Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024
Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don't quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!
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 here 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.
many victim impact statements about the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are harrowing.
some are not quite so harrowing
12extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:
anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?
he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshi's Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius
anyway, he's decided it's time to flip to the non-losing side
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430
(stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)
not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack
12Yesterday before bed I saw some galaxy-brained takes on PKM (personal knowledge management software) from a 7-day old account, and curiosity took over me. I was not disappointed. (sadly they deleted their account after I woke up: /u/Few-Elephant-2600 if you're bored and have moderator API access)
Since GPUs continuously generate large amounts of waste heat during AI training, could electric/GPU stoves utilize this unused thermal energy resource through on-demand tickets as distributed networks instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove? What are the scientific challenges?
Honey can you preheat the porn generator?
Maybe you could pair it with this accursed AI of Things Smart Oven. Fun quotes:
“Users aren’t aware of any of the oven’s learning processes,”
Ovens that learn from one another
Finally, I can experience Windows progress bars when baking potatoes:
The predictive model updates the remaining baking time every 30 seconds
11I’ve started noticing what might be described as “filler art” being done by AI. For example, while a local restaurant was being constructed, it had boards up to obscure the goings on with AI art on it- easily distinguished by bad hands, disturbing looking noodles, and amorphous blobs resembling, uh, more morphous blobs. I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to ruin the sanctity of my phone.
Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.
10Apparently there's a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and... solve cold fusion?
James: You can just 'feel' the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You're literally going to ask it to 'solve cold fusion' and walk away for 6 months.
...
Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?
Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.
10Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.
The halving will occur at block height 840,000 (a count of how many blocks have been hashed to the blockchain), and already people are predicting that will be the most valuable block to be mined to date. This is related to the point above: Ordinals works by assigning serial numbers to individual satoshis (or sats, the smallest denomination of BTC), which turns a fungible asset like bitcoin into something with provenance, identity and scarcity.
Tristan, the founder of Ordiscan.com, which tracks Ordinals projects, predicts that collectors of these “rare sats” could value the data in block 840,000 at $50 million dollars. Under the “Rodarmor Rarity” system, which assigns value to Bitcoin protocol events like difficulty adjustments and halvings, the first satoshi in the block alone could be worth upwards of $1 million, he wrote in a blog post.
They're turning
Bitcoinssatoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?9Someone on discord linked me to this AI generated horror-show of a "childrens" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nywBUSaHFgY (I hesitate to give them any more views, Internet Archive says youtube vids take a few days to process though)
Which appears to be a channel of entirely AI generated video paired to children's songs. And it is gosh darn creepy and gross and exploitive and unhealthy.
I hope youtube cracks down on shit like this.
8I've been hoping to post something about the wild mid-tournament apex legends hacks, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of sourcing beyond the videos of its consequences
8CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/
the website links to a "concept paper" which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that don't add up to much at all
such as these under "gamification";
Badges (NFTs), points, scores, rankings, etc.
Early education (elementary school levels) are easier to gamify. High school subjects become more difficult as the subject becomes more complex. Hopefully by then, the kids have developed enough learning habits to sustain their on-going learning.
or under "completely online"
There are some drawbacks to the online approach, such as lack of peer support, group learning, etc. We won’t be able to solve all problems. We will try to address some of these issues in later iterations.
Use AI & automation
Scalable
The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so there's at least some money there (?)
anyway, dodgy af
8Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.
Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304
'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929
This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217
[1] when a notable person in CS dies there's sometimes a black bar under the HN header
7CW: Palestine-Israel.
Something I’ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesn’t really surprise me, but that’s not what I’m commenting on.
One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israel’s use of “AI” in warfare. I’m only going to link one source and I’m not going into it too deeply.
So what I’m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.
To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said it’s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.
*of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.
6
