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.
Funniest fuckin’ sentence I have read today:
First off, if you’ve read The Singularity Is Near, which was published 19 years ago in 2005, you should be aware that the sequel book is a lot less technical.
Wait, this guy published “is Near” twenty years ago and then UNIRONICALLY published “is Nearer”?
Come the fuck on, this has to be satire?
The sequel to “Apocalypse Now”, “Apocalypse Even More Presently”
iirc he predicted the singularity somewhere in 2040 so it does make sense, even if it looks weird.
Oh gosh, hopefully I live to see “Singularity Is Still Near, Just Not as Near as I Thought: Trust Me Bros” released in 2041
‘Sorry no singularity, climate change is an existential threat after all’.
(I’m bitterly reminded of the SSC post where he starts with ‘why don’t we hear about the ozone layer anymore, well the scientists fixed it!’ where he goes after the environmentalist movement. There is only one problem with the ‘we fixed the ozone layer’ thing. Butt wait, there is more!)
Buy my new book “You’re older than you’ve ever been”.
Twenty years pass
Buy my new book “And now you’re even older”
Asymptotically approaching the Singularity.
Gooning for rats
tl;dr is upset that Kurzweil is not as much of a doomer as they are
we’ve reached some zenith of insane facebook AI slop
hot Japanese cabin crew, barefoot, on a farm, with Jesus
(image)
a deficiency of tractors in the training data
But just enough fingers!
a deficiency of tractors in the training data
Just one more dataset bro, i promise bro just one more dataset and it’ll fix everything bro. bro just one more dataset
I’m also glad to see that whatever incremental improvements have been made the system is still unable to consistently do hands.
🎶 Three ladies! / deedle-dee-dee-dee-deet / Three ladies! / And I’m the Son of Man, Ja! 🎶
with south california band reject jesus, no less
we think that’s supposed to be Korean or Japanese Jesus, insofar as anything out of an AI is supposed to be anything
🎶 reach out and touch fAIth / your own personal jesus 🎶
(…sorry)
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.
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.
60% of the time, it works 100% of the time.
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
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
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
more generally I suspect that as soon as you are trying to compare some notion of a ‘true’ position eval function to eval functions you can actually generate you’re going to have a very difficult time making correct and clear predictions. the reason I say this is that treating such a ‘true’ function is essentially the domain of combinatorial game theory (not the same as “game theory”), and there are few if any bridges people have managed to build between cgt and practical Go etc playing engines. so it’s probably pretty hard to do
(I know there’s a theory of ‘temperature’ of combinatorial games that I think was developed for purposes of analyzing Go, but I don’t think it has any known relationship to reinforcement learning based Go engines)
petition to use the term “pyramid sucking” to refer to the activity of defending the Incredible Potential of AI, crypto, the metaverse, whatever the next thing is, etc
Also fits in with the ‘quantum’ grifters who believe in some spirit energy from the pyramids and tell you to build your own (fancy minerals optional) because of the quantum energy states. ‘a piece of meat doesn’t spoil under the pyramid!’ For example
Alternate pitch could be pyramid plugging. There’s an added slant here that pyramids don’t have flared bases.
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?
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.
https://xcancel.com/kitten_beloved/status/1810709361175691474
In which TPOT unites to yell at scooter because he isn’t down with mental health apartheid schemes.
“disorderly cities are required by the state religion”
When they are absolutely sure the tweet will not escape containment, they will just take assumptions like “a certain percentage of people has incurable Criminal Mind” as given and go from there.
Scott: ‘left thought’ okayyy
tangent: these screencaps are from scott? he doesn’t mention long acting injectable antipsychotics (one shot every 2-4 weeks or so, no pills needed; needs consent ofc, result is vastly increased compliance) is that not a thing over there?
e: he mentions it but doesn’t discuss it for whatever reason
Depot injections are ‘leftism’ it seems.
that twitter account is absolutely something
looks at profile ‘adorable and harmless’ and then 2 tweets later, turns out they are racist.
I’m always shocked to see someone to Milkshake Duck themselves this hard within a single post.
cozy twitterTPOT all over
This released today: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2024/240709.pdf
Cool (horrifying) look into one of the active Russian bot farms and their use of generative AI
orbstack 1.6.4:
Debug Shell: AI-powered package install suggestions for commands
in the app upgrade popup it’s just bare text. in the documentation for debug shell there’s no reference. in the release notes feed it’s the same bare text
I’ve already sent feedback asking for more information about it, but just … what? I mean there’s that annoying(-to-me) ubuntu shell hook that goes “oh hey $binary not found, try installing $pkg!” already, and that’s been out for years, but what?
if/when I hear more I’ll post comment I guess. in the meantime consider me fucking bewildered.
I’m pretty sure this is just a handy convenience around launching another container that has debug tools in all the same namespaces (network, pid, user, filesystem, …) as the other. Kubernetes has a similar thing and it’s pretty handy.
Edit: oooooh wait, I misread your entire comment: you were referring to the ai-powered install instructions. Oops, and yep, that is a big yikes. Wow.
yeah the orb debug shell is kinda neat! it leverages nixpkgs for its packages scope, and allows you to attach a not-impoverished shell to a container (which is immensely helpful because the tooling and systems in containerland suck so extremely fucking hard)
hoping for a sensible response from the developer
Aaah!
PagerDuty suggestion popup: Resolve incidents faster with Generative AI. Join Early Access to try the new PD Copilot.
Xe Iaso joked about this sort of thing happening, not so long ago…
So it sounds like they’re firing pagey
for orgs that require a written reason when you resolve an issue
I’ve been out-of-the-loop for a bit on the Nix drama. Is there a good summary of the last couple weeks?
Store path names starting with . are now permitted, fixing some home-manager issues.
Oh hell yeah
Man there was a long thread about different forms of self-identifying as Muslim that was finally purged by mods after 2 days.
Evaluation is 5-20% faster than 2.18, depending on which benchmark is in use, thanks to eldritch horrors.
this is awesome
nix flake lock --update-input nixpkgsis now the much more reasonablenix flake update nixpkgs.but this is making me go “fuck yeah” on the inside. it seems like a small change, but I can’t emphasize enough how frequently this command gets used (for every flake dependency, not just nixpkgs) for how longwinded and non-memorable the old form of it was. it’s kind of fucking incredible how many UX warts Nix has just from the old evaluator’s devs digging in their heels on shit like this.
which reminds me, I need to check if lix/aux are going to do a cli-side nixpkgs search with a reasonable invocation
what do you mean you don’t like when your package search command is one of several random, probably-unmaintained ecosystem packages that has to very slowly index everything every time nixpkgs updates because it doesn’t have access to the evaluator’s internals?
I keep getting the itch to do something like that old hfimd page for a variety of ops infrastructure tools, because fucking hell
If Books Could Kill back with Hanania’s piece of work https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/afe6b965e80359c1edbb86f78bde3997
opening line “This book’s so fucking stupid, I regret choosing it”
It’s weirdly open about its nostalgia for the good old days when you could throw around racial slurs and watch porn at work with no consequences.
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs/ google giving preferential treatment to itself by putting a piece of spyware in chromium that will work only if google domain asks about it
Medium article about Yud came across my dash (I hope the link works).
Thanks for posting this. I live in Sweden and many of these actors are new to me.
FWIW we have our own word for people who try to hijack the judicial system with spurious lawsuits etc: rättshaverist (“justice wrecker”). I don’t believe the Roman/German law system really meshes well with the SovCit movement in common law systems, but I’m sure people are trying to apply it.
My god this sounds boring as shit
I really can’t imagine reading a book by someone whose vision of the future is “men will be taller and have more muscles, women will stay the same height but they’ll all be conventionally attractive and have voluntary control of their uterus”.
Babel-17 came out in 1966, and its vision of the future was that a good ship’s captain knows how to complete a poly triad and you can’t leave Earth without a full crew including three ghosts and a furry.
Now that’s the kind of stuff that makes puppies sad…
(New wave SF is a bit of a blind spot for me. Never really read any Delany, even though his autobio is one the best I’ve read)
Here’s a link that bypasses the URL shortener.
Also: ew.
Perilous Waif follows the story of its narrator Alice Long, a cybernetically enhanced orphan with a variety of superhuman powers in the 25th century. One of these enhancements causes Alice’s body to grow very fast, giving her the body of a thirteen year old at just age six.
(I’ll try put a decent summary of links on this later)
there’s a UK party that (aiui) committed electoral crimes by submitting non-existing genML-created people as candidates, a whole new usecase!
gonna be real fun to see that catching sunlight, if TNI manages to do due process right
what a coincidence, “aiui” is the sound I make when I get caught doing electoral crimes.
max headroom for prez
one guy whose pic looks like a fucking Auton actually got in touch with the Grauniad and showed them the original of his ridiculously yassified campaign photo
Am I crazy to think that guy has musk’s face?
it continues to do my head in that I vacillate on whether there’s more insane politics shit for y’all in TNI, or in what we have here in ZA
There was a new government elected last week on a platform which can be broadly summarised as “no more insane politics shit”. So far they’re showing dangerous signs of competence and rational thought. What a load of weirdos.
If you want more crazy, that political party is actually a limited company in which the leader is also the majority shareholder and the bylaws permit him to fire and appoint a majority of directors at will. I’m not sold on whether all those candidates were actually fake, but journalists from more credible outlets than Byline Times are no doubt working on physically tracking down every one off these candidates as we speak to verify their existence or otherwise.
This happened a while ago and I still have mixed feelings about it: a band I like started a music label and named it p(doom): https://pdoomrecords.com/
oh no
