this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Molly White reports on Kamala Harris's recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.

VP Harris's press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.

Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected

[...]

Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.

More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.

Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.

"regulation" here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don't live in a sensible world.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Presented, without comment, this book cover:

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Blockchain Technology and Digital Twin for Smart Hospitals

(found on the social medias, the books' website)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.

This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

the upside of it listing a pile of author names: one can go look up their published works, and add them to crank trackers if necessary (seems likely)

the ToC is some fantastical fucking nonsense

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

this is one hell of a hat trick

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

only needs a quantum chapter somewhere in there for bonus scoring round..

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

In other news, Elon actually did it

He actually went and crippled blocking

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

my bet: tweets that came to felon's attention which he couldn't view because the poster had block felon

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

This is a license for stalkers & abusers ! No surprise from someone like Elon I suppose

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I’m really really not happy about this. There is one person I’ve been trying to keep out for the last few years and now they can come crawl all my fucking posts?? And report my account!?

Edit: apparently being protected should offer me some protection still.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

saw this via a friend earlier, forgot to link. xcancel

socmed administrator for a conf rolls with liarsynth to "expand" a cropped image, and the autoplag machine shits out a more sex-coded image of the speaker

the mindset of "just make some shit to pass muster" obviously shines through in a lot of promptfans and promptfondlers, and while that's fucked up I don't want to get too stuck on that now. one of the things I've been mulling over for a while is pondering what a world (and digital landscape) with a richer capability for enthusiastic consent could look like. and by that I mean, not just more granular (a la apple photo/phonebook acl) than this current y/n bullshit where a platform makes a landgrab for a pile of shit, but something else entirely. "yeah, on my gamer profile you can make shitposts, but on academic stuff please keep it formal" expressed and traceable

even if just as a thought experiment (because of course there's lots of funky practical problems, combined with the "humans just don't really exist that way" effort-tax overhead that this may require), it might inform about some avenues of how to to go about some useful avenues on how to go about handling this extremely overt bullshit, and informing/shaping impending norms

(e: apologies for semi stream of thought, it's late and i'm tired)

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago

fig. 1: how awful.systems works

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

25085 N + Oct 15 GitHub ( 19K) Your free GitHub Copilot access has expired

tinyviolin.bmp

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

it just clicked for me but idk if it makes sense: openai nonprofit status could be used later (inevitably in court) to make research clause of fair use work. they had it when training their models and that might have been a factor why they retained it, on top of trying to attract actual skilled people and not just hypemen and money

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There's no way this works, right? It's like a 5y.o.'s idea of a gotcha.

This would be like starting a tax-exempt charity to gather up a large amount in donations and then switching to a for-profit before spending it on any charitable work and running away with the money.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

i'm not a lawyer and i've typed it up after 4h of sleep, trying to make sense of what tf were they thinking. they're not bagging up money, they're stealing all data they can, so it's less direct and it'd depend on how that data (unstructured, public) will be valued at. then, what a coincidence, their proprietary thing made something useful commercially, or so were they thinking. sbf went to court with less

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

There’s no way this works, right?

the US legal system has this remarkable "little" failure mode where it is easily repurposed to be not an engine of justice, but instead of engine of enforcing whatever story you can convince someone of

(the extremely weird interaction(s) of "everything allowed except what is denied", case precedent, and the abovementioned interaction mode, result in some really fucking bad outcomes)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...

Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Sadly I think the only way to trust you are not getting a lot of AI art is by starting to follow a lot of artists you like on social media. Just going to a site which sells things seems a bit risky atm.

e: for example 40k stickers

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago (10 children)

In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.

Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Ted_Danson_choosing_between_clam_chowder_fountain_and_bees_with_teeth.webm

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn't know how much of a fool RMS was. : "RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt." (It gets worse btw).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't think anything in the report is new, is it? Isn't this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.

Nice to have it all in one place though.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

There's a little bit of new stuff in there, but it's all just corroborating the old or relatively minor. Still, it's a lot in one place.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

What do these people think leadership is?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

No, obviously opinions like

"if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein's teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented",
"stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it's supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine",
"I don't believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.^1^ What if you lie about who is dying?",
"Overtly sexualizing 'parody' ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is",
"It's fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it's basically proprietary, right?",
"You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>",

are in the same category as "I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting" when it comes to evaluating someone's aptitude as a leader.

I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I'd be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.

1: It's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

Especially leadership of a political organization that's basically just there to turn his opinions into code and publish his essays.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Something to which they, and people like them, are entitled

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago

the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.

of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein's victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn't underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

this demented take on using GenAI to create documentation for open source projects

https://lobste.rs/s/rmbos5/large_language_models_reduce_public#c_j8boat

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Good sneer from "Internet_Janitor" a few comments up the page:

LLMs inherently shit where they eat.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The top comment's also pretty good, especially the final paragraph:

I guess these companies decided that strip-mining the commons was an acceptable deal because they’d soon be generating their own facts via AGI, but that hasn’t come to pass yet. Instead they’ve pissed off many of the people they were relying on to continue feeding facts and creativity into the maws of their GPUs, as well as possibly fatally crippling the concept of fair use if future court cases go against them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

oh hey that would be my comment 😁

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It was a pretty good comment, and pointed out one of the possible risks this AI bubble can unleash.

I've already touched on this topic, but it seems possible (if not likely) that copyright law will be tightened in response to the large-scale theft performed by OpenAI et al. to feed their LLMs, with both of us suspecting fair use will likely take a pounding. As you pointed out, the exploitation of fair use's research exception makes it especially vulnerable to its repeal.

On a different note, I suspect FOSS licenses (Creative Commons, GPL, etcetera) will suffer a major decline in popularity thanks to the large-scale code theft this AI bubble brought - after two-ish years of the AI industry (if not tech in general) treating anything publicly available as theirs to steal (whether implicitly or explicitly), I'd expect people are gonna be a lot stingier about providing source code or contributing to FOSS.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm no longer worried that LLMs will take my job (nor ofc that AGI will kill us all) Instead the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available. It's a bit like draining the Aral Sea, a vibrant ecosystem will be permanently destroyed in the short-sighted pursuit of "development".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available.

I personally anticipate this will be the lasting legacy of AI as a whole - everything that you mentioned was caused in the alleged pursuit of AGI/Superintelligence^tm^, and gen-AI has been more-or-less the "face" of AI throughout this whole bubble.

I've also got an inkling (which I turned into a lengthy post) that the AI bubble will destroy artificial intelligence as a concept - a lasting legacy of "crud and untruth" as you put it could easily birth a widespread view of AI as inherently incapable of distinguishing truth from lies.

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