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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Who’d have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.
Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35T crypto we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.
The question (which doesn’t matter) now is, does he really understand crypto? Or did he get at the right conclusion because he thinks that everybody else, like him, is just scamming all the time?
Given the kinds of crowds he hangs out with (i.e. mostly other rich people and political elite) is that not an understandable conclusion?
anything that makes yglesias have a bad day is generally a good thing
but it sounds like the orange man understands the crypto market perfectly: the numbers are all made up and everyone’s lying
(at least I think it’s that one? one of them’s quite the bootlicker. I’m bad at names tho)
I mean there are definitely some brain rotted crypto bros who would buy shares at face value because it’s totally gonna go to the moon guys
I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.
Ah yes the advertisement which causes T&S people (who have seen some things) to go on long rants on why you should never put pictures of your kids online publically.
fuck that’s gross
where’d you find/run across that? can’t tell if it’s a normal ad or some gig-site thing or what
Saw it posted on Reddit. It’s apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:
People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.
ah, doman name sounds like it’s one of the microwork farms
Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.
Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.
And now they’re suing him.
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/
lol holy shit, he was barely getting started
shortly after the first posts, he (most likely personally, although remains to be seen) had the trademark usage page updated specifically to take aim at wpengine
and started making his employees do an astroturfing campaign on their private socials
and blocked wpengine from interacting with wordpress.org at all, by both blocking accounts and IPs
dude’s lost it. coming up soon, mass migrations off wordpress?
Sounds like someone under a lot of pressure to raise revenue and not having much success.
Haha I saw it from new comments view, didn’t check the thread title
Mullenweg’s the same guy who publicly harassed a random transwoman on Tumblr and had a general meltdown to the point where Tumblr staff had to distance himself from him, so I’m not shocked.
(That its Tumblr is the only thing that shocks me - you’d think he’d have realised its queer-friendly rep was one of the main things going for it)
wait are there non-queer people on Tumblr even??
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
Granted, Apple’s banhammer forced Tumblr’s hand on that front (though Tumblr’s complete failure on moderation did give Apple that golden opportunity).
(The whole debacle did lead to Newgrounds getting hit by two separate waves of new users - a minor wave in November after the NSFW purges kicked in, then a major wave in December after the porn ban was officially announced. I have nothing more to add, I think it was pretty funny Tumblr shat the bed that hard)
Hello Matt this is your lawer speaking
just heard a podcast ad for amazon prime saying it causes “involuntary deal squeals” followed by a categorization of different kinds of customer grunts and squeals according to product. not making this up
god that’s just really icky
I swear I keep seeing Amazon ads in this same icky dehumanizing “cute” style, like some of the annoyance-based ads I vaguely remember from when I still had cable TV. is this just what ads become every time a corporation decides you have no other choice? (yes, almost every time)
From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:
Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.
Oh, so they publish textbooks.
“They represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste.”
🎶 Please allow me to introduce myself 🎶
now where did I leave my hammer and sickle
“…37%… That means nearly one in four…”
Eh, no it doesn’t, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.
So you’re saying that they’ve got books worth at least a grand which their owners are literally using to flaunt their wealth?
I’m legally obligated to say stealing is legally and morally wrong buuuuuuuut
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren’t getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
Of course the books are just vapid art books or travel books.
I just learned about this “wonderful” little item too
“Complimentary Carbon Efficient Delivery”
Carbon Efficient even…
That means that DHL driver has to take bike instead of car for this one
If there is an elevator in the apartment, the driver has to take the stairs, contractually. Of course people who order that don’t live in high rise apartments where the driver can reach the door, so everybody wins.
@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is “Veblen goods”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
“a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.”
handy to know, ty
Assouline! The gasoline of ass!
Our anti-AI milita will be called “The Artists’ Rifles”
Ah, late stage capitalism at its finest.
I vaguely remember mentioning this AI doomer before, but I ended up seeing him openly stating his support for SB 1047 whilst quote-tweeting a guy talking about OpenAI’s current shitshow:
I’ve had this take multiple times before, but now I feel pretty convinced the “AI doom/AI safety” criti-hype is going to end up being a major double-edged sword for the AI industry.
The industry’s publicly and repeatedly hyped up this idea that they’re developing something so advanced/so intelligent that it could potentially cause humanity to get turned into paperclips if something went wrong. Whilst they’ve succeeded in getting a lot of people to buy this idea, they’re now facing the problem that people don’t trust them to use their supposedly world-ending tech responsibly.
Isn’t the primary reason why people are so powerful persuaded by this technology, because they’re constantly sworn to that if they don’t use its answers they will have their life’s work and dignity removed from them? Like how many are in the control group where they persuade people with a gun to their head?
it’s easy to imagine a world where the people working on AI that are also convinced about AI safety decide to shun OpenAI for actions like this. It’s also easy to imagine that OpenAI finds some way to convince their feeble, gullible minds to stay and in fact work twice as hard. My pitch: just tell them GPT X is showing signs of basilisk nature and it’s too late to leave the data mines
Blast from the past, we’re kinda behind the times here in Sweden
Hidden crypto mine found in Swedish hospital (link in Swedish)
I hate how it is called mining, like it is digging up some resource from the earth. While it is just an advanced calculator.
Imagine they found a hidden iron ore mine (That is what I recall being mined in Sweden, if anybody knows something more interesting, like some precious stones, please inform me (looking at this gold/silver could also work)) under a hospital. But nope, just a hidden datacenter.
Satoshi is/was a goldbug so it’s an entirely intentional term.
I had a look and couldn’t find how it started being called mining. Satoshi started out calling it “farming”.
damn I misrembered the whitepaper, probably because it gave such goldbug vibes otherwise
oh totally, which is presumably why someone coined “mining”
Bootleg mining was a thing in coal-bearing areas of Poland and Ukraine during times of greatest economic shitshows (early interbellum and 90s)
I wanted to make a joke about artisanal mining, but then I saw it was a thing and how mostly horrible it was.
It should be called botting or grinding, at least more than it should be called mining.
Eh, it’s destroying a common good to extract resources (landscape / minerals, electricity / numberwang). I say the shoe fits.
That is a good comparison. Thanks.
People are “blatantly stealing my work,” AI artist complains
When Jason Allen submitted his bombastically named Théâtre D’opéra Spatial to the US Copyright Office, they weren’t so easily fooled as the judges back in Colorado. It was decided that the image could not be copyrighted in its entirety because, as an AI-generated image, it lacked the essential element of “human authorship". The office decided that, at best, Allen could copyright specific parts of the piece that he worked on himself in Photoshop.
“The Copyright Office’s refusal to register Theatre D’Opera Spatial has put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work without compensation or credit.” If something about that argument rings strangely familiar, it might be due to the various groups of artists suing the developers of AI image generators for using their work as training data without permission.
and now when somebody will generate exactly the same thing, it won’t be new stuff either el reg: Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster
Appropriately for this sort of meaningless bilge, the name is also bullshit. The way to say “space opera” in French is “space opera”.
“Space opera’s the same, but they call it le space opera.”
It’s been a long time since I lived in France, so my sense of what is idiomatic has no doubt grown rusty, but “Théâtre D’opéra” doesn’t sound right. The word “Théâtre” doesn’t belong in a reference to the place where operas are performed. It’s “L’opéra Garnier” and “L’opéra Bastille” in Paris and “L’opéra Nouvel” in Lyon, for example. I’d read “théâtre d’opéra” as more like “operatic theatre” in the sense of a genre (contrasted with, e.g., spoken-word theatre). I could be completely wrong here, but the title feels like a naive machine translation.
That’s absolutely right.
a twitter thread by sv ceo where comment section wants to do some recreational union busting, political assassinations and automating away longshoremen (lmao) over checks notes black friday bringing slightly less profit to mass retailers. to which i say, fuck your black friday then
and he says that it’ll affect elections? specifically in “don’t do anything visible in interest of unions or trump will win” kinda way? what kinda madhouse is this americans explain https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/1836498432510562788#m
fuck your black friday then
the institutionalisation of it is/was also just fucking nuts
and then in recent years it’s slowly been creeping out into other countries too, with other vendors in other places aping “black friday deals”
I have no mouth and I must scream
Is this the Flexport(?) guy? They’re YC funded I believe.
yeah so it seems
was/is he unusually shitty or notorious for something
dunno really, he’s got a lot of threads on HN where hackernews incorrect each other about logistics
I think the dude is just a wonk who happens to have gotten funding
Saw an unexpected Animatrix reference on Twitter today - and from an unrepentant promptfondler, no less:
This ended up starting a lengthy argument with an “AI researcher” (read: promptfondler with delusions of intelligence), which you can read if you wanna torture yourself.
Guy invented a new way to misinterpret the matrix, nice. Was getting tired of all the pilltalk
yes. that’s all true, but academics and artists and leftists are actually calling for Buttlerian jihad all the time. when push comes to shove they will ally with fascists on AI
This guy severely underestimates my capacity for being against multiple things at the same time.
The type of guy who was totally convinced by the ‘but what if the AI needs to generate slurs to stop the nukes?’ argument.
Inventor sez “I locked myself in my apartment for 4 years to build this humanoid”. Surprisingly, not a sexbot!
Surprisingly, not a sexbot!
would be a good album name
also series potential in there
Surprisingly (not), a sexbot!
Surprisingly, not a sexbot!
Well, not with that attitude
not a sexbot!
Skill issue.
You know that’s for Gen 2.0
This tech curve is about to go exponential, if you know what I’m sayin’
–venture capitalists, probably
all hail the hockey stick may we forever outspend all competition and reap the rewards of a ravaged market we solely control
