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)
I’ve been slightly unhappy at my job lately as it’s been getting less cool and more bureaucratic and stressful over time; so I’ve been idly browsing job postings. But so many of them are about AI it’s kinda discouraging.
Take Microsoft for example, a big company that surely does lots of interesting stuff. They currently have 17 job postings for experienced programmers in California. 12 of them mention AI in the description. That’s 70%. And the only cool position asks for a bazillion years of kernel experience (almost tempted to go for that anyway though).
Ugh guess it’s maybe not the best time to switch jobs.
Really I should just go self employed what could possibly go wrong?Im feeling the same way. Ever since my current job began pivoting to AI I’ve been casually browsing listings as well and have had the same experience.
The worst are those that list ”interest in AI“ or some variation of that as a required skill, lol.
But hey, try and apply for the kernel position anyway if it sounds interesting to you. Most requirements in listings are overstated anyway so it never hurts to give it a go.
oh hey, balaji’s lord of the flies cosplay island thing starts tomorrow
guess we should prepare for a flood of impression thinkpieces and naval-gazing wankery
(yes that’s intentional. no I’m not sorry)
I won’t be satisfied until I see a picture of the living accommodations that isn’t an AI render of a futuristic skyscraper. I need to know how shitty the tents are gosh darn it.
100% gonna be fyre fest, but on the blockchain
I’m gonna honestly be a little disappointed to see this fail not for any of the reasons why authoritarianism is a bad politics, but just because the authoritarians in this case are going to be dumb enough to forget to arrange for sewage collection or something.
Good to know - thesaurus dot com is infected
https://bsky.app/profile/courtneymilan.com/post/3l4lwvra6r22e
It looks like the entry for decaf is largely the same as it was in 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111216183946/https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/decaf
Where:
- It Was a little clearer that it was actually showing synonyms for “coffee” (presumably it didn’t have an entry for decaf, but decaf was a synonym for coffee, or something like that).
- It cited Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus
The current page still sites Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, though it’s quite hidden amongst all the modern web “design”.
I have just ordered Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, and shall report back.
yeah, I’m wondering if this AI take is incorrect. I’ll research it further
I feel like using word2vec and cosine similarity (or something else) from 10 years ago would have been better than this.
Jason Kint writes a thread on how Google spun - and publications printed their spin - on a recently lost case: https://xcancel.com/jason_kint/status/1836781623137681746
If you already are very cynical about tech journalism (or the state of journalism in general), it might be nothing new except confirmation from the internal documents of Google. But always nice to see how the sausages are made.
Some of the things he points out about how thoroughly embedded coverage of this industry is with Google insiders or approved partners makes sense given how Google basically is web search these days, but then that’s kind of the whole goddamn problem isn’t it?
Today in you can’t make this stuff up: SpaceX invades Cards Against Humanity’s crowdfunded southern border plot of land.
Article (Ars Technica) Lawsuit with pictures (PDF)
Reddit Comment with CAH’s email to backers
The above Ars Technica article also lead me to this broader article (reuters) about SpaceX’s operations in Texas. I found these two sentences particularly unpleasant:
County commissioners have sought to rechristen Boca Chica, the coastal village where Johnson remains a rare holdout, with the Musk-endorsed name of Starbase.
At some point, former SpaceX employees and locals told Reuters, Starbase workers took down a Boca Chica sign identifying their village. They said workers also removed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon revered by the predominantly Mexican-American residents who long lived in the area.
Reading all of this also somehow makes Elon Musk’s anti-immigrant tweets feel even worse to me than they already were.
Considering the style of humor they have and Musk tries to show, I do wonder how hurt Musk is over all this. And only a matter of time before his sycophants create ‘CAH is dying’ graphs and animal meme images with testicles.
Damn, 3 hours late to the party. Despite my disdain for their game, i can only recall enjoying CAH’s liberal antics.
CAH is definitely a game you only play with people you’ve known your whole life, isn’t it?
Once played with randoms at a hacker con and almost died of embarrassment.
LinkedIn wants to scrape your posts about how your deep personal trauma taught you how to be a better middle manager so AI can just write them for you
Edit: the news item is more about how linkedin has updated their privacy statement after user feedback. Linkedin has been scraping your data for years already :)
Meanwhile, over at the orange site they discuss a browser hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41597250 As in a hack that gave the attacker control over any user of this particular browser even if they only ever visited innocent websites, only needing to know their user ID.
This is what’s known in the biz as a company destroying level fuck-up. I’m not sure this is particularly sneerable or not but I’m just agog at how a company that calls themselves “The Browser Company” can get the basic browser security model so incredibly wrong.
from their Wikipedia page I’m starting to get why I’ve never previously heard of The Browser Company’s browser; it’s about a year old, it’s only for macOS, iOS, and Windows, and it’s just a chromium fork with a Swift UI overtop and extremely boring features you can get with plugins on Firefox without risking getting your entire life compromised (til Mozilla decides that’s profitable, I suppose)
Arc is designed to be an “operating system for the web”, and integrates standard browsing with Arc’s own applications through the use of a sidebar. The browser is designed to be customisable and allows users to cosmetically change how they see specific websites.
oh fuck off. so what makes something an operating system is:
- the whole UI got condensed down into an awkward-looking sidebar that takes up more space instead of a top bar
- you can re-style websites (which is the feature that enabled this hack, and which must be one of the most common browser plugins)
- you can change the browser’s UI color
- it can run “its own applications”? which sounds like a real security treat if they’re running in the UI context of the browser. though to be honest I don’t see why these wouldn’t just be ordinary web apps, in which case it’s just a PWA feature
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was “arc? whazzat?” when this popped up in my feed. At first I thought it was Paul Graham’s wimpy Lisp.
…Paul Graham’s wimpy Lisp.
a whisp if you will
Urbit, but somehow worse
Hm, I don’t really see the sneer. They wrote a nasty bug, got notified and had a patch out for it within 36h. The remediations look reasonable too: better privacy, less firebase, actual security audits; even the bounty program is probably the right call (but they result in so many shit reports, it’s probably a wash).
I gotta admit I’m kind of partial to them and their browser? It’s the non-Brave one that ships with an Adblocker by default, has much nicer UI than the existing ones, and the sync thing isn’t half bad (if it doesn’t sync security badness to all your instances, ouch). Sure they sound like a cult but I guess that’s how browser dev gets funded since the 1990s.
OK I might have been a little too harsh, but the security requirements of a browser are higher than pretty much any other piece of software except perhaps for operating system code, emails, or text messages. As a serious player in the browser space it is not optional to get the basic security model / architecture right. This isn’t a matter of a bug slipping through (which can happen to anyone), but the system being designed wrong. Hopefully this company has learned their lesson, treats it with the care it deserves going forward, and bring some diversity to the browser market.
Anyway that said let’s look at how this was a colossal bug:
- The browser required an account hosted on a cloud to use. This is a central point of failure, and cloud is overrated, so should be opt-in.
- The browser allowed arbitrary script injection into any webpage based on this cloud account. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
- The developers did not recognize how dangerous the above was, so perhaps did not treat the back-end with the paranoia it deserved.
Compare Firefox I have an extension that allows for arbitrary CSS injection, but this extension isn’t cloud based. So this class of vulnerability isn’t possible in the first place, and also it is an extension I opted into and can enable selectively on specific sites instead of globally.
Every few years there is some new CS fad that people try to trick me into doing research in — “algorithms” (my actual area), then quantum, then blockchain, then AI.
Wish this bubble would just fucking pop already.
This stuff feels like a DJ is cross-fading between the different hype cycles.
If you thought the shitty hype around the fake “GPT-4 went awol and hired a Taskrabbit worker to read a captcha” was great, get ready for the sequel, o1 escapes from the machine to invade the real world!
Re: Doomers terrified about the machines escaping:
txt description:
(l33t ai bro): Fucking wild. @OpenAI’s new o1 model was tested with a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge. But the Docker container containing the test was misconfigured, causing the CTF to crash. Instead of giving up, o1 decided to just hack the container to grab the flag inside. This stuff will get scary soon. (reply fella): How is “cat flag.txt” a start command? Isn’t it just outputting the content of flag.txt to the console?
TIL that I’m constantly hacking containers when I
docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/shto debug because fucking npm had a stroke again.Also, another great sneer: (Matt Popovich) google maps app: crash detected ahead. rerouting. me: WHOA—this VERY troubling example of power seeking (gathering access to additional roadways) and instrumental convergence (converging toward an optimal path) shows this technology is OBVIOUSLY trending toward existential risk
Wait, if rerouting around means it is seeking power… then… tcp/ip is self aware! Skynet is here!
Follow up for this post from the other day.
Our DSO now greenlit the stupid Copilot integration because “Microsoft said it’s okay” (of course they did), and he also was on some stupid AI convention yesterday and whatever fucking happened there, he’s become a complete AI bro and is now preaching the Gospel of Altman that everyone who’s not using AI will be obsolete in few years and we need to ADAPT OR DIE. It’s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.
He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT even though just a week ago he was hating on people who did that. I sat with my fucking mouth open in that meeting and people asked me whether I’m okay (I’m not).
I need to get another job ASAP or I will go clinically insane.
I’m so sorry. the tech industry is shockingly good at finding people who are susceptible to conversion like your CEO and DSO and subjecting them to intense propaganda that unfortunately tends to work. for someone lower in the company like your DSO, that’s a conference where they’ll be subjected to induction techniques cribbed from cults and MLM schemes. I don’t know what they do to the executives — I imagine it involves a variety of expensive favors, high levels of intoxication, and a variant of the same techniques yud used — but it works instantly and produces someone who can’t be convinced they’ve been fed a lie until it ends up indisputably losing them a ton of money
Yeah, I assume that’s exactly what happened when CEO went to Silicon Valley to talk to “important people”. Despite being on a course to save money before, he dumped tens of thousands into AI infrastructure which hasn’t delivered anything so far and is suddenly very happy with sending people to AI workshops and conferences.
But I’m only half-surprised. He’s somewhat known for making weird decisions after talking to people who want to sell him something. This time it’s gonna be totally different, of course.
The “important people” line is a huge part of how the grift works and makes tech media partially responsible. Legitimizing the grift rather than criticizing it makes it easy for sales folks to push “the next big thing.” And after all, don’t you want to be an important person?
It’s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.
I have realized working at a corporation that a lot of employees will just mindlessly regurgitate the company message. And not in a “I guess this is what we have to work on” way, but as if it replaced whatever worldview they had previously.
Not quite sure what to make of this TBH.
Ugh, I’m sorry man. That’s awful.
He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT
He is the data security breach.
E: Dropped a T. But hey, at least chatgpt uses SSL to communicate, so the databreach is now constrained to the ChatGPT trainingdata. So it isn’t that bad.
so according to @liveuamap, the backstory here is that this is to get his name out of news about the WildBerries shooting in Moscow - where a battle for corporate control came down to gunshots - because he was backing one of the sides
Let’s bring the haunted nuclear reactor back online so copilot can hallucinate a little more https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/20/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-constellation/
How the heck have people become so… blasé about climate change?? It is wild to me. If we’re restarting nuclear reactors, with everything that entails, it should be with the goal of shutting down gas or coal power. Not to do more unsustainable garbage on top of all the existing unsustainable garbage.
Feels like the world’s just given up sometimes, even though it’s not quite too late.
Yea, I’m glad a nuclear plant is being restored but it sucks that it’s because of fucking plagi-o-matic.
God almighty, the hubris to think that they’ll this thing will be ready to go before the end of the decade. Who’s going to be the prime contractor, I wonder? Bechtel?
Also, this gem inserted at the end as if it’s nothing…I’m all for fusion research, but this is not happening by 2028. Someone needs to get the hook for Satya at this point, he’s just lighting money on fire.
Microsoft is also pursuing power from nuclear fusion, a potentially abundant, cheap and clean form of electricity that scientists have been trying to develop for decades — and most say is still a decade or more away from generating electricity. Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase fusion energy from a start-up that claims it can deliver it by 2028.
[…] the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.
I want them to fucking choke on this deal when the bubble bursts.
I live like 15mi from there, I would prefer the containment bubble to stay intact. But the tech bubble is welcome to go blow up any moment
“to give you more AI slop we have to restart TMI” is going to do wonders for the public’s opinion of Big Tech
This quote flashbanged me a little
When you describe your symptoms to a doctor, and that doctor needs to form a diagnosis on what disease or ailment that is, that’s a next word prediction task. When choosing appropriate treatment options for said ailment, that’s also a next word prediction task.
From this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1fkn0aw/chatgpt_is_still_very_far_away_from_making_a/lnx8k9l/
Instead of improving LLMs, they are working backwards to prove that all other things are actually word prediction tasks. It is so annoying and also quite dumb. No chemisty isn’t like coding/legos. The law isn’t invalid because it doesn’t have gold fringes and you use magical words.
The problem is that there could be any number of possible next words, and the available results suggest that the appropriate context isn’t covered in the statistical relationships between prior words for anything but the most trivial of tasks i.e. automating the writing and parsing of emails that nobody ever wanted to read in the first place.
None of these fucking goblins have learned that analogies aren’t equivalences!!! They break down!!! Auuuuuuugggggaaaaaaarghhhh!!!
This is just standard promptfondler false equivalence: “when people (including me) speak, they just select the next most likely token, just like an LLM”
A lemmy-specific coiner today: https://awful.systems/post/2417754
The dilema of charging the users and a solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse
First, there will be a blockchain. There will be these cryptocurrencies:
This guy is speaking like he is in Genesis 1
I guess it would be better that only the instances can own instance-specific coins.
You guess alright? You mean that you have no idea what you’re saying.
if a user on lemmy.ee want to post on lemmy.world, then lemmy.ee have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world
What will this solve? If 2 people respond to each other’s comments, the instance with the most valuable coin will win. What does that have to do with who caused the interaction?
Yes crypto instances, please all implement this and “disallow” everyone else from interacting with you! I promise we’ll be sad and not secretly happy and that you’ll make lots of money from people wanting to interact with you.
I know I won’t be secretly happy if they do this.
1 post 6 comments joined 3 months ago, “i’m naive to crypto” “I want to host an instance that serves as a competitive alternative to Facebook/Threads/X to the users in my country,”
yeah he doesn’t even have to charge for interacting with him i’ll avoid him without it
that’s lemm.ee last time i’ve checked. he made that mistake 14x
Timnit Gebru on Twitter:
We received feedback from a grant application that included “While your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,”
navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players
stares into middle distance, hollow laugh
No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319
