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)
Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj
translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong
And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?
i wouldn’t want to sound like I’m running down Hinton’s work on neural networks, it’s the foundational tool of much of what’s called “AI”, certainly of ML
but uh, it’s comp sci which is applied mathematics
how does this rate a physics Nobel??
They’re reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.
lol holy shit actual tweet
Image description: tweet from the official Nobel Prize account. Text reads,
Congratulations to our 2024 medicine laureate Victor Ambros ✨
This morning he celebrated the news of his prize with his colleague and wife Rosalind Lee, who was also the first author on the 1993 ‘Cell’ paper cited by the Nobel Committee.
#NobelPrize
Blake reaction description: sighing and muttering, “yep, assholes will asshole”
a friend says:
effectively they made machine learning look like an Ising model, and you honestly have no idea how much theoretical physicists fucking love it when things turn out to be the Ising model
does that match your experience? if so i’ll quote that
That sounds about right, yeah.
yeah, takes from physicists i know range from “wtf” to “it’s plaaausible with a streeetch”
looking through the committee, I see Ulf Danielsson is notable on AI mostly for being skeptical (he writes pop sci books so people ask him about all manner of shit)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo
It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities … but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control
😩
Getting a head start on that Nobel disease.
This work getting the physics nobel for “using physics” is reeeeeeal fuckin tangential
Also: TL note: 11,000,000 Swedish Krona equals 11,386,313.85 Norwegian Krone
In other news, Hindenburg Research just put out a truly damning report on Roblox, aptly titled “Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids”, and the markets have responded.
Just remembering this banger from back in the day.
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
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!
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
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 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
