18

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
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

New piece from The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date

The full piece is worth a read, but the conclusion's pretty damn good, so I'm copy-pasting it here:

All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

apparently those qualcomm NPUs (the "AI assist" chips in the copilot(?) laptops) aren't very good

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago

The what in the what now?

What a terrible day to tech.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 16 points 1 day ago

non processing units

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

inference-tasks focused coprocessor

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This sadly has caused my login problems to reappear on bsky. No idea what they are doing with their service, but I'm having regular issues with the site. Also seems 'downforeveryoneorjustme' enshittified. (the image is showing a part of the site which is now an advertisement for some AI bullshit chatbot/imagegenerator everything aislop roleplay thing). (seems to be fixed now, but wow did bsky have weird issues for me).

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

looks like the name server is getting hammered

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 15 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago

who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 2 days 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.

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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)

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 2 days 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

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

this is one hell of a hat trick

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

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

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

He also put 'everything you post is now training data for ais' in his tos apparently. So nightshade poison those images and start building a following on other sites artists. (And as a non artist, reminder to self to like and repost more artists I like).

E: quick source

[-] maol@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago

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

[-] mii@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 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

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 22 points 2 days ago

fig. 1: how awful.systems works

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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)

[-] MBM 7 points 1 day ago

I don't know what's worse, that or some of the weird twitter responses it's getting

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

why not both

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago

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

tinyviolin.bmp

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 2 days ago

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

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 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

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 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)

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
18 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1335 readers
80 users here now

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

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS