this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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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

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Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 2 months ago (17 children)

The Death of the Junior Developer

Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there's no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we'll have AGI by then and it'll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer's time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

Microsoft's AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding, there's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts.

Watch the entire interview if you're bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Have a cursed book written by Henry Kissenger in 2023.

The Age of AI: Our Human Future -- https://www.amazon.com/Age-I-Our-Human-Future/dp/0316273805

^Found^ ^by^ ^way^ ^of^ ^https://old.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1dqv2kj/having_heard_the_entirety_of_the_kissinger_series^

[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I hate that I saw that same post earlier today

Here's a quote from the book:

AI already transcends human perception — in a sense, through chronological compression or “time travel”: enabled by algorithms and computing power, it analyzes and learns through processes that would take human minds decades or even centuries to complete.

Glad to know the calculators I had in school were capable of time travel

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 months ago

everything with a memory is capable of time travel

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Isn't it absolutely deranged? These people have (well had lol) real power over us.

There is a great March 2023 episode of Trashfuture I'm listening to atm called "The Diet of Brainworms" about this book. They basically want to install feudalism and tech-priests because AI is sO pOwErFuLl.

One of the hosts (Riley iirc) made a great point that it's as if someone showed Kissenger that trick where you write "boobs" using a calculator, and he became deeply unsettled by the computer's power of speech. Also appreciated the one about Kissenger being the guy who used an etch-a-sketch to draw a gun and was scared of it.

[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (6 children)

What do normal people - people who don't pay for twitter, or sneer at rationalists - think of Twitter atp?

Went on to Twitter (my mistake) after seeing Inside Out 2 because it's the latest kid's movie to feature [trope that I found passe that I can't figure out how to spoil inline] and I see a post on my feed from "HBD Chick".

And I'm like okay, that has to be "happy birthday, right?". Nah, her third retweet is creamy porno redux.

Just like all the other right wingers and embarrassingly enthusiastic neoliberals and occasional Musk fans, I don't follow her or anybody that follows her, there's literally no connection or personal interest.

I feel like the post Elon shift is really understated for how bad the site's gotten. Like I see more people talk about how Instagram reels is racist than I do about the average twitter replies section. I know a lot of left leaning people fled for bluer pastures, but I'm surprised you don’t see more buzz about it from regular, non-power users.

[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Note: all the talk I mention is online talk. Nobody in my irl life talks about social media dynamics ever, thank GOD

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago

Only time non-online people I know IRL talk about it is when they ask me the most basic of basic stuff.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@blakestacey @techtakes

“"I do shoot myself in the foot from time to time, but at least you know it is genuine, not from the PR department,””

He is the PR department.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I assume some PR departments of potential advertisers saw that and went 'lower the twitter spend more!', I'm imaging the Futurama joke where Fry talks to investors while stock price tally is running live behind him.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Twitter's main issue is that it's not really very big. It wasn't big even pre-Musk. If you have the choice between advertising on a really big social network (Meta (=FB, IG, Whatsapp...)) with a functioning trust & safety team and ad brokers who take you seriously and don't accuse you of being woke, and one which has way smaller reach, no T&S to speak of, and whose owner can use his outsized influence to call your CEO a pedo whenever the ketamine kicks in, the choice is clear.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (4 children)

42 upvotes? In 2 hours? There is some serious weirdness going on here.

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[–] WhyNotZoidberg@topspicy.social 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

@gerikson @Soyweiser It is funny, because by 99% of media sites Twitter was always one of the Three Big Ones: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Those were the social networks that were linked TO, and also the social networks media followed. MAYBE Linked In, if it was a "business" publication.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Twitter had outsized impact because it's where the journalists hung out, and structurally it was much more everyone in the same place than FB/IG

[–] WhyNotZoidberg@topspicy.social 1 points 2 months ago

@dgerard Plus you get to write articles about "Twitter Storms" about your articles.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago

I realized Twitter was for weirdo wonks when the local "Idol" reality show just had IG links for the contestants (Sweden). There might be markets where Twitter is locally bigger, but in Sweden it was always a niche thing.

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I used to hear about it IRL and now I don't idk

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago

not a single fucker ever calls it anything other than twitter

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[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Strange sightings of electoral posters in Tokyo:

A collection of posters for the Tokyo governor election, with an anonymous “AI mayor” candidate from the “AI party”

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

https://www.ai-mayor.com/

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI%E5%85%9A

This is just weird. But I guess that's to be expected from elections anywhere in the world, disgruntled groups use them to get their message out.

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[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"look surely not everything in America is explained by racism" "... OH COME ON NOW"

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 1 points 2 months ago

I doubt you had to do square dancing lessons in school over there but apparently that was a RW thing too.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 months ago

some of the rest is explained by greed

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