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.

7 points

(happened to notice this while digging into something else)

upwork’s landing page has a whole big AI anchorblob. clicking from frontpage takes you to /nx/signup (and I’m not going to bother), but digging around a bit elsewhere finds “The Future Of Work With AI”

so we’re now at the stage where upwork reckons it’s a good bet to specifically hype AI delivery from their myriad exploitatively arbitraged service providers

(they’re probably not wrong, I can see a significant chunk of companies falling over each other to “get into AI” at pay-a-remote-coder-peanut-shells prices)

permalink
report
reply
20 points

Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - they’ve switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.

permalink
report
reply
2 points
7 points
*

this is quite infuriating, i had a number of mozilla/firefox people telling me that this feature wouldn’t work with opt-in (it’s bullshit though) because too few users would enable it, and neither fucker asked himself : “wait, if we’re afraid we can’t convince our user base to buy-in, perhaps we shouldn’t develop the feature?”

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points
*

Sounds like a good idea to piss off your primary user base, because at this stage I feel the only people singing Firefox’s praise are privacy advocates who won’t touch Chrome & friends with a ten-foot pole.

(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)

It’s also enabled in the dev builds, by the way. I just checked.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)

it definitely reads like the same shithead, but I’ve had them blocked on mastodon for some time so I can’t say for sure if it was for rampant LLMery or for doing the “without advertising the modern web would die and you don’t want that do you” thing advertisers do constantly

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points
*

Lol what an absolute tool. That’s the same shit the marketing bozos at my job say when I inform them that, no, I can’t auto opt-in our customers into whatever stupid Facebook ad campaign they’re pushing this week because it’s literally against the GDPR and our privacy laws.

But I guess that’s the logical next step if your whole business model depends on lazy deceiving people into clicking the button with the flashiest color in the cookie popup without reading the label.

P.S. the modern web can die in a fucking fire.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

and because it feels like it’s worth screaming this into the void in case there’s any marketing assholes reading: fuck yes I’m here to kill the modern web

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points
*

Well, I needed an excuse to use Supermium - no better excuse than this.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

I don’t really know if any chromium-based options are a real solution - there’s so much code in there that a lot of times won’t get caught (cf. brave etc for this very thing), and goog is actively working to push their own agenda and they have a lot more dev-hours than anyone else to churn shit out

ladybird and servo seem like the most promising alternative paths right now, and ladybird less so because chuds -_-

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Ladybird isn’t going anywhere. The web standards move too fast and they’re not going to be able to catch up. I wish it was another way, but there’s no way a couple of million $ is going to move the needle here when (probably) tens of billions have been poured into chromium/FF.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points
*

Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didn’t like the feel of Chromium.

I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went “fuck it, I’m sticking with Libre”.

permalink
report
parent
reply
18 points

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02218-7

Might be slightly off topic, but interesting result using adversarial strategies against RL trained Go machines.

Quote: Humans able use the adversarial bots’ tactics to beat expert Go AI systems, does it still make sense to call those systems superhuman? “It’s a great question I definitely wrestled with,” Gleave says. “We’ve started saying ‘typically superhuman’.” David Wu, a computer scientist in New York City who first developed KataGo, says strong Go AIs are “superhuman on average” but not “superhuman in the worst cases”.

Me thinks the AI bros jumped the gun a little too early declaring victory on this one.

permalink
report
reply
12 points

See, in StarCraft we would just say that the meta is evolving in order to accommodate this new strategy. Maybe Go needs to take a page from newer games in how these things are discussed.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

this is simple. we just need to train a new model for every move. that way the adversarial bot won’t know what weaknesses to exploit

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

In chess the table base for optimal moves with only 7 pieces takes like ~20 terrabytes to store. And in that DB there are bizzare checkmates that take 100 + moves even with perfect precision- ignoring the 50 move rule. I wonder if the reason these adversarial strats exists is because whatever the policy network/value network learns is way, way smaller than the minimum size of the “true” position eval function for Go. Thus you’ll just invariably get these counter play attacks as compression artifacts.

Sources cited: my ass cheeks

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

i don’t think that can be quite right, as illustrated by an extreme example: consider a game where the first move has player 1 choose “win” or “hypergo.” if player 1 chooses win, they win. if player 1 chooses hypergo, begin a game of Go on a 1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000,000 board, and whoever wins that subgame wins. for player 1, the ‘true’ position eval function must be in some sense incredibly complicated, because it includes hypergo nonsense. but player 1 strategy can be compressed to “choose win” without opening up any counterattacks

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

60% of the time, it works 100% of the time.

permalink
report
parent
reply
16 points

And in other news:

Muse is a new creative platform that can create your own AI-generated series so you can dive into a new world of storytelling without the need for personal content creation.

Who the fuck are these people and why do I not have a button that spreads Lego bricks across their floor?

permalink
report
reply
9 points

Yeah, I always hated the part of art and storytelling where there was always a tiny and sometimes misshapen window into the human soul there. Better to do away with that and replace it with an endless parade of #sponsoredcontent. That way there’s no risk of suddenly developing empathy or accidentally connecting with the people I’m exploiting as a billionaire VC.

permalink
report
parent
reply

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @blakestacey Their end game is to have content, not art, as you said, because, well, art makes us empathize when we just wanna see another… well, I don’t even know how to describe **content** I was gonna joke about action movies but some of them are fantastic metaphores. For example, the Matrix movies being a whole empathy session for Trans struggles.

permalink
report
parent
reply
16 points
*

From the just released GOP 2024 party platform (PDF), this is a single bullet point in CHAPTER THREE: BUILD THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN HISTORY:

Republicans will pave the way for future Economic Greatness by leading the World in Emerging Industries.

Crypto

Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency. We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.

Expanding Freedom, Prosperity and Safety in Space

Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.

When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.

permalink
report
reply
13 points

unAmerican

This is somehow the worst thing Republicans did this year.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points
*

Human Flourishing

This term was already very iffy, but this cements it into being full on red flag territory.

When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.

Wouldnt be surpised if we discover he is behind it, the whole manufacturing things in space (yes I also played SMAX Musk) has his smell over it. What makes this a bit more funny is that Musk has also been hired to help safely crash down the ISS into the sea (Personally considering the cost of lifting stuff out of our gravity I would try to keep it up there, if I wanted to build more things in space, but due to capitalism we cannot (really, the ISS is going to be trashed because figuring out who own what part and resolving all that is too hard, capital says no)). Which brings up a fantastic opportunity for a random person on twitter who has Musks ear. We can now put a city at risk of being crushed by the ISS by tweeting ‘hey musk, make the ISS do a barrel roll’.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points

@gnomicutterance @dgerard Has the Republican writing style guide been updated to mandate that Weird Capitalisation thing that Cheeto Benito does or something?

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

dogwhistles all the way down

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

Fantasy PnP RPG Capitalisation.

permalink
report
parent
reply

TechTakes

!techtakes@awful.systems

Create post

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.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

Community stats

  • 2.2K

    Monthly active users

  • 348

    Posts

  • 8.9K

    Comments

Community moderators