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)
re: election results. unfortunately i’m not surprised or even disappointed by now. it makes me feel sad for my 2015 self and her naivete. she didn’t understand what a disgusting and evil culture she lived in
I don’t have too much coherent to say right now
fuck the fascists for what they’ve done and what they intend to do
fuck the neoliberals for doing their best to convince marginalized people that they shouldn’t defend themselves against a terrible fate
fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths
shit’s about to get very hard and very weird and I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life
what a surprise, the thread all the leftist shitposters on mastodon boosted about how you’re a class traitor if you don’t vote for the Green Party (who I don’t buy as socialist) or “any other socialist party” (fucking who??? am I supposed to write “socialism” on my ballot in crayon???) conveniently went missing
anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight
i do love how the “anti-imperialist” protest vote against harris was a choice between like three or four putin apologists. the state of the US left is really fucked up and i don’t want to look at it ever again.
i bet the self-described antiimperialists going all for Southern Lebanon Parking Lot 2024 feel real smug right now
anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight
I’ve intentionally been avoiding feeds the last few days because I just do not have the headspace for it, but I quickly checked on shit now
and
fuck
Didn’t the Green Party woman also just go ‘I’m pro Israel’ the day for the election or so? Which I think is one of the reason she might have picked up a few moves (the idea she might be more pro gaza I mean).
The bad guys have definitely learned a new sort of trick. Haven’t wrapped my head around it yet, but it is bad, innit?
Apologies for the screed:
Quick recap:
2016-2020: executive orders every day, non-elected positions being captured by conservatives, dems just hand-wringing and tweeting. but Dems get lucky with a pandemic and trump loses
2021-2024: weekend at biden’s.
Where was the election reform? The dismantling or reform of the electoral colleges? The extra seats on the SC? Bribing the public with stimulus packages to boost the economy?
Remember when we pushed Biden left? Remember when the dems preserved abortion rights, prevented the invasion of ukraine, and stopped bankrolling Israel’s genocide?
“exercise your democratic rights and voice by voting for our candidate that wasn’t democratically chosen as our candidate”. “vote blue and do not voice any critical thought”. “any vote that isn’t for the party that didn’t meaningfully reverse or prevent conservative actions is a vote for trump”.
In sum: the bad guys didn’t do anything new.
The closest we got to a trump loss was some republican spook who went to a trump rally with a gun because it was closer than the harris rally.
According to some reports the dems simply stayed home and he even lost votes compared to 2020
The thing that’s most baffling to me is how the difference in ground game had zero impact. We were pounding the pavement, doors got fuckin knocked. The GOP did less than zero, firing their entire staff responsible for in-person outreach and gave 100 million to PACs run by grifters who put it directly into their own pockets.
Unless we’ve missed a trick, retail politics as it has existed is dead.
Dem talking heads spending so much energy courting moderate conservative votes was an excellent way to demobilise their base. They really gave their all to lose an election that should have been a free win.
This wasn’t a free win, however. The reason Harris took over in the first place was because Biden’s performance in the debate was poor enough that the Democrats thought there was no longer any chance with him, and this was already with lowering approval ratings. Had he stayed, I bet Trump’s victory would have been even wider.
I mean, I don’t think it was unreasonable to expect liberals to show up against someone who’s sole policy proposals were mass deportations and political reprisals, and so I can understand the logic of focusing on the center (which in US politics means center-right).
But this being the democratic party, they also couldn’t commit to an actual narrative to make that play. Rather than “look at their ties to Big Tech!” or even sticking with “look how weird these people are!” they had to go hat-in-hand and stake themselves to divisive (to say nothing of abhorrent) policies because that’s the only connection they could try to make. I think we’re seeing a major problem with the whole “big tent” concept.
It was twitter. Elon Musk joins Trump’s team. What happens? Harris’ chances begin to drop.
Trump did lose support, but there was probably enough propaganda on Twitter to make enough people go “both sides” and just sit out the election.and of course, Twitter and Facebook style influence campaigns work just as well or even better elsewhere, in communities that haven’t hardened themselves against that type of bullshit
IDK, do you really think twitter still has that much cultural relevance? ugh
I’m sure it played a part, though.
I’m seeing some takes now that the ground game did make a difference of a couple of points in the swing states, where it was concentrated, it’s just that that wasn’t enough.
Not enough for the presidential race, sadly; perhaps enough to scrape by with a few Senate victories.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life
strong agree
minor upside: it’s going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off
fucking fuck this sucks
minor upside: it’s going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off
correct. keep receipts.
fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths
So much this
Not surprised, still very disappointed, I feel sick.
Yeah this is fucked up. I feel so bad for everybody (esp the Americans, but this will hurt the world). Shit this prob means I should start looking into seriously helping out locally when all this explodes into more international shit. (Which imho is the best you can do anyway, do things locally, build a bit of a support network for your community).
(Note I’m not American, but I think this will end badly, just the fucker stepping out of the paris accord for example, and all the weird blowhard fascists this will make feel emboldened to do more politics locally).
E: I really hope the people who go ‘this is the same as in 2020, wait till all votes are counted’ are correct and not on hopeium.
i think they indeed are on hopium/copium
I can’t tell, US elections have imho always been extremely dumb. (But, in the past decades+ ours have not been much better).
both by electoral college and by popular vote trump has advantage, and worse than that house and senate are republican now
Yeah, turns out this is the bad place.
The history books are going to refer to this era as “The Stupid Years”.
Because all of this is very fucking stupid.
I fully expect they are, even as I also hope they’re not.
Well, it’s more like 2000, really, in the sense that the courts are being used to restrict voting rights. There’s strong evidence of flagrant UOCAVA violations: thousands of absentee ballots which should affect the federal election have been challenged in swing states. Edit: Here is part 1 and part 2 from an attorney whose Pennsylvania UOCAVA ballot was challenged; he goes through the law and explains what he’s going to do.
I think I’m more angry than anything. l hadn’t realized how tight my media bubble had gotten and was pretty sure this wasn’t realistic. I had gotten myself ready for another round of 2020 nonsense and denial, not this.
are you US-based? very sorry, take care
yes, i am. i’ve been plotting to get out for years but i’ve been too depressed since my partner died to make any progress tbh. i’ve no idea what to do
ugh that sucks, I’m sorry
I would suggest Canada, but we’re set to get our own Trump in power in about a year or so. Too many people looking on the house on fire and thinking that pouring gasoline on it is the best solution.
Слава Україні. The world has failed you.
The level of fucked we are is too big for words
I wanted to say something darkly comedic about the AI bubble popping under the new regime, but my heart is too sick to make a joke
Nashville, here. I hear ya.
I don’t know what else to say, I can’t explain any of this, but also please know that you’re not alone out there.
The American electorate has just covered itself with gasoline because eggs cost 2 dollars more. Come January they strike the match. gg. HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE NOVEMBER 5TH. My only consolation is that I’ll hopefully get to watch some of the Magas/non voters/vote-your-conscience peeps suffer before the end. But Ol musky and peter thiel will be in their gilded bunkers while the fires consume us all.
yeah, a lot of broke trumpists will get fucked over, along with all other broke americans, getting worse if they are lgbt or non-white or need healthcare, or are migrants. on top of palestinians, lebanese (done deal at this point), ukrainians (likely) and maybe taiwanese
one thing that i can think of that could reduce damage is that while some policies are stupid, cruel and obviously harmful for everyone, that didn’t stop them previously, but this might make line no go up for billionaire republicans, and if they have trump’s ear, that could make their implementation ineffective on purpose. i mean here specifically undocumented migrant work whose deportation would make post-covid inflation look like a joke
Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:
Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.
“One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”
a real web3 moment if there ever was one.
unfortunately the six active players bit is a joke
For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn’t a great rolemodel.
(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on ‘traditional rationality’)).
Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women bitches thing. Miss me with that PUA shit
Considering the history of PUA stuff on lesswrong, Im going to assume this was a pro not a con for them even.
Feynman reminds me of the brujo (one specific man, not brujería in general) from Pirsig’s Lila. Feynman’s safecracking and unorthodox approaches are like the brujo’s routine flaunting of social norms; through routinely doing things the wrong way (sacred clowning), new possible behaviors and modes of social existence are explored. Also, Feynman’s attitudes towards women remind me of that brujo’s tendency to spy on women by looking through their windows into their homes while they were not necessarily dressed, which the brujo’s society did not tolerate.
In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”
Edit: Found the map she’s using:
I’m sure her results would be very accurate if troll farms could vote and chatgpt was doing the count.
Looks like she lost despite the polls legitimately being pretty left-biased this year. Even when it’s right the hallucination machine is still wrong.
Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:
- The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
- I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
- it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.
Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
NB: am not a US voter.
The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
such a metal album name
Their grindcore coverband is called Earthcofffin Hopecrusher. Their 2 minute long album with 14 songs was pretty good.
Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in “metal album title or emo album title?”
I feel like it’s slightly more emo for sheer length, “The Earth is Our Coffin” and “Hope is a Mistake” are both awesome metal albums in their own right, but the combination can only be from the genre that brought you “A Detailed and Poetic Physical Threat to the Person who Intentionally Vandalized My 1994 Dodge Intrepid Behind Kate’s Apartment”
Brb mailing this to myself
I think “any idiot that got lucky under capitalism” is a pretty good description of Musk and his type, to be fair.
The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the “hope” that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks he’ll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.
The thing that really grinds my gears about the escape to Mars plan is that Earth is already habitable (for now) and Mars is not. If we can make an uninhabitable planet habitable, we could just make the already habitable planet stay habitable. There is no scenario where terraforming Mars is easier than, uh, “terraforming” the Earth.
This is like 30-90% of why I’m a mars hater. Not only should we rehabilitate earth first, the fact is we are dehabilitating it instead and are not making any meaningful effort in the other direction.
The orange site is an easy target, but the lack of solidarity in the comments about the NYT Tech Guild strike fills me with dread.
A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.
Said it before, I’ll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out
We live in a world where you can watch billionaires publicly humiliate themselves on the daily and never suffer consequences for it. What’s a little temporary embarrassment compared to that?
The worst part about Trump being president is Trump being president for a year. The second worst part is Vance being president for the next three (after Trump dies of heart failure). The third worst part is the fact that I’ve been owned in a way I can’t even explain to my closest friends.
The third worst part is the fact that I’ve been owned in a way I can’t even explain to my closest friends.
Oh god, this so much. Well, third worst for me personally, as a non-American white guy. I suppose Palestinians, Ukrainians, and marginalized groups in the US might have a few issues they’d rank higher.
the bit i wonder about is: would president couchfucker block weapons exports to Ukraine
Most likely. Backing out of international obligations and supporting fellow authoritarians seem to be pretty consistent aspects of what passes for MAGA ideology.
i guess this depends on how much vested interest (monetary) he has in MIC
trump seems to treat nato as america’s weapons shop buyers club
I haven’t done a headcount yet and the election’s not fully tallied, but I think that the Senate still has around 70% support for NATO, and historically we can expect to see a “blue dog” phenomenon in the House as a reaction to Republicans gaining seats. Effectively, both the Democrats and Republicans will function as big tents of two distinct parties, and there is usually tripartisan support (everybody but the far-right Republicans) for imperialism. We may well see votes where the legislators override presidential vetoes to force weapons sales and otherwise fulfill NATO obligations.
And yes, you read that correctly; Democrats move right as a reaction to Republicans doing well. Go back to bed, America…
there is usually tripartisan support (everybody but the far-right Republicans) for imperialism
i’m not sure how thoroughly trumpists have purged the party of noncompliants, so maybe this non-far-right republicans block is smaller than it used to be
And yes, you read that correctly; Democrats move right as a reaction to Republicans doing well
i’m not surprised by small to medium number of spineless MPs effectively changing sides, i have seen that previously. it is surprising to me that it keeps happening and dems don’t boot these people without notice, or at least deny them places on ballot
What did sideburns ever to do that guy?
@slopjockey @BlueMonday1984 Vance concerns me more than Trump.
Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc
Carbon capture, small nuclear reactors. We stopped thinking big. To really solve climate change we need to do one easy, but big thing. Blow up the Sun.
Kill and dethrone God.
You’ll hear no complaint from me.
Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?
Don’t think we should put another space guy into politics, no matter their expertise at blowing up stars. They tend to go bad quickly.
SMRs make me so goddamn miserable. We already know how to build nuclear plants. Build those! We’re kind of on a tight deadline here, maybe don’t waste time trying to invent a less efficient reactor that’s supposed to solve a problem we don’t have.
We already have working carbon capture technology, too. It’s called plants. Thanks to deforestation and ocean pollution we’re making negative progress creating CC machines, nice job.
Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.
I’m about to pass out from the cognitive dissonance I’m feeling from seeing andressen and musk talking about privilege
Unfortunately there aren’t enough mind altering, ego-killing drugs out there for either of these dicks to understand and internalise the (common usage of the) words they posted.
You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?
Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results are… basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual “gameplay”.TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things aren’t even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer they’re using to render this.
Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.
maybe i’m a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren’t armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming… if you look at this “game” as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging
it reminds me of other “games” like Marian Kleineberg’s Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft’s Yedoma Globula. there’s one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don’t recall the name
I do like it also, but notice how they try to hide most of these strange effects in their demo video. They’re trying to pass it off as a playable minecraft. Anything interesting about the technology is a defect to these people.
They also claim this is “the first playable AI-generated game” when the exact same sort of thing already existed in 2022 (and it looked a lot more efficient and haunted): https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/ Maybe it doesn’t count if you call it “Neural network” instead of “AI”.
That article gave me a whiplash. First part: pretty cool. Second part: deeply questionable.
For example these two paragraphs from sections ‘problem with code’ and ‘magic of data’:
“Modular and interpretable code” sounds great until you are staring at 100 modules with 100,000 lines of code each and someone is asking you to interpret it.
Regardless of how complicated your program’s behavior is, if you write it as a neural network, the program remains interpretable. To know what your neural network actually does, just read the dataset
Well, “just read the dataset bro” sound great sounds great until you are staring at a dataset with 100 000 examples and someone is asking you to interpret it.
What the hell is this even arguing for? Is one module with ten million lines somehow better than 100 modules à 100k lines?
yeah, that “most of the internet will be Al-generated” nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
It’s dream logic.
Showed this to my wife.
You know what the worst part is? We’re spending all this computing power to generate this bad acid trip, but if I just took a bunch of LSD you know what I’d still have? The things in my pockets. I’d have a better time just having a bunch of LSD and walking down to the 7-11
I’ve seen this floating about quite a bit, and everyone I know is dunking on it - the most frequent comparison I’ve seen is calling it “Minecraft with dementia”.
It also shows why those DOOM demos were only 2-3 seconds long, because that’s how long it can keep cohesion for.
oh cool, Minecraft LSD: Dream Emulator edition
which would be a cool concept, if the generative AI model weren’t incredibly prohibitively expensive to run, trained on plagiarized videos, and incapable of coherently tracking state (believe it or not, LSD: Dream Emulator does have a gameplay and progression loop… game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick)
game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick
This has been a thing with games leaning heavily on procedural generated content as well. Takes a lot of effort to make those more interesting in the longer term. The ai is the future of gaming people are sure to rediscover this fact again. Sadly compared ro pgc people they will waste a lot more energy and money.
I think it’s fine to have little art games that are only interesting to play for a few minutes. They can still have an impact that stays with you forever. Catacombs of Solaris for instance is one I love and think about all the time.
These AI guys though, god it must be so sad working on this stuff. They can’t be proud of what they’re making if the goal is to trick people into thinking you can have a real Minecraft game in there. The game is not even relevant, as far as I can tell they’re only using it to draw attention to their stupid and doomed ASIC business.
goddammit! you have no idea how many variations of “first person walking simulator projected image texture trippy visuals” i slapped into every search engine!
but yes, that was the one i was thinking of
Ah awesome! I didn’t think it was because you can’t upload pictures, but maybe you can in the “Revisited” version!
i went and bought it, and yup, the revisited version is the one i was thinking of. time to walk around inside a picture of Sam Altman so i can absorb his raw intellect and business acumen
Pgc can be a useful tool in the toolbox however. Just look at dwarf fortress for example. But games need more than just that. And with LLMs there could also ve some use (generation of voices I think for example, or some low level of conversational chatter). The problem is the data usage, the anti worker stuff (no voice actor wants their voice stolen for example), and like in this case, the people just promoting their other crap. Like how crypto games are just a shell to promote their crypto bs.
LLMs could have some minor use but with the backlash due to techbros going their usual vc style techbro ways, and steam requiring disclosure I doubt it will be of much use the risk is too great. Which considering the power costs is great.
We also have stuff like DLSS, which is pretty cool and I imagine ends up being more efficient in energy usage. The key thing I believe is it’s built as a specific tool for a specific purpose, instead of general purpose slop machines eating humongous databases to excrete absolutely nothing useful for anyone.
Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that creates it, just someone who is reviewing it.
See, there’s the mistake. You can’t let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.
why do neurotypical people love to do this. why can’t you say sam harris sucks in a normal way
People enjoy making amateur diagnoses of public figures, and people enjoy feeling like they’re superior to neurodivergent people.
actual diagnosis, inexplicably not in the DSM-5
For a palette cleanser, you might appreciate that If Books Could Kill just released a solid dunk on Sam Harris
ha, the screen cap is from the ibck subreddit. one of my favorite podcasts
that adds a whole nother layer of lol
NASB - Brian Merchant’s celebrating the first anniversary of Blood in the Machine’s release
Reading through it, its clear an earlier comment of mine was dead-on - the public image of the Luddites has been fully rehabilitated, and we can primarily credit Merchant for pulling it off.
I don’t blame Saltman for this one, since it’s just a more specific version of the general pathology that assumes the markets are basically Gods.
"In our top story today, the rapture has drawn the souls of the faithful into heaven and we have entered what experts are calling a “final tribulation”. We’re also receiving reports that Dread Cthulhu has awoken from his deathly slumber in his house at R’lyeh, and environmental groups are claiming that increased sightings of wolves and frost giants could herald the arrival of Fimbulwinter and through it Ragnarök.
The stock market, however, seems to be taking the literal end times in stride, with strong performances from Raytheon and other manufacturers countering a downturn in other sectors."
you see, air defense is very useful against supernatural horrors beyond human comprehension
(also they recently changed name to RTX after merger. surely no fucked up managerial cancer would spread from there, like with Boeing-McDonnel Douglas merger. not like they make anything of absolutely critical importance for Ukrainians)
what a terrible fate https://archive.ph/X2s3z
Ah, copilot is so extremely popular that MS has decided to bundle it into O365 for
freea moderate “depends by region” price increaseI’m sure that’ll totally make people want it even more! hordes at the gate!
