Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didnāt survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my accountās cake day, too, so thatās cool.)
The suspicion that notbyai.fyi was in fact a pro-ai techbro highlighting scrapable data has prompted comment from the founder: https://mastodon.social/@notbyai/116004178899556722
Hi, Allen here! I never thought Iād need to say this but, I am not an AI bro. I donāt work for an AI design agency. Weāre not in the AI industry, nor do we sell your data.
ā¦which seems like a load of cobblers. Imbl brings the receipts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@imbl/116014455337112737
Iāll assume the argument will devolve into weasel words over what āai broā and āai design agencyā will mean, and I suspect the conclusion will be that actually heās working for and with ai bros, with an interest in selling ai bro-related services to further the goals of ai bros in general, but somehow that wontāt be precisely the same thing.
On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you arenāt distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesnāt quite match up with the noises coming out of them.
Too bad, I liked about half of his films, esp The Wrestler.
Either the stupidity just metastasized or China is going to try to pull a reverse star wars and make the US burn up an even more horrendous amount of cash to keep up with nothing.
China plans spaceābased AI data centres, challenging Muskās SpaceX ambitions (reuters)
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Enjoy sneering at this LWer tackling Proust
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3ZtsYBYBcTTFXH5S/in-search-of-lost-time-a-review
Edit it has garnered one comment so far
Thank you for the service you have valiantly rendered to us all, by making our own reading of these books unnecessary.
You know what? I donāt think Proust would have disagreed with having rats avoid his novel.
The comment, see my prediction that when a movement runs out of idea they inevitably start a dating site for the in crowd, and ālets do book summaries so we can all read fasterā. Esp vague self help style places do this all the time.
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is one of those books that people like to claim to have read but never did.
First I heard of this.
intellectual elite my arse.
I happen to know there are multiple translations of the novel into English, and Iām confused as to why the reviewer refers to
My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation
which doesnāt really mesh with anything here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time#English-language_translations
Not that it matters much in the end.
Iād chalk it up to the LWer inability to a) summarise and/or summarise accurately, and/or LLM usage.
im gonna shit
warming up on philosophy with Simulacra and Simulation
oh no baby what are you doing
some important characters in the narrative Iāve completely skipped over, mostly to do with the Nature of Art (in society) subplot, because nothing actually happens in them and itās all social parties and talking
you ā¦ mother ā¦ fucker ā¦ so not only did you manage to miss the fact that this is a gay book, you completely skipped past one if not the most important theme in the novel which is language and the way people talk and write and the various ways they conduct themselves in different times and places, but oh nothing happens itās just people talking aaaaaaaaaa
also this is a funny book! itās funny! itās not all maudlin meditations upon time and memory! fuck you!
you completely skipped past one if not the most important theme in the novel which is language and the way people talk and write and the various ways they conduct themselves in different times and places
I donāt think the LWer even realised those themes were there. This whole review screams āfailed high school Englishā to me.
I feel like I just read someone reviewing Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by complaining that thereās no upbeat sections and no overall chorus and the song isnāt about anything, that weāre just ātossed about on the storms of emotion that by the end we are all seasick toā
I liked the part where the reviewer is mysteriously compelled to visit France while reading this novel, which is notably set in France.
Username is one ātā off from being an anagram for enteritis
Tangentially on topic:
Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! Iāll likely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and Iām hopeful that itāll win all the awards.
Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:
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In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol
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Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.
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Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.
@o7___o7 @techtakes Thatās why Iām fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.
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Today in excellent cold opens: āI didnāt talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so Iām so healthy.ā
that one in which the person behind/running @FirefoxWebDevs drops the mask so fast it looks like a magic trick: gallery link
thread by @self, toots by myself and others. the poster managed to keep their civility for quite a while until I daredā¢ to highlight their lack of a reply outside of UK 5pm, at which point they immediately ramped up
(and based on some screenshots Iāve been sent, heās also been doing the classic tail-darvo moping elsewhere)
for those who hadnāt seen before, FWD is an account that showed up on the fedi not too long ago (3~4mo?), and has been acting as a Mouthpiece (and semi consent manufacturing outlet)
across a number of āpollsā (with forced answer paths) theyāve had their replies absolutely blasted, and across literally hundreds of replies theyāve dodged the point so hard they might have invented a new sports class
earlier today I attempted to (quite lightly) check with them if they understand why their responses arenāt all-liked. it didnāt take much of long for them to go off the rails
Iāll have you know weāre acting like someone whoās rude to āserving staffā right now, where serving staff is defined as a formerly chrome currently mozilla developer relations marketing guy with fucking flatlined vibes
listen here you little shit, we have a USER STUDY that proves that those who donāt even think of āserving staffā are the most virtuous humans. no you canāt see the data why would you even ask that
uhm @self can you show me where I wrote this? can you show me where I wrote these exact words? no? thatās so irrational of you.
Thanks for lighting his ass on fire. o7
and it wasnāt even my goal to do that! couple of replies across hours, trying to see if this guy is capable of ā¦ irunno, unassing their head(?) and engaging with the criticisms
then the subtlest thing set them off and shit went mask off so fast
but hey, at least this way we now just know and donāt have to guess. so much easier
The vibes were wretched. Why do people to have to battle emotional abuse from a goddamned web browser?
but hey, at least this way we now just know and donāt have to guess. so much easier
+1, yeesh. Btw, if Dingus McGee there resides in the UK, might some of that shit might be legally actionable? Iād certainly have strong feelings about being defamed by the representative of a rather well-funded technology company lol
YCombinator will let founders accept payments in butts:
Hmm, we already tried the thing where a bunch of startups have their cash on deposit with a couple of normal, FDIC-insured banks that had grossly mismatched duration in their capital structures. I wonder how this will play out
pegged butts
heh heh
āThey pretend to pay us, we pretend to workā
OT: vehicle shopping is such a clusterfuck these days jfc. Do not recommend. Also car salesmen are on par with rationalists, I swear to god.
The āweāll save some bucks by removing physical knobs and pose this as futuristic by making some vital functions only accessible via multiple levels of menus on a touchscreenā thing is the worst and should be banned.
the last time I drove a car was in 2015 or so, and back then every car I got had no computers in them. I dread the day that I need to have a vehicle again and my friggin car will upload bullshit into the cloud or whatever. the idea of having screens of any kind on a car is repulsive to me
One thing I discovered on my momās late-model VW SUV is that the manufacturer-provided semi-physical/capacitative touch dash buttons are pretty much useless when interacting with Apple CarPlay; that all becomes touchscreen-only. And the forced transition in inputs is not particularly obvious. I have to wonder if most implementations are like that, compounding confusion on top of distraction.
Huh, I just realized yesterday that my car (also a late-model VAG model) does have a touchscreen that reacts to gloved fingers. This was the base infotainment system, not Carplay.
Unfortunately the steering wheel controls are touch, not physical. A big downgrade.
Navigation stuff is unfortunately (and embarrassingly) critical for me, otherwise Iād be in total agreement with you.
Iāve been deliberately learning to navigate without GPSes and tech devices, as a life skill (also on foot/public transport). Iām terrible at navigating, but Iām realising navigating is kinda like handwritingāin that itās very easy to fall into the trap of saying āIām terrible at thisā as a kind of immutable personality trait, while in fact itās perfectly expected that one is bad at a skill that one never uses, and turns out I can get better at it even with a little bit of deliberate practice. I suck at things but I can improve.
In the meantime when I use an electronic map to navigate, I still would rather stick a smartphone to the dashboard a car and use whatever navigation app I prefer, than have the screens and navigators built into the car.
OT but, though this is mostly about appreciating things in nature rather than navigating a city by car or on foot, this book has helped me a lot with not being anymore a person with a ābad sense of directionā, even when walking downtown: The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley . I really recommend it for people who hike, even occasionally.
Iāll check this out, thanks!!
new odium symposium episode. this one is a lot lighter than the previous two. we went back and looked at joseph swetnam, the guy the word misogyny was coined to describe, and how he got relentlessly dunked on by his peers.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/9-first-149546072, or on any platform
Found another website doing a good job keeping eye on the slop machines and their promoters: The AI Dirty List.
It also lists those who have fought against the bullshit fountains as well.
Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11ās AI overload ā scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift
- recall might be rethought, again
- copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) āunder reviewā
- no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows
Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if youāre smart what happens after the launch is someone elseās problem. I wouldnāt be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately āscaled backā.
R3call
Buisness plan: daily reminders to Recall the Recall Recall. Itās memento mori for CEOs as a service.
Does (deservedly) mercilessly bullying Slopya Nadella actually work?
Re datacenters in space:
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862222
Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170
Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435):
it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sunās power
We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sunās power. A few trillionths per year.
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
The leaps in logic are so idiotic āhe managed to land a rocket up right, so maybe he can pull it off!ā (as if Elon personally made that happen, or as if a engineering challenge and fundamental thermodynamic limits are equally solvable). This is despite multiple comments replying with back of the envelope calcs on energy generation and heat dissipation of the ISS and comparing it to what you would need for even a moderately sized data center. Or even the comments that are like āmaybe there is a chanceā, as if it is wiser to express uncertaintyā¦
SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
Truly a conundrum worthy of the XXI century
Very much āsweaty guy hovering over two buttonsā
1,604 comments jfc
The headline alone is worthy of upvoting. About halfway through the article, the author includes an embedded YouTube video of the Dilberito Flash game. Made me reflect that 20 years ago, they might simply have directly embedded the game itself. And contemplate what the Web might look like if/when external YouTube embedding craps out.
And goddamn:
his former syndicate, publisher, and professional organizations have all declined to pay tribute or even acknowledge his passing.
I didnāt realize it was quite that harsh, but so it goes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
