self

joined 1 year ago
[–] self@awful.systems 1 points 18 minutes ago

I hereby vow to be extremely firm and extremely realistic

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 8 hours ago

finally my pyramid scheme is coming to fruition

sneerchain, coming soon to an awful system near you

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

fucking… maybe if I edit it in nobody will notice

maybe they’ll pay even more for the director’s cut

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 22 hours ago (6 children)

what kind of leftist would I be if I didn’t?

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

no part of me is surprised that every famous FOSS personality has a ridiculously bad age of consent take, but it is a real fucking problem that this keeps happening

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The funniest part was probably them blaming anime avatars for trans people.

holy fuck, I’ve seen anti-trans accounts on mastodon spew this same shit and I’m kind of surprised it’s a wider conservative conspiracy theory and not something local to mastodon

just kidding the funniest part was the guy calling trans people the “priest class” of urbanism

leftists don’t go to church on Sundays, they just trans themselves and then bikeshed about bike sheds

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 23 hours ago

a lot of projects with crypto ties have been doing this kind of hedge — they now emphasize data sovereignty instead of web3, decentralization, and other poisoned buzzwords, but they never really answer why crypto assholes would invest in a company if not to do crypto asshole shit when the time is right

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 23 hours ago

fuck yes, why wasn’t my college this cool? all I got was an AI elective taught by a guy whose proudest achievement was having the only remaining Genera license on campus

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (8 children)

this is leftist infighting between Mondayists and Tomorrow-Evaporists and I won’t allow it in this space

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

all the replies anthropomorphizing the LLM cause it generated something creepy and they don’t know why aren’t surprising, but for some reason this one really pisses me off:

I just checked out the conversation and it looks legit. So weird. I cannot imagine why it would generate a completion like this. Tell your brother to buy a lottery ticket.

an LLM generating absolute garbage that happens to be abusive in some way is a lottery ticket event, is it? I had no idea lottery wins happened that fucking frequently

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

I can’t stop, it’s like eating potato chips, and as a firm realist. I’d like to point out two things.

There are two sides: the anti-corpo leftists who eat Pringles, and the hyper “where do we sign” neo liberals who prefer doritos.

[–] self@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

I am a firm realist. I’d like to point out two things.

There are two sides: the anti-corpo leftists of Del Taco, and the hyper “where do we sign” neo liberals of Taco Bell.

Del Taco Leftists are sure Taco Bell will literally just evaporate tomorrow, and the neo liberals are sure that the secret menu has already happened and will be revealed for Taco Tuesday.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Taco Bell literally cannot evaporate, and they are also probably struggling to design a burrito that doesn’t fucking suck. They will probably find ways to distract you with churro bites instead, as a reasonable fast food chain would.

 

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
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