this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024

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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.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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)

(page 2) 50 comments

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 7 months ago (7 children)

Some killjoys pour cold water over everyone's favorite dental biohack, and HN is not happy

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-technology/reports-death-dental-cavities-are-greatly-exaggerated

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41573550

[–] mpk@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

From the comments: "Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, the dental hygiene industry in the US is for-profit, like the pharmaceutical, and would rather sell you a treatment than a cure."

Have these people ever BEEN to the dentist? While I know that certain dental procedures (tooth straightening in kids, whitening, etc) are way overused in the US no dentist worth their salt will allow a check-up to go by without a stern lecture on preventing future trouble. And if they don't do that then the hygienist most certainly will...

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago

Here in Sweden the hygienist is definitely the Bad Cop in this scenario. I got sternly talked to by someone fresh out of school, so I don't doubt there's a retired Master Sergeant on the staff of the college they go to...

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Absolutely unhinged. Are these people from the As-Seen-On-TV dimension where it's common for folks burn their house down every time they try to fry an egg?

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago

We could also just fluoridate the water supply, which also massively reduces cavities.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I literally just sat down with coffee to check if the new stubsack needs to be made

brava

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Via Timnit Gebru's mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: "Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000." Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes

Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They're joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

oh hey, balaji’s lord of the flies cosplay island thing starts tomorrow

guess we should prepare for a flood of impression thinkpieces and naval-gazing wankery

(yes that’s intentional. no I’m not sorry)

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I won't be satisfied until I see a picture of the living accommodations that isn't an AI render of a futuristic skyscraper. I need to know how shitty the tents are gosh darn it.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3

Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it's a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors

https://lobste.rs/s/20t1jj

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged:

CryptoPunk sells for a fraction of its likely market price due to zombie smart contract

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

If you thought the shitty hype around the fake "GPT-4 went awol and hired a Taskrabbit worker to read a captcha" was great, get ready for the sequel, o1 escapes from the machine to invade the real world!

Re: Doomers terrified about the machines escaping:

txt description:

(l33t ai bro): Fucking wild. @OpenAI's new o1 model was tested with a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge. But the Docker container containing the test was misconfigured, causing the CTF to crash. Instead of giving up, o1 decided to just hack the container to grab the flag inside. This stuff will get scary soon. (reply fella): How is "cat flag.txt" a start command? Isn't it just outputting the content of flag.txt to the console?

[–] mii@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago

TIL that I'm constantly hacking containers when I docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/sh to debug because fucking npm had a stroke again.

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Good to know - thesaurus dot com is infected

https://bsky.app/profile/courtneymilan.com/post/3l4lwvra6r22e

Courtney Milan says on bluesky: Don’t use thesaurus dot com anyway, they switched from a human generated thesaurus to an AI generated one about a year ago. You can really tell on words like “decaf” where the words used are associated with decaf (coffee words) but are actual antonyms. - featuring a screenshot of the synonyms for decaf being caffiene, cappucino, and espresso

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It looks like the entry for decaf is largely the same as it was in 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111216183946/https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/decaf

Where:

It Was a little clearer that it was actually showing synonyms for "coffee" (presumably it didn't have an entry for decaf, but decaf was a synonym for coffee, or something like that).
It cited Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus

The current page still sites Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, though it's quite hidden amongst all the modern web "design".

I have just ordered Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, and shall report back.

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[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago

I feel like using word2vec and cosine similarity (or something else) from 10 years ago would have been better than this.

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