Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 04 August 2024

Dear ~Sneerclub TechTakes, will you be my 'Friend'? :)

AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)

AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)

Here's Friend's advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is... unsettling.

In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?".

I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.

Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community

https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m

OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m

Note: reposted from last week’s Stubsack :)

Does TP0 have an point he's trying to push with this thread? It's disingenuous enough that it feels like there's an agenda, but at the same time what could the point even be? Fuck cancer patients?

https://xcancel.com/St_Rev/status/1817261327628587225

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(Tweet source)

I had a simple question: how to rescue a Windows hard disk to a new SSD?

The answer is ddrescue from a Linux USB stick, but the Windows user wasn't comfortable at the command line.

But if you Google it, you get:

• insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
• AI slop.

Eventually I just did it myself with ddrescue. But I got a first-hand experience of how fucking unusable search is now.

Oh, and Google is now showing AI slop answers at the top of searches in the UK.

Baldur Bjaranason coming in with a solid sneer aimed squarely at his own industry's finest

@ai_shame RT'd a good sneer in the wild recently:

Bonus: Eliezer, of all people, also sneered at the TESCREAL twat:

Here's a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, and alse separately highlights new posts, to make long running threads easier to follow. I'm posting it in the stubsack because it's the thread I had in mind when writing it.

Pasting it in the browser's console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I've cross tested it any... Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won't steal your crypto, or mine any new.

In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.

edit: Also if you prepend javascript: to the code and store it as a bookmark you can just invoke it by calling the bookmark, like a macro, see https://awful.systems/comment/4173451

Note: longer threads don't load all comments at once, so you'll have to rerun the script if you scroll down far enough.

edit: fixed for Edge, because why wouldn't it show dates differently there.

edit: updated it to check if there's a (xx New) notice in the post count in the OP and use the number to highlight the latest xx posts, i.e. all post made since the last time you were here. Change the value of variable newPostColor if you don't like the lovely shade of lavender I picked. Depending on if edited posts are counted as new or not the count might be off, and like, what if there's a new post that's also been edited? Solving that seems to mean moving away from the warmth and comfort of the quick and dirty territory, and also is there a public philthy repository somewhere?

edit: here's how it looks in the SAP thread:

edit: NEW: added some legibility changes and also consecutive executions now toggle old post highlights.

Code now in spoiler:

(() => {
    function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
        const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
        return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
    }

    const newPostCount = (() => {
        const text = document.querySelector("span.fst-italic").textContent;
        return text.includes("New") ? parseInt(text.match(/\d+/)[0]) : 0;
    })();
    const newPostColor = "#783AFF";

    const timestampNodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
        .map(x => {
            return {
                Node: x,
                PostBox: x.closest('.ms-2'),
                Date: Date.parse(
                    x.dataset.tippyContent
                        .split('\n').at(-1)
                        .replace(/Modified |at /g, "")
                        .replace(/(?<=\d+)(st|nd|rd|th)/g, ""))
            };
        })
        .filter(x => x.PostBox != null)
        .sort((x1, x2) => x2.Date - x1.Date);

    const minDate = timestampNodes.at(-1).Date;
    const maxDate = timestampNodes.at(0).Date;
    const hl = (dt) => getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, dt);

    timestampNodes
        .forEach((x, i) => {
            if (i < newPostCount) {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = newPostColor;
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.person-listing').style.textShadow = '1px 1px 0.75px #FFFFFF';
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            }
            else if (x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor == "") {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = hl(x.Date);
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            } else {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = "";
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = "";
            }
        });
})()

This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn't it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that "regular" Republican politicians wouldn't have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there's many an NPR-loving granny googling "what is a yarvin" and getting wound up about it in her group chats.

We've all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, "the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time." I therefore propose a new thing, the "Yarvin Window," which we can define as "the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents."

This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.

https://nitter.poast.org/edzitron/status/1819591404873568715

Zitron's sample size may be limited to his Twitter following, but its a bad sign for AI if bashing it gets you praise from both sides of the political aisle:

Bonus Tweet from Chris Alvino:

I was just thinking about this today. I had a thread go viral where I bashed AI, resulted in thousands of new followers, and I've had to block a bunch bc they turned out to be on the far right. Honestly amazing how bipartisan AI hate is. Never seen anything like it before 😂

Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694

Utilitarianism-poisoned globe emoji tries and fails to convince Americans to give state power back to a fascist

Rumor, but lol if true "A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets" Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.

Morning lads, let's have a big week 💪

This orange thread is about San Francisco banning certain types of landlord rent collusion. I cannot possibly sneer better than the following in-thread comment explaining why this is worthwhile:

While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren't the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don't cover them in giant metal spikes.

Riffing on this fun subthread:

• Will AI invent the Philosopher's Stone?
• Can AI duck the Zuck?
• WIll AI divide by zero?
• Can AI give you diarrhea?
• Will AI make "fetch" happen?
• Will AI have a second helping?
• Does AI unlock the secret to making the Moon happy again?
• Can AI stop eating after only one marshmallow?

a long AI sneer on gabi belle's channel

the comments also have some bangers. a quick selection:

My mom used to transcribe calls for companies as work, but then her work implemented AI to transcribe the calls, leading to work calls having sentences in them such as: “Thanks for watching!” “This venue has the best beat” and putting in random websites that DONT EXIST into the calls, when the caller said nothing like that.

imagine this in financial or medical services

had a survey from my university about how staff feel about AI implementation for our university. One question that concerned me was "how do you feel about AI being used for grading?"

The issue with AI grading assignments is that students will most likely get the mindset that if the professor or TA doesn't care enough to put in the effort to look at my work to give me feedback to do better, why the hell should I put in the effort and spend thousands to do this?

please come to our university, it costs 500k for a year and we pinky promise that the prof/TA won't get more than 10% of it, your learning is our "top priority"

My friend and I entered an art contest a few months ago and she lost to very obvious ai “art”. She spent months on a self portrait oil painting that even when putting my bias aside was amazingly beautiful and definitely deserved to win. There was ai competing in the charcoal category with me too but luckily someone looked at competing pieces before the judges actually scored anything and bombarded the hosts of the competition to remove the piece and they did eventually. It’s incredibly frustrating especially considering part of the first place prize was a scholarship that my friend definitely deserves and needs, and the contest hosts were very hesitant to remove the ai “art”.

it's weird how a chunk the art world continues being bad at handling fakes

For additional context, training ChatGPT-3 took enough energy to propel the titanic at full speed for 37 hours. Or around 920 tons of coal.

just absolutely mental

google continuing on their crusade to force ads down everyone’s eyeballs

not that it’s surprising, just “good” to see this playing out exactly as predicted

Band I like accidentally purchases a poster design from a probable AI grifter. Here's their apology/acknowledgement post:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C98X_6huBOJ

The poster in question:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C95H8MQuVI6

I do not blame the band. I blame the AI person for being shit and passing off AI-generated shit as his own.

babe wake up Gamers Nexus is absolutely cooking Intel rn

more of a nsfw, a post on pointing and laughing at the fash. figured y'all may also enjoy reading it

Google Pulls “Dear Sydney” Olympics Ad After Backlash To Its Portrait Of A Young Girl Using AI

The ad itself is just fucked - its like something you'd find in a shitty cyberpunk novel.

Presented without comment: this utter crankery about hacking the Matrix (HN)

Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity [37-39] research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric paths such as:, meditation [40], psychedelics (DMT [41-43], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD) [44, 45], dreams [46], magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide [47], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel [48], or religion.

Among the things they've already tried are torture, touching grass, and declining all cookies:

Unethical behavior, such as torture, doesn’t cause suffering reducing interventions from the simulators.

Breaking out of your routine, such as by suddenly traveling to a new location [199], doesn’t result in unexpected observations.

Saying "I no longer consent to being in a simulation" [200].

PURE PROMO: we're doing a Pivot to AI patrons’ video Q&A on Thursday August 8, at 16:00 UTC

also taking cryptocurrency questions

like you know I answer any of you guys' questions anyway, but this is in a much l33t3r format

first taste of apple intelligence and it's about as good as you could expect

but hey, an apple product has acknowledged swearing - progress!

The whole space scene really depresses me now. The Musk cult and TESCREAL and more overt ideologies (I’ve seen claimed old time L5 people throw around ‘spiteful mutant’ and other stuff). The whole thing just seems to be going nasty.

Astronomy thankfully is still chill.

Meta: reddit sneerclub appears to be open again. Is this an authorized action or has Reddit scabbed it?

iter.next() yields https://awful.systems/post/2063781

The subreddit is allowing comments and submissions again.