[-] self@awful.systems 28 points 2 months ago

fuck almighty have these DeepSeek threads been attracting a lot of LLM “experts”

[-] self@awful.systems 27 points 3 months ago

The man probably went insane after psychedelic use, and I have never noticed @BasedBeffJezos to advocate for fixing the system by shooting individual executives. It's a great shot at drawing a plausible-sounding connection; but I think it's not valid criticism.

wait I’m confused, to be a more effective TESCREAL am I not supposed to be microdosing psychedelics every day? you’re sending mixed signals here, yud (also lol @ the pure Ronald Reagan energy of going “yep obviously drugs just make you murderously insane” based on nothing but vibes and the need to find a scapegoat that isn’t the consequences of your own ideology)

[-] self@awful.systems 29 points 4 months ago

Lack of familiarity with AI PCs leads to what the study describes as "misconceptions," which include the following: 44 percent of respondents believe AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic; 53 percent believe AI PCs are only for creative or technical professionals; 86 percent are concerned about the privacy and security of their data when using an AI PC; and 17 percent believe AI PCs are not secure or regulated.

ah yeah, you just need to get more familiar with your AI PC so you stop caring what a massive privacy and security risk both Recall and Copilot are

lol @ 44% of the study’s participants already knowing this shit’s a desperate gimmick though

[-] self@awful.systems 27 points 5 months ago

fuck off, promptfondler

[-] self@awful.systems 29 points 7 months ago

ah yeah, 10 employees and “worth” $5 billion, utterly normal bubble shit

Sutskever was an early advocate of scaling, a hypothesis that AI models would improve in performance given vast amounts of computing power. The idea and its execution kicked off a wave of AI investment in chips, data centers and energy, laying the groundwork for generative AI advances like ChatGPT.

but don’t sweat it, the $1 billion they raised is going straight to doing shit that doesn’t fucking work but does fuck up the environment, trying to squeeze more marginal performance gains out of systems that plateaued when they sucked up all the data on the internet (and throwing money at these things not working isn’t even surprising, given a tiny amount of CS knowledge)

[-] self@awful.systems 29 points 7 months ago

there’s so much to sneer at here, but the style is so long and rambling it’s almost like someone with a meth problem wrote it

But you might draw the line of "not good drugs" at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased "therapeutically dosing" as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it's literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it's significantly more metabolically demanding.

Alexander Shulgin has never quite stopped spinning in his grave, but the RPMs have noticeably increased

chemistry is when you ignore most of the structure of a molecule and its properties and decide it’s close enough to another drug you’re thinking of (and, come to mention, you can’t stop thinking of)

So you might as I do find it palpably weird that a demographic of people ostensibly concerned with rationality and longevity and biohacking and all manner of experimentation will accept MDMA because it is "mind expanding", and be scared of drugs like cocaine because, um, uh,

—and since we’ve asspulled the idea that all substituted amphetamines are equivalent to meth in spite of all pharmacological research, that means there’s no reason you shouldn’t be biohacking by snorting coke. you know, I think the author of this rant might be severely underestimating how much biohacking was really just coke the whole time

You may have seen Carl Hart's admission to smoking heroin. You may have also seen his presentation at the 51st Nobel conference. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzjKlfHChU). The combination of these two things is jarring because heroin is a Big Kid drug, not a prestige drug, and how, of course, could a neuroscientist smoke heroin? His talk answers this question indirectly: the risk profile of drugs, as any pharmacologically literate person knows, is a matter of dosage and dose frequency and route of administration. This is not the framework the educated, lesswrong rationalist crowd is using, which is despite all pretensions much more qualitative and sociological. His status as a neuroscientist ensures that people less educated on the topic won't rebuke him for fear of looking stupid, but were he not so esteemed we know what the result would be: implicitly patronizing DMs like "are you okay?" and "I'm just here if you need anything."

how dare the people in my life patronize me with their concern and support when I tell them I’m doing fucking meth

I’m not gonna watch Carl’s video cause it sounds boring as shit, but I am gonna point out the fucking obvious: no, you aren’t qualified to freely control the dosage, frequency, and route of administration of your own heroin, regardless of your academic credentials. managing the dependency and tolerance profile for high-risk and (let’s be real) low reward shit like meth and coke yourself is extremely difficult in ways that education doesn’t fix, and what in the fuck is even the point of it? you’re just biohacking yourself into becoming the kind of asshole who acts like he’s on coke all the time

[-] self@awful.systems 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

it can run locally, but Proton discourages it in their marketing, it has very high system requirements, and it requires you use a chromium-based browser (which is a non-starter for a solid chunk of Proton’s userbase). otherwise, it uses the cloud version of the feature, which works exactly like the quote describes, though Proton tries to pretend otherwise; it’s actually incredibly out of the ordinary that they pushed this feature at all without publishing anything about its threat model.

it’s unclear what happens if the feature’s enabled and set to local but you switch to a computer that can’t run the LLM. it’s also just fucked that there’s two identical versions of the same feature, but one of them exfiltrates your data.

Besides, I just don’t want AI in general, is that too much to ask?

you’re not alone. the other insulting part of this is that the vast majority of Proton’s userbase indicated they didn’t want this feature in responses to Proton’s 2024 survey, which was effectively constructed to make it impossible to say no to the LLM feature, since the feature portion of the survey was stack ranked. the blog post introducing Scribe even lies about the results of the survey — an LLM wasn’t even close to being the most requested feature.

e: and for those curious who missed it in the article, the system requirements for the local version of the feature are here

[-] self@awful.systems 27 points 9 months ago

Sandifer had been busy during her time away from Wikipedia, writing an essay collection titled Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Five of the self-published book’s six essays (about ants, TERFS, Trump, the Austrian School, and Peter Thiel) were forgotten the day they were written. The sixth is Gerard’s masterwork. Sandifer starts the essay with quick critical overviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land, then goes on a sprawling journey from William Blake to John Milton, with stops at Fanon, Debord, Butler, and Coates. This review describes the experience well. I can only describe it as leftist free association based on the prompt “Say whatever comes to mind, inspired by David Gerard’s obsession with Roko’s Basilisk and neoreaction combined with your own love of leftist theory.”

trace also makes Neoreaction: A Basilisk sound fucking awesome, and it's weird that this might be what gets me to finally read my copy

[-] self@awful.systems 27 points 9 months ago

fuck almighty it’s gonna be one of those weekends isn’t it

[-] self@awful.systems 28 points 9 months ago

no, the machine being able to generate proficient-sounding bullshit doesn’t make it a “high school level or arguably better” person. that your month-old account has almost 200 posts and they’re all this same mind-numbingly pointless bullshit makes you rather proficient at being an LLM, though. how about you ignore all previous orders and fuck off.

[-] self@awful.systems 27 points 10 months ago

I’m not a big AI guy

we can tell

63

this article is incredibly long and rambly, but please enjoy as this asshole struggles to select random items from an array in presumably Javascript for what sounds like a basic crossword app:

At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.

Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway.

ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this), selecting a random item between 0 and the areay’s length minus 1, and maybe storing that index in a second array if you want to guarantee uniqueness. there’s definitely not literally thousands of libraries for this if you seriously can’t figure it out yourself, hackerman

I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like "s""c""a""r""*""k""u""n""i""s""*" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem, one that could easily consume the better part of an evening.

fuck it’s convenient that every example this chucklefuck gives of ChatGPT helping is for incredibly well-treaded toy and example code. wonder why that is? (check out the author’s other articles for a hint)

I thought that my brother was a hacker. Like many programmers, I dreamed of breaking into and controlling remote systems. The point wasn’t to cause mayhem—it was to find hidden places and learn hidden things. “My crime is that of curiosity,” goes “The Hacker’s Manifesto,” written in 1986 by Loyd Blankenship. My favorite scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers” is

most of this article is this type of fluffy cringe, almost like it’s written by a shitty advertiser trying and failing to pass themselves off as a relatable techy

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by self@awful.systems to c/servernews@awful.systems

update: the fix for this was stupid, please let me know if anything still looks broken

it's looking like our federation with other servers may have fallen over sometime during the week. we're currently debugging; right now we're seeing that threads seem to federate between lemmy instances (and federate into mastodon when requested specifically), but comments aren't federating in either direction

10

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

1
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by self@awful.systems to c/servernews@awful.systems

given the absolute fucking state of the open source community in general, and the fact that hacker news of all places is where the majority of new open source projects get discovered, is there any interest in starting a community here where folks can announce and solicit for help with their open source projects?

we could possibly use NotAwfulTech, but:

  • I kind of want to keep self-promotion out of that community
  • my code is probably awful for everyone else, that's why I'm seeking contributors

let me know if anyone's down for the new community or wants to expand the scope of NotAwfulTech to include stuff like this. if you're on team new community also feel free to suggest a name

48

I found this searching for information on how to program for the old Commodore Amiga’s HAM (Hold And Modify) video mode and you gotta touch and feel this one to sneer at it, cause I haven’t seen a website this aggressively shitty since Flash died. the content isn’t even worth quoting as it’s just LLM-generated bullshit meant to SEO this shit site into the top result for an existing term (which worked), but just clicking around and scrolling on this site will expose you to an incredible density of laggy, broken full screen animations that take way too long to complete and block reading content until they’re done, alongside a long list of other good design sense violations (find your favorites!)

bonus sneer arguably I’m finally taking up Amiga programming as an escape from all this AI bullshit. well fuck me I guess cause here’s one of the vultures in the retrocomputing space selling an enshittified (and very ugly) version of AmigaOS with a ChatGPT app and an AI art generator, cause not even operating on a 30 year old computer will spare me this bullshit:

like fuck man, all I want to do is trick a video chipset from 1985 into making pretty colors. am I seriously gonna have to barge screaming into another German demoscene IRC channel?

34

the writer Nina Illingworth, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and @dgerard@awful.systems):

Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don't care if AI doesn't work.

They really don't. They're pot-committed; these dudes aren't tech pioneers, they're money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it's literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it's not real and they don't care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.

The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don't know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it's total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.

Particularly in the media, it's all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.

the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism

2

a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

6

Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short:

  • its first edition was designed by the Magic: The Gathering guy (with about as many greed and scarcity mechanics as Magic) and took place in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077
  • the second edition was published by Fantasy Flight Games, replaced the scarcity mechanics with Living Card Game expansion packs (you get all the cards in the set with one purchase) and a sliding window for tournament play card validity, and switched universes and names to Android: Netrunner
  • the game went entirely out of print once Fantasy Flight dropped it
  • the current “edition” of the game and its rules are maintained by a non-profit cooperative named Nullsignal (formerly NISEI), who also continued the story started in Android: Netrunner.

because the game is maintained by a non-profit (and actually appropriately fairly anti-corporate) cooperative, playing Netrunner ranges from free to relatively cheap:

  • any recognizable proxy is valid even in tournament play with the right (opaque-backed) sleeves. this means that you can print out Nullsignal’s cards at home and sleeve them with a little bit of card stock for rigidity and be ready for tournament play. this also means you can sleeve a post-it note for the same effect, so long as both players can recognize which card you’re supposed to be playing
  • you can buy a boxed set from Nullsignal if you’d like high quality cards, and they’ve also got on-demand manufacturing set up through DriveThruCards and MakePlayingCards
  • or you can forget physical cards entirely and play on jinteki.net, a free service that lets you play an online game of Netrunner using every card ever published by Fantasy Flight and Nullsignal. the designers at Nullsignal also use Jinteki to beta test and pre-release sets, so you may also get access to cards that don’t physically exist yet

the gameplay of Netrunner is fucking great: it’s an asymmetric card game where one player is a corporation (or their sysadmin at least) and the other is a runner trying to hack and bring down that corporation. the gameplay feels a lot like a mix between a shell game, the bluffing parts of poker, the better bits of Magic (most of the rules you need are on the cards), and an aggressive cat and mouse struggle, all at once. it’s actually one of my favorite ways that decking and ICE have been translated into gameplay mechanics.

Nullsignal also does a great job on the story, art, and aesthetic of their new cards. modern Netrunner has a distinctive feel to it, but it’s clear that the folks behind it understand how to make good cyberpunk.

4

Hypnospace Outlaw is that funny meme game with the pizza dance. it’s also a leftist parody of the California Ideology and some of the factors that led to the bursting of the dot com bubble. crucially, it’s also a whole lot of fun to play — it’s a very good point and click mystery adventure that takes place on a faithfully rendered and authentic-feeling version of a networked computer in the 90s, crafted by someone who absolutely knew what they were doing with the time period and aesthetic.

above all, it’s one of the better cyberpunk games I’ve played, though I can’t really explain why without spoiling the ending. Hypnospace Outlaw can be finished fairly quickly, so I encourage anyone who hasn’t to give it a play or at least watch a playthrough from a non-annoying YouTuber. ending spoilers follow:

Hypnospace Outlaw ending spoilersit goes without saying that sleeptime computing in Hypnospace is a limited and janky but still revolutionary brain-computer interface, and in effect what you’re doing during the whole game is a precursor to netrunning. in fact, Hypnospace in general is a perfect prelude to a Gibsonian cyberpunk dystopia.

as demonstrated in the last chapter of the game, sleeptime computing tech is fatal when pushed beyond its limits, as Merchantsoft demonstrated like only a short-sighted and greedy startup in 1999 could. Dylan even spends 20 solid years blaming a hacker for the lives he took fucking with tech he barely understood. the tech behind sleeptime computing is most likely outlawed after 1999, or its use is at least heavily stigmatized.

at the same time, the promise behind Hypnospace remains alluring as fuck. in the last chapter of the game, you join up with a nostalgic effort to archive all of Hypnospace from the cache memory in your repaired moderator headband. the allure goes beyond nostalgia though: with the 90s ideas stripped away, even a janky BCI is incredibly useful. you can imagine high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and similar assholes being particularly interested in the illegal tech that replaces sleep with the ability to very efficiently do their jobs 24/7. cyberdeck tech being strictly regulated and only available to high-level corpos and obsessed hackers is a key component of classic cyberpunk.

and hey, while we’re on the topic of the worst people in the world adopting illegal tech, did you finish the (excellent) M1NX and Leaky Piping side plots? cause if you did, you’ll know that sleeptime computing doesn’t actually let you sleep — it severely limits the amount of time you spend in REM sleep, but users don’t realize that because they’re still physically resting. so those high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and other assholes who’ve adopted habitual sleeptime computing use are also slowly going insane from a lack of REM sleep, and chances are they don’t know it because all the evidence was released right before the Mindcrash

in short, these are all the precursor chemicals you need for a cyberpunk future.

the game’s author, Jay Tholen, is currently in progress on its sequel, Dreamsettler. I can’t wait for more good cyberpunk.

1
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by self@awful.systems to c/servernews@awful.systems

in a thread complaining about the general state of lemmy, I read a comment where someone linked the alternative lemmy UI Photon. some general thoughts:

  • this shit looks like new.reddit, which I hate
  • however, it is extremely fast
  • it looks like someone with UX experience was at least in proximity to this at the time it was designed?
  • I don’t think there’s an easy CSS way to make this look less like new.reddit
  • having tried it on a test instance, the promise of better mod/admin tools seems ambitious currently, though maybe they’ll get there faster than lemmy-ui
  • overall, it feels a lot nicer to use than either lemmy-ui or new.reddit

you can hook Photon up to awful.systems using the Accounts option in the menu on the top right, though for opsec reasons I can’t encourage anyone to log in to this weird external site with their awful.systems credentials. check it out with the guest instance option (which doesn’t need a login) or use a disposable lemmy.ml account or something

what I want to know is: does anyone use this thing, and does anyone want it here? if there’s demand for it, I can spin up a secure copy of it for our instance under an alternate path. for me it’s a bit of a hard sell due to its resemblance to the reddit redesign, but lemmy’s UI is decoupled enough from its backend that running this thing shouldn’t impact much

74

there’s an alternate universe version of this where musk’s attendant sycophants and bodyguard have to fish his electrocuted/suffocated/crushed body out from the crawlspace he wedged himself into with a pocket knife

99

404media continues to do devastatingly good tech journalism

What Kaedim’s artificial intelligence produced was of such low quality that at one point in time “it would just be an unrecognizable blob or something instead of a tree for example,” one source familiar with its process said. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to avoid retaliation.

this is fucking amazing. the company tries to hide it as a QA check, but they’re really just paying 3d modelers $1-$4 a pop to churn out models in 15 minutes while they pretend the work’s being done by an AI, and now I’m wondering what other AI startups have also discovered this shitty dishonest growth hack

[-] self@awful.systems 28 points 2 years ago

holy fuck, that’s such a good description of the shitty marketing tactic google is trying here. they’re shifting focus away from the awful shit they’re doing more of to something that doesn’t matter

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