this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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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)

(page 3) 45 comments
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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Another proposal for naming our militia: The Cassandra Division

Our Motto: "Sic diximus vobis"

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 16 points 4 days ago (4 children)
[–] istewart@awful.systems 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

But Trump can't explain things, and Urbit defies explanation. So does the statement "Trump explains Urbit" represent undefined behavior in English?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

What is worse? Trump explaining urbit and coming close? Or him explaining it so wrong you feel the need to set the record straight about the gravest misconceptions? ("Trump said Elon invented it, but it actually was Yarvin, also as Elon didnt invent it, he certainly didnt say 'good idea sir' to Trump").

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[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 3 days ago

saltman: no better time to be a startup

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

begins invisible accordion

Then Curtis Marvin, very smart guy, went to MIT like my famous uncle, he said, "but sir, a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"

Many such cases, I said.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

masterful endofunctor, sir

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago

Have any of the trumps been on the red scare pod yet? Feel like that’s on the timeline.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)
They made this terrible thing look like a train
There's something sweet in the air what I can't say
Would I like a drink to calm the brain?
Oh, please stay in the chairs

But oh, God
I don't wanna go to Mars
What kind of brainwashed idiot does?
It's all a lab rat life in jars
They branded the dream of ages
I don't wanna go to Mars
Be with me here and return to dust

-- White Lies, I Don't Want To Go To Mars, 2022

I remember really liking it when I heard it around first release. it holds up.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You ever have that moment where you hear about a song and only then realize that you had liked 2 or 3 from the same band from radio or recommendations over the years without connecting that it was the same group? Because yeah that just hit me.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago

I first heard Bush’s Chemicals Between Us from a neighbours soundsystem during a party one weekend in the early 00s, and then it took me well over a decade to find it (while still hearing other Bush songs over the years)

yep I know exactly what you’re describing there

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (4 children)

is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we've endured that's gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?

[–] rook@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices

Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

yeah but I didn't say that flat ui was created for efficiency. Any efficiency of a flat ui is cancelled out by the excesses of client-side JS. I know it is fashion, I was there. But I also know that there is a sense that it is efficient by the designers that design with it.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

Just chiming in to say to hell with skeuomorphism, I still want Apple Platinum back. Bonus points if it comes with an option for Dark Platinum that was only present in the early releases of OS X Server.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

The ongoing trend of "flat UI" is largely not due to processing power though. Even inexpensive computers have CPUs and GPUs that could push very fancy graphics without problems, see what the same machines can do in game graphics (and I don't mean high-end gaming, I mean the kind of simple gaming that can run on a low-end laptop these days). Some of the early GUIs in the 1980s had "flat design" due to performance limitations, but that went away in the 1990s. Today it could still be a reason in some embedded system scenarios with simple microcontrollers, but not in a desktop or laptop computer, and also not in smartphones or tablets.

The reason we have the bland flat design is the same why we still have things like "all surfaces are ugly glossy black plastic" (luckily this one is on its way out) or "war on physical buttons" aka "touchscreens everywhere"... it's simply a design trend.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 11 points 3 days ago

@nightsky "touchscreens everywhere" isn't an aesthetic choice, it's a cost-of-goods choice: which adds more to the cost of a physical product, a bunch of bespoke embossed buttons/keys for specific tasks, or a single mass-produced touchscreen?

It's the same reason modern electronics uses embedded microcontrollers rather than actual properly designed task-specific gate arrays.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

I hear you, but I didn't say flat ui is due to processing power. My line of thought is that a sudden bump in available processing power might prompt designers to feel that elaborate uis are fine now because despite flat ui not being an efficiency thing, it is definitely perceived as one by the average designer who doesn't know how much of the css used to render it is generated client-side via js

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

to the computing side, and with the proviso that in my own estimation of my skills I am at best slightly less than "dangerously clueless": unfortunately not as much as may be desired because the kind of chips being added are fairly specialised silicon

it's not impossible that people may find other uses for it over time but to the best of my knowledge as it stands right now much of this shit is dead weight the moment this bubble pops

(I don't think it will all go entirely away; there are some ML uses that are not complete trash. but that's a long different arc)

I'm not sure I follow the skeu side of your comment?

[–] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

My baseline understanding is that "NPUs," as such, are vector accelerators with perhaps lower precision and definitely lower peak TDP. I say this because much of the incremental ML research I've skimmed over seems to be around getting away with lower precision, dropping down to FP8 or even FP4 from FP16 when they can get away with it.

I'm still confused as to why and how this is an acceptable tradeoff to firing up an iGPU with precise power/TDP stepping. Perhaps one of those situations where the power budget and latency to fire up the whole GPU block or burst it to max power ends up costing as much as the actual calculation. I think for purposes of this discussion, we also need a source that sheds light on the architectural differences between NPUs and GPU shader/execution units.

[–] counteractor@pawoo.net 3 points 3 days ago

@istewart @froztbyte some of this stuff is not easy to reuse for other purposes because of the drivers and APIs.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldn't be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuff...

So, from what you're saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

broad brush strokes, yes largely that

there's some extremely fucking interesting details in the weeds, but that's beyond the scope of merely a comment (and also I don't feel equipped to make a goodpost about it as yet)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 17 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 18 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

A bit of an aside, but how did everyone decide to use the exact phrase "decisive victory" when congratulating president elect Trump? It keeps jumping out to me and I find it kind of weird. It has almost a militaristic tone.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Also it isn't? 50.2% to 48.1% of votes is not decisive in any sensible meaning of the word?

If you account for the turnout (around 60%) it means 30% voted for Trump and 28.9% for Harris, so "none of those" won decisively with 40%!

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

IMO, coordinated media strategy. you can send all the people you want to congratulate you a prebaked message or tweet or whatever, saves them the trouble of writing something themselves. That or copy paste

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I think that particular talking point also serves an exculpatory purpose: "If it was only a razor-thin victory I might understand being angry with me, but see it's a decisive victory. He has the mandate ~~of heaven~~ of the people (this is a Trumpian victory! not a Democrat failure!) ! It would be wrong not to congratulate him!"

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

after this decisive victory, I guess I have no choice but to take this mask off, what a shame...

that+ losing the popular vote in 2016 must have really hurt that ego of his.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago

LLM Use cases:

  1. Crime
  2. Laziness
  3. Congratulating Donald Trump for anything ever
[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 7 points 5 days ago

@sailor_sega_saturn

Maybe it's one of those cliches like “bus plunge”

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

Could be they are sharing a bit of a media bubble. In 2016 there was a bit of a (pre election) "he will win in a landslide" thing due to Scottbert.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

That they are posting this on substack, and how important that platform has become in the blogosphere is already a bit of a sign.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago (10 children)

More election shit, unfortunately. This time it's hot tea from SRD:

Superstonkers go surprised_pikachu.jpg

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 21 points 5 days ago

Holy shit I had no idea there was a left wing branch of the mad cryptofascist meme stock cult.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Missed opportunity in the headline: superstonkers go super bonkers

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago

damn that is so much better

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Should've probably posted this earlier, but fuck it: South Korea's ‘4B’ Movement Goes Viral in US After Trump Elected

“4B” is shorthand for a South Korean movement in which women refuse to engage in heterosexual marriage, childbirth, dating, or sex with men. It comes from the words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, and bisekseu, all of which start with a Korean prefix for “no.” It originated in 2019 in response to a culture that women felt was patriarchal beyond repair, and has since gained some traction in other countries.

Also, fuck it, quick sidenote:

This is mostly gut instinct, like most of the Trump predictions I've made, but I'm expecting a spike in full-blown misandry over Trump's term. Mainly because Trump managed to win over Gen Z men this election, and because the Trump administration is almost certainly going to town on abortion/women's rights.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

a spike in full-blown misandry

Misandry as in something equal to misogyny? If so, then I have to disagree, since men have historically been absolute pieces of shit towards women throughout history and misandry has never really manifested significantly.

E: I noticed I have a downvote. Hello to our sole MRA lurker!

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Misandry as a concrete power structure that advantages women and disadvantages men? Unlikely, though with the likely resurgence of active patriarchy we should expect to see the negative consequences this has for men, especially non-normative men. Patriarchal masculinity is a game that necessarily has more losers than winners. I'd go so far as to say that some of the more politically-minded incels and MRAs are going to get even louder because while they blame feminism the actual source of the problems they're feeling is patriarchy.

Misandry as a vague cultural meme about men being terrible and the friction that this causes, particularly for men struggling to find a healthy way to exist under patriarchal masculinity as discussed above? Very likely. At the same time while this won't feel good for men it's worth noting that these men are going to be complaining about losing a game where women are game pieces rather than players, which is pretty crappy. Like a king complaining to a pawn about how cruel it is to only move one square at a time without acknowledging that the entire game revolves around them.

I actually have no idea how to navigate this in a healthy way since I've definitely been on the losing end of patriarchal masculinity in ways that while deeply hurtful are very different in kind even if not in scope from the ways that system hurts women.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago

Misandry as a vague cultural meme about men being terrible and the friction that this causes, particularly for men struggling to find a healthy way to exist under patriarchal masculinity as discussed above?

Looking back, that's definitely the kind of thing I was expecting to spike. I was just too deeply peeved about vaguely gestures at everything to see that clearly.

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