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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • the sharing part of it is indeed the thing I give the fewest shits about tbh. things I care more about are software choices and longevity. so, for example, fuck anything js/php - by and large those tend to be unserious software that'll be a nightmare to run even now, and even worse in time

    I should probably do a bit of a sketchdown of the exact shape of my desires here, if for nothing else than giving direction to whatever I may have to write myself. a friend and I have been mutually grumping about this in chat for a while, because our wants are quite close but also just different enough to bounce ideas off each other

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    Post your IT redundancy tales here
  • it ..... it's really wild

    the vagueposting obscures a lot of detail

    "there is currently an ongoing murder case, soon to go to trial" is, well. yeah. that's a thing.

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • fair 'nuff

    I keep finding myself in a position of thinking "bah imma have to write this myself, aren't I", because nothing I've found as yet actually works the way I want things to work :|

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • what are you folks doing for/with bookmarking? I've killed my usage of pinboard because I learned the dude's going off the deep end

    already found a couple of the link* flavoured open source things, but looking for some practical/lived feedback

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • haven't really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is "not enough counter-friction left". foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing

    I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago

    not that the above guess eliminates the thing you're pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the "why has this suddenly accelerated so much" angle

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • the sum total of luxury ZA coiners’ mettle was measured, and it was found to be extremely lukewarm

    that’s about 60k usd raw. PPI-equiv would be a bit higher (we have really cheap goods compared to US/UK), but I laugh at this number

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    "The Subprime AI Crisis" - Ed Zitron on the bubble's impending collapse
  • ah yes, thanks for that extremely valuable driveby input that you gave after someone most definitely was speaking directly to you

    oh, wait. hang on. sorry, I just checked my notes here. it's the other thing, the opposite one.

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    OpenAI does not want you delving into o1 Strawberry’s alleged “chain of thought”
  • the other thing about this that's often come to mind for me is that the "who" picked in such things tends to be telling of the speaker, and of their perception of "impenetrable"

    relatedly, a somewhat common phrase around this side of the world is/was "it's greek to me". I don't know the history of why it came into public lexicon around here (whether it was imported or grew locally), but been curious.

    which leads to my sidebar and sneer: it'd be nice if it were easier to research things like this, and good god the modern internet makes it hard to do that. holy fuck what a tsunami of dogshit. and then fucking LLMs and openai come around, going "HOLD MY BEER". le sigh.

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    "The Subprime AI Crisis" - Ed Zitron on the bubble's impending collapse
  • who doesn't like a good old wordless driveby post making no statement of intent and giving no direction

    I swear, some days I feel like some of these people mumble "hail eris" as they wander past

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • I believe the term is not so much meant to convey properties of science upon them as to describe the particular strain of racist shitbaggery (which dresses itself in appears-science, much like what happens in/with scientism)

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    AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses
  • I could swear I’ve seen a shartup with this pitch

    will try check tomorrow, rn I’m enjoying the sounds of the first thunderstorm of the season

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  • www.prnewswire.com K1 Acquires MariaDB, a Leading Database Software Company, and Appoints New CEO

    /PRNewswire/ -- K1 Investment Management, LLC ("K1"), one of the largest investors in small-cap enterprise software companies, today announced the completion...

    I will say I'm not much of a fan of mysqls but uhhhhh this seems bad

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    chipsandcheese.com Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy

    Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike a…

    saw this kicking around on the lobsters frontpage

    > IBM also includes a DPU for accelerating IO, along with an on-board AI accelerator

    ah yes. an AI accelerator. for a chip that goes into a system that'll quite possibly have a lifespan measured in decade-partials. in environments so extremely up to date with the bleeding edge of technology that they are absolutely not losing their programmers to retirement. an AI acceleator for that. makes total sense.

    imagine being the poor engineers who had to spec that out, design it, and get it actually existing. nevermind even the awe-inspiringly stunning disregard to reality that it takes for some management fuckhead(s) to have "steered" this

    > Funny enough, I asked why IBM had different terminology compared to the rest of the industry. They said IBM came up with the terminology first, and later on the industry adopted different terminology. It was all lighthearted and funny.

    ah yes! funny! haha. not at all some weird insular shit from the same company that runs a worlds-apart platform with a control grip so strong it makes larry ellison check if they're infringing on anything actionable...

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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.

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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.

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    jordaneldredge.com The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins

    I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes

    found this kicking around on one of the feeder sites a few days ago and only got to read it now

    kinda neat. it's the sort of thing that you used to find quite a lot with keygens and other things prone to easter eggs, and that I don't really know of being as prevalent in more recent gaming and such

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    Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

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    www.coindesk.com Mass Adoption Would Ruin Crypto. Keep It a Niche

    There is an unavoidable tension between the aims of decentralization and onboarding everyday users.

    there is some strong copium in the article, combined with a total description of having a massive gambling addiction without, y’know, actually realising it’s an addiction

    remarkable stuff

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    theconversation.com AI chatbots are intruding into online communities where people are trying to connect with other humans

    People participate in online communities to share experiences and sympathy. AI chatbots that join the conversation can only pretend to offer either.

    there are some remarkable instances of bad behaviour in there already, but imagine being the sort of product team that thinks users being gaslit by a chatbot that they couldn’t even consent to choose to use is totes something to deliver without any modification or remark

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    this time in open letter format! that'll sure do it!

    there are "risks", which they are definite about - the risks are not hypothetical, the risks are real! it's totes even had some acknowledgement in other places! totes real defs for sure this time guize

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    Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? 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 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.

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    since I haven't touched AP before (and figure other possible contributors may not have either), going to use this post as wayfarer bathroom graffiti

    feel free to contribute your own learning and investigation as well

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    It’s been a long couple of years with people going hard on building all their communications on the gamer chat company, disregarding all warnings and concerns because of shiny creature comforts

    Soon: “we trusted you! We moved from slack to you! 😭”

    Guess it’s only a handful of months before the tortured handwringing starts?

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    fortune.com Is AI the new crypto? DeepMind cofounder says ‘hype’ and ‘grifting’ threaten the emerging sector

    The surge in venture funding and public excitement has DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis thinking about crypto parallels.

    Unfortunately I can’t snip from mobile easily now, but maybe someone else can archive it and comment with archive link?

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    thebaffler.com The Miseducation of Kara Swisher | Edward Ongweso Jr.

    Kara Swisher made a career of dumbing down tech reporting and criticism. She’s a little sorry!

    Too tired to sneer at the book myself right now but the article doesn’t pull punches either

    Figured it’s worth posting since the book author has featured here more than once recently and has definitely been an enabler to The Shit

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    github.com GitHub - 9001/r0c: retr0chat telnet server

    retr0chat telnet server. Contribute to 9001/r0c development by creating an account on GitHub.

    found via someone running a server at revision

    retro fun. quite slick, too!

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    Not entirely the usual fare, but i figured some here would appreciate it

    I often rag on the js/node/npm ecosystem for being utter garbage, and this post is a quite a full demonstration of many of the shortcomings and outright total design failures present in that space

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    Invite up at https://2024.revision-party.net/blog/04-invitation/

    ~2 weekends away (who cares about the week)

    Prepare for watching mathematical black magic!

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    www.maximumtruth.org Top AIs still fail IQ tests

    Maybe we have some time before AIs conquer the world

    starting out[0] with "I was surprised by the following results" and it just goes further down almost-but-not-quite Getting It Avenue

    close, but certainly no cigar

    choice quotes:

    > > Why is it impressive that a model trained on internet text full of random facts happens to have a lot of random facts memorized? … why does that in any way indicate intelligence or creativity?

    > That’s a good point.

    you don't fucking say

    > I have a website (TrackingAI.org) that already administers a political survey to AIs every day. So I could easily give the AIs a real intelligence test, and track that over time, too.

    really, how?

    > As I started manually giving AIs IQ tests

    oh.

    > Then it proceeds to mis-identify every single one of the 6 answer options, leading it to pick the wrong answer. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to its misidentifications

    if this fuckwit had even the slightest fucking understanding of how these things work, it would be glaringly obvious

    there's plenty more, so remember to practice stretching before you start your eyerolls

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    [shitpost?] [idea] a “days since” counter

    One for the sidebar, in the spirit of incident-day-free counters[0], tracking how many days since the last time there was a dipshitted thing from the tescrealtors

    Could do it with flap-counter or nixie-clock numbers for a bit of feel?

    [0] - is this an insensitive idea? I know the counters tend to form part of safety culture and their reset indicates harm, but those clowns are exactly dangerous, so..

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    blog.google Introducing Gemini: our largest and most capable AI model

    Gemini is our most capable and general model, built to be multimodal and optimized for three different sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano.

    [open scene]

    > background: a brightly lit airy Social Gathering space with multicoloured furniture (meeting rooms are so 2010). people have been arriving in clumps of 2~5 for over 30 minutes, and the presentation can start soon

    sundar: I want to thank you all for coming. this one should be quick today.

    * sundar briefly sweeps his eyes across the room before continuing *

    sundar: guys! GUYS! we made the prompt VIDEO CAPABLE! it can follow A STREAMING SEQUENCE OF IMAGES!! you can immediately start testing this from your corporate account (whispers if you're in the right orgs). for the public scoff, we'll start with Ask Us pricing in a few months, and we'll force it on the usual product avenues. the office and mail suites stand ready to roll out the integration updates before anyone can ask. you know how the riffraff gets....

    * some motion and noise in the back *

    sundar: ... sorry melanie, what's that? speak up melanie I can't hear your question. you know how much that mask muffles your voice...

    * a game of broken telephone for moving a handheld microphone to the back of the room ensues *

    melanie: hi sundar, congratulations to the team for their achievement. I wanted to ask: how does gemini pro solve the issues other models have faced? what new innovations have been accomplished? how is it dealing with the usual issues of correctness, energy consumption, cultural contexts? how is it trained on areas where no datasets exist? were any results sourced from cooperation with the AI ethics and responsibility workgroups that have found so many holes in our previous models?

    sundar: * smiles brightly, stares directly into middle of crowd. moves hand to the electronic shutter control, and starts pressing the increase button multiple times until shutter is entirely opaque *

    [sundar walks off into the fake sunset, breaks open the boardroom whiskey]

    [inside the private exec room]

    sundar: FUCK! that was too close. didn't we fire those types already in the last layoffs...? someone get me HR, we need to do something

    [end scene]

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