put a calculator inside their body so they can do instant arithmetic like a computer?ā
I assume heās talking about that kind of stuff, but being vague so you canāt call him out if he gets details wrong.
Brb gonna go collect a trillion dollars for my startup idea that makes babies grow a malignant style parasitic twin that is actually a compute farm
These people arenāt looking for scientists, theyāre looking for alchemists
