this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
15 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

42 readers
19 users here now

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

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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)

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I saw this over the weekend and the title itself is rather lovely, but even more hilariously it's from the atlantic

evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman's bullshit grows

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman’s bullshit grows

Precisely when that rising tide will drown Altman I'm not sure, but I feel safe in saying it'll probably drown the rest of the AI industry (and potentially "AI" as a concept) as well - Altman is pretty much the face of this AI bubble, after all.

The rising tide was likely also helped along by OpenAI going fully for-profit, which shattered the humanitarian guise it spent the last decade or so building, and, to quote myself, "given the true believers reason to believe [Altman would] commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buck".

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.

Winter is coming.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.

Oh, I expect a real harsh AI winter once this spring comes to a close - the public isn't just overtly disappointed about AI's failure to deliver, but outright angry at the nasty shit AI's unleashed upon them.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Many thanks to @blakestacey and @YourNetworkIsHaunted for your guidance with the NSF grant situation. I've sent an analysis of the two weird reviews to our project manager and we have a list of personnel to escalate with if we can't get any traction at that level. Fingers crossed that we can be the pebble that gets an avalanche rolling. I'd really rather not become a character in this story (it's much more fun to hurl rotten fruit with the rest of the groundlings), but what else can we do when the bullshit comes and finds us in real life, eh?

It WAS fun to reference Emily Bender and On Bullshit in the references of a serious work document, though.

Edit: So...the email server says that all the messages are bouncing back. DKIM failure?

Edit2: Yep, you're right, our company email provider coincidentally fell over. When it rains, it pours (lol).

Edit3: PM got back and said that he's passed it along for internal review.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI's legal issues:

And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:

With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry's Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.

Precisely how, I'm not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

To my mind, the cover of "researchers" using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago (5 children)

check out this jumpscare suckerpunch mashup

some of the details are so on point I’m almost left pointing and mouthing “art”

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

First-ever criminal charges against financial services firms for market manipulation and “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry

Cryptocurrency is a 15-year old industry built mostly on market manipulation and wash trading and now we're seeing the first charges for it? Man, back in the day they told me doing crime was illegal.

Deflationary

With every transaction supply shrinks by burning a percentage of reflections to the burn wallet

Turns out libertarians actually love taxes, but only if instead of spending the tax money on anything, it's burned to waste.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

fix the year! we're back in the present! out of the time traveling cybertruck!

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Tried to get out, door cut my leg off. Now I have to go back to the future to get it reattached.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

Just remembering this banger from back in the day.

[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

Oh look! Human horrors ~~beyond~~ regrettably within my comprehension

https://x.com/haveibeenpwned/status/1843780415175438817

Tweet descriptionNew sensitive breach: "AI girlfriend" site Muah[.]ai had 1.9M email addresses breached last month. Data included AI prompts describing desired images, many sexual in nature and many describing child exploitation. 24% were already in @haveibeenpwned . More: https://404media.co/hacked-ai-girlfriend-data-shows-prompts-describing-child-sexual-abuse-2/

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›