Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
why in the fuck does calibre’s source code have an
aifolder?https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/tree/master/src/calibre/ai
at the very least call it “llm” or something. does this folder contain A* as a subroutine? or how about a chess engine? someone needs to develop a pill that cures misanthropy because for some reason this specifically broke me.
Calibre recently implemented integrations with various slop generators. Its optional (for now).
guess it’s finally time to rewrite calibre
i’m thinking cobol as a big misanthropic fuck you to humanity
and i’ll call the rewrite
coblibreand it’ll include allusions everywhere to tyrion killing tywin, fuck it
This isn’t a particularly novel stupid take, but it was made by a bluesky engineer, and it is currently dunking-on-bluesky season so here we are.
“If you imagine that an ai is a person, then saying bad things about it is bigotry”
Welp, they’ve got me there. Guess I’ll never say anything bad about anything again, because it is racism, if you think about it.
https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2f66lgh2c2v
alt text
A bluesky post by dystopiabreaker.xyz
i’m completely serious when i say that much of the dismissive ai discourse on here fires the bigotry neuron
And two replies by hailey.at
an unfortunate irony about this post - and even if you are the staunchest anti-ai critic out there, i think you’d agree - is that some of the most bigoted things are being said to respond to this. copy/pasting phrasing and terminology used by bigots but replacing “dna” with “bits” doesn’t make it ok
if you’re writing a sentence that sounds like eugenics but you go “oh that’s fine to say because it’s not a real person” (whatever that means) you may want to consider what made you okay with saying that
Said engineer’s also brainstorming new ways to spy on users and adding a new misfeature that scans everything you post, in direct response to getting clowned on.
‘some of the most bigoted things’
You mean stuff like ‘no this is stupid, wtf is wrong with you’ or ‘lol, look they really think LLMs are alive’ stuff like that? The worst I saw (granted I didn’t look very hard) was ‘ok boomer’.
Of course actual meanings of words mean nothing to AI fans.
(Also, thing which is a personal gripe, the skeet before the ‘bigotry neuron’ has 2 images in it, without alt text. If you are going to pretend to value progressive values, at least put in some effort).
Ah, the beauty of the fundamental theorem of concern-troll linguistics. If you can change the words in a sentence so that the new sentence is racist, the original must be as well. Example:
Aaron: The weather is just ok.
Baron: OMG. I can’t believe you just said that. What if I changed the noun and adjective, like this: “<ethnic group> is <negative adjective>”. Go home and think about what you did.
(an exception can be made for people repurposing real-world slurs and putting a techy spin on them. fuck directly off with “wireback” and similar shit)
i read that there was one based on a mexican-slur, but i couldn’t think of it
spent weeks trying to rhyme “wet” with something, couldn’t come up with it, damn i guess i’m not a poet at least i know it
“wire” — fuck me that is so lazy
If I imagine that my butt is a rocket, then I can fart my way to the moon
I might flesh this out into a proper post, but I remember stumbling on this weird website: https://www.reactionary.software/
I originally found it on r/shittysysadmin when a screenshot of the discord for it (so much for modern software being bloated and unusable) had the person behind it defending that the site didn’t have an ssl cert, since that was a way “modern browsers control you”.
I was curious and poked around on the site, and first thing you see is this:
Make software great again! For programmers who hate modern software. Modern software is overcomplicated, bloated, unreliable, incomprehensible, pointlessly ideological, and mostly unusable. We like the values of older software: simplicity, reliability, and usability.
This seems pretty fashy, but there is some legitimate criticisms of modern software.
Saving programming from modern culture
Nevermind, fash.
On the about page, he starts by mentioning html swipers, and one he made himself. The one he made is pretty dogshit on anything but a phone.
After talking a bit on how terrible modern software he then compares it to brick walls, which were also so much better back in the day (?).
He then rambles about ancient greece and rome.
An excerpt:Why did it take to long? Because humanity had become just too stupid to appreciate good ideas. They weren’t completely retarded. Ptolemy’s horrible system did require some intelligence to create. […] Today’s West is currently at the level of the decaying Greeks, heading toward complete idiocracy. The programmers in Silicon Valley are like Ptolemy, able to construct and maintain horrible overcomplicated monstrosities, but totally unable to innovate at a fundamental level. All good programming ideas are rejected because they don’t fit into current programming ideologies. Any programmer like Aristarchus who comes up with a good programming idea will be rejected and ridiculed for violating orthodoxy. Modern programmers are in love with their own ideas and love complexity. They hate simplicity and anything that violates their ideologies.
He then complains about how his parser was met with scorn by Modern Programmers, because they were too stupid to appreciate how good it was?
The post is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/cv78b3/parsing_for_programmers_who_hate_modern_software/
Some excerpts:
What is good? The short answer is that everything that modern culture hates is good, and everything that modern culture loves is bad. But we need more details than that. You can find good values in scripture or in good traditional culture. These values should be applied to programming and to everything else in life. I wrote an Old Testament guide to programming. I also discussed applying traditional Japanese culture to programming. These are just two examples. Any other scripture like the Quran or any traditional culture should work fine to give you good values, in contrast to the horrible values of modern culture, and these good values can guide you to writing good reactionary software.
So, anything anti-modern is good?
Going back to the homepage, there’s a page for existing reactionary software.
Java 8.
One of the pinnacles of software, to him, is Java 8.
Not java specifically, just java 8.Luan is a language he made, which I can only describe as a mash of lua, java and php.
Here’s a snippet from the docs:local Io = require "luan:Io.luan" local Http = require "luan:http/Http.luan" return function() Io.stdout = Http.response.text_writer() %> <!doctype html> <html> <body> Hello World </body> </html> <% endSo, this is basically a lua clone, written in java. with a few missing features .
The why page on the luan site is probably the most deranged bit of this.
Luan rejects the complexity of modern software. […] Luan will appeal to you depends on who you are. Members of modern culture will not like Luan because they hate simplicity. Luan will only appeal to good cultures that value simplicity, so I will address the two good cultures that I know of.
The mentioned two good cultures are the Mennonites, and the Japanese.
Japan is the only remaining country that I know of that values quality.
You cannot expect to achieve Japanese standards of quality and reliability if you use modern western software. So use Luan instead.
He has a chronically inactive forum at https://mikraite.arkian.net/Reactionary-Software-f1999.html .
Also, shoutout to this political take: https://web.archive.org/web/20240831203139/http://mikraite.arkian.net/Are-democrats-actually-our-allies-td4846.html
I have just realised that I unintentionally fleshed this into a proper post.
the site didn’t have an ssl cert, since that was a way “modern browsers control you”.
I feel attacked. Not in the ‘I agree with this person’ way, but in a way that this feels like nerd sniping people like me. So stupid you have to react.
Java 8
See! That is what I mean!
But as somebody who values old cultures, I will not throw stones. ;)
Also the guy is an eugenicist wannabe cult leader.
Great find. A reactionary fetishising Japan?? Unheard of
Last week on, “Please do not build the torment nexus”
No, it never works out in the movies, I mean somehow these poor delusional humans convince themselves that they can control the kill bots…
Because the Terminator franchise is from Hollywood, the heroic resisters to SkyNet are Americans. Someone didn’t watch the movies very well.
OFC the OG Terminator was a scary foreign man with a pronounced accent…
Good to know that she still has space on her war crime scorecard
I know it’s terrible being a drama gossip, but there are some Fun Times on bluesky at the moment. I’m sure most of you know the origins of the project, and the political leanings of the founders, but they’re currently getting publicly riled up about trans folk and palestinians and tying themselves up in knots defending their decision to change the rules to keep jesse singal on site, and penniless victims of the idf off it.
They really cannot cope with the fact that their user base aren’t politically aligned with them, and are desperate to appease the fash (witness the crackdowns on people’s reaction to charlie kirk’s overdue departure from this vale of tears) and have currently reached the Posting Through It stage. I’m assuming at some point their self-image as Reasonable Centrists will crack and one or more of them will start throwing around transphobic slurs and/or sieg-heiling and bewailing how the awful leftists made them do it. Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
Well, they’re already using “waffles” as a transphobic slur (irony poisoning speedrun any%), so it’s really more of a question of which transphobic slurs they’ll escalate to next.
And all this because she simply could not shut up. Which seems to be one of the oldest, modding a large community rules.
Nobody ever seems to learn the “never get high from your own supply” lesson. Gotta get that hit of thousands of people instantly supporting and agreeing with whatever dumbfuck thought just fell out.
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
whenever there’s a huge scandal he listens to his PR people, keeps his mouth shut, then goes on a media tour where he lies his ass off in exactly the same way at each stop. it’s that simple and yet almost no other tech people can do it
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
Its an extremely low bar to clear, but I’ll begrudgingly hand it to him for being one of the few tech CEOs who didn’t actively limbo under it.
here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit
here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:
here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)
Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon
This doesn’t include her blurb about, “are you paying us? where???”
But weren’t there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
The question on getting paid might give credence to the rumors that they’re running out of money and won’t make it (user-growth wise) as an ad platform. Which, lol and also lmao.
Yeah, I can’t see that they’re doing anything besides burning runway. It’s probably shortly going to become cliche to say, “glad I never made an account there,” but, welp, glad I never made an account there
But weren’t there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
Even beyond that, the Twitter refugees came to Bluesky because they wanted a Nazi-free successor to Twitter. Most of them would’ve happily pitched in to keep the site alive whilst goodwill remained.
Bluesky wanted to be Nazi Twitter, then Elon purchased Twitter and stole their market.
Huh, didn’t know about the guy behind tangled.org (Anirudh Oppiliappan) being a waffle enthusiast too 🫤 Just visited his bsky profile, and he’s enthusing about a “decentralised accelerationism” post by jay.
I hadn’t really seen the point of the tangled project (I’m not sure what atproto brings to version control) but I was interested in an ecosystem around the jujutsu vcs stuff. I guess I won’t find that here.
ok plz explain what “waffles” means in this context
TL;DR: It’s all a meme-poisoned bluesky circle-jerk involving transphobes and people who desperately want transphobes to think they’re cool.
The link from self to mcc’s bluesky thread sums up this stuff with references, but to attempt to summarise the summary, there’s a tweet from the depths of time (2017) that says
Twitter the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say “I like pancakes” and somebody will say “So you hate waffles?”
Bluesky ceo jay graber uses “waffles” as shorthand referencing this post, and whipped it out when asked about bluesky’s ongoing unwillingness to do anything about noted transphobe jesse singal, who has since posted about how much he loves waffles.
jfc
Thanks for taking the time to expand
Somehow I missed this when it came out, but apparently starmer’s digital ID scheme is so half-baked that even palantir are backing away and saying they won’t tender for it. “Worst person you know”, etc.
Content warning for flattering pictures of moseley jr 🤮
Paywalled:
Archived:
It’s so fucking weird because as a regular EU citizen an ID card is a normal and good thing to exist and have, yet somehow the anglo world has managed to make it controversial and bad by insisting on a horrible surveillance police state version of the concept.
It’s a combination of reflexive authoritarianism and a complete and total inability to deliver a big public-sector tech project without it drowning in corruption and incompetence.
States which already have ID cards implemented them before the advent of modern consultancies. Even the UK managed driving licenses and passports OK, back in the day. But until someone buries deloitte and capita et al at crossroads at midnight with their heads chopped off, I suspect we’ll never manage such a thing again.
A hackernews claiming to be a cerebras insider is calling schenanigans. Not sure how trustworthy of a source this is, but the replies may be interesting.
what fresh hell is this
Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin (HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45471573)
pushy rationalist tried to glom onto and fly to meet my niche internet microcelebrity friend & i talked her through setting boundaries instead of installing this person in her life. my good deed for the week
In today’s torment nexus development news… you know how various cyberpunky type games let you hack into an enemy’s augmentations and blow them up? Perhaps you thought this was stupid and unrealistic, and you’d be right.
Maybe that’s the wrong example. How about a cursed evil ring that when you put it on, you couldn’t take it off and it wracks you with pain? Who hasn’t wanted one of those?
Happily, hard working torment nexus engineers have brought that dream one step closer, by having “smart rings”, powered by lithium polymer batteries. Y’know, the things that can go bad, and swell up and catch fire? And that you shouldn’t puncture, because that’s a fire risk too, meaning cutting the ring off is somewhat dangerous? Fun times abound!
https://bsky.app/profile/emily.gorcen.ski/post/3m25263bs3c2g
image description
A pair of tweets, containing the text
Daniel aka ZONEofTECH on x.com: “Ahhh…this is…not good. My Samsung Galaxy Ring’s battery started swelling. While it’s on my finger 😬. And while I’m about to board a flight 😬 Now I cannot take it off and this thing hurts. Any quick suggestions
Update:
- I was denied boarding due to this (been travelling for ~47h straight so this is really nice 🙃). Need to pay for a hotel for the night now and get back home tomorrow👌
- was sent to the hospital, as an emergency
- ring got removed
You can see the battery all swollen. Won’t be wearing a smart ring ever again.
At least it wasn’t a cock ring.
Let’s be honest: These are exactly the sort of people who will stick their dicks into the Torment Nexus.
It almost surely has been done, but dare I ask where one can find trashy romance a la “pegged by the basilisk”
“Pegged in the ass by a physical manifestation of an online forum thought exercise gone horribly wrong” should be a Tingler if it isn’t already one.
There were some issues with an internet-connected chastity device not that long ago, but they were conventional “we can’t be bothered to secure our web service, even when everyone is telling us it is terrible” issues, rather than “knob gets crushed and catches fire”. Still, there’s plenty of scope for someone to make one of those in future… OTA BMS firmware updates are very much a thing, and the market for alarming sex toys is practically unlimited.
(now I think about it, I suspect there’s a market for very poorly secured internet-connected sex toys. someone got off to that headline, I’m pretty certain)
Is your ring even swole, bro
YaaS: Yubitsume as a Service
AI video generation use case: hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days, such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?
It his the uncanny valley triggers quite hard. It’s faintly unsettling t watch at all, but every individual detail is just wrong and dreamlike in a bad way.
Also, weird scenery clipping, just like real kids did back in the day!
https://bsky.app/profile/mugrimm.bsky.social/post/3lzy77zydrc2q
genuinely think nostalgia might be the most purely evil emotion, and every one of these RETVRN ai videos i see strengthens that belief
It is a literal gateway to fascism imho, esp when people get into nostalgia for a time that never was.
And compared to nostalgia for mom n pop stores, this even is nostalgia for a mass produced product.
I will say that the flipping between characters in order to disguise the fact that longer clips are impractical to render is a neat trick and fits well into the advert-like design, but rewatching it just really reinforces how much those kids look like something pretending real hard to be a human.
Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?
Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?
I was gonna say that was probably the slop extruder’s doing, but it looks to have been applied manually for some godforsaken reason. Best guess is whoever was behind this audiovisual extrusion thought “celluloid filter = Nostalgiatm”.
I suspect it is also hiding some rendering artefacts.
I imagine it helps with the slightly plastic look that skin still gets too
hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days
Nostalgiabait is the slopgens’ specialty - being utterly incapable of creating anything new isn’t an issue if you’re trying to fabricate an idealis-
such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?
Okay, stop everything, who the actual fuck would be nostalgic for going to a fucking Wal-Mart? I’ve got zero nostalgia for ASDA or any other British big-box hellscape like it, what the fuck’s so different across the pond?
(Even from a “making nostalgiabait” angle, something like, say, McDonalds would be a much better choice - unlike Wal-Mart, McD’s directly targets kids with their advertising, all-but guaranteeing you’ve got fuzzy childhood memories to take advantage of.)
Oh hey, bay area techfash enthusing about AI and genocidal authoritarians? Must be a day ending in a Y. Today it is Vercel CEO and next.js dev Guillermo Rauch
https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031
image description
A screenshot of a tweet by Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel. There’s a photograph of him next to Netanyahu. The tweet reads:
Enjoyed my discussion with PM Netanyahu on how Al education and literacy will keep our free societies ahead. We spoke about Al empowering everyone to build software and the importance of ensuring it serves quality and progress. Optimistic for peace, safety, and greatness for Israel and its neighbors.
I also have strong opinions about not using next.js or vercel (and server-side javascript in general is a bit of a car crash) but even if you thought it was great you should probably have a look around for alternatives. Just not ruby on rails, perhaps.
Amazing how they all went from oh us poor nerds vs the jocks to bending the knee and licking the boots of the strongmen. see also YT bribing Trump.
…to “it’s OUR TIME NOW”, cf. the most recent two blogs from david heinemeier hansson, palmer fucking luckey in recent nixos thing etc. etc.
The US economy is 100% on coyote time.
It wouldn’t matter if everyone came to their senses today. All the money that’s been invested into AI is gone. It has been turned into heat and swiftly-depreciating assets and can never be recouped.
It’s surreal isn’t it?
The AI industry is getting sneered by the dictionary.
dictionaries are obsolete bricks remembers that they are useful that’s why they’re actually ai when you think about it
You know, I think that even the brick comparison still favors the traditional dictionary. After all, if you wanted to use it for traditional brick purposes like holding doors, weighing down papers, or throwing at [redacted], you would need to invest in a bunch of GPUS and burn them out generating a bunch of worthless slop, spending God only knows how much water, energy, and time. I want to save the rainforest as much as the next guy, but I think it’s obvious that the paper brick is far more cost-effective for both the user and the environment. And provided you can clean the dirt and blood off afterwards, you can even still use it as a dictionary.
what is “linear definitional bias”
Whatever the precise definition, it appears to be comorbid with stimulant dependency
E: eurgh, had forgotten the whole bsky waffle thing. Wasn’t making a reference to that, sorry if it came off as insensitive. Got rid of the comment anyway.
(I had totally forgotten this post, and also didn’t expect the CEO to double/triple down, and now make mentioning waffles into a anti-trans dogwhistle).
The sound a vibe coder makes while edging to Ani
(This is also what all their other words mean)
A good thing! (Unless you prefer noise machines that might give you random definitions with equal probabilities.)
The dictionary doesnt tell me how wise and smart my misinterpretation of a basic idea is and then tells me im right, weird AI bro.
C’mon bro, it’s just a bag of words bro~ We actually discussed this previously, on Awful, and this comment is a reply for them in particular.
Opening the sack with this shit that spawned in front of me:
Guess it won’t be true AGI!
On top of everything else, “the father of quantum computing” is such lazy writing. People were thinking about it before Deutsch, going back at least to Paul Benioff in 1979. Charlie Bennett and Giles Brassard’s proposal for quantum key distribution predates Deutsch’s quantum Turing machine… No one person should be called “the father of” a subject that had so many crucial contributors in such a short period of time.
Also, chalk up another win for the “billionaires want you to think they are physicists” hypothesis. It’s perhaps not as dependable as pedocon theory, but it’s putting in a strong showing.
the father of quantum computing agrees
And then you read the article and he is basically just saying big if true.
Pigs will be a true method of space exploration if they can fly to Mars in 1 hour.
GPT-8: The Ocho
Now trained with comprehensive coverage of top-fuel lawnmower racing and timbersports
I hear GPT-8 will broadcast a dyson sphere circumnavigation race
Is this true for everything else, too? I will be a true AGI if I solve quantum gravity. A half eaten salami will be true AGI if it solves quantum gravity. My grandmother will be a true bicycle if she has wheels.
If saltman knew what quantum gravity was and why LLMs won’t solve it first, maybe he’d have general intelligence
wait, how much compute would they need for this, ignore patent absurdity of it all for a minute? would they wrap it up under 1 quadrillion dollars?
If we knew that we wouldn’t need a GPT-8 to solve quantum gravity, would we now?
maybe 2, for good measure
So as historically new versions are made about every ~2 years. This means we are 6 years out.
E: late edit, but this made me realize how often people use AGI to mean ASI. And that I also often do it.
