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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.

Last week's thread

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

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

Got recommended a video from a friend, and its a damn good sneer at the state of YouTube sponsorships:

Why YouTube Sponsors Are (Almost) Always Terrible

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

It amazes me how well SponsorBlock works and how bad YouTube feels without it. I guess the main downside is that it's a little harder to tell the good 'toobers with strong moral backbone who don't shill awful shit in the first place from those whose sponsor segments merely get automatically skipped.

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we've endured that's gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

to the computing side, and with the proviso that in my own estimation of my skills I am at best slightly less than "dangerously clueless": unfortunately not as much as may be desired because the kind of chips being added are fairly specialised silicon

it's not impossible that people may find other uses for it over time but to the best of my knowledge as it stands right now much of this shit is dead weight the moment this bubble pops

(I don't think it will all go entirely away; there are some ML uses that are not complete trash. but that's a long different arc)

I'm not sure I follow the skeu side of your comment?

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldn't be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuff...

So, from what you're saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

broad brush strokes, yes largely that

there's some extremely fucking interesting details in the weeds, but that's beyond the scope of merely a comment (and also I don't feel equipped to make a goodpost about it as yet)

[-] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

My baseline understanding is that "NPUs," as such, are vector accelerators with perhaps lower precision and definitely lower peak TDP. I say this because much of the incremental ML research I've skimmed over seems to be around getting away with lower precision, dropping down to FP8 or even FP4 from FP16 when they can get away with it.

I'm still confused as to why and how this is an acceptable tradeoff to firing up an iGPU with precise power/TDP stepping. Perhaps one of those situations where the power budget and latency to fire up the whole GPU block or burst it to max power ends up costing as much as the actual calculation. I think for purposes of this discussion, we also need a source that sheds light on the architectural differences between NPUs and GPU shader/execution units.

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[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Another proposal for naming our militia: The Cassandra Division

Our Motto: "Sic diximus vobis"

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

Wired tried to put out a defence of tech and the result is incoherent drivel. See for yourself.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

If you gotta conclude with, "tee hee! simulation theory!" you're not just cooked... you're seared and roasted

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

So why must binary digits define, for all time, the limits of computation, and our experience of it?

There's enough layers of irony here that it's a bit hard to tell if he's making a serious argument here or not; but this is one of the weirder straw-men arguments I've ever read.

"No no no, it's not all the exploitation, social ills, lack of user control, shoddy quality, and general capitalism I hate in the modern "tech" industry; it's the fact that it uses binary!"

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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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