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)

18 points

I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

“GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

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15 points

No no no it’s fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

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15 points

a user called “crypto-bitcoin” raises an issue with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Accessibility List

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11 points
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Image description

Image shows user joined two weeks ago.

.
Yikes. Could be a troll (I hope it’s a troll)

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12 points

a lost not very computer literate dude who just got scammed i guess

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13 points
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Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don’t know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).

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21 points
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amazing work they’ve achieved so far though

yes, that’s the complete change set for the fork

oh and a Godot discord moderator turned out to be extremely into dropping n-words in chat

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14 points

This is fucking hilarious. GIT is my favorite blockchain

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6 points

I have no idea what set the drama off btw, I have not really looked into it (could it be that this mod you are talking about was the unofficial mod the godot communication was talking about? Or is that a different mod? And did the redot (wait, re.? please tell me it isn’t a reference to the reeeee thing) people really pick the side of the n-word mod?)

I did see that the guy who started redot basically only forked it and then went ‘any devs wanna take over this fork?’ Very I started the wiki, without even starting a wiki.

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13 points
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apparently godot posted something about supporting LGBT in games? can’t find the original. then Grummz posted ragebait about it and the chuds flooded their github and discord with fuckwittery

this is from like 5 min following links after reading your post

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8 points

found it: https://bsky.app/profile/gamingonlinux.com/post/3l5ca3blqgn2y

The idiots claimed using game engines was le wokisme and Godot took the piss, and Grummz ran with it

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14 points

they’re already sniping at each other

GUYS GUYS THE LOGO IT IS VERY IMPORTANT

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11 points

god these people are fucking losers

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12 points

There’s a new fork of Godot!

It’s called Lolidot, because of course it is

it’s going great too

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9 points

Of course it could get worse.

Lol at them just removing the godot donation links/list of donors and just replacing it with their own. What a grift.

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8 points

from the godot discord:

godotclayjohn • 20h ago •

fund.godotengine.org!

Obviously I can’t share access to the backend, but the numbers on the side are kept up to date. Last week we went down by about €5,000 when a corporate sponsorship expired.

Since Friday morning we lost €170/month in sponsorships but gained €1,610/month in new sponsorships. In terms of numbers of people: 10 people have cancelled their donations so far and 74 new people have signed up.

go woke, go 1400 EUR ahead and lose a pile of shitheads you never wanted

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4 points
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ahahaha that’s amazing

it also pushed me to start learning Godot since its community seems awesome, and that’s definitely showing through on the docs so far — they go into so much depth on why Godot’s designed like it is, and what specifically it’s good for

I’ve only just started, but it’s reminding me very positively of what Unreal Engine was for a brief period of time: a runtime for a powerful domain-specific scripting language that could be extended by native code when needed, targeting indie devs

unfortunately Tim Sweeney kind of sucks at designing languages (though he used to do it a lot) so UnrealScript was a real fucking mess, and UE never really captured the indie market (cause you had to pay a fuckload for the privilege of writing native code) so UnrealScript got excised and the engine became “free” (as in free timeshare) and entirely refocused on developers pumping out AAA garbage and other whales (and, more charitably, anyone who needs an engine that can do state of the art graphics)

Godot, so far, to me feels kind of like an Unreal Engine that didn’t fuck up with the indie market and also isn’t closed source greedware

also apparently there’s a new Unreal scripting language? it’s got the Haskell guy behind it and it’s functional which is cool, but it’s also already bathed in horseshit:

Verse is the new scripting language for Unreal Engine, first implemented in Fortnite.[11] Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.[12] Conceived by Sweeney,[13] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the metaverse.[14] A research paper, titled The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming, was also published.[15]

The language was eventually launched in March 2023 as part of the release of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at the Game Developers Conference, with plans to be available to all Unreal Engine users by 2025.[11]

so I guess Fortnite modders can weigh in on how good Haskell for Gaming

e: also, imagine if any of these pro gamers knew Godot is the Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad engine

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7 points

the chuds have done their usual thing of throwing themselves on the ground and acting extremely injured by being blocked for violating the CoC of an open source project (via Liam at GamingOnLinux):

what’s fucked is this is the exact same playbook as NixOS and Python, though this time Godot doesn’t seem to be taking any shit and that seems to be preventing those tactics from working. weird how easy it is to weather shit like this when you have a fucking spine and aren’t trying to retain fascist assholes

image description

Twitter posts by Rémi Verschelde (@Akien): I see misunderstanding around Godot blocking some users on its GitHub organization.

  • We’ve blocked 5 accounts so far
  • All opening issues with slurs, harassing contributors (breaching Godot’s CoC and GH’s ToS)
  • Blocking users does NOT prevent download of the engine or source

Blocking users doesn’t even prevent them from reading issues and PRs, just interacting with them. You can read and download anything from a GitHub repository as an anonymous (not logged in) user. *git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot… works for anyone with an Internet connection.

Just adding as some asked - if you want to quote this to people who still believe we’re mass blocking people on GitHub and cutting them off their tech stack, feel free to grab a screenshot. I locked my account while the heat dies down, so you can’t easily link those tweets.

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7 points

Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052

@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.

For your delectation, here are the HN comments

I’m in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.

Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.

There’s not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.

Here’s the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk

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14 points

oh i dunno, there was

Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.

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12 points

I think the one thing LLMs have shown us is that coherent English is less complicated than we previously believed. I don’t think we learned anything about actual cognition.

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7 points

The best way to unearth sneers is to state “there are no sneers here”

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5 points

David took it as a personal challenge

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7 points

This remark is actually part of a long fight between CS and CS people. And it is really frustrating in various ways, as CS always thinks they did better than CS while being blind of the actual accomplishments of CS they don’t know and just how complex the subject matter is. It is an annoying failure to communicate between both disciplines. (A lot of people don’t fall victim to this btw, but it can be really annoying to encounter a ‘Our CS is good, and theirs is bad because strawman’, who often don’t even realize that various words have different meanings in the different fields).

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5 points

For the record, I think the Counter-Strike people are correct on this one, mainly because heuristically Confederate States advocates are wrong by default.

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10 points

The best thing about the lobste.rs thread is to identify prompt fondlers among the brethren.

Here’s something I’ve never heard of before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec’s_paradox

Moravec wrote in 1988: “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers[…]”

Apparently he had GPT back then!

Anyway is this anything anyone takes seriously? Steven Pinker makes an appearance in the wiki page, which is a bit of a red flag.

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7 points

So to throw my totally-amateur two cents in, it seems like it’s definitely part of the discussion in actual AI circles based on the for-public-consumption reading and viewing I’ve done over the years, though I’ve never heard it mentioned by name. I think a bigger part of the explanation has less to do with human cognition (it’s probably fallacious to assume that AI of any method effectively reproduces those processes) and more to do with the more abstract cognitive tests and games being much more formally defined. Our perception and model of a game of Chess or Go may not be complete enough to solve the game, but it is bounded by the explicitly-defined rules of the game. If your opponent tries to work outside of those bounds by, say, flipping the board over and storming off, the game itself can treat that as a simple forfeit-by-cheating. But our understanding of the real world is not similarly bounded. Things that were thought to be impossible happen with impressive frequency, and our brain is clearly able to handle this somehow. That lack of boundedness requires different capabilities than just being able to operate within expected parameters like existing English GenAI or image generators, I suspect relating to handling uncertainty or lacking information. The assumption that what AI is doing is a mirror to the living mind is wholly unproven.

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7 points

Moravec’s Paradox is actually more interesting than it appears. You don’t have take his reasoning or Pinker’s seriously but the observation is salient. Also the paradox gets stated in other ways by other scientists, it’s a common theme.

One way I often think about it: in order for your to survive, the intelligence of moving in unknown spaces and managing numerous fuzzy energy systems is way more important to prioritize and master than like, the abstract conceptual spaces that are both not full of calories and are also cheaper to externalize anyways.

It’s part of why I don’t think there is a globally coherent heirarchy of intelligence, or potentially even general intelligence at all. Just, the distances and spaces that a thing occupies, and the competencies that define being in that space.

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7 points

Yeah, it’s a real thing that happens when programming robots. Kinematics is more difficult than route planning, for example.

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12 points

Well that’s quite the confused comment chain given that neither Go nor chess are solved. “Remember that thing everyone said wouldn’t happen? Well it still hasn’t happened! 🫨”

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7 points

Confusing ‘solved’ with ‘a computer can win playing vs high level human players a high % of the times’ because they don’t know that ‘solved’ actually has a specific meaning.

Tech reporting has massively fucked up this as well over the years btw, so I’m not that annoyed random HN people also don’t get it. But there is a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game

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5 points

I remember when

I don’t think AI will ever be able to get me to lick my own elbow (while my body is undamaged). Boom AGI will never happen. Logic’ed

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9 points
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I might be wrong but this sounds like a quick way to make the web worse by putting a huge computational load on your machine for the purpose of privacy inside customer service chat bots that nobody wants. Please correct me if I’m wrong

WebLLM is a high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine that brings language model inference directly onto web browsers with hardware acceleration. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and is accelerated with WebGPU.

WebLLM is fully compatible with OpenAI API. That is, you can use the same OpenAI API on any open source models locally, with functionalities including streaming, JSON-mode, function-calling (WIP), etc.

We can bring a lot of fun opportunities to build AI assistants for everyone and enable privacy while enjoying GPU acceleration.

https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm

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8 points

I do believe that’s the chrome-only horseshit that Proton uses for their local LLM, and reputedly it’s very slow and fairly unreliable

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10 points
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chrome-only

The whole concept of responsive really died in the arse with the onset of the full stack web developer.

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11 points

the web platform is great!

  • your apps run everywhere (that a modern version of chrome runs)
  • every API is pointlessly terrible because your app is simultaneously a document and an Angular monstrosity
  • progressive enhancement! (is dead and they’re Weekend at Bernie’s-ing the body around knowing most web developers won’t notice)
  • it’s an open platform! (controlled almost entirely by Google, with Apple’s only role being to slow down the terrible fucking ideas coming out of the standards process, and all other parties being effectively Google mouthpieces)
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9 points

I read this twice as LLM interference engine and was hoping for something like SETI or Folding@Home except my computer could interfere with ChatGPT somehow.

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