Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

169 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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)

(page 2) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] JFranek@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

Just something I found in the wild (r/machine learning): Please point me in the right direction for further exploring my line of thinking in AI alignment

I'm not a researcher or working in AI or anything, but ...

you don't say

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

Alignment? Well, of course it depends on your organization's style guide but if you're using TensorFlow or PyTorch in Python, I recommend following PEP-8, which specifies four spaces per indent level and…

Wait, you're not working in AI the what are you even asking for?

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago

neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI's legal issues:

And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:

With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry's Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.

Precisely how, I'm not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

To my mind, the cover of "researchers" using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

from this article

Amazon asked Chun to dismiss the case in December, saying the FTC had raised no evidence of harm to consumers.

ah yes, the company that's massively monopolized nearly all markets, destroyed choice, constantly ships bad products (whose existence is incentivised by programs of its own devising), and that has directly invested in enhanced price exploitation technologies? that one? yeah, totes no harm to consumers there

[-] rook@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 3 months ago

yet another way to write shitty python

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

Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to "optimize your workout with every rep" or some such nonsense.

I tried to remember the name of it by googling "AI exercise equipment" and despite the slick branding (it's called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think it's awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days I'm imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone else's in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.

load more comments (7 replies)

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

fix the year! we're back in the present! out of the time traveling cybertruck!

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

Tried to get out, door cut my leg off. Now I have to go back to the future to get it reattached.

load more comments (1 replies)

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

check out this jumpscare suckerpunch mashup

some of the details are so on point I’m almost left pointing and mouthing “art”

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

First-ever criminal charges against financial services firms for market manipulation and “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry

Cryptocurrency is a 15-year old industry built mostly on market manipulation and wash trading and now we're seeing the first charges for it? Man, back in the day they told me doing crime was illegal.

Deflationary

With every transaction supply shrinks by burning a percentage of reflections to the burn wallet

Turns out libertarians actually love taxes, but only if instead of spending the tax money on anything, it's burned to waste.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (4 replies)

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

Oh look! Human horrors ~~beyond~~ regrettably within my comprehension

https://x.com/haveibeenpwned/status/1843780415175438817

Tweet description

New sensitive breach: "AI girlfriend" site Muah[.]ai had 1.9M email addresses breached last month. Data included AI prompts describing desired images, many sexual in nature and many describing child exploitation. 24% were already in @haveibeenpwned . More: https://404media.co/hacked-ai-girlfriend-data-shows-prompts-describing-child-sexual-abuse-2/

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

Just remembering this banger from back in the day.

load more comments

this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024

21 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1533 readers

146 users here now

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

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems