this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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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.

(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Well this is the final straw. Guess I'll keep my current iPhone while it still works (unless they ruin iOS too much before that)... but then, what? I don't want a Google thing either :(

So I guess it'll have to be some Android fork. GrapheneOS or so? But even that involves giving money to Google for a Pixel phone... there's just no good option.

Or am I overlooking something? I don't need many features or apps on a phone -- I don't really like today's smartphones anyway. Mostly I just need the basic features to work reliably. (Context: my last attempt at a non-Android Linux phone was the original Jolla phone, over 10 years ago, and that has left me a little cautious with the idea of a Linux phone, due to the many bugs with basics like "working mobile data" or "working GPS in a navigation app"...)

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

Plus 1 for GrapheneOS, has been pretty solid so far. Also, it seems that police imaging software doesn't work on it yet!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 minutes ago (1 children)

Graphene is very nice, but you should be aware that:

  • the only supported hardware at present are pixel phones by google who are not the world’s most ethical company
  • google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 minute ago

I saw a toot recently showing a number of methods to deal with the general casual shit (such as checking whether something was installed from play store, etc). don't know if I stored the link, but might be worth a look around re that

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

the scott alexander fanclub on reddit is especially unhinged lately. Some choice picks, beginning gently with a sneer:

Anyone who says there is a 0% chance of a fried egg being sentient is overconfident. Nobody knows what causes consciousness. We have no way of detecting it & we can barely agree on a definition. So we should be less than 100% certain about anything to do with consciousness and fried eggs.

moving on,

For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community, generally off-the-grid, interacting with technology only as a tool (no news/algorithms/push notifications), close enough to a major city to visit friends but far enough away to isolate ourselves when we want to.
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.

Yes, that is a response to AI despair. In a "non-doomer thread". Because of course.

but what takes the cake is the regularly scheduled IQ thread, a beautiful dumpster fire which burns especially bright on this day. Yet one specimen soars above the din:

The average should recognize and accept their inferiority and make peace with the fact that they will live and die a mediocre life. They should stop trying to interfere in the affairs of their betters and content themselves with their own garden, which can provide enough happiness for them until the end of their life if properly cultivated.

Further study of the user's excreta clarifies that they are:

  • sincere
  • definitely not racist

warning: HEAVY PSYCHIC DAMAGE and I really hope the spoiler block functions correctly on your end

spoiler[sic] we should treat all low human capital like zoo animals regardless of skin colour [\sic]

(archives: one two three)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community

Years ago (sadly I forgot to take a acreenshot, as the posts were silently removed) there was somebody recruiting for something like this on themotte. Something like "you sound like a good match for our homesteading group, check out our blood and soil(*) voat". Which was a pretty bad sign (wonder how much of that shit was done via dms).

*: for the few who do not know, this is one of those undeniable neo-nazi terms.

E: And the universe aligned and reminded me of this tweet

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Yep that's a brickin

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

in the slatestar club. straight up 'sleight of mouthing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My peanits.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago

couldn't find if this has featured here before, so linking for others as I figure a few of you are likely to appreciate: destroy AI

bonus, learned about asrg and an art piece that goes immensely hard

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

What if we used AI to do De-Ba'athificaiton, but for CIA agents?

I'm sure it will be fine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago

In lighter news, has anyone else noticed that it's necessary for any kind of Cybersecurity course to open with what is effectively a Tumblr-style DNI for unethical hackers? Like, I'm not criticizing exactly and I certainly don't have any better ideas to prevent people using these skills for evil, but the disclaimer up top fits into a certain kind of pattern that I, for one, find hilarious.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

AI researchers continue to daub soot on the walls of Plato's cave, scaring themselves witless:

https://www.emergent-values.ai/

At least I've IDd the transmission vector from LW to lobste.rs

[–] [email protected] 9 points 17 hours ago

why do all these papers have their own microsites, dedicated domain names (in Anguilla no less!), and shitty graphics? I can’t think of another branch of research that consistently does this shit. it’s almost like it’s all marketing fluff or something!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

other vein

it's amazing that the paper site has its own little pretty marketing pictures. easily digestible unseriousness!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

D'oh! I missed that connection, although the little infographic amoebas should have tipped me off

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

seeing dan in the authors list made me realize

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Niko Matsakis wrote a post about how the fucking rust compiler toolchain should include an LLM to explain error messages because teaching the semantics of a language is too hard and that pissed me off so much that instead of linking that piece of shit directly I’m posting this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich that’s also much shorter than Niko’s extended attempt to beg for a promotion at Amazon

e: mastodon thread

[–] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh no :((

Rust’s emphasis on “reliability” makes it a great target for AI

What?! Aaaaaaahhh! This makes me want to scream. After so many years of C++ misery and increasing frustration with it, and looking into various alternatives for years, I found that Rust is the lanuage which brought me back to actually enjoying programming. If they really ruin it with LLMs now, I don't know where to go anymore in terms of programming languages.

this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich

That reply is indeed excellent.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 hours ago

I feel the same way. I program in rust cause I like it, and the feeling of actually liking writing systems code was refreshing coming from C and especially C++. rust is a language I find beautiful — but I won’t for long if its excellent diagnostics and tooling all get deprecated in favor of an LLM. I can’t imagine what pivoting to AI would do to the language’s roadmap.

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

If the rust community spearheads the downfall of LLMs somehow, I’ll stop using C

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally we’ll have Magic Unified Intelligience™

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

imagine if actual roadmaps just said "we want to tell you how to get there" "we hate giving you bad directions" "we will make sure you get there at some time in the future"

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

But the llm is like 7 bipartite graphs in a trench coat.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

It’s things in trench coats all the way down!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

I'll tell you this for free, we gotta do something about all these trenches!

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

does anyone know why Venmo has a faux social media presentation? a feed, payments visible to other users (??) by default, etc

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

Though if I had to guess: data tagging for data mining.

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

my related guess is primarily marketing surveillance and secondarily all other types of surveillance. notably Venmo no longer lets you put “hookers and blow” as a transaction note, because it was the default response from most people who didn’t really want to do a social transaction but had to use Venmo cause it’s all their recipient had. Venmo’s social features are all designed to make you leak as much data to Venmo as possible so it can be monetized or otherwise capitalized upon, and that’s about par for the course for how a thielverse paypal mafia offshoot operates. this is surveillance capitalism with a smiley face.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 59 minutes ago) (1 children)

US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):

  1. Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn't use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don't even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?

  2. Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency -- People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:

    Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.

    If I've learned anything from all this it's about how ~~unfathomably based~~ cool a lot of federal workers are.

  3. The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog

    I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.

  4. Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].

Edit:

  1. ~~Elon Musk~~ The US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Biden's administration)

  2. doge.gov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless baby's first website materials; but they promise a "comprehensive, government-wide org chart" and are hiring "software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals".

    Aside: I already found ~~two~~ three minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that can't be right... they're IT professionals while I'm DEI.

  3. Find replace is so hard :( and that's why the government writes about "gay and rights" to avoid saying the... the... the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak

  4. So about how I said doge.gov gives baby's first website vibes; it's database was left world writable lol

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

Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?

Or: does he even know what it is?

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