this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (3 children)

Presented, without comment, this book cover:

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Blockchain Technology and Digital Twin for Smart Hospitals

(found on the social medias, the books' website)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.

This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.

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[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

it just clicked for me but idk if it makes sense: openai nonprofit status could be used later (inevitably in court) to make research clause of fair use work. they had it when training their models and that might have been a factor why they retained it, on top of trying to attract actual skilled people and not just hypemen and money

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 11 points 2 days ago

Speaking of twitter shit, I'm sad that it's back online in Brazil.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.

As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

The first clause of the opening line, and we've already hit a "citation needed".

He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize "science, technology, and the economy".

You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

lol fandom could have been even worse

hackernews: post by languagehacker: Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 23 points 2 days ago (6 children)
[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 13 points 1 day ago

That's just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago (2 children)

ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:

  • The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
  • Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
  • Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle

Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.

Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to "open" castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs

that said it's not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it's not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv

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[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 19 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Musk's twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer

[–] self@awful.systems 17 points 2 days ago (9 children)

the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)

given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends

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[–] barsquid@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago

This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

twitter gon' have nothin' left but the cranks

[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago

Just guys like that and guys like this

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago (8 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn't know how much of a fool RMS was. : "RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt." (It gets worse btw).

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

What do these people think leadership is?

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 16 points 1 day ago

No, obviously opinions like

  • "if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein's teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented",
  • "stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it's supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine",
  • "I don't believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.^1^ What if you lie about who is dying?",
  • "Overtly sexualizing 'parody' ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is",
  • "It's fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it's basically proprietary, right?",
  • "You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>",

are in the same category as "I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting" when it comes to evaluating someone's aptitude as a leader.

I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I'd be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.

1: It's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Top level comment at time of posting:

“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”

???

No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.

of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein's victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn't underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...

Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

New pair of Tweets from Zitron just dropped:

I also put out a lengthy post about AI's future on MoreWrite - go and read it, its pretty cool

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 17 points 20 hours ago

fig. 1: how awful.systems works

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 15 points 2 days ago

Zitron's given commentary on PC Gamer's publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:

He's also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley's worst excesses. I don't have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago

As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Me, a nuclear engineer reading about "Google restarting six nuclear power plants"

lol, lmao even

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I bear news from the other place!

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/

Post content reproduced here:

autoplag image of some electronics on a table

hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but that’s what it looked like

for a subject which tells u to “analyse the deeper meaning”, “analyse the composer’s intent”, “appreciate aesthetic and intellectual value” having an AI image in which you physically can’t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, it’s just extremely ironic 😭 idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since i’m an artist, what r ur thoughts?

*NB: original post contains the text: "as an artist using AI images" but this was corrected in a later comment:

also i didn’t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, “as an artist who DOESNT use AI”

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