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.
the wife sent this one to me
buddy slept through ww1+2 (it fits because brits called germans huns in their propaganda), also, roughly 5% of world population
From a piece by Scott Alexander, I think.
oh no
Most women think about steppe nomads at least once a day.
what can I say he cooked
That’s how he suckers you in!
I’ll allow it
after all this time, TIL that Roko pronounces his name “Rocko” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIwJDnej7pg
I’m not a native english speaker, how else was he supposed to pronounce it?
I think the most common would be “roh-koh”, I could also see a front-o accentuated form being used
that flat “rocko” as in the vid was one I wouldn’t have thought to hear
That just sounds incredibly British to me.
When I clicked the video I fully expected Rocko with a c to mean Rosko.
it’s amazing how he continues to provide fresh reasons to want to boop him on the nose
man, all these old transhumanist videos https://www.youtube.com/@Transentience/videos you could waste hours of your life on old and pointless bs
“Genes vs Memes”
okay, I checked, it’s after midday. definitely okay to start drinking.
I’m pretty sure you’re only allowed to have that discussion if you’re a Metal Gear villain. Which despite his best efforts Roko does not have enough dramatic presence or raw drip for.
drip vs drool
Quick, someone file the copyright for “Roko’s Postmodern Life”
One step closer to Doctor Rockso the clown.
Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community
https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m
just changed the litter tray, you may wanna repost in the fresh new stubsack
Done 🫡
pivot-to-ai.com needs a new theme. Blocksy looks really nice - but it doesn’t work with WP Dark Mode and caches badly.
Need a 2 column blog theme suiting full short posts on the front page, that plays nice with Dark Mode. Any tips?
Libertarian nerds run straight into actual California, not the AI-generated dreamland they imagine
Mercury news: “Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report”
The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience, and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”
HN shows what they think of the 3 people with actual thoughts on the issue by downvoting them to death
Who could have predicted this except for everybody ! There’s a reason none of these galt gulches ever get built.
which spent more than $800 million buying more than 60,000 acres of mostly agricultural land near Fairfield
Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman, just in case anyone thought there was a difference
Was the stumbling point when they explained to the county the part about the perpetually tortured child?
Turns out that load-bearing children are out of code.
more on the nsfw side but this is a kinda interesting finding/use of existing tech
niche because only some types of slop, but still!
so what rhymes with Proton getting into AI grifting? you fucking guessed it
I’m sorry, what’s a 1-2-punch, idgi 🤔🤔🤔
(big fat fucking /s ofc)
The fuck is happening over there?
I could have “excused” the AI bullshit as “we did it to appease the corporate customers who make us money” but there’s no way you can spin this.
I’m canceling my account. At this point I might just say fuck it and use my Yahoo mail for everything again.
(And this time the Reddit thread is the dumpster fire I’ve been expecting the last one to be lol)
Can’t blame this shit on the survey!
I checked, crypto shit was not in any of the top 8 results (top 5 broken out, and they mentioned 3 more, which are surely #6 through #8).
we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.
further down the page
Proton is not a crypto company. We do not speculate in crypto
so I’ve accidentally been paying shitheads who speculate on crypto to speculate on crypto. I’m kinda angry at myself for not catching this.
so what rhymes with Proton getting into AI grifting?
Thanks, I hate it
How do people do this without dying of anxiety?
BTW, that last comment on RetractionWatch was grim:
I recently saw a presentation by a job candidate (a PhD with many years experience) who used figures that were clearly AI-generated. They weren’t as funny as this example or the giant rat penis, but certainly fictional and unreal. In and of itself, troubling enough. Worse was that my colleagues involved in the interview didn’t care when I pointed it out.
it’s easier if you are a shameless fraud without a shred of integrity
This is also probably why MBAs like it
2 Giant 2 Rat Penis
ai use case: you can pump out pseudoscience promoting fluff disguised as papers in predatory journals with less effort
Okay but this is about alkaline water so it’s garbage even without the genAI imagery.
It’s even by Wu et al., come on, low hanging fruit
Butters and Trump are ruining my ability to get anything done in town today. Not a big fan of this dumb shit inconveniencing me IRL.
Here’s a tweet of Winklevoss feeling snubbed by VP Harris (twitter.com)
The Biden-Harris Administration wages all-out war on the crypto industry for 4 years. Despite all of this, Kamala is still invited to the @TheBitcoinConf in Nashville and given a chance to speak to our industry and reset the relationship. What does she do? She declines. She can’t even take the first step and show up to start mending fences. Our industry won’t forget this. We will show no mercy in November.
My hope is that in the not-too-distant future there are no politicians at any Bitcoin or crypto conferences. Not because they are not welcome, but because crypto is so universally accepted that it is no longer a campaign issue and therefore would be a waste of their time. Like going to a conference on whether or not email or the Internet should be legal or allowed.
Ooh, Like the internet! I got Bingo!
Bitcoin bros: more of this self-aggrandizing rage please. It’s so entertaining to read.
Ooh, Like the internet!
Considering the history of legislation and the internet (and the recent KOSA thing) being treated like the internet is the last thing you would want.
@sailor_sega_saturn @techtakes
NO SLURP JUICES FOR KAMALA
None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with multiple slurp juices on a single ape!
Ow god. This is the acasaul torture simulation!
They targeted gamers.
Gamers.
We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.
We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
This pasta will never die.
Not a sneer, but [a mildly interesting open letter(https://noml.info/):
A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.
The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.
Personally, I don’t expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people’s wishes and avoid scraping shit without people’s permission.
Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people’s work, and the fact a lot of people’s work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say “no”, the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.
The best proposal I’ve seen so far
short of destroying all AI scrapers, and essentially what anyone familiar with the specs would come up with.The only thing I’d add is an analogue to
data-nosnippetto exclude only specific sections of the HTML document (w/o needing to reach for an entire iframe); though that’s harder to implement on the crawler end so maybe that’s for the best.Google uses a second User-Agent directive; while Bing suggests using noarchive. Both of these are pretty hacky and not general, so it’d be good to see the industry standardize on the above proposal.
The proposal itself does still assume that AI scrapers are being run by decent human beings with functioning moral compasses, which is why I feel its inadequate.
This take might be overly harsh on AI/tech as a whole, but at this point I’ve run out of patience regarding this bubble and see no reason to believe anyone in the AI space is a decent human being, at least for the time being.
OpenAI is creating the trustless economy that makes bitcoin necessary. taps forehead
News article about how hard it is to block AI scraping: https://www.404media.co/websites-are-blocking-the-wrong-ai-scrapers-because-ai-companies-keep-making-new-ones/
At this point, I wouldn’t fault anyone for blanket-blocking all scrapers/robots - sure, doing that will make you unfindable by search engines, but search is basically useless nowadays for finding anything actually interesting, and trying to play whack-a-mole with AI scrapers just means you’re gonna get your shit stolen.
Might as well go back to word-of-mouth.
Let’s see how long HN takes to ban yet another literal Nazi.
I’m pretty sure that if the community “takes out the trash” (i.e. downvotes to dead status[1]) the mods won’t bother to ban the user.
[1] I happen to believe thta this is not sufficient to get rid of bad actors
Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/
Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can’t even buy gift cards at scale.
Real “Scott’s Tots” energy
it’s going well:
Not everyone wants ai for their search tools
@BlueMonday1984 @dgerard The completely open ‘I’m scamming the elderly’ at the end is kinda chilling
Its a surprisingly good complement to OP Chris Paxton’s Tweet about “normie opinion on AI”, given it shows why said “normie opinion” is so resoundingly negative.
I’ve made some brief nods to how the AI bubble is rapidly souring public perception of tech (here and here), but it really feels like AI has, to quote @datarama, “made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness”.
I feel like I should collect my thoughts on that front - I could probably make an interesting post out of it.
ChatGPT’s new search feature hasn’t even launched and already its shitting the bed
The sneers are writing themselves
OpenAI said in its announcement that search responses will include in-line citations and that users can open a sidebar to view links to external sources. The long-term goal is to then incorporate search features into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI product.
“The long-term goal is to reinvent the Internet of 25 years ago, but worse.”
what do you mean you don’t want a search engine but much less efficient and much, much worse? you don’t like progress?
I’m starting to think tech wants us to hate tech so we’ll stop having hopes for tech so they can just sell tech to military in multiple countries. I get the strong feeling that all these people in tech viscerally hate that average users use things they created like email, SMS, RSS feeds, etc etc etc. @self @blakestacey
Military contracting comes with actual requirements and product has to be up to spec, can’t have that
