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

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    40 minutes ago

    Slate says: “For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!”

    The Collinses are ineffective, abusive industry plants from Peter Thiel’s extended circle. They know they’re entirely media creations. They play off that fact to ensure that journalists never follow up on how many initiatives they’ve started and abandoned, neglect to interrogate their contradictory stances on issues like abortion and “race science,” and even seem to accept that they’re openly being taken for a ride by these dorks. Yet in spite of it all, no one listens to their podcast, they don’t really have much of a following, and their specific appeal is concentrated to a few far-right circuits.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    2 hours ago

    So the far right people are already infighting each other with disinformation. Now they are accusing others of being part of the USAID thing. See this tweet by I,hypocrite (lporiginalg) (Note the guy is a bad guy (an anti-Semite for example), so this is fasc on fasc action).

    "So let me get this straight…

    Vaush

    Aella

    Richard Hanania

    James Lindsay

    Were all funded by USAID? WHO ELSE?

    <community note pointing out this isn’t true>"

    They are coming for you Aella, hope you have an exit strategy (Just saying: Publicly burning bridges, and dropping the chatlogs of others would create a lot of goodwill on the anti-fascist side, and would be a good first step in rebuilding trust with some people (even if for a lot this cannot be regained)).

    Perhaps using a lot of lying shitheads to get political clout is a bad idea, as even when you are in power, they will not stop lying (and being shitheads).

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      49 minutes ago

      Basically this is the usual battle between the literal neo-nazi antisemites and the more mainstream fascists who’ve pivoted from virulent antisemitism to anti-muslim racism and support for Israel (but that won’t stop them from having a go at the (((globalists))) every other day). Fun for all.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        8 minutes ago

        Yeah very much whoever wins we lose. We should just build a large trebuchet and fire them all into the sun. But sadly the gov does nothing.

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    6 hours ago

    There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it’s really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I’m greeted with:

    Note: I have absolutely no idea what “Fcitx” even is. Or why and how it’s launched, or whether I’m actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to “improve the experience” with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I’m just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don’t even want to know how much lifetime I’ve already spent chasing Linux problems like that.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      3 hours ago

      I dunno, still not as bad as the last Win10 update I was presented with that wanted to resize the recovery partition and shrink my C drive at the same time. That was the push I needed to switch to my Gentoo install and never look back. I presume that Windows is probably pretty decent about live partition resizing these days, but I don’t know that for sure, and I don’t want to waste time being concerned about it on a system that’s mainly for gaming anyway.

      • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        2 hours ago

        Yep, I’m certainly not claiming that Windows is better at it these days… (Possibly unpopular opinion: Windows usability peaked with WinXP.)

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      5 hours ago

      Fcitx is an input method editor used to type different languages, especially those that need to be composed from context (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) I believe it comes preinstalled with KDE (at least in kde-full it does, unsure about the smaller packages), but it should be totally safe to remove if you don’t need this functionality.

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    8 hours ago

    I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of “well I don’t know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology” and sometimesI wish I’d collected receipts to say “I told you it’s not”.

    Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:

    • Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
    • Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home’s evil cousin
    • Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies

    And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        7 hours ago

        Ok, maybe cryptocurrencies made those a little bit easier than doing the same thing with MMO money or having to mail physical goods. I can even go out on a limb and credit the blockchain itself for them, even though the design kind of makes transactions inherently more traceable than some possible aleternatives do.

              • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
                4·
                1 hour ago

                No worries. I do agree ransomware industry might not have taken off or at least might have taken off a lot slower if the victims had to make a gold mule video game character or mail cash or precious metals through seedy relay addresses to pay the ransom. So I’ll habe to credit cryptocurrency, if not necessarily blockchain per se, for that dubious achievement.

                • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
                  3·
                  1 hour ago

                  Yeah good point on the blockchain tech split vs actual cryptocurrencies. Esp considering the stories some of the exchanges basically did away with the blockchain for internal trades.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      8 hours ago

      not sure if this is entirely ignorable as a tactic or if the counter-tactic is to post similar stickers but with references/QR codes to classic shock sites.

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    22·
    1 day ago

    I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it’s “normal overwrought” or “LLM bullshit.” You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don’t say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like “as a language model”).

    No one describes their algorithm as “efficiently doing [intermediate step]” unless you’re describing it to a general, non-technical audience — what a coincidence — and yet it keeps appearing in my students’ writing. It’s exhausting.

    Edit: I really can’t overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get

    my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element

    which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get1

    In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable i initialized to 0. At each step of the loop, we check if i is less than n - 1. If so, we then check if the element at index i is less than or equal to the element at index i + 1. If not, we output False. Otherwise, we increment i and repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we output True.

    and I’m fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.

    1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven’t determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it’s only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.

    • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      My sympathies.

      Read somewhere that the practice of defending one’s thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.

      I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”. My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn’t get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”.

        But we know the tech behind these models right? They dont change their weights when they produce output right? You could have a discussion if updating the values is learning, but it doesnt even do that right? (Feeding the questions back into the dataset used to train them is a different mechanic)

        • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          1 day ago

          That’s true, and that’s one way to approach the topic.

          I generally focus on humans being more complex than the caricature we need to be reduced to in order for the argument to appear plausible. Having some humanities training comes in handy because the prompt fans very rarely do.

  • NextElephant9@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    I don’t know if this is the right place to ask, but a friend from the field is wondering if there are any examples of good AI companies out there? With AI not meaning LLM companies. Thanks!

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      sounds a bit of a xy question imo, and a good answer of examples would depend on the y part of the question, the whatever it is that (if my guess is right) your friend is actually looking to know/find

      “AI” is branding, a marketing thing that a cadaverous swarm of ghouls got behind in the upswing of the slop wave (you can trace this by checking popularity of the term in the months after deepdream), a banner with which to claim to be doing something new, a “new handle” to use to try anchor anew in the imaginations of many people who were (by normal and natural humanity) not yet aware of all the theft and exploitation. this was not by accident

      there are a fair of good machine learning systems and companies out there (and by dint of hype and market forces, some end up sticking the “AI” label on their products, because that’s just how this deeply fucked capitalist market incentivises). as other posters have said, medical technology has seen some good uses, there’s things like recommender[0] and mass-analysis system improvements, and I’ve seen the same in process environments[1]. there’s even a lot of “quiet and useful” forms of this that have been getting added to many daily use systems and products all around us: reasonably good text extractors as a baseline feature in pdf and image viewers, subject matchers to find pets and friends in photos, that sort of thing. but those don’t get headlines and silly valuation insanity as much of the industry is in the midst of

      [0] - not always blanket good, there’s lots of critique possible here

      [1] - things like production lines that can use correlative prediction for checking on likely faults

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      The only thing that comes to mind is medical applications, drug research, etc. But that might just be a skewed perspective on my end because I know literally nothing about that industry or how AI technology is deployed there. I’ve just read research has been assisted by those tools and that seems, at least on the surface level, like a good thing.

    • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      There are companies doing “cool-sounding” things with AI like Waymo. “Good” would require more definition.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      “De <space> colonized” is also on there, that will give some interesting problems when automated filters for this hit Dutch texts (De means the).

      E: there are so many other words on there like victim, and unjust, and equity, this will cause so many dumb problems. And of course if you go on the first definition of political correct (‘you must express the party line on certain ideas or be punished’) they created their own PC culture. (I know pointing out hypocrisy does nothing, but it amuses me for now).

      • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
        13·
        2 days ago

        @sc_griffith

        Note: They’re all problems. Just “Trauma" is kind of extra-important because of its use as a medical term.

        Trauma surgery, Barotrauma, Traumatic Brain Injury, Penetrating Trauma, Blunt Trauma, Abdominal Trauma, Polytrauma, Etc.

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            10·
            1 day ago

            I don’t think “victim” is really a word that’s even used especially much in “woke” (for a lack of a good word) writing anyway. Hell, even for things like sexual violence, “survivor” is generally preferred nomenclature specifically because many people feel that “victim” reduces the person’s agency.

            It’s the rightoid chuds who keep accusing the “wokes” for performative victimhood and victim mentality, so I suppose that’s why they somehow project and assume that “victim” is a particularly common word in left-wing vocabulary.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              1 day ago

              Good point, had not even thought of that. Shows how badly they are at understanding the people they are against. Reminds me how they went, a while back going after the military for actually reading the ‘woke’ literature. Only the military was doing it explicitly so they would understand their enemies, so they could stop them.

            • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
              9·
              1 day ago

              @Soyweiser

              A quick pubmed search finds NIH such supported research as:

              "In 2005 the genome of the 1918 influenza virus was completely determined by sequencing fragments of viral RNA preserved in autopsy tissues of 1918 victims”

              Insights on influenza pathogenesis from the grave. 2011, Virus Research

              "death of the child victim”

              Characteristics, Classification, and Prevention of Child Maltreatment Fatalities. 2017 Military Medicine

              Etc

    • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
      11·
      2 days ago

      @sc_griffith

      "Gender Neural”

      That typo is probably going to screw a lot of Neuroscience grants just because it’ll match on some dumb regex.

      Also, apparently Hispanic and Latino people don’t exist?

    • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      “Both what I’ve seen, and what the administration sees, is you all are one of the most respected technology groups in the federal government,” Shedd told TTS workers. “You guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists.”

      (emphasis mine)

      Well, maybe start acting like it champ.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Minor note, but Musk wears that jacket everywhere, even at a suit and tie dinner with Trump. I don’t get how Trump (if my assumptions on him wanting to be seen as a certain type of having class/higher society type) stands him. Looking at the picture, he might be having second thoughts all the time.