Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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. A lot of people didnāt survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my accountās cake day, too, so thatās cool.)
Very impressed with this comment from the creator of the Zig programming language, regarding dealing with AI slop submissions, and generally about LLMs for coding.
I should look into Zig again! Technically, Iāve always leaned more towards Rust, because I like its more uncompromising approach to safety, while Zig always seemed to me a bit more middle-of-the-road on that. But Iāve been disappointed about how wide-spread LLM usage has become in Rust circles, I fear that its culture might tip over in favor of slop. (But itās not there yet and I hope it wonāt happen!)
Anyway, Iām ordering the āIntroduction to Zigā bookā¦
I was taught to take off every Zig, not install them! Clearly it was a more innocent time.
Wow, I also now found the migrating to codeberg post. I should revisit Zig.
And the correct policy regarding āAIā, too. Viva Zig
Re datacenters in space:
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862222
Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170
Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435):
it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sunās power
We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sunās power. A few trillionths per year.
SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
Truly a conundrum worthy of the XXI century
Very much āsweaty guy hovering over two buttonsā
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
The leaps in logic are so idiotic āhe managed to land a rocket up right, so maybe he can pull it off!ā (as if Elon personally made that happen, or as if a engineering challenge and fundamental thermodynamic limits are equally solvable). This is despite multiple comments replying with back of the envelope calcs on energy generation and heat dissipation of the ISS and comparing it to what you would need for even a moderately sized data center. Or even the comments that are like āmaybe there is a chanceā, as if it is wiser to express uncertaintyā¦
1,604 comments jfc
The headline alone is worthy of upvoting. About halfway through the article, the author includes an embedded YouTube video of the Dilberito Flash game. Made me reflect that 20 years ago, they might simply have directly embedded the game itself. And contemplate what the Web might look like if/when external YouTube embedding craps out.
And goddamn:
his former syndicate, publisher, and professional organizations have all declined to pay tribute or even acknowledge his passing.
I didnāt realize it was quite that harsh, but so it goes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
OT: paying the cat taxā¦again. Please ignore the ash on Hectorās head, its an ongoing mystery where thats been coming from.
You can basically tell their personalities from the photo.
Tangentially on topic:
Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! Iāll likely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and Iām hopeful that itāll win all the awards.
Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:
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In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol
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Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.
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Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.
@o7___o7 @techtakes Thatās why Iām fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.
I reread the last couple of āmain lineā laundry files books before I dived into the latest. The complete capture of the US government by The Sleeperās minions tracks whatās actually happened since in the US I had a panic attack and needed a day or two to calm down.
Same thing happening in the UK now. I can t think of anywhere safe to hide.I hear ya. I mean, Strossās George Clooney stood and fought the horrors, while ours ran away to France. (The book really captured the unique American flavor of High Weirdness and the stickiness of Amercaās belief in its own mythos, didnt it though?)
In the here and now, I try to remind myself that theyāre the ones who suck and that they should hide.
When Woke 2 comes weāre going to be insuffferable.
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once again, the facade of the āwhoops, bad companyā falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask
transcript
a quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: āSo whatās the deal with this ghastly woman again? Sheās a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?ā
the quoted tweet by aella reads: āThereās apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?ā
also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if itās a sock
robin hanson blocked me for referring to him as aella with tenure. now i think that heās ghislaine maxwell with tenure
āpro-billionaireā sorry I just threw up in my mouth a little. Also the billionaires are the ones rushing to create the thing so many rationalists claim is an existential risk, why the fuck would you support them??
Yeah, @XiWellWisher going up against Aella on X, The Everything App is well into late-SNL stages of unfunny parody
i donāt find that name too strange, itās a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth
Bruh
Ryan Mac:
Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.
We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.
For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.
Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.
Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantirās chairman and tells Epstein there is āno need to rush.ā This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.
Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thielās VC funds.
One of @ering.bsky.socialās great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the āopticsā of telling founders that Epstein was involved.
So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.
At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.
[ā¦]
While reporting this, I had something happen thatās never happened. A comms rep for one of the coās disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAIās chatbot.
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AIās say so.
I see that Silicon Valley has transcended AGI technology* and can now execute NP-complete** problems.
* A Guy in India
** Nationals from the Philippines, CompletelyWAYMO exec admits under oath cars in the US have āhuman operatorsā based in Philippines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClPDbwql34oEnjoyed this piece from Mission Local on San Franciscoās āMarch for Billionairesā yesterday.
Choice excerpts:
Despite the San Francisco locale, a participant said the event had āgrassrootsā origins at a ālittle rationalist restaurant get togetherā in a āgroup houseā on Shattuck Avenue, subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies.
Mission Local contributor Benjamin Wachs coined a term for an event in which media observers outnumber participants: a panopticonference. This was close to that. Those in attendance did their best to field questions from the barrage of journalists that backed them into a tree.
This is where Annie, a young transgender woman who attended the protest in a T-shirt that said āIām in a polycule with Aella,ā first met Kauffman. An impromptu debate ensued, with Annie āaggressively defending billionaires.ā It was, participants concluded, worthy of a larger forum.
āPeople are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,ā she said. āWe are beautiful. Weāre smart. Weāre strongā¦ We are supporting the billionaires, here.ā
A polycule with Aella, otherwise known as a nightmare fuck rotation
āPeople are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,ā
Remember when Rationalists pretended to care about truth, steelmanning, ideological turning tests etc.
(Also implying that billionaires are strong and attractive is funny)
subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies
Yall still are radical hippies. Some hippies just love the boot.
California is, I believe, the only state to give health insurance to people who come into the country illegally,ā Kauffman said nervously. āI think we probably should not be providing that.
Rationalism, the empathy removal training center.
āIt is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,ā Annie said. āJust like Germany does to the extremist organizations.ā
Well, Germany certainly did excel at removing classes of people from society
lol.
Her political awakening, she added, was watching the press āconstantly pump out obviously fake informationā against Trump during the 2016 election instead of reporting on the āactual abhorrent views he holds.ā
Converted by Scott. (That āpeople are saying I was wrong but actually I was rightā disclaimer aged worse than the post).
gag. going full mask off now
Did any actual billionaires show up to press their case, or was it all just cronies?
from bsky photos looks like entire gathering was 30 people. t h i r t y p e o p l e i might have counted some reporter or someone passing by randomly by accident
Scum.
edit: reasonably certain annie is annieposting from tpot.
annieposting
I assumed billionaires could afford better signs. Were all her EAs on leave that week?
Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11ās AI overload ā scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift
- recall might be rethought, again
- copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) āunder reviewā
- no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows
Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if youāre smart what happens after the launch is someone elseās problem. I wouldnāt be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately āscaled backā.
R3call
Buisness plan: daily reminders to Recall the Recall Recall. Itās memento mori for CEOs as a service.
Does (deservedly) mercilessly bullying Slopya Nadella actually work?
But why are we talking about some AI agent platform in the Urbit newsletter? Naturally because we think, Urbit fixes this.
As a matter of fact, Tlon is already working on this with their Openclaw Plugin for Tlon Messenger. It is currently in an early adopter phase, but they expect to provide an instance of Openclaw with every ship that they host for their users.
but of course
desperately trying to latch themselves onto the coattails of whatever passes for cool among nerds these days
The common clay of the new west:
transcription
Twitter post from @BenjaminDEKR
āOpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you arenāt careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking āis it daytime yet?ā every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude āno, itās still night.ā Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The āHeartbeatā cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, (āremind me tomorrow to get milkā)ā
Continuation of twitter post
ā1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied āHEARTBEAT_OKā 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:
- Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
- 25 Ć $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
- Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking āis it daytime yet?ā every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude āno, itās still night.ā The problem is:
- Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
- Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
- Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking Thatās $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.ā
There are other posts of the same story that include the original ādevā learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.
https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226
Thereās also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150
Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:
- Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it mustāve done a bit more than that to get banned)
- Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
- Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.
Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, itās obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. Thatās not sustainable.
I hadnāt realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.
$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit theyāre eating is good?
As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.
How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit theyāre eating is good?
They think itās just that theyāre early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, whoās to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.
I guess I can check back in six months to see how theyāre doing ā¦ wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, werenāt they? Thatās a bummer.
Well, sure, but that was six months ago.
Tired: itās required to taste
Wired: itās an acquired taste
theyāre already pivoting to the narrative that ālocal models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run themā
and it will be trivially affordable to run them
ON WHAT HARDWARE BEN, DDR2 SCAVENGED FROM JUNKYARDS???
i still think that lots of people damaged by chatbots will stop in their tracks when this vc money burning charade ends, they wonāt be able to set up it all locally because chatbots brainrotted them even if it was possible in the first place
thankfully temporarily free
god I canāt wait for the subsidies to end
So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein
But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so
How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?
Similarly, whatās going on with Charles Murray (Bell Curve) ???
He converted to christianity? https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Religion-Seriously-Charles-Murray/dp/1641774851
But now supports euthanisia? https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-i-changed-my-mind-on-assisted-suicide/
Over in the epstein files, Jim Watson tried to make an intro but Murray never replied? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA00475960.pdf
Apparently heās a Quaker, so maybe thatās how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I donāt know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.
Also, looks like Harris also deliberately side-stepped the dinner bait but I donāt know how much of that was because of Chomskyās presence. Epstein tried again a year later without the Chomsky attendee name-drop, but Harris might have just not replied.
At least there are no surprises with Dawkins, even his sleazy friend Brockman seemingly finds him tiring
Glib jibes aside, I havenāt been able to bring myself to look at many of the docs that arenāt just quasi-celeb emails, the few I did see were far too much for me. Iām horrified at nearly everyone from all ideological stances on a number of different levels I never considered. I can only hope the remaining victims someday are able to find some peace, and some kind of huge systemic reform can come from this. What a vile world we live in.
being a member of the old boy club beats ideological differences.
Apparently heās a Quaker, so maybe thatās how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I donāt know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.
Quakers have a history of being anti-racist, but views on stuff like abortion and euthansia cam vary a lot. Quakerism is big on both individual conscience but also social justice and activism. Itās an interesting denomination.
Today in excellent cold opens: āI didnāt talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so Iām so healthy.ā
Either the stupidity just metastasized or China is going to try and pull a reverse star wars on the US and make them burn up an even more horrendous amount of capital to keep up with nothing.
China plans spaceābased AI data centres, challenging Muskās SpaceX ambitions (reuters)
You know what they say. Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake, as this can allow them to continue their errors and lead to their own downfall
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