this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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TechTakes

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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

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Today in "propaganda I didn't think I needed to worry about" - Cybertruck kids books!

And another one! This one actually has a good title in "The Ugly Truckling" and I'm legitimately mad as the father of a truck-obsessed child that it's wasted here.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Headline photo is actually a jump-scare

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Fun fact, I looked at that article. And my monitor exploded. No joke. I was in sudden darkness, and the mains were turned off. Pc survived thankfully, and I have a secondary monitor but lol wtf. (I need to go to bed).

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Pivot to AI: Amy is retiring! Probably! yes my cowriter has heard the call of revolution and will be having full and frank debates in the marketplace of ideas. WIth sweet reason.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Send her my thanks for her service! o7

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

According to some roblox wiki also the richest person (in roblox). So wonder if it is libertarian goes monarchist.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I think you'll find Guangdong did a lot of the actual building.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Thanks! I uninstalled it and things appear to work normally.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

year of Nakamoto 17

so what you're saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

you forgot sanctions evasion, volunteering as a liquidity pool for iranian laundromat, and north korean ransomware

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The rise of ransomware and cryptocurrencies sadly are linked.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I know, that's why I'm giving them this one.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

there are always swiss banks and abu dhabi charities

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

If only the Supreme Court had as much of a spine as the Romanian Constitutional Court

Law prohibiting driving after consuming substances declared as unconstitutional. Of course, the antidrug agency bypassed the courts and parliament to pass it anyway.

See also: Constitutional Court cancels election result after Russian interference

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire

I love you, David.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

If Jason Wilson calls you for a quote, you give him your best.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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, 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the replies, I guess the "good" was vague on purpose, to see how people interpret it...

This popped up on one of my feeds today and I saved it, can't remember from where, it's relevant to the above so sharing here: https://oneproject.org/ai-commons/ (AI Commons: nourishing alternatives to Big Tech monoculture).

They talk about AI for good, at some point they mention how the term is sometimes used just for marketing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

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

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