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

unrelated but we're all gonna get so many of trumpist brown-nosed sleazes as ambassadors now

it looks likely that we out there in poland might get georgette mosbacher as next ambassador. she was more of an lobbyist going hard against eu digital tax, but there's much more

[-] istewart@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago

I am left thinking that many people here in the US are going to have a hard time accepting that having this person, at this stage in his life, as the national figurehead will do permanent damage to the US' prestige and global standing. Doesn't matter if Reagan was sundowning, media was more controlled then and his handlers were there to support the institution of the presidency at least as much as they were there to support a narcissist. In 2016, other countries could look at Trump as a temporary aberration and wait him out. This time, it's clear that the US is no longer a reliable partner.

An intentional sacrifice of the US' role as head manager of the global economy is not nearly as well thought out as the people pushing it think it is.

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

plenty of them will just shrug it off as "commie propaganda" and will ignore reality as long as they can receive coast to coast am, then blame dems for the bits they cannot ignore anymore

bonus points to former hilary's consultants (or so i hear) running current campaign deciding that going to the right (who the fuck likes cheney?) was a good idea

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[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago

Ah, copilot is so extremely popular that MS has decided to bundle it into O365 for ~~free~~ a moderate “depends by region” price increase

I’m sure that’ll totally make people want it even more! hordes at the gate!

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago
[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)
  1. Just wanted to say thanks again to the admins and community for maintaining this oasis of sanity.

  2. How do you all suppose the Great Bullshit Implosion is going to interact with our incoming US government? When it becomes clear that the money is running out, will OpenAI be able to talk the Trump government into bailing them out, or will the fash kick them when they're down, since tech will be a nice fat scapegoat for the economy hitting the shitter?

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[-] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago

My hope is that either more progressive third party options become more viable OR the dems finally understand that being essentially republican is a bad strategy and actually become progressive. I know the reality is that the dems will learn nothing from this as they have clearly learned nothing from 2016.

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[-] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago

the writer's room is [open]

that's dasha the laptop, she used to work in a corporation but is sick of that and retired to be a writer

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago

mozilla is having another wee purge on the foundation side

this shit reads exactly like corporate raider playbook

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago

“Our mission at Mozilla is more high-stakes than ever,” wrote Syed in an email to staff, a copy of which was shared with TechCrunch. “We find ourselves in a relentless onslaught of change in the technology (and broader) world, and the idea of putting people before profit feels increasingly radical.”

"which is why we don't"

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[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago

Bitcoin peaks as Trump is elected

(Article encrypted in Finnish, see spoiler for translation)

lightly fixed machine translationThe cryptocurrency Bitcoin climbed to a new high record on Wednesday as Republican Donald Trump seemed to be taking the lead in the US presidential election. Bitcoin went up by almost $6,000 and traded above $75,000. The previous record from March, when the rate settled slightly below $73,800?

Trump has previously branded cryptocurrencies a scam, but he changed his line and during his campaign has praised them and promised to make the United States the world's centers for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

“The price of Bitcoin has followed Trump’s position in opinion polls and the betting market. Investors estimate that the victory of the Republicans would increase the demand for digital currencies", says Russ Mold, an analyst at the financial company AJ Bell, to the AFP news agency.

In the United States, the stock exchanges in New York were on the plus side at the end of the trading day on Tuesday after the previous day's declines.

The technology-focused Nasdaq closed up by a percent 1.4, while the more general S&P 500 was up 1.2 percent. The Industrial-oriented Dow Jones, on the other hand, ended the day with a 1.0 percent increase.

The dollar is initially weakened against the euro, but began to rise in Asian markets against both the euro and the Japanese yen as Trump's lead. Stock exchange rates were also rising in various parts of Asia. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 index ended by a percent 2.4.

The presidential race is a struggle between Democrats Kamala Harris and Republican Trump.

Trump has proposed a combination of low corporate tax rates and looser regulation that would be boosted by corporate profits and tighten the stock market, experts told ABC News.

Dry heaving at the shameless public fellatio Trump performed on Musk in his speech.

[-] hrrrngh@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago

I know this shouldn't be surprising, but I still cannot believe people really bounce questions off LLMs like they're talking to a real person. https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/47183/are-llms-unlikely-to-be-useful-to-generate-any-scientific-discovery

I have just read this paper: Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli, "Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models", submitted on 22 Jan 2024.

It says there is a ground truth ideal function that gives every possible true output/fact to any given input/question, and no matter how you train your model, there is always space for misapproximations coming from missing data to formulate, and the more complex the data, the larger the space for the model to hallucinate.

Then he immediately follows up with:

Then I started to discuss with o1. [ . . . ] It says yes.

Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which o1 says yes [ . . . ]. Then it says [ . . . ].

Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which it says yes too.

I'm not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.

When I was a lab demonstrator in university, one of the lab exercises was somewhat hard to get right, and our team noticed a huge raft of plagiarism. Not only were multiple students using the exact same code, but it was code that didn’t even work! The course had a policy of instant failure with evidence of plagiarism, which was made clear at the start of the course, and yet this just kept happening. To top it all off, the lab exercises didn’t change from year to year, so the same code kept showing up! This plus a number of other incidents broke me and made me realise I didn’t have it in me to be this kind of educator.

It would be great if this was all a big psyop by big tech to gaslight educators into ending their careers for some kind of mass brainwashing conspiracy, because at least there would be some intention behind it. Instead, we’re poisoning collective consciousness with cyberslop because we think one day the virtual dumbass will reach enlightenment. We don’t actually have a way for that to happen, so we’re just going to metaphorically bash our own heads against rocks in hopes we glitch ourselves into the singularity.

So yeah in short my head would explode too.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago

Seeing a worrying trend of people wanting to cosplay as La Resistance, going dark, hiding from the cops. "Fun" fact, the Gestapo was extremely good at finding, torturing and killing people in the resistance. If people only know you via encrypted messaging, who is gonna raise a ruckus when you're sent to a camp?

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago
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[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

hackernews having a normal one (EDIT: Then things got worse)

HN Title: The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800

In the top comments:

dash2 55 minutes ago | next [–]

Here's an interesting extract:

We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.

This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708

red016 3 minutes ago | parent | next [–]

i’d be more interested in jewish numbers than protestant or catholic

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago

Ah yes, the famous European Jewish run universities. You don't have to be an idiot to be anti-Semitic, but it certainly helps.

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