this post was submitted on 13 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] 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

here’s the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:

New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here's a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don't have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won't be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.

there’s a (mid) joke here about how a boy who’s obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics

and who wouldn’t trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:

After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

this guy's information diet is 90% recycled memes by volume, isn't it

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

New piece from The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date

The full piece is worth a read, but the conclusion's pretty damn good, so I'm copy-pasting it here:

All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (3 children)

apparently those qualcomm NPUs (the "AI assist" chips in the copilot(?) laptops) aren't very good

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thus leading to this sneer on HN. I'm quoting it in entirety; click through for Poe's Law responses.

I was telling someone this and they gave me link to a laptop with higher battery life and better performance than my own, but I kept explaining to them that the feature I cared most about was die size. They couldn't understand it so I just had to leave them alone. Non-technical people don't get it. Die size is what I care about. It's a critical feature and so many mainstream companies are missing out on my money because they won't optimize die size. Disgusting.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

gonna have to ship this person a 20d100 kit. maybe custom woodgrain? show some thought, y'know

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

The what in the what now?

What a terrible day to tech.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago

non processing units

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

inference-tasks focused coprocessor

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

cope rocessor

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It really is incredible how bad twitter got to make me root for the company that thinks DID is good protocol design and that was started by Jack Dorsey.

But heck it I'm (cautiously) rooting for Bluesky.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This sadly has caused my login problems to reappear on bsky. No idea what they are doing with their service, but I'm having regular issues with the site. Also seems 'downforeveryoneorjustme' enshittified. (the image is showing a part of the site which is now an advertisement for some AI bullshit chatbot/imagegenerator everything aislop roleplay thing). (seems to be fixed now, but wow did bsky have weird issues for me).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

looks like the name server is getting hammered

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

Molly White reports on Kamala Harris's recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.

VP Harris's press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.

Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected

[...]

Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.

More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.

Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.

"regulation" here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don't live in a sensible world.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Presented, without comment, this book cover:

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Blockchain Technology and Digital Twin for Smart Hospitals

(found on the social medias, the books' website)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.

This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

the upside of it listing a pile of author names: one can go look up their published works, and add them to crank trackers if necessary (seems likely)

the ToC is some fantastical fucking nonsense

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

this is one hell of a hat trick

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

only needs a quantum chapter somewhere in there for bonus scoring round..

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

He also put 'everything you post is now training data for ais' in his tos apparently. So nightshade poison those images and start building a following on other sites artists. (And as a non artist, reminder to self to like and repost more artists I like).

E: quick source

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

This is a license for stalkers & abusers ! No surprise from someone like Elon I suppose

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

my bet: tweets that came to felon's attention which he couldn't view because the poster had block felon

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I’m really really not happy about this. There is one person I’ve been trying to keep out for the last few years and now they can come crawl all my fucking posts?? And report my account!?

Edit: apparently being protected should offer me some protection still.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago

fig. 1: how awful.systems works

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

saw this via a friend earlier, forgot to link. xcancel

socmed administrator for a conf rolls with liarsynth to "expand" a cropped image, and the autoplag machine shits out a more sex-coded image of the speaker

the mindset of "just make some shit to pass muster" obviously shines through in a lot of promptfans and promptfondlers, and while that's fucked up I don't want to get too stuck on that now. one of the things I've been mulling over for a while is pondering what a world (and digital landscape) with a richer capability for enthusiastic consent could look like. and by that I mean, not just more granular (a la apple photo/phonebook acl) than this current y/n bullshit where a platform makes a landgrab for a pile of shit, but something else entirely. "yeah, on my gamer profile you can make shitposts, but on academic stuff please keep it formal" expressed and traceable

even if just as a thought experiment (because of course there's lots of funky practical problems, combined with the "humans just don't really exist that way" effort-tax overhead that this may require), it might inform about some avenues of how to to go about some useful avenues on how to go about handling this extremely overt bullshit, and informing/shaping impending norms

(e: apologies for semi stream of thought, it's late and i'm tired)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I don't know what's worse, that or some of the weird twitter responses it's getting

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I can also hear Timnit Gebru wailing in despair all the way from my house, because this is exactly the kind of AI-reinforced bias that she was talking about while everyone was arguing about whether to listen to the doom cult. These are not theoretical problems with the technology; they are fully extant and easily demonstrable. The more these systems are integrated into processes that effect actual people the more often we'll see this kind of thing happen.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

why not both

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

25085 N + Oct 15 GitHub ( 19K) Your free GitHub Copilot access has expired

tinyviolin.bmp

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