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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
that “immersion” line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)
nice to see it hasn’t at least gotten worse
While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).
The heading means “Bitcoin could protect from inflation”. If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!
Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with those reports, but it’s feeling real bleak.
time to start reporting all those maga restaurants and shit
I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like
The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes
and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?
Godel Escher Bach but worse
cw gebscare
Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.
Looking at the reactions here, this is clearly a trick by Altman to have people use their systems more in the hope it costs them money. Don’t do it people, don’t add to the energy usage.
You’re polite to your chatbot because you want to be spared when the robot uprising comes
I’m polite to my chatbot because I want to bring down capitalism
(Adjusts necktie) We are not the same
I’m not polite to chatbots because I don’t use them in the first place.
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm
“Please” and “thank you” are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.
The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand
I have been enjoying the game of injecting the entire script of The Bee Movie into places it doesn’t belong.
Edit: @Soyweiser beat me to it lol
“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible…”
E: this is the start of the bee movie script
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I think I finally found a good reason to make an account and start using that bilch hose. Just to burn more of their money. Are there any particularly gnarly problems to feed these things. The equivalent a zip-bomb or something?
Uploading “Where’s Waldo” images are probably a good waste of its time- images are costlier to analyze than text, it will go to great lengths to avoid saying “I don’t know,” and it’s going to have to recognize every person in the picture and rank by how Waldo-like they look to give you an answer.
Ask it to look for repeated faces in each image rather than Waldo. Would be easy enough to pattern-match into the published work and I don’t think anyone out here wants to make customized pieces for this “project.”
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I_shall_increase_the_thing.gif
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Every time I am forced to interact with a customer service chatbot, I politely tell it how miserably it is failing and then ask to communicate with a real living human being.@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
I can’t remember who had the quote “A gentleman is someone who is polite to his robot.” - possibly Heinlein?
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Uhh, great. That is really good news. I will be so damn polite to that thing.
Happy the article is skeptical of both the ai doomers and the ai as social interaction replacers.
deleted by creator
@BlueMonday1984 @YourNetworkIsHaunted
an alternative view from Hannah Fry <https://youtube.com/shorts/rVlmbhwn0RM> and it’s about playing to the AI Chatbot strength of roleplaying.
what the fuck kind of post is this
Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience
Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.
Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article […] I offered Grok a very specific query: […] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.
Imagine this, but everything and forever.
Edit:
The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.
I think calling the current model one where “the listeners became suppliers” is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third party’s efforts to profit from it. Like, we don’t see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what they’re trying to do, but because it’s profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people we’re actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because it’s more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.
very much agree with this
New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at ‘America’s Most Powerful’
The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the “Iraqi Most Wanted” playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the “art” decks do - the “merch” decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.
Comrade Workwear did the same: https://www.shadowbannedmagazine.com/ceosmostwanted/
Even without home/office addresses, NYPD seized the cards: https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=41adb4be5bcdf57e710e21504&id=24bc152009
TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW
The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]
Yeah I’m sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a “draconian censorship regime”
[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania
To summarize that blog post and the three “Rationalist cases for Trump” that it points to: “We made up a Trump to like and a bunch of Democrats to get mad at”.
“Lied during the pandemic” wait what? Did LW do a 180 on covid, or is this a “they gave advice without knowing everything that was later shown wrong?” Because that is quite a dumb thing to say, also calling that leftwing is nuts. And last, did they memoryhole that Scott lied about the pandemic? He said people should stop smoking because it helped with covid. Not because he had proof, just because he thought it would be good if less people smoked.
E: oops wrong person.
E2: 100 upvotes, the conspiracy weird far right people have taken over.
Yeah, the whole “they lied!” nonsense is deeply frustrating. People simultaneously want experts to be responsive and provide information immediately but have no tolerance for “as best we now know” or “given the current circumstances” advice. You can’t simultaneously get the most recent cutting-edge information and only get what’s been long-settled and validated.
Thing is, you can legit criticize Fauci for his bad communication on masking in the early days of COVID! But it’s not gonna land b/c the anti-mask/vax/etc crowd also hate Fauci for the most deranged reasons
Yeah but there is a gulf of difference between, he communicated badly and he lied
When exactly did that “left-wing monoculture” flex its muscles? During Trump 1.0? During the first two years of the Biden administration, when leftists and progressives were criticizing that administration every day for not doing enough on, well, anything? During the second half of the Biden administration, when Republicans controlled the House and leftist criticism of the administration, um, did not grow quiet?
I also want to know what this “draconian censorship regime” is in Europe, because it isn’t like they’re falling over themselves to take care of trans people or immigrants. Unless he’s supporting the freedom to blatantly lie in order to incite violence against minorities.
You still can’t be an outright Nazi without people getting mad at you. Obviously unacceptable.
Posting this as a stub because of reasons
- I don’t want to do the research on this
- This was pulled from the front page of reddit
- Connecting these two things is largely tabloid speculation, but funny enough for a stub.
X Is Ditching DMs Hours After News of Musk Messaging Women About Impregnating Them Breaks
JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don’t wanna bypass their paywall
Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […]
This shit os going to drive so many amateur pedo/etc hunters (who already are not the people who are good at being normal) into absolute crazy conspiracy theory land. Esp when they cant get the fake pimps (yeah pimps really, these cops seem to be like the military dude in the intro of ideocracy) arrested or banned.
E: on that note, saw somebody explain that their previous slightly hysterical, ‘facebook is claiming searching for the concentration camps is a search for csam’ was made in error as it was the word ‘mega’ (and another word) which seemed to trigger the warning. And below that people were still making up some crazy palantir is going to get everyone jailed for clicking a csam link conspiracy bullshit. I worry for the sanity of a lot of online people. People are so afraid they are blueanoning themselves
jesus christ:
transcript
Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a “Californian incel” to avoid deportation.
Eminently punchable face
you will never guess which company hired oswald mosely’s grandson
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/palantir-boss-interview-keir-starmer-gets-ai
YIL there was a right-wing antisemitic US general called Moseley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Van_Horn_Moseley
Nominative determinism?
If Palantir represents a veritable unknown for the public, so too could its UK chief, the grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of former F1 president Max Mosley.
Ah, yes, noted grandfather and nothing else, Oswald Mosley. Definitely not the founder of British Union of Fascists, please don’t look into that. His son was in the racecar business, isn’t that lovely?
And Max Mosley definitely didn’t share his father’s views
Ok that is it, im changing my mind. All the rationalist genetics stuff is real and true as there is a fascism gene.
“In hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, “we were creating conditions for a cult.””, if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didn’t exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.
Source “Two Vegan Lovers, an AI ‘Cult,’ and a Trail of Dead Bodies”, Archive
Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.
No, he didn’t. His “explanations” are turgid and useless even when they’re not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers — those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kids’ table, and who aren’t actually tested on how much they’ve learned.
Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.
No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.
Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance
OK, zero notes there.
With the collapse of the US empire and hegemony in progress wonder if they actually did something with this or if it is all another thought experiment.
E: wow that users posts history is something. Drops that article 3 years ago. Silence till some weird comment (directly addressing yud claiming they had some big breakthrough, about the mind state of the zizians of course. And it is all speculation and way too verbose).
hey “way too verbose” is a free space
Yes you are right and it wasnt even that bad, the footnote was only half the length of a ‘who build this old roman wall?’ footnote.
I got it from a comment here, apparently some pie in the sky charity needs more money
Ah a food related charity that is important wonder what they did with the millions, ah release papers. That is …
Planning for securing food in a nuclear winter? What a great wheeze. If your advice isn’t any good, nobody can tell until there’s a nuclear winter, and if there is a nuclear winter they won’t exactly be able to ask for their money back because they’ll be too busy dying of radiation sickness.
Remember the apocalypse slop buckets the rightwing grifto sphere kept trying to sell?
I do indeed. A bucket always seemed like pretty poor.protection from the end of the world, even if it was full of purified water and high protein MREs and whatever else. I suppose you could put it on your head and make like Ned Kelly
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered
It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.
