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)
Today in “Promptfondler fucks around and finds out.”
So I’m guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn’t end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing or when to stop, especially when it’s being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn’t remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.
Emphasis added.
So the ongoing discourse about AI energy requirements and their impact on the world reminded me about the situation in Texas. It set me thinking about what happens when the bubble pops. In the telecom bubble of the 90s or the British rail bubble of the 1840s, there was a lot of actual physical infrastructure created that outlived the unprofitable and unsustainable companies that had built them. After the bubble this surplus infrastructure helped make the associated goods and services cheaper and more accessible as the market corrected. Investors (and there were a lot of investors) lost their shirts, but ultimately there was some actual value created once we were out of the bezzle.
Obviously the crypto bubble will have no such benefits. It’s not like energy demand was particularly constrained outside of crypto, so any surplus electrical infrastructure will probably be shut back down (and good riddance to dirty energy). The mining hardware itself is all purpose-built ASICs that can’t actually do anything apart from mining, so it’s basically turning directly into scrap as far as I can tell.
But the high-performance GPUs that these AI operations rely on are more general-purpose even if they’re optimized for AI workloads. The bubble is still active enough that there doesn’t appear to be much talk about it, but what kind of use might we see some of these chips and datacenters put to as the bubble burns down?
But the high-performance GPUs that these AI operations rely on are more general-purpose even if they’re optimized for AI workloads. The bubble is still active enough that there doesn’t appear to be much talk about it, but what kind of use might we see some of these chips and datacenters put to as the bubble burns down?
If those GPUs end up being used for Glaze and Nightshade, I’d laugh like a hyena.
Hopefully this doesn’t break the rules. But where can I find some educational podcasts that aren’t overly capitalist, reactionary, rationalist, or otherwise right-leaning or authoritarian in nature.
I want to specifically avoid content like Lex Friedman, Huberman, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. That sounds good on the surface but goes down a rabbit hole of affirming reactionary bias.
I’m not amazing with words, so I hope what I’m saying makes sense. Thanks.
Most everything from Cool Zone Media is going to be pretty decent. Haven’t listened to the whole catalogue, but Ed Zitron of Better Offline is an established nonmember (as far as I know) friend of the sneer and Behind the Bastards is truly excellent.
Maintenance Phase is an excellent examination of diet and health grifters, and Mike’s others (You’re Wrong About and If Books Could Kill) are also pretty excellent.
I also want to spotlight Wittenburg to Westphalia, a history podcast ostensibly about the wars of the reformation and the social and economic chamges of the early modern period. But in order to really give a sense of how dramatic those changes are, he has so far provided only an incredibly thorough examination of medieval European society from the politics to economics and social structures. He has an episode about unfree labor that I found particularly interesting.
Second on Maintenance Phase! I marathonned it on a road trip a couple of days ago, and not only is it a well-researched and a fun listen, you’ll discover that so much of the stuff Aubrey and Michael discuss is directly congruent to our typical subjects. Can’t recommend it enough.
They’ve inspired me to work on an effort post for MoreWrite, tentatively titled, “A Unified Theory of Bullshitter-Driven Social Diseases.”
Which isn’t going to be as pompous as it sounds, I promise!
Sounds great! Looking forward to reading it
The Aristocrats!
via friend:
I’m thoroughly convinced Musk is an AI generated person and his life’s goal is simply to find the AI that generated him.
The world is a simulation and Musk has a green jewel above his head.
it’s time for our weekly what in the fuck is wrong with you Proton
I’ve definitely seen this kind of meme format, to be fair. But generally speaking I think we should make a rule that in order to be considered satire or joking something should need to actually be funny.
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says in-depth Marxist economic analysis? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster breaks down historical context of Game of Thrones? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says the same VPN marketing schpiel as every other podcaster? Not. Funny.
Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052
@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.
For your delectation, here are the HN comments
I’m in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.
Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.
There’s not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.
Here’s the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk
oh i dunno, there was
Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.
This remark is actually part of a long fight between CS and CS people. And it is really frustrating in various ways, as CS always thinks they did better than CS while being blind of the actual accomplishments of CS they don’t know and just how complex the subject matter is. It is an annoying failure to communicate between both disciplines. (A lot of people don’t fall victim to this btw, but it can be really annoying to encounter a ‘Our CS is good, and theirs is bad because strawman’, who often don’t even realize that various words have different meanings in the different fields).
For the record, I think the Counter-Strike people are correct on this one, mainly because heuristically Confederate States advocates are wrong by default.
Exactly the problem im talking about. What about all the good things the confederate state … no wait.
A redditor has a pinned post on /r/technology. They claim to be at a conference with Very Important Promptfondlers in Berlin. The OP feels like low-effort guerilla marketing, tbh; the US will dominate the EU due to an overwhelming superiority in AI, long live the new flesh, Emmanuel Macron is on board so this is SUPER SERIOUS, etc.
PS: the original poster, /u/WillSen, self-identifies as CEO of a bootcamp/school called “codesmith,” and has lots of ideas about how to retrain people to survive in the longed-for post-AI hellscape. So yeah, it’s an ad.
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fufbfm/im_a_tech_ceo_at_the_berlin_global_dialogue_w/
The central problem of 21st century democracy will be finding a way to inoculate humanity against confident bullshitters. That and nature trying to kill us. Oh, and capitalism in general, but I repeat myself.
that thread’s so dense with marketing patterns and critihype, it’s fucking shameless. whenever anyone brings up why generative AI sucks, the OP “yes and”s it into more hype — like when someone brings up how LLMs shit themselves fast if they train on LLM-generated text, the fucker parries it to a “oh the ARM guy said he’s investing in low-hallucination LLMs and that’ll solve it”. like… what? no it fucking will not, those are two different problems (and throwing money at LLMs sure as fuck doesn’t seem to be fixing hallucinations so far either way)
the worst part is this basic shit seems to work if the space is saturated with enough promptfondlers. it’s the same tactic as with crypto, and it’s why these weird fucks always want you on their discord, and why they always try to take up as much space as possible in discussions outside of that. it’s the soft power of being able to shout down dissenting voices.
CEO of cloudflare says he’ll donate the bandwidth for Wordpress dot org to shut mullenweg up https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663
Cloudflare is such a weird company in various ways. Saying loudly that they can’t judge groups when people ask them not to support the neo-nazis, harassers and worse (they have moved on this under pressure, but it takes a lot of pressure). But then they do this.
Wasn’t the first time he shut down 8chan (or was it Kiwifarms? Something along the lines), he immediately came out to say “It’s really bad that I have the power to take down a website of shitheads.” Just seemed like everything about his ideology is confused.
Nobody told him to make his CDN so dominant in the market. He kinda chose to have this power. If you think Cloudflare’s services are some kind of a universal inalienable right, make them free, you pussy. Be a philantropist, share that sweet bandwidth with the poor. Gimme a /24, coward. Why are you taking money for a basic necessity, you monster?
Y’all can thank me for taking down 8ch and KF, because I also do not run hosting infrastructure for either of them. Same goes to all of you who do not run a CDN that welcomes nazi websites. Thank you for your service.
There’s nothing confused about his ideology. Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought, but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence in Ireland (which was the final act of kiwi farms, from recollection. Presumably even the ceo couldn’t defend them at that point, though I bet he tried).
Dude doesn’t give a shit about free speech, or lament the power he’s ended up with. He just really loves fascism.
what’s the over/under on the spruce pine thing causing promptfondlers and their ilk to suddenly not be able to get chips, and then hit a(n even more concrete) ceiling?
(I know there may be some of the stuff in stockpiles awaiting fabrication, but still, can’t be enough to withstand that shock)
If we’re lucky, it’ll cut off promptfondlers’ supply of silicon and help bring this entire bubble crashing down.
It’ll probably also cause major shockwaves for the tech industry at large, but by this point I hold nothing but unfiltered hate for everyone and everything in Silicon Valley, so fuck them.
Building 5-7 5GW facilities full of GPUs is going to be an extremely large amount of silicon. Not to mention the 25-35 nuclear power plants they apparently want to build to power them.
So on the list of things not happening…that would be 25-35 reactors, as long as cooling is available you can just put them in one place. 5GW is around size of largest european nuclear powerplants (Zaporozhian, 5.7GW; Gravelines, 5.4GW; six blocks each) or around energy consumption of decently-sized euro country like Ireland, Hungary or Bulgaria. 25GW is electricity consumption of Poland, 30GW UK, 35GW Spain
this is not happening hardest because by the time they’d get permits for NPP they’ll get bankrupt because bubble will be over
Gonna build enough clean energy to power a medium sized industrialized nation just to waste it all on videos of babies dressed up as shrimp jesus.
