this post was submitted on 10 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.

(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

does anyone know why Venmo has a faux social media presentation? a feed, payments visible to other users (??) by default, etc

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Though if I had to guess: data tagging for data mining.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (9 children)

nasb, Curtis Yarvin's Cult For Billionaire Morons

the comment around 13:00 onwards, "it was very hard to get people to care about this before". felt in my bones.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (4 children)

AI researchers continue to daub soot on the walls of Plato's cave, scaring themselves witless:

https://www.emergent-values.ai/

At least I've IDd the transmission vector from LW to lobste.rs

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In lighter news, has anyone else noticed that it's necessary for any kind of Cybersecurity course to open with what is effectively a Tumblr-style DNI for unethical hackers? Like, I'm not criticizing exactly and I certainly don't have any better ideas to prevent people using these skills for evil, but the disclaimer up top fits into a certain kind of pattern that I, for one, find hilarious.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] rook@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Encouraging news: Thompson Reuters has won a copyright case against defunct AI firm Ross Intelligence, with the judge ruling that training your ai on copyrighted works is not fair use. I’m interested to see where this goes next.

https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

so apparently one of the weird creeps went to go shittalk europe (video, transcript (archive))

it's some full-on doublespeak and utterly wild shit. some of the best tho:

The US innovators of all sizes already know what it’s like to deal with onerous international rules.

"waaaaaaaah how dare you have your own rules we need to care about, so hard"

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well now, this is intriguing. Let me check out their website and see if they have the source code for this open source offering available there. Oh dear, looks like they have forgotten to include a link to the source code (though they did make sure to prominently include the referrer of platformer.news in the URL so that's good for them). Not to worry, surely they have a GitHub or something. Oh, still nothing. Maybe there's a link in this Mozilla blog post about it? Still no, but they seem to accidentally imply this is some kind of an AI thing? Is this finally the open source AI we have all been so excitedly waiting for?

To be a little more serious, there's barely anything here to even be gullible about. Just a Vaporware idol for corpos to have a circlejerk around and congratulate themselves for pretending to do something about the bad vibes. If there's a real ambition beyond corporate peacockery here, the motivation is merely to take care of the pesky content moderation without having to pay people to do it.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

merely from seeing the domain and author, probably all of it - casey newton’s got a real bad case of access syndrome, and keeps writing fluff/puff pieces uncritically amplifying tons of bayfucker nonsense

(it’s even beyond the usual levels of what one may refer to as useful idiot)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

(I’ll read the rest of it later as my brain boots and the day’s bullshit allows on time)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Ed Zitron behind a tree rubbing his hands together

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

couldn't find if this has featured here before, so linking for others as I figure a few of you are likely to appreciate: destroy AI

bonus, learned about asrg and an art piece that goes immensely hard

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