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)
check out this jumpscare suckerpunch mashup
some of the details are so on point I’m almost left pointing and mouthing “art”
First-ever criminal charges against financial services firms for market manipulation and “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry
Cryptocurrency is a 15-year old industry built mostly on market manipulation and wash trading and now we’re seeing the first charges for it? Man, back in the day they told me doing crime was illegal.
Deflationary
With every transaction supply shrinks by burning a percentage of reflections to the burn wallet
Turns out libertarians actually love taxes, but only if instead of spending the tax money on anything, it’s burned to waste.
Further proof that at least some of these people don’t have a problem with losing money, they have a problem with other people receiving it.
Fraudster: “the “objective on the secondary markets” is to find “other buyers from the community, people you don’t know about or don’t care about” because “we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit.””
Is this supposed to be a parody or something? If so, why is this being done at the direction of the FBI? Or is that also part of the parody? If so I didn’t know you could use the FBI logo for that purpose.
linked post details it, but tldr sting setup
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
maybe also link in the wp/mullenweg thread
Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!
Has wordpress matt had a stroke or what? This is off-the-wall.
Google finally did it, they made Chrome completely unusable
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
hmm, I meant to link that when I saw it, guess I forgot. whoops :D
but yeah, entirely unsurprising from the guy who literally started by harvesting a pile of data and then building a commercial service off it. facebook and parentco should be ended, his assets taken for public good
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
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.
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.
This week’s Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 really hit home. It’s about a startup trying to sell “The AI Scientist.” It even does reviews!
Can “AI” do your science for you? Should it be your co-author? Or, as one company asks, boldly and breathlessly, “Can we automate the entire process of research itself?”
Major scientific journals have banned the use of tools like ChatGPT in the writing of research papers. But people keep trying to make “AI Scientists” a thing. Just ask your chatbot for some research questions, or have it synthesize some human subjects to save you time on surveys.
Alex and Emily explain why so-called “fully automated, open-ended scientific discovery” can’t live up to the grandiose promises of tech companies. Plus, an update on their forthcoming book!
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/s1Eyp5R4cdSZVm3y2q58xq
How do I find product-market fit for my terminators?
fix the year! we’re back in the present! out of the time traveling cybertruck!
Tried to get out, door cut my leg off. Now I have to go back to the future to get it reattached.
I’m temporarily-boating up to Boston
Done.
Any mild pushback to the claims of LLM companies sure bring out the promptfondlers on lobste.rs
https://lobste.rs/s/qcppwf/llms_don_t_do_formal_reasoning_is_huge
Plenty of agreement, but also a lot of “what is reasoning, really” and “humans are dumb too, so it’s not so surprisingly GenAIs are too!”. This is sure a solid foundation for multi-billion startups, yes sirree.
it’s kind of comforting that the current attitude towards generative AI in some tech spaces is “of course it can’t do cognition and it isn’t really good for anything, who said it was” which is of course rich from the exact same posters who were breathlessly advertising for the tech as revolutionary both online and at work as recently as a couple of weeks ago (and a lot of them still hedge it with “but it might be useful in the near future”). the comfort is it feels like that attitude comes from deep embarrassment, like how the orange site started claiming it is and always was skeptical of crypto once the technology got irrevocably associated with scams and gambling and a lot of the easy money left
I was watching a h0ffman stream the other day when someone happened to bring up autoplag in some context. didn’t see the asking context, but h0ffman’s answer warmed my heart. paraphrased: “what would you want to use that for? you wouldn’t steal a mod, why would you want to use a prompt? that stole from artists. fuck that shit.”
(h0ffman’s one of the names in the demoscene, often plays sets at compos, does some of his own demos, etc)
yeah, there’s a stench of desperation from the defenders
of course, as with crypto, there are uses (in the case of crypto , nothing legitimate). And it will be going to be a fallback for fondlers to point them out (for example, I believe that auto-generated audiobooks are viable, if they’re generated from actual books)
these chuds lack self awareness and they never realise that by moving the goalposts on brain stuff they are admitting their own idiocy.
neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI’s legal issues:
And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:
With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry’s Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.
Precisely how, I’m not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.
To my mind, the cover of “researchers” using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.
Hey ChatGPT, write a novel titled OpenAI Gets Pounded In the Ass by Pterodactly Lawyers, in the style of Chuck Tingle.
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
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.
Why is it always bioshock girl 😭
I saw this over the weekend and the title itself is rather lovely, but even more hilariously it’s from the atlantic
evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman’s bullshit grows
evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman’s bullshit grows
Precisely when that rising tide will drown Altman I’m not sure, but I feel safe in saying it’ll probably drown the rest of the AI industry (and potentially “AI” as a concept) as well - Altman is pretty much the face of this AI bubble, after all.
The rising tide was likely also helped along by OpenAI going fully for-profit, which shattered the humanitarian guise it spent the last decade or so building, and, to quote myself, “given the true believers reason to believe [Altman would] commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buck”.
Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.
Winter is coming.
The AI climate change
Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.
Oh, I expect a real harsh AI winter once this spring comes to a close - the public isn’t just overtly disappointed about AI’s failure to deliver, but outright angry at the nasty shit AI’s unleashed upon them.
Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me is that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who’d describe themselves using titles like “futurist” and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they’d have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech – didn’t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.
Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like “Chief Visionary”. These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)
Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he’s being showered with cash and hyping for all it’s worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and… we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.
The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs… none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it’s just that people would have asked “What is this for?” and “Why is it better?”. It’s what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who’ve spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.
Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as “a startup” now has to mean $10m in seed capital and “graduating” from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.
How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.
(full disclosure: I’ve had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied “I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly” person I’ve ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)
They were the first hype men of tech – didn’t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas.
This is a bit unfair, i think nick land also sold drugs. Not sure however.
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!
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.
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
Imagine, a corporation finding their own voice, as a proper signal of their awareness of their customers. Nope, gotta sell your soul to tech stocks.
I really think that Naomi Klein pointing out the brand being the product created a wave of tech entrepreneurs who reacted by making the user experience the product and now we’re seeing how bad they are at the most basic brand maintenance.
Plus they create brands that cultivate a following that is not compatible with corporate growth interests. Proton are like Mozilla, they wanna play with the bad kids but they promised their parents they’d come straight home
In other news, an AI booster got publicly humilitated after prompting complete garbage and mistaking it for 8-bit animation:
And now, another sidenote, because I really like them apparently:
This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.
Beyond the slop-nami flooding the Internet with soulless shit whose creation was directly because of tech companies like OpenAI, its also given us shit like:
-
Google’s unholy ‘Dear Sydney’ ad, and the nuclear backlash it got.
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Apple crushing human creativity for personal gain and being forced to apologise for it
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Mira Murati openly shitting on artists as gen-AI steals their artwork and destroys their livelihoods
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Gen-AI boosters producing complete shit and calling it gold (with Proper Prompter and Luma Labs providing excellent examples)
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And so much goddamn more, most of which I’ve likely forgotten
This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.
As a programmer who likes to see himself more adjacent to artists (and not only because I only draw stuff — badly — and write stuff — terribly — as a hobby, but also because I hold the belief that creating something with code can be seen as artistic too) this whole attitude which has been plaguing the tech industry for — let’s be real here — the last 15 years at least but probably much longer makes me irrationally angry. Even the parts of the industry where creativity and artistry should play a larger role, like game dev, have been completely fucked over by this idea that everything is about efficiency and productivity. You wanna be successful? You need to be productive all the time, 24/7, and now there’s tools that help you with that, and these tools are now fucking AI-powered! Because everything is a tool for out lord and savior productivity.
(I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I’ve been meaning to do for a year now,)
(I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I’ve been meaning to do for a year now,)
Go for it, Mii - I’d be happy to read it.
This response from her. Lol. Lmao.
can you and all your anti-ai bots just block me? we get it, you hate ai art
What a misunderstood wee lil smol bean, waah
anti-ai bots
there’s nothing I hate more than when people who hate chatbots flood me with chatbots
e: please stop sending soldiers from your anti-war militia to fight me
actually that sounds like a metal gear plot point I’d overexplain while intoxicated
Honestly I would love to hear someone try to explain the Metal Gear story while drunk.
…No no no you see the Patriots are actually the AI reconstitutions of Plasma Snake’s old boy scout troop from the like the 80s, Shadow Moses, and they really liked (hic) Gundam and then…
…But see, they actually didn’t even like all the wars and stuff even though they were making all kinds of money and explosions, so Raiden - oh and he’s a robot now but it’s cool he gets a dog - has to figure out what’s going on but then it’s all “The good old days after 9/11” ha ha ha…
“games explained badly, the podcast” sounds like it has phenomenal potential for pissing off just about the entire gamersphere
I’m down
I’m so down for this I might unbury my good microphone
“and then Dick Cheney appears and that’s the final boss and he beats your ass. no, not a character based off of Dick Cheney…”
Even in the still image that dog’s legs look like a first draft Minecraft centipede.
Just ignore the inconsistent theming, blurry cars, people phasing in and out of existence, nonsense traffic signals, unnatural leaf rustling, the car driving on the wrong(?) side of the road and about to plow into a tree, the weirdly oversized tree, the tree missing a trunk, the nonsense traffic paint, the shoddy textures, and the fact that the scene is entirely derivative and no one feels any joy from watching it.
Phew
If you ignore all that it could be the end of animators!!
I was focusing more on the fact Justine failed to recognise Minimax had failed at its only job (giving her…whatever that anim is…instead of something actually 8-bit), but yeah all that sucks too
Why the fuck is there a gigantic 1000-year-old oak blocking the entire pavement. Also why is that one in autumn colors.
-
speaking of the Godot engine, here’s a layered sneer from the Cruelty Squad developer (via Mastodon):
image description
a 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
chef’s kiss, no notes
and also speaking of Godot — does anyone doing game dev right now have a good source for placeholder assets? I just finished all the introductory tutorials for the engine and now I want to flex what I’ve learned a bit
Itch and Kenney have good ones:
https://itch.io/game-assets/free
https://kenney.nl/assets (all CC0)
Synty also has a nice placeholder pack for $7. The post-it notes are kind of adorable:
https://syntystore.com/products/polygon-prototype-pack
I don’t think most of these are made for Godot, so you may have to mess around with import settings or set up tilesets/materials yourself
nice! it seems like Kenney’s a pretty popular choice for this kind of thing. I’m kinda tempted to grab their Asset Forge tool to quickly bang out some lo-fi semi-custom models, but I don’t know how its workflow looks for animations and materials. in the worst case, maybe it’ll save me from half of the spiral learning curve that is Blender?
the synty pack looks really good! at a glance it seems like their assets come rigged for Unity — maybe there’s a converter that’ll allow me to convert that rigging into the format Godot’s animation system wants
I don’t know how materials work in Asset Forge, but they have a guide on their site for exporting models to animate with Mixamo: https://kenney.nl/knowledge-base/asset-forge/rigging-a-character-using-mixamo. You could also animate things like moving platforms or doors in-engine with an AnimationPlayer.
Speaking of Asset Forge, Kenny Shape is a similar thing for quickly throwing assets together. It has a really fast 2D workflow for creating 3D models that reminds me of Doom mapping a little bit. For lo-fi levels, you might also like Crocotile 3D or the combo of TrenchBroom + Qodot. Crocotile is great for repurposing 2D pixel art tilesets from itch or OpenGameArt into 3D assets, and Trenchbroom/Qodot is a more fully featured level editor I’ve seen people work crazy fast in.
oh that’s awesome! I was wondering how I’d do fairly large levels for a 3D space, and it turns out the answer is that neither quake-style mapping nor competent tiling systems will ever go out of fashion
was curious and threw some search queries at the internet. looks like there are a couple of convertor tools out there, although I obvies can’t comment on relative merits worth a damn without spending some time staring at innards and docs/usage
