this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/

(it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)

TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (7 children)

genuine question https://mathstodon.xyz/@sc_griffith/113680680638530340

[–] istewart@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The British elected a guy who wears a mop on his head. You cannot convince me that is his actual hair.

I still have occasional intrusive visions of Johnson busting into an unattended supply closet in the Palace of Westminster to steal a fresh mop head, shouting, "BLOODY LABOUR NICKED ME TOUPÉE!"

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 15 points 3 days ago

@istewart @techtakes Spoiler: it's not his natural hairstyle, he's been caught deliberately mussing it up before going on camera. Also, his friends and family call him "Alex" (short for Alexander), not "Boris". It's all an act.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

He's really sold the bit, hasn't he?

Yet, if you cover up his hair, he easily scans as "generic English aristocrat."

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

mild guess: "golden boys, with the the 30+ years required to look Politically Evolved"? and of course the selection factors involved from even just getting to that point and the stylist/image handling that that involves

there's also an element of the system does as designed, and there's an element of self-reinforcing delivery/production of these ghouls

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Oddly parodied before it happened in the tv series community (the dad of the somewhat racist main character. The dad itself is very racist).

E: I do wonder what Javier Milei looks like if he would dye his hair

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

somewhat racist

You can excuse racism?

[–] istewart@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago

he would continue to look like shit

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

People probably asked the same question about the first Habsburgs.

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

~~Brief~~ overlapping thoughts between parenting and AI nonsense, presented without editing.

The second L in LLM remains the inescapable heart of the problem. Even if you accept that the kind of "thinking" (modeling based on input and prediction of expected next input) that AI does is closely analogous to how people think, anyone who has had a kid should be able to understand the massive volume of information they take in.

Compare the information density of English text with the available data on the world you get from sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, proprioception, and however many other senses you want to include. Then consider that language is inherently an imperfect tool used to communicate our perceptions of reality, and doesn't actually include data on reality itself. The human child is getting a fire hose of unfiltered reality, while the in-training LLM is getting a trickle of what the writers and labellers of their training data perceive and write about. But before we get just feeding a live camera and audio feed, haptic sensors, chemical tests, and whatever else into a machine learning model and seeing if it spits out a person, consider how ambiguous and impractical labelling all that data would be. At the very least I imagine the costs of doing so are actually going to work out to be less efficient than raising an actual human being and training them in the desired tasks.

Human children are also not immune to "hallucinations" in the form of spurious correlations. I would wager every toddler has at least a couple of attempts at cargo cult behavior or inexplicable fears as they try to reason a way to interact with the world based off of very little actual information about it. This feeds into both versions of the above problem, since the difference between reality and lies about reality cannot be meaningfully discerned from text alone and the limited amount of information being processed means any correction is inevitably going to be slower than explaining to a child that finding a "Happy Birthday" sticker doesn't immediately make it their (or anyone else's) birthday.

Human children are able to get human parents to put up with their nonsense ny taking advantage of being unbearably sweet and adorable. Maybe the abundance of horny chatbots and softcore porn generators is a warped fun house mirror version of the same concept. I will allow you to fill in the joke about Silicon Valley libertarians yourself.

IDK. Felt thoughtful, might try to organize it on morewrite later.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 26 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.

One would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

In other news, Character.AI has ended up in the news again for allowing school shooter chatbots to flourish on its platform.

You want my off-the-cuff take, this is definitely gonna fuck c.ai's image even further, and could potentially leave them wide open to a lawsuit.

On a wider front, this is likely gonna give AI another black eye, and push us one step further to the utter destruction of AI as a concept I predicted a couple months ago.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

In the department of not smelling at all like desperation:

On Wednesday, OpenAI launched a 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) telephone number that anyone in the US can call to talk to ChatGPT via voice chat for up to 15 minutes for free.

It had a very focused area of expertise, but for sincerity, you couldn't beat 1-900-MIX-A-LOT.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

FWIW I just got an email from GitHub announcing that Copilot is now free for my account (a very basic one).

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Seems like everybody got that email, my account is semi-abandoned and still got it. I love the reek of desperation in the morning

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago

yep I think so too. as I think I posted here a while back:

25068   + Oct 12 GitHub          ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon

and now suddenly it's Launched Again! but with limits. gotta whet those appetites just a bit more! sales will totes follow soon!

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

mine showed up in spam 🤣

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

if you think about it the human mind is really just a kind of naturally arising artificial intelligence #Deep

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I mean, considering only the relationships between words and symbols in the complete absence of context and real-world referents is a good description of how a certain brand of tech dunce thinks.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

The object vs meta level.

[–] rook@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago

Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware that’s foisted upon them.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/the-new-nvidia-app-is-probably-hurting-your-pc-gaming-performance/

[–] Rinn@awful.systems 18 points 5 days ago (9 children)

Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. I'm not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that it's a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume I'm making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that he'd try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Unfortunately it doesn't look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboard's refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.

Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since I'm pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

The starcraft apm thing always amused me, people who instead of giving an order once, just keep clicking that mouse and issuing the same move order over and over again because apms. Good way to teach Goodhart's law to Gamer Brains.

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? it’s anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago

A lot of the spamming at the SC2 tournament level is about staying warmed up so that when you get into a micro-intensive battle later on where all of those actions might count (splitting your marines to protect from AoE while target-firing the suicide bombing banelings, for example) you can do it. Doesn't make it look less ridiculous, especially in the first couple of minutes before the commentary has anything to really talk about so they try to act like stealing 5 minerals at that stage could somehow decide the game. But there is a slightly more reasonable logic to it than just speed running an RSI to look cool.

The original StarCraft also offers a lot of opportunities to use your "extra" APM to optimize around the godawful AI pathing and other "quirks" of the engine. It's not as bad as, say, DotA in terms of "this was a limitation of the original engine that is now a major cornerstone of playing the game well and if you complain about it you're just bad" but it's definitely up there. As the game goes on you'll usually see players start getting slightly more fast and loose with, say, optimizing the mining at their new base because at that point in the game splitting your focus that much is more detrimental even if you can move that fast.

I definitely ended up in the occasional spectator and campaign player for all that, though. Especially now that I'm starting to have creaky old man wrists of my own.

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[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago (7 children)

OT: how would you guys recommend learning to program?

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

well, first you'll need a solid grounding in the theory of categories

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

that was a joke about abstract mathematics. anyway I'm not much of a programmer but I have found I've learned a lot from working on godot stuff, so I second that recommendation

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[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume you’ve read through some of this one.

Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial

other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isn’t the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and it’s fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I did have this wacky idea for a roguelike…

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

hell yeah! roguelikes are so much fun to work on! that could be a very good way to learn GDScript. generally I recommend learning your first couple languages to completion — but where you decide what complete is, including “I’m tired of this language/project” (not at all an uncommon case, and a good sign your brain’s ready for something new). once you’re at that point, you’ll likely be ready for a new language — and languages generally get much easier to learn once you’ve got a couple under your belt.

(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myself… there’s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myself… there’s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

this looks really cool 👀

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

I’m excited to try it! I’ve had so many game ideas lately that’d be a lot more convenient to do with godot’s tooling, but would really benefit from something like Bevy’s ECS. this one looks broadly inspired by a similar API to Bevy so it could be the best of both worlds. I’m very curious how it performs — it’s almost certainly gonna be slower than Bevy, but there’s a lot of types of games where logic isn’t a bottleneck.

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