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 - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)
My organic chemistry professor used ChatGPT to write a lab procedure. My other chemistry professor’s daughter is VP of AI at Microsoft. AAAAA
Two posts in two weeks about professors using ChatGPT has me questioning my desire to go back to school
do you have it? i’m in this field and i wonder how badly it fucked up
there are two incredible footguns in there, both of which can be trivially avoided
Wait I know nothing about chemistry but I’m curious now, what are the footguns?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/footgun
i’ll pick up handbook for a similar course that i was TA for and i’ll take it apart Soon™
Starting things off with a fresh post from Brian Merchant: Tech under Trump, part 1
Eugenics in action:
Danish parenting tests under fire after baby removed from Greenlandic mother
Psychometric tests are widely used in Denmark as part of child protection investigations into new parents, and have long been criticised by human rights bodies as culturally unsuitable for Greenlandic people and other minorities.
In a 2022 report, the institute said that because the tests were not adapted to take cultural differences into account, Greenlandic parents ran “the risk of obtaining low test scores, so that it is concluded, for example, that they have reduced cognitive abilities, without there being actual evidence for this."
Psychological assessments of her were made by a Danish-speaking psychologist. Kronvold, whose first language is Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), is not fluent in Danish.
Oh man that is so grim
Kronvold, 38, was given an FKU test in 2014 before the birth of her second child, a boy, and again recently while pregnant with her third child. Speaking through an intermediary, she told the Guardian that on this last occasion she was told it was to see if she was “civilised enough”.
billy spears got it right. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
Software licensing is notoriously labyrinthine, so resources like the site Microsoft will close – Get Licensing Ready – can be very handy. Today, the site offers over 50 training modules plus documentation.
I’m sorry, mister MSFT, why did you cause there to be more educational content about your stupid licenses than there is for theoretical physics in an undergrad programme, have you ever considered that it’s time to stop? Get some help?
OT: is Tallinn nice?
i’ve been there for few days for conference once and it does look at least like a nice place to visit with no obvious glaring problems to be seen. walkable, organized, you can get around without a car np, doesn’t seem to be extremely expensive but again, i haven’t been there for a long time. it’s like you took nicer parts of Warsaw, slapped a port next to it and cooled down a few degrees
unless you’re talking about that EA techbro billionaire, then i’ve got no idea
looking to move?
I woke up and immediately read about something called “Defense Llama”. The horrors are never ceasing: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/24/defense-llama-meta-military/
Scale AI advertised their chatbot as being able to:
apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities
However their marketing material, as is tradition, include an example of terrible advice. Which is not great given it’s about blowing up a building “while minimizing collateral damage”.
Scale AI’s response to the news pointing this out – complaining that everyone took their murderbot marketing material seriously:
The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.
On the one hand, that spectacular failure could potentially dissuade the military from buying in and prolonging this bubble. On the other hand, having an accountability sink for war crimes would be a tempting offer to your average army.
I’ve been wondering about this
One the one hand, military procurement (at least afaik) tends toward complete functional product
On the other hand, military R&D programs have been among the most spectacularly profligate financial black holes in recent decades
None of the options involved feel great, even if “it gets shunted from mil procurement and all industry claims get publicly brandished as the bullshit it is” comes to pass (which tbh still feels like an optimistic outcome, with unclear time horizons)
currently in vc delusion, the public just doesn’t understand how to move about efficiently
the levels of not-even-wrong from these dipshits continue to be astounding
If I mathed right that’d be one waymo every 350 feet of road on average. Is that a lot? It sounds like it might be a lot. Especially since self-driving cars greatest weakness appears to be driving in the vicinity of other self-driving cars.
I think the idea is to solve that by networking all the self-driving cars together. I’m sure the long history of trying to get vendors to agree on a standard when they all benefit individually from the lock-in of proprietary systems has nothing to teach us about this prospect.
here’s a thought. what if we just stacked every building on top of each other and had the cars drive vertically along the outside. then you wouldn’t need roads at all
I have a stanford degree just like this guy btw. so you have to take my idea seriously
the richest boy in the world sued to stop The Onion from turning infowars into a parody of itself on the grounds that he thinks infowars’ twitter accounts shouldn’t be transferred as part of the bankruptcy even though that’s something that happens constantly and also wouldn’t impact the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings even if it were grounded in anything resembling fact
Musk has also tweeted occasionally that he believes The Onion is not funny.
it’s getting really hard to adequately describe how funny musk isn’t. it’s not just try-hard shit like the weird sink thing, the soul-sucking cameos, or the fact that he’s literally throwing his money into stopping a comedy site from existing — it’s everything taken as a whole. I’d call him anti-comedy, but he’s so much less interesting than that implies
The Onion clowns on Ol’ Musky constantly, despite his efforts to shut them down. Around the peak space X buzz, they wrote a headline that was like “Musk invents the first infinitely divorceable wife”, which he managed to scrub from the internet (or at least, I can’t find it within 5 seconds), but other than that, he can only cope and seethe. He knows the onion is funny and can do nothing to become funny himself.
I would label him as anti-humor or humorless. Dishumorous?
Musk is the most boring and pathetic kind of unfunny where he desperately wants to be in on the joke but is terrified that the joke is on him (because it is). Rather than accept this with any kind of humility he instead cannot accept the L and has basically spent all his vast money and power making that everyone else’s problem.
He is the worst mad scientist, ranting about how they called him mad when what we actually said was “lol u mad bro?”
presented without comment.
Promptfondlers too lazy to even fondle prompts anymore. I’m sure this is the prime target demographic for Elon’s brain chips.
1.2 thousand upvotes for the LLM equivalent of adding a little astrology to your holistic medicine. reddit ain’t ok
This is completely off topic I think but I need you all to see this, it’s important on a spiritual level
This map is infinitely sneerable, every region you look at is somehow worse than the previous one, regardless of the order in which you do that.
Tag yourself, I’m Cracked Coast, population 17.
Unifying belgium and the Netherlands makes me think really bad things about the map designers. People who want that are either fools who dont know much about the region or white nationalist fascists. (They often also want SA included)
someone needs to stop paradox gamers from interfacing with the real world
Isn’t there a huge neo-nazi subculture around Paradox games, with weird mods and stuff?
As a bit of a map painter, Paradox themselves nowadays takes a pretty anti neo-nazi stance. And most public places do so as well (this was a relatively recent change btw, people didn’t seem to notice just how bad remove kebab memes etc were). There is sadly the general undertone of ‘ironic’ far right meme culture which is pervasive in gaming. So that will always be a problem. So neo-nazis not so much, but people making jokes about genocide, and the high risk of your fave content creator suddenly going some weird anti leftwing/culture war rant which makes it clear he (it is always a he) knows nothing yes very much. No idea how much of these people are crypto-fascists or not, as the rest of the space does seem welcoming to trans people and women. (this is my view of the general paradox gaming culture places I have been into, I’m not denying there are neo-nazi groups into paradox games, they just don’t seem to be overt or liked vs the general edgelord gamer types).
There is no Poland, which unfortunately tracks, historically.
I can see Denmark having Scania now, which is what a lot of the more racist Scanians have wanted since forever. But you can’t just split Sweden (Sverige, Svea Rike) into Sweden and Svealand, which isn’t even historically correct (it’s way too big).
Also Ulster being 50% of the island of Eire is gonna work out great.
Why does the region around Armenia look so unchanged? Why is Transylvania in Ukraine? Italy becomes Romania, ok I’ve had enough
there are two transylvanias
Police are openly admitting to using chatGPT to hallucinate reports. I’m sure they were before, but now they’re comfortable enough to admit to it.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this. Nothing at all.
great news for lawyers hopefully
I wonder if we’re going to see Baldur Bjarnason or Emily Bender tapped as expert witnesses in the not-too-distant future.
