this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

How do I find product-market fit for my terminators?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41825473

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Today's entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.

We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.

A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Has wordpress matt had a stroke or what? This is off-the-wall.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

25071 + Oct 12 GitHub ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon

lol

guess how soon?3 days.

oooh how I'm looking forward to frog-boiler api adjustment pricing season, there's going to be so much cope

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (8 children)

speaking of the Godot engine, here’s a layered sneer from the Cruelty Squad developer (via Mastodon):

image descriptiona post from Consumer Softproducts, the studio behind Cruelty Squad:

weve read the room and have now successfully removed AI from cruelty squad. each enemy is now controlled in almost real time by an employee in a low labor cost country

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In other news, Hindenburg Research just put out a truly damning report on Roblox, aptly titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids", and the markets have responded.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

I think Zuckeberg has been saying the silent part out loud since day one.

People just submitted it.

I don't know why.

They "trust me"

Dumb fucks

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

Can't really say I'm surprised that Mr Facebook takes this attitude. His whole fortune is built on the belief that aggregating and hosting content is more valuable than creating it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

I trained a neural network on all the ways I've said that I hate these people, and it screamed in eldritch spectra before collapsing into silence.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

As always with plagiarism, regardless of what they say they always, always, always act out of a complete disregard for the value of whatever they're ripping off.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (5 children)

i wouldn't want to sound like I'm running down Hinton's work on neural networks, it's the foundational tool of much of what's called "AI", certainly of ML

but uh, it's comp sci which is applied mathematics

how does this rate a physics Nobel??

[–] Al0neStar 22 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (6 children)

They're reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo

It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities ... but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control

😩

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

the mozilla PR campaign to convince everyone that advertising is the lifeblood of commerce and that this is perfectly fine and good (and that everyone should just accept their viewpoint) continues

We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it

try, you say? and what's your plan for when you fail, but you've lost all your values in service of the attempt?

For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.

are you fucking kidding me? "we can only be who we are if we maybe sorta listen to you while we keep doing what we wanted to do"? seriously?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.

How do we ensure that traffic safety is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? A big part of the answer is drunk driving.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the purestrain corporate non-apology that is “we should have communicated our vision effectively” when your entire community is telling you in no uncertain terms to give up on that vision because it’s a terrible idea nobody wants

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Don't know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I'm not inherently familiar with (is there a "welcome guide" of some sort somewhere I missed).

Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:

The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

I just... don't have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we'll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text "work" for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).

I hope some people watch this closely, I'm sure there's going to be some gold in this mess.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

Wikipedia's mod team definitely haven't realised it yet, but this part is pretty much a de facto ban on using AI. AI is incapable of producing output that would be acceptable for a Wikipedia article - in basically every instance, its getting nuked.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

lol i assure you that fidelitously translates to "kill it with fire"

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Welcome to the club. They say a shared suffering is only half the suffering.

This was discussed in last week's Stubsack, but I don't think we mind talking about talking the same thing twice. I, for one, do not look forward to browsing Wikipedia exclusively through pre-2024 archived versions, so I hope (with some pessimism) their disapponintingly milquetoast stance works out.

Reading a bit of the old Reddit sneerclub can help understand some of the Awful vernacular, but otherwise it's as much of a lurkmoar as any other online circlejerk. The old guard keep referencing cringe techbros and TESCREALs I've never heard of while I still can't remember which Scott A we're talking about in which thread.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Scott Computers is married and a father but still writes like an incel and fundamentally can't believe that anyone interested in computer science or physics might think in a different way than he does. Dilbert Scott is an incredibly divorced man. Scott Adderall is the leader of the beige tribe.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:

https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919

They're basically admitting they didn't pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.

But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The logical conclusion of normalizing "Social Media Manager" as a role in companies is that as they get better at their jobs and become more believable, the average corporate communication will trend towards 13-year old edgy shitposter. God I feel old.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

every time I get mail “even a 🤏 teensy bit like this! 🤩” from serious-company I have actual financial dealings with, a part of me dies inside

and it’s getting more goddamn frequent too

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

PC Gamer put out a pro-AI piece recently - unsurprisingly, Twitter tore it apart pretty publicly:

I could only find one positive response in the replies, and that one is getting torn to shreds as well:

I did also find a quote-tweet calling the current AI bubble an "anti-art period of time", which has been doing pretty damn well:


Against my better judgment, I'm whipping out another sidenote:

With the general flood of AI slop on the Internet (a slop-nami as I've taken to calling it), and the quasi-realistic style most of it takes, I expect we're gonna see photorealistic art/visuals take a major decline in popularity/cultural cachet, with an attendant boom in abstract/surreal/stylised visuals

On the popularity front, any artist producing something photorealistic will struggle to avoid blending in with the slop-nami, whilst more overtly stylised pieces stand out all the more starkly.

On the "cultural cachet" front, I can see photorealistic visuals becoming seen as a form of "techno-kitsch" - a form of "anti-art" which suggests a lack of artistic vision/direction on its creators' part, if not a total lack of artistic merit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Why is it always bioshock girl 😭

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj

https://mastodon.social/@Meyerweb/113267932851356871

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Earlier today, the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack, which has now been claimed by the BlackMeta hacktivist group, who says they will be conducting additional attacks.

Hacktivist group? The fuck can you claim to be an activist for if your target is the Internet Archive?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Someone shared this website with me at work and now I am sharing the horror with you all: https://www.syntheticusers.com/

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

Reduce your time-to-insight

I do not think that word means what they think it means.

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