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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing

    https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3

    Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it's a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • The 1911 is Murican, not some Italian crap

    /s obviously, Italian gunmakers are very good.

    Also it's really weird how there's a ton of small-business innovation in American gun gear, but the only ones who seem to be making money are European companies?

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    "The Subprime AI Crisis" - Ed Zitron on the bubble's impending collapse
  • "AI, please summarize this LW"

    "Certainly. Here is the summary: give all your money to Yud or burn in virtual hell forevermore"

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    "The Subprime AI Crisis" - Ed Zitron on the bubble's impending collapse
  • JFC how many novel-length emails do you get in a week?

    I think a more constructive way to handle this problem is to train people to write better emails.

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • They suck at technical explanations too, unless it's a Wikipedia link.

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    AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses
  • Sounds like a great solution people will be prepared to pay OpenAI $100B in the future for, and not at all like an incremental upgrade over StackOverflow with extra ecocide added.

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    Post your IT redundancy tales here
  • This was before I was made redundant ,which happened for unrelated reasons and was ok.

    I worked at a startup. Before I started, the company had an NT server running Exchange, which contained all customer relationship data, emails etc. The box was also a fileserver. One day, space was running out. The "admins" (== developers who only knew Linux) solved the problem by deleting all the "*.log" files cluttering up the filesystem, thereby effectively lobotomizing Exchange.

    After some weeks a highly-paid consultant gave up. The company needed a new email server.

    The devs decided to use qmail, because "secure". To translate between the firstname.lastname@company.com address to the firstname_lastname directory, a Perl script was inserted between qmail and the mailboxes. As time went by, this Perl script metastized to include email renames and even out of office replies. It grew to ~300 lines and was run on every single email that arrived.

    After a while we got acquired by grownups who knew how to manage Exchange. I discovered that if an email was misplet, it wasn't bounced, instead it was forwarded to root's email account, which was a couple of gigs in size.

    I swore to never touch email administration again.

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    AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses
  • Programmers hate programming and love code reviewing, right? Right?

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • I almost made it but couldn't be arsed to replicate the explanation text

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    Strawberry fields forever — OpenAI’s new ‘o1’ model
  • Was hoping to talk about it but i dont think im going to find that here.

    If only you'd asked ChatGPT "is awful.systems a good place to fellate LLMs"

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
  • You just might be a techbro if you're worth billions and still can't resist mouthing off on Xhitter.

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    In a rare moment, the orange site asks where the emperor's clothes are
  • GPT-4o got a whole lot closer to realism though- I’d say we’re better than Skyrim’s pre recorded speech system at this point.

    Wow, better than a game released in 2011...

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    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
  • Saw this gem of a plaintive plea from a promptfan:

    can’t you just train a LLM to only output “sorry, I can’t answer your question”?

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  • protos.com Bitfinex hacker Razzlekhan was job hunting at Bitcoin 2024

    Razzlekhan, who conspired to launder tens of thousands of bitcoin, told attendees she was searching for work as a crypto consultant.

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    www.web3isgoinggreat.com Martin Shkreli claims to have been behind a Donald Trump memecoin

    After Arkham Intelligence announced a $150,000 bounty for anyone who could prove the identity of the person behind a Donald Trump memecoin called $DJT, blockchain sleuth zachxbt quickly rose to the occasion. He submitted evidence that Martin Shkreli, the "pharma bro" who spent years in federal priso...

    This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

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    www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com Ross Ulbricht - Lawyers, Guns & Money

    Trump: Donald Trump promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online illegal drug marketplace Silk Road, in a raucous speech before the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday night. “And if you vote for me, on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,” t...

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    www.404media.co Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher

    “The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” the founder of Bards and Sages said.

    > “It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

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    time.com U.S. Must Act Quickly to Avoid Risks From AI, Report Says

    The U.S. government must move “decisively” to avert an “extinction-level threat" to humanity from AI, says a government-commissioned report

    The grifters in question:

    > Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

    Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

    Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

    The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

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    https:// news.ycombinator.com /item

    HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

    Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

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    www.theverge.com Elon Musk’s legal case against OpenAI is hilariously bad

    Elon Musk’s greatest legacy will be as a provider of inane law school exam hypotheticals.

    Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.

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    www.theregister.com Developer of Dean Phillips bot suspended by OpenAI

    Biden's challenger model shot down despite super PAC support

    Apologies for the link to The Register...

    Dean Phillips is your classic ratfucking candidate, attempting to siphon off support from the incumbent to help their opponent. After a brief flare of hype before the (unofficial) NH primary, he seems to have flamed out by revealing his master plan too early.

    Anyway, apparently some outfit called "Delphi" tried to create an AI version of him via a SuperPAC and got their OpenAI API access banned for their pains.

    Quoth ElReg:

    > Not even the presence of Matt Krisiloff, a founding member of OpenAI, at the head of the PAC made a difference.

    > The pair have reportedly raised millions for We Deserve Better, driven in part by a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who described his funding of the super PAC as "the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office."

    So the same asshole who is combating "woke" and DEI is bankrolling Phillips, supposed to be the new Bernie. Got it.

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    [SOLVED] cannot login using mobile Firefox

    Anyone else have this problem? It’s been bothering me for a while and is the last thing keeping me using mobile Chrome.

    On the login page , after entering username and password, the “login” button does nothing. It might slightly change color but I am not directed to the site logged in, nor do I get an error.

    platform: iOS

    The username and password are entered automatically via either Firefox’s password store, or iOS’.

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    Years ago (we're talking decades) I ran into a small program that randomly generated raytraced images (think transparent orbs, lens flares, reflection etc), suitable for saving as wallpapers. It was a C/C++ program that ran on Linux. I've long since lost the name and the source code, and I wonder if there's anything like that out there now?

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    Rules: no spoilers.

    The other rules are made up as we go along.

    Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.

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    The wider community is still on Reddit, I wonder if there’s an interest to have a small alternative?

    If not, what’s a good Lemmy instance for these things?

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    www.astralcodexten.com In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism

    "All you do is cause boardroom drama, and maybe some other things I’m forgetting..."

    In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote

    > For the OG effective altruists, it’s imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.

    Looks like great minds think alike! The EA's need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!

    The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence

    > I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.

    What's the German term for a recommendation that's the exact opposite?

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    [this is probably off-topic for this forum, but I found it on HN so...]

    Edit "enjoy" the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233810

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    arstechnica.com AI fever turns Anguilla’s “.ai” domain into a digital gold mine

    Tiny island country could rake in 10% of its GDP in domain sales this year.

    Title quote stolen from JZW: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/10/the-best-way-to-profit-from-ai/

    Yet again, the best way to profit from a gold rush is to sell shovels.

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