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.

  • @BlueMonday1984
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    274 months ago

    Anyways, first actual post of the week (albeit not the first sneer):

    oh no

    (Source)

    • @o7___o7
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      4 months ago

      Jesus, take the wheel!

      –intel, probably

    • @froztbyteOP
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      104 months ago

      you know

      I actually meant to post that (a friend sent it to me earlier, and it was why I even got around to starting the new stubsack)

      adhdbrain is a fuck

      (it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

      • @BlueMonday1984
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        114 months ago

        (it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

        Anything that takes the edge off a possible Great Recession sequel’s fine in my book

  • Mii
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    224 months ago

    Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we’re trying to force everyone to use one instead of using hunter2 everywhere.

    Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that “Usually there’s no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT.”

    Usually.

    • @froztbyteOP
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      144 months ago

      what

      whattttttttt

      whatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

      and it’s not like crowdstrike didn’t just happen. I guess maybe it was too recent, and the lesson-of-pain hasn’t percolated through to dipshit"integration advisor" technical sales fuckwits yet

      bonus round, whatever the hell lemmy did here:

      • @V0ldek
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        244 months ago

        It only shows it like that to you because it’s your password.

      • @selfA
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        94 months ago

        ah yeah, the well-known nter2 Rust function that lets you… enter the number 2, you know?

        • @froztbyteOP
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          74 months ago

          would’ve thought that’s a js/ts package

  • @hrrrngh
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    173 months ago

    Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0

    These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/

    Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.

    Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.

    I’m sure!

    • Mii
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      143 months ago

      They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.

      Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

      • @Soyweiser
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        93 months ago

        Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

        They prob should do a video on this effect as shown by the early ELIZA experiments. That even the smartest people could get fooled by a dumb program. Doubt they will though if they are into EA stuff.

        • @o7___o7
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          I still maintain that ChatGPT’s main draw is as a Ouija board for weird nerds.

    • @imadabouzu
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      113 months ago

      Kurzgesagt

      Yeah I’m not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as “all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s”.

    • @BigMuffin69
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      3 months ago

      Some ‘scientists’ cough Yud/Rob/Kokotajlo cough believe in FOOM. Anyways, let’s not question this fundamental assumption so we can engage in fear baiting and mental masturbation for the remainder of our show. It’s bonkers that people keep citing Kokotajlo as an AI researcher, like, I have serious doubts this man knows what a computer is. Pretty good at grifting though. Also why is Rob Miles still listed as a PhD student. Like cant he hurry up and fuckin graduate already? Christ.

      As an aside, I remember watching a PBS space time and seeing sponsored by Open Philanthropy (or some other EA organization) and I was like no not my beloved PBS!! I know it feels :(

      • @imadabouzu
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        13 months ago

        Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it’s important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.

        The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It’s fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman’s “last invention” is wrong because most, unfortunately, most “smart people’s” view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.

        In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.

    • 13 barn owls in a black cloak
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      103 months ago

      @hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they’ve previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.

      This is extra crap because I’d already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn’t have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.

    • @blakestaceyA
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      93 months ago

      Idea: a Pivot to AI video series hosted by an avatar that’s, like, a talking polyhedron in the style of Mind’s Eye/Body Wars era CGI.

      This would require effort and thus is a terrible idea, but I find the mental image amusing.

      • David GerardMA
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        133 months ago

        using Hatsune Miku but with my voice would save on having to maintain a video setup

        • @V0ldek
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          53 months ago

          Hatsune Miku but with my voice

          Thanks, this will be my dreams now for the rest of the month

      • @selfA
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        73 months ago

        we need to bring back machinima

        I call dibs on being represented by the left pong paddle, lovingly recorded from the analog output of an Atari Pong TTL standup (or FPGA equivalent)

    • @gerikson
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      63 months ago

      I’ve never heard of this outfit. Is it a sort of skepticsphere darling?

      • @Soyweiser
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        103 months ago

        more a sort of ‘I love science’ youtuber I think.

    • @ShakingMyHead
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      74 months ago

      The government has asked for “structural relief” - which could, in theory at least, mean the break-up of the company.

      How likely would this be?

    • @Soyweiser
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      64 months ago

      I heard that one of Bidens good things is to put actually effect people on antitrust laws. Sadly I also heard that Harris is planning on putting somebody else on there.

      • @V0ldek
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        94 months ago

        A lot of what Biden did was based on the wide margins the executive had. But now with Chevron deference dead people can sue those efforts and will win via the 5th Circuit or SCOTUS, because they’re institutions bought by people who most vehemently hate antitrust laws. Similar reasoning applies to right-to-repair efforts.

        In other words, USA will never have nice things unless Harris pulls off a major court reform.

        • @Soyweiser
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          64 months ago

          Thanks! Indeed, I keep forgetting Chevron. Not sure how far this replacement is related however, but there should be a different priority indeed. Hope she pulls it off, people seem happy with Waltz at least. He also seems like a mostly decent person. Worst I saw people go was compare him to Boss Hogg, which is quite the dated reference.

    • @blakestaceyA
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      144 months ago

      Surely the words being put into the son’s mouth should be “What’s his TikTok?”.

    • @Soyweiser
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      134 months ago

      I’m embarassed for the person wearing that shirt, and the people who made it, and us all for having seen that.

      No wait something is wrong… This is the torture simulation!

      • AcausalRobotGod
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        104 months ago

        Dammit, you caught me again! Time for another go-round…

      • @sc_griffith
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        i assume the shirt is ironic haha

        • @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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          104 months ago

          I think you’re right but I’ve also learned to never underestimate the level of cringe some people are capable of.

        • @Soyweiser
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          As I’m no longer able to pronounce gif correctly (I started calling it jif ironically) I’m a firm believer in you will eventually turn into that which you pretend to be.

    • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      114 months ago

      i’m not reading all that, at least now, but i’d just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development

      • @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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        104 months ago

        I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the “spare” cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

    • @froztbyteOP
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      64 months ago

      “for SBV values of explaining”

  • @froztbyteOP
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    144 months ago

    I didn’t even know this was happening friend sent me the screenshot, but apparent grimusk are in the bureaucratic stages of their relationship ending. and of course it’s going extremely normal:

    • @Soyweiser
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      I sadly know more, it is horrible. Not only is there a custody battle, grimes grandma is dying and she has never seen grimes kids, and because Musk isn’t reacting to anything Grimes mother put a plea online for him to please let her grandkids see her mother.

      Poor kids, just heartbreaking.

      E: source

      • @froztbyteOP
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        114 months ago

        heh

        that looks pretty fucking shitty. but we all already knew both of them were fucking ghouls. sucks for the kids, hopefully they can get out okay eventually. but that’s about as much as I’m willing to say (largely: reasons private, w/ heavy state load implications. I don’t mind telling/explaining, but not in public, and it’s a lot of work/context)

        • @Soyweiser
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          84 months ago

          Yeah both suck, I have some opinions who would prob be better as a parent, but really just hope the kids get out ok. All this laughing at the weird tech fascists is a lot less fun due to there being so many innocents hurt.

          • @antifuchs
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            74 months ago

            And he keeps making more innocents to hurt.

  • @selfA
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    144 months ago

    this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)

    this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now

    • Mii
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      64 months ago

      I’m really not a fan of Python (in general; the whole philosophy of that language is kinda opposite to my idea of programming) but I have to admit the project does look interesting at first glance.

      And after glancing at the Lemmy codebase a few times I think that an alternative or at least competition is a good thing.

    • @froztbyteOP
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      64 months ago

      I just half-wrote a post in this textfield then snipped it

      will dm elsewhere

      (largely snipped because I’m too fucking out of spoons today to format it without edgepruning (which it probably deserves))

  • @froztbyteOP
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    133 months ago

    lol holy shit, apparently a US chain is trying to do"AI-based" individualised pricing of goods in-store

    can’t wait to hear of someone being charged $500 for a packet of gum

    • Mike
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      143 months ago

      An “Oops, racism!” incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.

      • @froztbyteOP
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        63 months ago

        probably a couple of them, too :|

        (I can speculate a few off the top of my head as-is, but not sure I want to enumerate them)

    • @rook
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      123 months ago

      Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?

      (also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)

      • @BlueMonday1984
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        93 months ago

        I’m sure such blatant and unrepentant price gouging won’t end in any violent altercations from infuriated customers!

        (Ah, who am I kidding, somebody’s gonna blow their lid over Kroger jacking up water prices on a hot day. They’ll be lucky if nobody gets shot before they ditch the idea.)

        • @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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          93 months ago

          Especially since if I understand the idea properly you’ll be able to watch the gouging happening right in front of you. Like having your very own grocer with a price gun marking up the things you need but without the ability to punch him in the face until he stops doing that job.

    • @V0ldek
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      63 months ago

      Is that in any way legal?

      • @froztbyteOP
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        63 months ago

        it’s the USA, it’s near certainly going to be multiple ways of legal

        and if they get kicked in the teeth, they’ll get around it by putting up a little sign somewhere near the door (visible, but unobvious) which claims that “by shopping there you accept the possibility”, and that may be enough

        • @selfA
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          83 months ago

          this might run afoul of some of our scattered price gouging regulations (see some instances of sellers getting slapped during the toilet paper shortage nonsense), but interestingly this was announced after the Supreme Court kneecapped our ability to enforce any regulations at all

          it’s almost like the corpos took a monstrous lesson from covid and were waiting for the right combination of deniable technology and probability of the success of the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup to announce something like this

          • @froztbyteOP
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            63 months ago

            hmm yeah that’s a good point. I wonder if they’re planning to skirt that by capping the raised price, just plan to avoid places with that regulation entirely, or what else

            probably it’ll be some inventive new form of extremely-USAian fuckery that I’m not in a cynical mood to guess at in speculation right now

          • @mountainriver
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            43 months ago

            I happened to come across an article mentioning the Robinson–Patman Act (from 1936) in relation with wage fixing by algorithm.

            From Wikipedia: “a United States federal law that prohibits anticompetitive practices by producers, specifically price discrimination”

            It might be relevant here. Obviously I am not a US lawyer specialised in monopoly law.

    • @o7___o7
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      53 months ago

      Common Kroger L.

      They just got done being bullied into dropping plans to go to 100% self-checkout, too.

      • @Soyweiser
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        I never really got the (E: thanks froztbyte, I meant user complaints here, there certainly are job complaints re self-checkout see reply below) complaints of self checkout, works great in most places in .nl I tried it.

        And then the local Lidl got a self checkout. I now get why people hate those things, somebody really designed it with the idea of ‘people in our stores are criminals we must catch’ in mind. Turns out those styles of self checkouts are more common in EE as well. A small example of a problem with it. The part where you in other self checkouts would put your bag to put your stuff into was a scale, and because of that I couldn’t put my bag there as I thought I was trying to sneak products through, and every item had to be placed there on the scale after weighing. (And then it didn’t always work correctly). You could almost smell the security person who designed it going ‘im gonna catch all those baddies!’ (that could have also been me, I need to remember to wash my clothes). The machine also felt cheap, and the way the employees had to interact with it (they had to physically touch the machine with some key, and not use a tablet like all the other self checkouts (I had gotten something with alcohol in it)) didn’t help this feeling.

        Moral of the story, there are ways to do self checkout better than others.

        • @froztbyteOP
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          93 months ago

          there’s that (the high-trust vs low-trust designs), but also there’s another dimension of it: cashier (and similar jobs) are one of the few low-end open to a lot of people in the US, which means this would kill yet another avenue of earning for many of them

          (to which the fix is not a simple yes or no to whether self-checkout should be an option)

          • Mike
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            73 months ago

            One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.

          • @Soyweiser
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            63 months ago

            Yeah I should have mentioned that, I do get those complaints. But most people I see complaining about self-checkout dont take that angle. Sorry I should have used my brain, realized where I was typing and not forgotten that people here tend to be more class aware.

        • @o7___o7
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          73 months ago

          I got flashbacks from reading this.

          You have to imagine that the future roadmap includes robot dog enforcers for capturing shoplifters.

          • @froztbyteOP
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            53 months ago

            Laundry Files curse strikes again

            • @o7___o7
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              fr! BTW, speaking of class consciousness, I once got myself in big trouble with one of these things.

              My SO and I had just finished reading Kraken by China Mieville when we went into Krogers to pick up a few things.

              spoiler

              One of our favorite characters, Wati, managed to overthrow the reigning order in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife after thousands of years of servitude by unionizing all of the magical assistants. Dude rocked. He is tragically lost in the final chapters of the book, and we both kind of had a grown-up cry over it.

              The one open checkout line was 40 miles long (as is tradition), so she ducked into the self-checkout, and I said, “Wew, Wati would hate that we’re doing this.”

              She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day, which was 100% fair.

        • @mlen
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          63 months ago

          I run into this process every time I visit Poland (mostly because I visit so rarely that I forget) and every time I’m astonished how seriously fucked up it is.

          The most annoying part is having to scan a receipt in order to exit the self checkout area.

          In the stark contrast to the above self checkout process in Switzerland works so smoothly. Mostly because nobody is subjected to the bullshit described above. There’s even an option to grab a scanner, scan everything on the go and just pay at exit.

          • Mike Knell
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            53 months ago

            @mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then you’re good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.

            • @Soyweiser
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              43 months ago

              ‘Steekproef/steekproeven/Steekproefsgewijs’ Here.

              Do note that I have some suspicions that these random checks are not random and are in fact tied to some ML algorithm combined with all the new cameras that are in supermarkets now.

      • @froztbyteOP
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        53 months ago

        ah heh, that would’ve been the other leg of this plan, I imagine

        “sorry about the unfortunate pricing” says the dead-ending support flow, which doesn’t have the ability to contact an actual human anywhere in the tree

  • @jax
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    134 months ago

    my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:

    What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn’t want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it’ll be fine as long as there’s a big cyber noggin down the track… just google TESCREAL. We didn’t make this up.

      • @Soyweiser
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        114 months ago

        Walks into the room, hits the top of the doorframe, making sounds like a gallon of water being sloshed around

        You called?

          • @sc_griffith
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            53 months ago

            hmm this got me scrolling through his TL. I didn’t know or forgot that shen is actually a really good poster, shame I didn’t follow him while I was on twitter

            • @Soyweiser
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              3 months ago

              Shen always seemed like a pretty decent person who posts pretty well. The whole situation where people attacked him for accepting the theft of his bike was pretty strange. (The comic just went ‘well, guess they need it more than I do, whatever’ which seems like a healthy way to get over your bike getting stolen. And people lost their minds, how dare Shen not be angry!).

              And seems somebody made a docu about that note the person reacting to this still mad about Shens acceptance.

              • @sc_griffith
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                when I first saw the bike comic I remember it struck me as exactly what someone would write in the midst of a pathetic attempt at positive thinking. but if it represents how he genuinely felt, for me it goes from cringe and not that interesting to just not interesting

                that comic is especially enraging to right wingers. with them is where I’ve seen the sustained loathing for it. the idea that despised lowlies are stealing your shit and you must strike back/first is fundamental to right wing ideology, especially the right wing conception of masculinity. you’re supposed to hate the people lower than you in the hierarchy largely because their existence is theft. a guy not being mad about actual real theft by some city rando spits on a premise their whole ideology rests on

                it kind of reminds me of the “I really like girls” video which I’m too lazy to pull up. it’s just a streamer doing a cute little rap about how he really likes women, and someone put a mildly cringe animation over it. very online right wingers hate hate hate that video, because you’re not supposed to actually like women: they’re lower than men in the hierarchy. or such would be the subtext when they ranted about it

                • @V0ldek
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                  43 months ago

                  I mean, what the hell else are you going to do if your bike was stolen? Instead of doing nothing about it you can go to the police so they can do nothing about it.

    • @maol
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      53 months ago

      3CR! You should pitch a Sneer Club show to them.

      • @jax
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        43 months ago

        didn’t think anyone would catch this! I might have to at this rate, there’d be no shortage of material…

        • @maol
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          43 months ago

          I had just been looking at their website or I wouldn’t have caught it, lol.

          I think Yeah Nah Pasaran have done some coverage of technofascism and TESCREAL.

          You should definitely pitch a show. You could have an evil AI as a co-presenter.

  • @blakestaceyA
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    Oh look, an AI tool to make Wikipedia worse.

    (Apparently, the Wikimedia Foundation couldn’t even be bothered to care about the standards that en.wp contributors deem necessary for sources on medical topics. Because it’s more important to “sustain and grow Wikimedia projects in a changing online knowledge landscape”. Dammit, where’s the button that sends electrical shocks through the Internet to anyone who talks like that?)

    • David GerardMA
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      113 months ago

      at least Wikipedia has some rather strident rules suggestions on LLM use - tl;dr under no goddamn circumstance, don’t be a fucking idiot. And this seems to be using it as a forest-burning search engine rather than anything that will generate wiki text.

  • @froztbyteOP
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    it happened

    I popped out somewhere to have a drink, and got to have someone tell me about their “edutech” startup that “uses AI”

    they very definitely overpromise (not gonna rinse their bullshit), and topped it off with “and then we use a LLM for suggesting improvements”

    (I ejected from the conversation but I can still hear it; it’s progressed to “talking about property” in the terms of mediocre early-20s white kids talking leveraging daddy and uncle’s assets)

    • @saucerwizard
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      84 months ago

      Sometimes I feel blessed to be beneath this all.

    • @Soyweiser
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      84 months ago

      Congrats on your stoic non-reaction and ejection. You are now provably better than the whole alpha-maleosphere.

  • @froztbyteOP
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    123 months ago

    person who can barely brain themselves finds they have to engage with US postal system, hilarity ensues

    (via friend who often sends me tweet-screenshots (one day I’ll convince 'em to join here))

    • @Soyweiser
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      For those who are wondering, real tweet. I checked. Guy is defending himself by going ‘physical mail is outdated and shouldn’t exist’. This guy is going to get cybercrimed by somebody so hard.

      E: also interesting, and relevant to our interests, you can just buy prestamped envelopes, so thanks chatgpt.

      • @gerikson
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        113 months ago

        In a couple of generations of LLMs ChatGPT will tell you you can just draw your own stamps and it will be perfectly legal.

            • Mike
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              103 months ago

              Rather embarrassingly, Austria Post doesn’t do that but does have “crypto stamps” which are regular stamps only with a QR code linking to an NFT or something. To be fair to Austria Post, though, they are really good at extracting cash from the pockets of overexcitable stamp collectors with gimmickry like this. https://onlineshop.post.at/en-AT/page/crypto-stamp

              • @antifuchs
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                63 months ago

                I still follow developments in Austria a little but I had missed this cursed bit of information. Thanks for the nightmares, hope my dad (a hobbyist stamp collector) won’t fall into that trap now.

          • @gerikson
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            43 months ago

            This is actually cool for real.

      • @slopjockey
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        63 months ago

        I think a human would probably recommend priority mail atp. You’d get tracking, wouldn’t waste 19 stamps, and shipping is already included in the cost

    • @V0ldek
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      43 months ago

      Holy shit, this is LinkedIn matetial

    • @gerikson
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      43 months ago

      Dude got a check delivered to him, presumably via the same mail system he is shitting on? But fine, apparently “not getting paid” is also a competitive advantage.

      Also checks, lol???

      • @froztbyteOP
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        3 months ago

        Also checks, lol???

        the US (banking system, but not exclusively that) is living in the past to a stunning degree

        couple years back when I visited (mid 2010s), in DC I had someone make a physical imprint of my CC for a payment, and in NYC doing card transactions on the subway ticket machines it doesn’t ask for card pin but instead for zip code (and as a non-resident, you just enter 0000 (never tried to see if others work))

        checks/cheques are still a rather frequent way of inter-business/inter-person value transfer

        • @gerikson
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          43 months ago

          We usually trail a bit behind here in Sweden so none of the plastic cards in my wallet have raised numerals anymore, but the last generation I had did.

          I’m old enough to literally handling cashing checks as a bank teller. Nowadays I guess a cashiers check is still in demand for big ticket items like vehicles but last time I got a car (via credit) it was all done by my digitally signing a bunch of stuff on my phone.

          • @froztbyteOP
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            33 months ago

            yeah here in ZA we’ve had futuristic banking since the 00s (straight-up USSD banking services were available), chip&pin have been around for probably a decade if not more

            it did take a little while for NFC to roll out (probably because our banks are dicks and charge vendors for payment terminals, which many would bother not replacing while their existing ones work) but even that is well into “you can nfc-pay at shops in towns in the middle of nowhere”

            afaik US banks are still working on the really, really hard problem of … same-/next-day interbank payments. you know, that thing that most other places have figured out 2~3 decades ago? yeah

            • @gerikson
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              33 months ago

              tbf I believe a contributing factor for US banks being stuck in the 1950s is regulation designed to prevent giant mergers. But I may be wrong.

    • @jax
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      134 months ago

      dude got fucking ratioed lol

      My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!

    • @blakestaceyA
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      104 months ago

      “Ideological Turing test”?

      Not gonna look up what that is, but I’m sure it’s debatebro “civility” fetishism.

      • @Soyweiser
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        64 months ago

        It is the not totally bad idea that you understand a different perspective if you can reliably write pieces of text in such a way that somebody from that perspective cannot tell you don’t hold that ideological position.

        It fails pretty quickly when tribalism comes into play (aka do it a few times, conclude ‘our side is better at passing this test, so we are better’, ideologies being broad and people not always realizing which ideology they really are in/differences in definitions. And other issues like it is just a bit of intellectual masturbation, depending on finding neutral people of that perspective. ‘you failed the intellectual turing test so we can ignore your criticism of our side’. ‘You would fail an intellectual turing test so we can ignore you’. It being debate bro culture with extra steps. People are not actually interested in the test but use the test as an argument to bash people (you once failed at detecting sarcasm and misattributed a sarcastic joke from a leftwinger to the far right? This shows the entire left fails the intellectual turing test and should not be listened to). etc etc. /rant

        • @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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          53 months ago

          Somehow that’s even dumber than I thought. Especially given the amount of actual political discourse taking the form of “can you believe the woke left wants to allow doctors to trans your children at the age of 3 months!”

          Could some of these people write a compelling pro-trans argument? Probably, given that their exaggerations are absurd, nonsensical , and/or contradictory on their face and that the pro-trans arguments are generally rooted in basic respect for people’s autonomy over their own bodies. But that doesn’t stop them from lying about what trans people actually want in order to gain political power by stoking the right’s identitarian outrage.

          • @Soyweiser
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            43 months ago

            Depends on who you mean with ‘those people’ I think the people of themotte woudl have a lot of trouble writing a pro trans argument for example. Esp as the people in there who are leftwingers (or pretend to be) tend to be anti trans, and there is also a big tendency for them to not understand basic leftwing ideas. That one leftwinger (forgot their name for now they had some number in their name) who kept engaging there, got a few complaints they kept reexplaining the same stuff.

            Yeah, if you keep ignoring the explanations and misrepresenting people, they will have to do that. (or quit).

      • @sinedpick
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        104 months ago

        I made the mistake of reading the comments on that substack and I’m beginning to actually feel the raw desperation of these sycophants for someone of “note” to notice them.

        Innumeracy is the opioid of the masses.

        This is the genius-level discourse that Bryan Caplan foments in his marketplace of ideas.

      • @sinedpick
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        94 months ago

        Is he ever going to specify which booster? If he refused Tdap he is a menace to society not because of risk of tetanus but spreading pertussis to the vulnerable.

        Still, anyone that took him seriously before this should be embarrassed.

      • @Amoeba_Girl
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        63 months ago

        It’s really really hard for me to take grown men who make a show of being deathly afraid of a little jab you can barely feel seriously.

        • @BlueMonday1984
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          63 months ago

          Same here. Any kind of jab’s a PITA for me, and anything intravenous is some of the worst shit I’ve ever experienced, but I’ve gritted my teeth and gotten through them no problem.

    • @gerikson
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      4 months ago

      I mean, for the doctor it’s pretty hard to tell a dude who is “GMU econ prof, NYT bestseller, father of 4, author of Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Case Against Education, Open Borders, & BBB” apart from any other entitled white guy whose read too much Facebook.

      • @Soyweiser
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        94 months ago

        Practically is there much difference?

    • @gerikson
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      74 months ago

      Woo, complaining about a community note is big Karen energy.

  • @sc_griffith
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    4 months ago

    went and peeked at the ezra klein podcast on the off chance he’s gotten into anything interesting

    There's something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It's clear we're witnessing the advent of a wildly powerful technology, one that could transform the economy and the way we think about art and creativity and the value of human work itself. At the same time, can't for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job.
So wanted to understand what I'm missing and get some tips for how could incorporate A.Il. better into my life right now. And Ethan Mollick is the perfect guide: He's a professor at the Wharton School

    lol

    • @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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      114 months ago

      To be fair, it’s hard to really internalize that all these rich and powerful techbros are actually morons after all these years of journalists like Ezra Klein breathlessly reporting their weird ideas and baseless claims about what they were going to be able to do in the next couple of years.

    • @swlabr
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      83 months ago

      I rewrote it for accuracy:

      There’s something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It’s clear we’re witnessing the advent of a wilfully stupid fart machine, one that could transform the atmosphere into farts and the way we think about farts and creating farts and the value of human farts itself. At the same time, I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’d want to sit in a room filled with my own farts.

      So I wanted to understand what I’m missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate farts better into my life right now. And Eating Mollusks is the perfect guide: He’s a pro-fartor at the Fartin’ School at the University of Farts

      • @sc_griffith
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        3 months ago

        the nuanced take nobody wants to hear: farts are a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or bad. that’s what progress is. we can’t let the possibility of a few bad uses of farts overshadow how farts can unleash the futures of truly creative individuals, businesses and societies.

        to address another common point: yes, there are kinks to be worked out. sometimes farted information can be wrong. farted music doesn’t always come out with the clarity we want. farted art is sometimes missing details. but farts are already revolutionizing and democratizing the arts, science, and even the concept of human interaction. we can’t lose sight of the great potential of farting - just like the early days of the internet, we don’t know what amazing things we’ll end up with because of it.

        • @swlabr
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          73 months ago

          Δ Thanks, this really changed my perspective on farts

    • @V0ldek
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      23 months ago

      Who the hell is Ezra Klein? Some Joe Rogan type of guy with a lot of bad ideas on a podcast?

      • @sc_griffith
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        53 months ago

        idk if this will mean anything to you but matt yglesias is the muppet version of ezra klein

        • @V0ldek
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          3 months ago

          I guess it does, in the sense that I have asked “who tf is Matt Yglessias and why does anyone listen to him” many times and received no satisfactory explanation either