this post was submitted on 04 Nov 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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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 31 points 1 month ago (13 children)

re: election results. unfortunately i'm not surprised or even disappointed by now. it makes me feel sad for my 2015 self and her naivete. she didn't understand what a disgusting and evil culture she lived in

[–] self@awful.systems 31 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don’t have too much coherent to say right now

fuck the fascists for what they’ve done and what they intend to do

fuck the neoliberals for doing their best to convince marginalized people that they shouldn’t defend themselves against a terrible fate

fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths

shit’s about to get very hard and very weird and I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life

[–] self@awful.systems 20 points 1 month ago (23 children)

what a surprise, the thread all the leftist shitposters on mastodon boosted about how you’re a class traitor if you don’t vote for the Green Party (who I don’t buy as socialist) or “any other socialist party” (fucking who??? am I supposed to write “socialism” on my ballot in crayon???) conveniently went missing

anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

i do love how the "anti-imperialist" protest vote against harris was a choice between like three or four putin apologists. the state of the US left is really fucked up and i don't want to look at it ever again.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago

anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight

I've intentionally been avoiding feeds the last few days because I just do not have the headspace for it, but I quickly checked on shit now

and

fuck

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life

strong agree

minor upside: it's going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off

fucking fuck this sucks

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

minor upside: it’s going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off

correct. keep receipts.

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[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago

Not surprised, still very disappointed, I feel sick.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Yeah this is fucked up. I feel so bad for everybody (esp the Americans, but this will hurt the world). Shit this prob means I should start looking into seriously helping out locally when all this explodes into more international shit. (Which imho is the best you can do anyway, do things locally, build a bit of a support network for your community).

(Note I'm not American, but I think this will end badly, just the fucker stepping out of the paris accord for example, and all the weird blowhard fascists this will make feel emboldened to do more politics locally).

E: I really hope the people who go 'this is the same as in 2020, wait till all votes are counted' are correct and not on hopeium.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 month ago (5 children)

i think they indeed are on hopium/copium

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I think I'm more angry than anything. l hadn't realized how tight my media bubble had gotten and was pretty sure this wasn't realistic. I had gotten myself ready for another round of 2020 nonsense and denial, not this.

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[–] self@awful.systems 30 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:

Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.

“One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago

a real web3 moment if there ever was one.

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn't a great rolemodel.

(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on 'traditional rationality')).

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women bitches thing. Miss me with that PUA shit

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

Considering the history of PUA stuff on lesswrong, Im going to assume this was a pro not a con for them even.

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[–] HotGarbage@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The orange site is an easy target, but the lack of solidarity in the comments about the NYT Tech Guild strike fills me with dread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42040795

[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Said it before, I'll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/mondays-campaign-11424-kari-lake-adds-ai-polls-rcna178681?icid=latestpost_bot

Edit: Found the map she's using:

https://xcancel.com/IwriteOK/status/1853647442740441289#m

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago

I'm sure her results would be very accurate if troll farms could vote and chatgpt was doing the count.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:

  • The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
  • I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
  • it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.

Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.

NB: am not a US voter.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 20 points 1 month ago (4 children)

The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.

such a metal album name

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I think "any idiot that got lucky under capitalism" is a pretty good description of Musk and his type, to be fair.

[–] maol@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the "hope" that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks he'll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.

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[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 17 points 1 month ago (8 children)

The worst part about Trump being president is Trump being president for a year. The second worst part is Vance being president for the next three (after Trump dies of heart failure). The third worst part is the fact that I've been owned in a way I can't even explain to my closest friends.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago

The third worst part is the fact that I’ve been owned in a way I can’t even explain to my closest friends.

Oh god, this so much. Well, third worst for me personally, as a non-American white guy. I suppose Palestinians, Ukrainians, and marginalized groups in the US might have a few issues they'd rank higher.

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[–] maol@awful.systems 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Carbon capture, small nuclear reactors. We stopped thinking big. To really solve climate change we need to do one easy, but big thing. Blow up the Sun.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 19 points 1 month ago

Kill and dethrone God.

[–] maol@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

You'll hear no complaint from me.

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[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (13 children)

You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?

Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results are... basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual "gameplay".

TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things aren't even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer they're using to render this.

Note that the person in the video isn't part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.

[–] ebu@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (5 children)

maybe i'm a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren't armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming... if you look at this "game" as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging

it reminds me of other "games" like Marian Kleineberg's Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft's Yedoma Globula. there's one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don't recall the name

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.

[–] ashley@awful.systems 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm about to pass out from the cognitive dissonance I'm feeling from seeing andressen and musk talking about privilege

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago (5 children)

why do neurotypical people love to do this. why can't you say sam harris sucks in a normal way

This is pure speculation on my part, but I think Sam is on the autism spectrum. He demonstrates an inability to read between the lines, doesn't seem to pick up on social cues, takes people incredibly literally, and is quick to label people he disagrees with as "bad faith" actors. The best example of this is his unyielding defense of JK Rowling, where he claims that she hasn't tweeted anything explicitly transphobic before. Meanwhile, anyone with eyes can see that she obsessively posts trans-critical content, props up TERFs, and writes books about cross-dressing murderers.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago

NASB - Brian Merchant's celebrating the first anniversary of Blood in the Machine's release

Reading through it, its clear an earlier comment of mine was dead-on - the public image of the Luddites has been fully rehabilitated, and we can primarily credit Merchant for pulling it off.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)
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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

Ah, copilot is so extremely popular that MS has decided to bundle it into O365 for ~~free~~ a moderate “depends by region” price increase

I’m sure that’ll totally make people want it even more! hordes at the gate!

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago
[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago
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