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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Why are you saying that LLMs are useless when they’re useless only most of the time
I’m sorry but I’ve been circling my room for an hour now seeing this and I need to share it with people lest I go insane.
that dude advocates LLM code autocomplete and he’s a cryptographer
like that code’s gotta be a bug bounty bonanza
I find the polygraph to be a fascinating artifact. most on account of how it doesn’t work. it’s not that it kinda works, that it more or less works, or that if we just iron out a few kinks the next model will do what polygraphs claims to do. the assumptions behind the technology are wrong. lying is not physiological; a polygraph cannot and will never work. you might as well hire me to read the tarot of the suspects, my rate of success would be as high or higher.
yet the establishment pretends that it works, that it means something. because the State desperately wants to believe that there is a path to absolute surveillance, a way to make even one’s deepest subjectivity legible to the State, amenable to central planning (cp. the inefficacy of torture). they want to believe it so much, they want this technology to exist so much, that they throw reality out of the window, ignore not just every researcher ever but the evidence of their own eyes and minds, and pretend very hard, pretend deliberately, willfully, desperately, that the technology does what it cannot do and will never do. just the other day some guy way condemned to use a polygraph in every statement for the rest of his life. again, this is no better than flipping a coin to decide if he’s saying the truth, but here’s the entire System, the courts the judge the State itself, solemnly condemning the man to the whims of imaginary oracles.
I think this is how “AI” works, but on a larger scale.
see also voice stress analysis, another thing that doesn’t work but is sold as working with AI
new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about “ontologically, is ‘superhuman prediction’ the same class as superintelligence?”
why? oh, y’know, just things:
Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.
I’ll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.
As zero cannot exist as a chance, there is a chance this will happen.
That’s why I vote 3rd party in presidential elections.
how to spot the US angst:
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading
Late response but cool song recommendation :)
haha yeah it’s quite fun
Habsburgs are good, actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497419
I think Zizek is a super nice guy, despite disagreeing with 90% of what he says. I still think he’s a great person with a nice soul.
The sentences these people post, man.
Anyway, it’s great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist to show how open minded he is. Damn, you respect Habsburg, Orban and Zizek, let me guess how you feel about Putin.
Anyway, it’s great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist
oh thank fuck I’m not the only one who knows about Zizek. there’s still so many people whose first introduction to leftist thought was The Pervert’s Guide to Film on Netflix or whatever who never went back to check if Zizek was maybe a fucking asshole
I’m still blissfully clueless as to who zizek is
although saying that here now might cause an accidental crash course
I mean, my awareness extends as far as “pure sniff ideology” and basically no context. Definitely heard some extremely bad takes on Ukraine though, which has quickly turned into my number one red flag for “actually pretty okay with Nazis when you get down to it”
EDIT: special thanks to skillissuer below for the correction re: Ukraine takes. Please trust his actual sources over my half-remembered reddit nonsense.
wait wdym as extremely bad takes on ukraine, because some of these i’ve been able to find before going to darknet (second page of startpage search results) seem rather sane
If we pressure Ukraine now, demanding peace, it will mean creating space for Russian expansion.
https://www.instagram.com/slavojzizeks/p/C8g0yYRvLFL/
The paradox of this combination is that what presents itself as a principled stance – peace at any price – is a mask for the worst ethnic egotism and ignorance of the other’s suffering: are we aware that, although Ukraine has defended its independence, it has already lost up to a third of its population through emigration, kidnapping and death?
It is not just with respect to the oligarchs and the cultural conservatives that Ukraine must go to war with itself.
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/08/ukraine-must-go-to-war-with-itself
We now know what the call to allow Putin to “save his face” means. It means accepting not a minor territorial compromise in Donbas but Putin’s imperial ambition.
What is absolutely unacceptable for a true leftist today is not only to support Russia but also to make a more “modest” neutral claim that the left is divided between pacifists and supporters of Ukraine, and that one should treat this division as a minor fact which shouldn’t affect the left’s global struggle against global capitalism.
…huh. Your sources are certainly more credible than my half-remembered reddit posts. I think I was probably mistaken on this one.
my bias against self-described hegelians is reinforced, bonus points for lacanism. every single one i’ve heard of in some detail (not that i’m looking for them) turns out to be a crank in some capacity. n=3
Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.
A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) “if you think that’s bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱”.
Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
Fuck it, we’re going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.
you have no idea how much I’ve been tempted to do UUCP
