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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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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago

Jackbooted thugs put creative entrepreneur behind bars for the "crime" of creating bots to listen to bot-created "music":

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/fbi-busts-musicians-elaborate-ai-powered-10m-streaming-royalty-heist/

[-] FredFig@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Spotify setting aside a pool of total royalties that everyone competes over is crazy. I get it's necessary to avoid going bankrupt when people like this show up, but wow, there's layers to this awfulness.

[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders... From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago

Próspera seeks to sue Honduras for 2/3 of its GDP because a new government told them to fuck off:

https://xcancel.com/GarrisonLovely/status/1831104024612896795

FP article: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/24/honduras-zedes-us-prospera-world-bank-biden-castro/

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago

goddammit you got to it eight seconds before me

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago
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[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)
[-] self@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago

it’s still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldn’t figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site

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[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think the suggestion that delegating is the problem is hilarious. Like, from everything I've seen, what happens when successful startups start floundering is less because anything has changed and more because the fundamental problems with the business finally catch up to the amount of money they have to burn. The problem isn't that founders are hiring liars as managers and delegating to them, it's that the founders themselves are primarily bullshit artists rather than people with good plans.

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[-] self@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago

so no surprise for this crowd, but remember all those reply guys who said Copilot+ would never be an issue cause it’d only work with the magical ARM chips with onboard AI accelerators in Copilot+ PCs? well the fucking obvious has happened

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago

"we couldn't excite enough people to buy yet another windows arm machine that near-certainly won't be market-ready for 3 years after its launch, so now we're going to force this shit on everyone"

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[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago

oh hey, we're back to "deepmind models dreamed up some totally novel structures!", but proteins this time! news!

do we want to start a betting pool for how long it'll take 'em to walk this back too?

[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago

Haven't read the whole thing but I do chuckle at this part from the synopsis of the white paper:

[...] Our results suggest that AlphaProteo can generate binders "ready-to-use" for many research applications using only one round of medium-throughput screening and no further optimization.

And a corresponding anti-sneer from Yud (xcancel.com):

@ESYudkowsky: DeepMind just published AlphaProteo for de novo design of binding proteins. As a reminder, I called this in 2004. And fools said, and still said quite recently, that DM's reported oneshot designs would be impossible even to a superintelligence without many testing iterations.

Now medium-throughput is not a commonly defined term, but it's what DeepMind seems to call 96-well testing, which wikipedia just calls the smallest size of high-throughput screening—but I guess that sounds less impressive in a synopsis.

Which as I understand it basically boils down to "Hundreds of tests! But Once!".
Does 100 count as one or many iterations?
Also was all of this not guided by the researchers and not from-first-principles-analyzing-only-3-frames-of-the-video-of-a-falling-apple-and-deducing-the-whole-of-physics path so espoused by Yud?
Also does the paper not claim success for 7 proteins and failure for 1, making it maybe a tad early for claiming I-told-you-so?
Also real-life-complexity-of-myriads-and-myriads-of-protein-and-unforeseen-interactions?

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

As a reminder, I called this in 2004.

that sound you hear is me pressing X to doubt

Yud in the replies:

The essence of valid futurism is to only make easy calls, not hard ones. It ends up sounding prescient because most can't make the easy calls either.

"I am so Alpha that the rest of you do not even qualify as Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons"

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago

Yud:

Curious who besides me predicted it on the record.

Not that curious, apparently

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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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