Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.
this one doesn’t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post that’s best summarized as:
I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and it’s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big “L”.
It’s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.
[…]
But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.
[…]
From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didn’t seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.
you’ve read all of this shit before. it’s another “centrist democrat” who thinks the republicans have really good points now that they’re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what I’ve quoted here. there’s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.
this post wouldn’t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:
Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.
In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.
I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.
and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tear’s name was George Washington
lol this mcdonough guy’s great
@nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who aren’t interested in that.
yes it’s a cynical power grab by the woke mob
and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each other’s company
the woke mob that is, at various points in his post, either a large group that’s taken over the Nix community, or a tiny and unimportant but loud group of marginalized folks, depending on what makes his point more efficiently at the time
this mcdonough dude’s a trip
referencing how much he loves this blog post from another guy just kicked out for sealioning
oh Shea’s Zulip posts are a fucking trip too. it’s yet another straight up tantrum from the same kind of folks who think you shouldn’t get banned if you tell every moderator to go fuck themselves, personally, during a phone call
they absolutely are
loved this LWN subthread where another of these guys makes vague accusations, replies look at his actual posts and say yeah you should have been kicked out
and this one where yet another poster laments needless politicisation and the immediate responses are “oh it’s you” and receipts
Libertarianism is the ideology of splitters (which is sort of ironic as that is what they accuse ‘the woke’ of being (which also gets combined with the oppression Olympics idea, ideas which are not only not compatible, but is a thing I have only see concern trolls use against things ‘ow you are protesting against the Gaza genocide? But you never said anything about the Darfuris in Sudan, which is a much worse genocide, much curious, I am very intelligent’) it is annoying)
E: note on a bit of language used which was a bit of a red flag to me.
I want people to know that the author of this blog post (another ex-contributor to the discussions) is not the only one who believes the process was corrupted[emph mine].
The language used here is quite interesting, corrupted vs coopted, or some other word, as corrupted has implications of a profane/divine sort of thinking (which fits nicely into my splitting link above. But it is probably just more like ‘government corruption’ than this divine/profane thing).
there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (…)
Ofc it’s not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of “let’s move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucks” then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!
You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?
For those wondering about the LessOnline event, here’s the actual plan
My man spent 10 paragraphs failing to describe the intended vibe of the event he’s organizing. This is what happens when you only read tweets and substacks, you completely lose the ability to describe the immaterial.
a dance concert led by the Fooming Shoggoths, with many songs that didn’t make it onto their April 1st album
dunno about you, but that absolutely informs me about the event in fullness
They are a satire of themselves. You really can read only that and perfectly imagine how insufferable the event is.
“cozy/spaciousness”
The Danes do not have a term for this, but if they did, it might be* hyggelig dimensioner*. A good name for an oversized couch at Ikea. Also, the Danes would not include “whiteboards everywhere” as part of cozy, warm, intellectual conversation, but hey.
From a comment thread:
Other ideas we chatted about having at LessOnline include maybe having some discussions about doing research inside and outside of academia, and also about learning from GlowFic writers how to write well collaboratively.
snerk
Also:
Also (if you haven’t seen) lots of new great writers confirmed attending including Scott Sumner, Agnes Callard, and Patrick McKenzie.
Is it worth getting Agnes Callard if she’s not a double act with her second husband/former grad student?
OK this is low-hanging fruit but ChatGPT-4o (4o? what even is branding?) was demoed with a feminine voice, So HN discussed it. And a couple extremely horny users can’t stop talking about robot girlfriend sex and the end of relationships
the western world is already experiencing a huge decline in womens sexual appetites – AI will effectively make women completely uninterested in men
An AI girlfriend that isn’t going to bring up the last three time you fought because you forget her birthday/called her fat/hit on her friends? are you sure you understand the target market?
I guess I can never understand the perspective of someone that just needs a girl voice to speak to them. Without a body there is nothing to fulfill me.
And after that you have a robot that listens to you, do your chores and have sex with you, at that point she is “real”.
If you want to solve procreation them you can do that without humans having sex with humans.
It got submitted to lobste.rs too and there are some insane takes there too
https://lobste.rs/s/ph5o0a/openai_gpt_4o
this model has lower latency, and they’ve priced it at half of the previous model’s price, despite it having comparable or better performance. If this is not a dumping price,[…]
Yeah it’s totes more efficient, it’s not like Altman/MSFT are desperate to goose subscriber numbers
I’ve seen first-hand how it helps non-programmers write programs to solve their problems (with “bad” code, but bad code is still empowering people), and I think that’s important given that software has been eating the world.
Couldn’t the thousands of people now free from mundane work, work together now on solving climate issues or issues that require physical human labor?
if LLMs/AI can run byrocracies (and whole countries) more efficiently, there are potential energy savings there too.
Well, I suppose dating a chatbot taped to a fleshlight is exactly the sort of relationship these people deserve. Self-solving problem.
I have now looked it up and heard ChatGPT-Four-Oh’s incredibly obnoxious fake-enthusiastic advert person voice. These people are very very sick.
Talking about the demo and not those HN reactions (they suck): So we all in tech have collectively forgotten the whole ‘apple iphones didn’t actually work when they were being presented and it was all just theatre’ thing? Because I wouldn’t trust a slick tech demo like that at all. (I also want to know about all the edge cases where it fails and well, there is also the whole ‘what is this even for?’ thing). (And yes some HN people did voice these concerns).
E: also don’t these GPT things have a sort of token limit? After a while they just get stuck in ‘cannot accept more new data’ mode basically (which I assume is a limit so people don’t use up too much compute (I hate how we are making that a word now)), how would that work? (This is more about the robofuckers, who have also not learned anything from the previous gen of this shit when somebody turned the naughty cybersex function off).
Don’t forget about how the presentations for Google Gemini and OpenAI Sora and Devin were all faked embellished too, but no one talks about that anymore either.
I’m still waiting for even one actual use-case for sexy Clippy that isn’t generating SEO spam while speedrunning climate change.
Some people at the EFF (or people who used to work there at least, apparently they sort of sold out, not clear on the details dont quote me on this one) prob had a small heart attack on the privacy concerns of linking cameras with openAI gpt systems. Chatbot powered advertisements, as seen in the movies!
countries with GPUs
Did this person forget how the internet works? Or is he imaging that people just buy a desktop to fuck (and that any desktopsexuals have not done so already. (keep that blacklight away from my dvd player please).
It never ceases to amaze me watching these tech bros breathlessly hyping the next revolutionary product for it to be a huge nothing burger. Like that’s it? You gave gpt an image to text input + and a text to speech app? Dawg, I’ve been watching Joe Biden & Trump play Fortnite for 5 years at this point, text to speech just doesn’t hit the same anymore.
I mean my god, at least some hardcore engineering went in to making the migraine inducing apple vision pro. If this is the best card in oai’s deck, I would be panicking as an investor.
good to see that LessWrong is about improving human rationality to decrease the existential risk of superintelligent AI, and not long screeds on current political issues from a reactionary perspective
If what you really care about is stemming the ill-effects of large and growing student debt, debt cancellation is a terrible policy. If you want people to consume less of something, the last thing you should do is subsidize people who consume that thing.
Yes, I agree, once debt is cancelled we shouldn’t let people go into debt and attending university should be free.
Also that is a weird sort of argument, how would people consume less schooling? ‘Yeah I’m going for my 4th degree now, after Biden canceled the debt of the first one, I hope he will cancel the other 3 as well’
This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that’s not an actual ancap position?
On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that I’m mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It’s difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.