this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

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

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (5 children)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT5MX8jK9tHiBM5NK/re-taste

A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.

No it doesn't, you fools, you absolute rubes

If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.

wat

Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.

Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (8 children)

Aaaah my eyes

The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.

This future doesn't have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.

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

This is from 2023 but when debugging an xfce issue this week I came across this forum post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16835

The user is competent enough to use xfce with Debian, but too incompetent to understand debug symbols is not a violation of privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (9 children)

Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.

I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (don't judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenberg's summary claims it was written in the 21st century. There's actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.

Given that it's in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. It's also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesn't really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.

Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.

* maybe the '70s give or take but I'm not a professional date guesser

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

https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1882927003508359242

Eliezer Yudkowsky says he would like to be a post-human some day, but the way to get there is by experimenting on augmenting biological intelligence through adult gene therapy targeting the human brain with suicide volunteers who may end up schizophrenic rather than taking a "leap of death" into unconstrained AI development

(found via flipping through LW for sneerable posts/comments)

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

Am I reading this right? Is he suggesting doing experiments on the suicidally depressed?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (3 children)

i read this and my brain started leaking out my ears

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

i want to slap each and every one of the people of X replying with something about autism

bad faith is actually incredibly easy to detect with a little practice if you're not a bad faith idiot yourself

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

Hackernews woke up feeling like fascism ( make sure to enable dead + flagged comments if you hate yourself):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696

(Two comment threads about the CDC purging "woke" research, the comments are bad even by HN standards)

Gee given a forum full of hackers you'd expect them to be against arbitrary removal of scientific studies. What happened to "information wants to be free"?


Bonus US terribleness: the NTSB suddenly thinks Twitter* is the bee's knees and way better than email! What coincidental timing https://xcancel.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1885734974298435943


Also I know I know, more US politics. It turns out silicon valley fascists have gained power so expect this to keep happening for the forseeable future 🙃.

These past two weeks have made me very uncomfortable working in Silicon Valley, I know last time I said I was planning to get out; but now it feels urgent both for my own well being, and to stop contributing to this industry. In trans communities we immediately saw coupy stuff** for the attempted transgender genocide that it is, the wider public and media is waking up to this very slowly.

* An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool.

** If there's interest I could try turning all of this into a top level post on morewrite or techtakes. I've been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it's extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool

Not just that, but a site that, if you are bot logged in shows an accounts posts not chronologically, but most popular first. Making it totally incapable to be used as a gov communication platform. Imagine looking at a gov storm warning system for your area and seeing the list of most virally named storms first, and nothing about how you should evacuate right now.

Amd yes it is quite horrible that the usa is in the book burning and building (more) concentration camps stages of the gearing up for genocide stages. Up next, taking away passports (which they are already not issuing anymore) and any guns (not that these help, historically speaking, iirc the Jewish people had guns in Germany at first).

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

Kelsey Piper bluechecks thusly:

James Damore was egregiously wronged.

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

Wow, the story is so much more troubling when you lie about it!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

People have worked out how to cram DeepSeek onto a Raspberry Pi

Anyways, here's a quasi-related sidenote:

Part of me suspects DeepSeek is gonna quickly carve out a good chunk of the market for itself - for SaaS services looking for spicy autocomplete or a slop generator to bolt on to their products, DeepSeek's high efficiency gives them a way to do it that doesn't immediately blow a massive hole in their finances.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Some light uplifting news amid *gestures at everything*. I saw this a minute ago from the guy who runs TheCodingHorror and co-founded Stack Overflow and Discourse: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ifd3ys/im_giving_away_half_my_wealth_to_make_the/

No EA stuff! $1M each going to eight great charities and non-profits as far as I can tell: Children’s Hunger Fund, First Generation Investors, Global Refuge, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, PEN America, The Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood, and Team Rubicon. (from The Trevor Project's blog post)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

oh well done, you've gone and made logorrhea a feature

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I wonder how much % of the freakout over Deepseek is AI doomers realizing the coming AI god might be ... ChiCom!

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