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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
How do I find product-market fit for my terminators?
Google finally did it, they made Chrome completely unusable
PC Gamer put out a pro-AI piece recently - unsurprisingly, Twitter tore it apart pretty publicly:
I could only find one positive response in the replies, and that one is getting torn to shreds as well:
I did also find a quote-tweet calling the current AI bubble an “anti-art period of time”, which has been doing pretty damn well:
Against my better judgment, I’m whipping out another sidenote:
With the general flood of AI slop on the Internet (a slop-nami as I’ve taken to calling it), and the quasi-realistic style most of it takes, I expect we’re gonna see photorealistic art/visuals take a major decline in popularity/cultural cachet, with an attendant boom in abstract/surreal/stylised visuals
On the popularity front, any artist producing something photorealistic will struggle to avoid blending in with the slop-nami, whilst more overtly stylised pieces stand out all the more starkly.
On the “cultural cachet” front, I can see photorealistic visuals becoming seen as a form of “techno-kitsch” - a form of “anti-art” which suggests a lack of artistic vision/direction on its creators’ part, if not a total lack of artistic merit.
Why is it always bioshock girl 😭
Any mild pushback to the claims of LLM companies sure bring out the promptfondlers on lobste.rs
https://lobste.rs/s/qcppwf/llms_don_t_do_formal_reasoning_is_huge
Plenty of agreement, but also a lot of “what is reasoning, really” and “humans are dumb too, so it’s not so surprisingly GenAIs are too!”. This is sure a solid foundation for multi-billion startups, yes sirree.
these chuds lack self awareness and they never realise that by moving the goalposts on brain stuff they are admitting their own idiocy.
it’s kind of comforting that the current attitude towards generative AI in some tech spaces is “of course it can’t do cognition and it isn’t really good for anything, who said it was” which is of course rich from the exact same posters who were breathlessly advertising for the tech as revolutionary both online and at work as recently as a couple of weeks ago (and a lot of them still hedge it with “but it might be useful in the near future”). the comfort is it feels like that attitude comes from deep embarrassment, like how the orange site started claiming it is and always was skeptical of crypto once the technology got irrevocably associated with scams and gambling and a lot of the easy money left
I was watching a h0ffman stream the other day when someone happened to bring up autoplag in some context. didn’t see the asking context, but h0ffman’s answer warmed my heart. paraphrased: “what would you want to use that for? you wouldn’t steal a mod, why would you want to use a prompt? that stole from artists. fuck that shit.”
(h0ffman’s one of the names in the demoscene, often plays sets at compos, does some of his own demos, etc)
yeah, there’s a stench of desperation from the defenders
of course, as with crypto, there are uses (in the case of crypto , nothing legitimate). And it will be going to be a fallback for fondlers to point them out (for example, I believe that auto-generated audiobooks are viable, if they’re generated from actual books)
Today’s entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.
We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.
A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.
More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427
Has wordpress matt had a stroke or what? This is off-the-wall.
maybe also link in the wp/mullenweg thread
Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!
25071 + Oct 12 GitHub ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon
lol
guess how soon?
3 days.
oooh how I’m looking forward to frog-boiler api adjustment pricing season, there’s going to be so much cope
neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI’s legal issues:
And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:
With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry’s Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.
Precisely how, I’m not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.
To my mind, the cover of “researchers” using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.
Hey ChatGPT, write a novel titled OpenAI Gets Pounded In the Ass by Pterodactyl Lawyers, in the style of Chuck Tingle.
This week’s Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 really hit home. It’s about a startup trying to sell “The AI Scientist.” It even does reviews!
Can “AI” do your science for you? Should it be your co-author? Or, as one company asks, boldly and breathlessly, “Can we automate the entire process of research itself?”
Major scientific journals have banned the use of tools like ChatGPT in the writing of research papers. But people keep trying to make “AI Scientists” a thing. Just ask your chatbot for some research questions, or have it synthesize some human subjects to save you time on surveys.
Alex and Emily explain why so-called “fully automated, open-ended scientific discovery” can’t live up to the grandiose promises of tech companies. Plus, an update on their forthcoming book!
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/s1Eyp5R4cdSZVm3y2q58xq
speaking of the Godot engine, here’s a layered sneer from the Cruelty Squad developer (via Mastodon):
image description
a post from Consumer Softproducts, the studio behind Cruelty Squad:
weve read the room and have now successfully removed AI from cruelty squad. each enemy is now controlled in almost real time by an employee in a low labor cost country
chef’s kiss, no notes
and also speaking of Godot — does anyone doing game dev right now have a good source for placeholder assets? I just finished all the introductory tutorials for the engine and now I want to flex what I’ve learned a bit
Itch and Kenney have good ones:
https://itch.io/game-assets/free
https://kenney.nl/assets (all CC0)
Synty also has a nice placeholder pack for $7. The post-it notes are kind of adorable:
https://syntystore.com/products/polygon-prototype-pack
I don’t think most of these are made for Godot, so you may have to mess around with import settings or set up tilesets/materials yourself
nice! it seems like Kenney’s a pretty popular choice for this kind of thing. I’m kinda tempted to grab their Asset Forge tool to quickly bang out some lo-fi semi-custom models, but I don’t know how its workflow looks for animations and materials. in the worst case, maybe it’ll save me from half of the spiral learning curve that is Blender?
the synty pack looks really good! at a glance it seems like their assets come rigged for Unity — maybe there’s a converter that’ll allow me to convert that rigging into the format Godot’s animation system wants
was curious and threw some search queries at the internet. looks like there are a couple of convertor tools out there, although I obvies can’t comment on relative merits worth a damn without spending some time staring at innards and docs/usage
I don’t know how materials work in Asset Forge, but they have a guide on their site for exporting models to animate with Mixamo: https://kenney.nl/knowledge-base/asset-forge/rigging-a-character-using-mixamo. You could also animate things like moving platforms or doors in-engine with an AnimationPlayer.
Speaking of Asset Forge, Kenny Shape is a similar thing for quickly throwing assets together. It has a really fast 2D workflow for creating 3D models that reminds me of Doom mapping a little bit. For lo-fi levels, you might also like Crocotile 3D or the combo of TrenchBroom + Qodot. Crocotile is great for repurposing 2D pixel art tilesets from itch or OpenGameArt into 3D assets, and Trenchbroom/Qodot is a more fully featured level editor I’ve seen people work crazy fast in.
oh that’s awesome! I was wondering how I’d do fairly large levels for a 3D space, and it turns out the answer is that neither quake-style mapping nor competent tiling systems will ever go out of fashion
I think Zuckeberg has been saying the silent part out loud since day one.
People just submitted it.
I don’t know why.
They “trust me”
Dumb fucks
Can’t really say I’m surprised that Mr Facebook takes this attitude. His whole fortune is built on the belief that aggregating and hosting content is more valuable than creating it
As always with plagiarism, regardless of what they say they always, always, always act out of a complete disregard for the value of whatever they’re ripping off.
I trained a neural network on all the ways I’ve said that I hate these people, and it screamed in eldritch spectra before collapsing into silence.
hmm, I meant to link that when I saw it, guess I forgot. whoops :D
but yeah, entirely unsurprising from the guy who literally started by harvesting a pile of data and then building a commercial service off it. facebook and parentco should be ended, his assets taken for public good
In other news, Hindenburg Research just put out a truly damning report on Roblox, aptly titled “Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids”, and the markets have responded.
TIL Roblox is listed on the fucking stock market.
i wouldn’t want to sound like I’m running down Hinton’s work on neural networks, it’s the foundational tool of much of what’s called “AI”, certainly of ML
but uh, it’s comp sci which is applied mathematics
how does this rate a physics Nobel??
They’re reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.
lol holy shit actual tweet
Image description: tweet from the official Nobel Prize account. Text reads,
Congratulations to our 2024 medicine laureate Victor Ambros ✨
This morning he celebrated the news of his prize with his colleague and wife Rosalind Lee, who was also the first author on the 1993 ‘Cell’ paper cited by the Nobel Committee.
#NobelPrize
Blake reaction description: sighing and muttering, “yep, assholes will asshole”
Wow. Congratulations to Rosalind Lee for her colleague and husband’s nobel. I can only dream of one day having my spouse be recognized with such prestigious accolade for something we have done.
a friend says:
effectively they made machine learning look like an Ising model, and you honestly have no idea how much theoretical physicists fucking love it when things turn out to be the Ising model
does that match your experience? if so i’ll quote that
That sounds about right, yeah.
yeah, takes from physicists i know range from “wtf” to “it’s plaaausible with a streeetch”
looking through the committee, I see Ulf Danielsson is notable on AI mostly for being skeptical (he writes pop sci books so people ask him about all manner of shit)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo
It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities … but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control
😩
Getting a head start on that Nobel disease.
This work getting the physics nobel for “using physics” is reeeeeeal fuckin tangential
Also: TL note: 11,000,000 Swedish Krona equals 11,386,313.85 Norwegian Krone
Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).
Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:
The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.
I just… don’t have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we’ll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text “work” for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).
I hope some people watch this closely, I’m sure there’s going to be some gold in this mess.
The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.
Wikipedia’s mod team definitely haven’t realised it yet, but this part is pretty much a de facto ban on using AI. AI is incapable of producing output that would be acceptable for a Wikipedia article - in basically every instance, its getting nuked.
lol i assure you that fidelitously translates to “kill it with fire”
Yeah, that sounds like text which somebody quickly typed up for the sake of having something.
it is impossible for a Wikipedia editor to write a sentence on Wikipedia procedure without completely tracing the fractal space of caveats.
I’d like to believe some of them have, but it’s easier or more productive to keep giving the benefit of the doubt (or at at least pretend to) than argue the point.
Welcome to the club. They say a shared suffering is only half the suffering.
This was discussed in last week’s Stubsack, but I don’t think we mind talking about talking the same thing twice. I, for one, do not look forward to browsing Wikipedia exclusively through pre-2024 archived versions, so I hope (with some pessimism) their disapponintingly milquetoast stance works out.
Reading a bit of the old Reddit sneerclub can help understand some of the Awful vernacular, but otherwise it’s as much of a lurkmoar as any other online circlejerk. The old guard keep referencing cringe techbros and TESCREALs I’ve never heard of while I still can’t remember which Scott A we’re talking about in which thread.
Scott Computers is married and a father but still writes like an incel and fundamentally can’t believe that anyone interested in computer science or physics might think in a different way than he does. Dilbert Scott is an incredibly divorced man. Scott Adderall is the leader of the beige tribe.
Scott Adderall
You Give Adderall A Bad Name
shit wasn’t there another one
There is always another Scott.
you know, one of the most abusive shitty people I’ve ever personally known was also a Scott
Montgomery Scott clearly statistical anomaly
Ah, but he’s not really a Scott so much as a Scot, and a Monty to boot.
oh you did better than I did
5 internet cookies to you
Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed)
first impression: your post is entirely on topic, welcome to the stubsack
techtakes is a sister sub to sneerclub (also on this instance, previously on reddit) and that one has a bit of an explanation. generally any (classy) sneerful critique of bullshit and wankery goes, modulo making space for chuds/nazis/debatelords/etc (those get shown the exit)
Now in 404media.
you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).
we’re pretty receptive to requests for explanations of terms here, just fyi! I imagine if it begins to overwhelm commenting, a guide will be created. Unfortunately there is something of an arms race between industry buzzword generation and good sense, and we are on the side of good sense.
the mozilla PR campaign to convince everyone that advertising is the lifeblood of commerce and that this is perfectly fine and good (and that everyone should just accept their viewpoint) continues
We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it
try, you say? and what’s your plan for when you fail, but you’ve lost all your values in service of the attempt?
For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.
are you fucking kidding me? “we can only be who we are if we maybe sorta listen to you while we keep doing what we wanted to do”? seriously?
How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.
How do we ensure that traffic safety is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? A big part of the answer is drunk driving.
How do we prevent huge segments of the world from being priced out of access through paywalls?
Based Mozilla. Abolish landlords. Obliterate the commodity form. Full luxury gay communism now.
What a pisstake. Shit I don’t want to use palemoon, are there any other browsers???
the purestrain corporate non-apology that is “we should have communicated our vision effectively” when your entire community is telling you in no uncertain terms to give up on that vision because it’s a terrible idea nobody wants
“it’s a failure in our messaging that we didn’t tell you about the thing you’d hate in advance. if we were any good we would’ve gotten out ahead of it (and made you think it’s something else)”
and the thing is, that’s probably exactly the lesson they’re going to be learning from this :|
Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:
https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919
They’re basically admitting they didn’t pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.
But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!
The logical conclusion of normalizing “Social Media Manager” as a role in companies is that as they get better at their jobs and become more believable, the average corporate communication will trend towards 13-year old edgy shitposter. God I feel old.
every time I get mail “even a 🤏 teensy bit like this! 🤩” from serious-company I have actual financial dealings with, a part of me dies inside
and it’s getting more goddamn frequent too
Imagine, a corporation finding their own voice, as a proper signal of their awareness of their customers. Nope, gotta sell your soul to tech stocks.
I really think that Naomi Klein pointing out the brand being the product created a wave of tech entrepreneurs who reacted by making the user experience the product and now we’re seeing how bad they are at the most basic brand maintenance.
Plus they create brands that cultivate a following that is not compatible with corporate growth interests. Proton are like Mozilla, they wanna play with the bad kids but they promised their parents they’d come straight home
