this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)

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[–] JFranek@awful.systems 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The promptfans testing OpenAI Sora have gotten mad that it's happening to them and (temporarily) leaked access to the API.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/artists-appears-to-have-leaked-access-to-openais-sora/

“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the [Sora early access] program for a $150B valued [sic] company,” the group, which calls itself “Sora PR Puppets,” wrote in a post ...

"Well, they didn't compensate actual artists, but surely they will compensate us."

“This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.”

OK, I could give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they're new to the GenAI space, or general ML Space ... or IT.

But I'm not going to. Of course it's about PR hype.

[–] mii@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago

I'd say lol but I'm like 72% sure this is straight out of the video game industry's playbook and very much intentional to create hype because everyone has forgotten this shit even exists.

Also, I'm still waiting for just one use case for video-generating autoplag that is, even in theory, not either morally reprehensible or outright criminal.

[–] self@awful.systems 16 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

the richest boy in the world sued to stop The Onion from turning infowars into a parody of itself on the grounds that he thinks infowars’ twitter accounts shouldn’t be transferred as part of the bankruptcy even though that’s something that happens constantly and also wouldn’t impact the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings even if it were grounded in anything resembling fact

Musk has also tweeted occasionally that he believes The Onion is not funny.

it’s getting really hard to adequately describe how funny musk isn’t. it’s not just try-hard shit like the weird sink thing, the soul-sucking cameos, or the fact that he’s literally throwing his money into stopping a comedy site from existing — it’s everything taken as a whole. I’d call him anti-comedy, but he’s so much less interesting than that implies

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago

The Onion clowns on Ol' Musky constantly, despite his efforts to shut them down. Around the peak space X buzz, they wrote a headline that was like "Musk invents the first infinitely divorceable wife", which he managed to scrub from the internet (or at least, I can't find it within 5 seconds), but other than that, he can only cope and seethe. He knows the onion is funny and can do nothing to become funny himself.

I would label him as anti-humor or humorless. Dishumorous?

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Musk is the most boring and pathetic kind of unfunny where he desperately wants to be in on the joke but is terrified that the joke is on him (because it is). Rather than accept this with any kind of humility he instead cannot accept the L and has basically spent all his vast money and power making that everyone else's problem.

He is the worst mad scientist, ranting about how they called him mad when what we actually said was "lol u mad bro?"

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 16 hours ago

after going closed-source, redis is now doing a matt and trying to use trademark to take control over community-run projects. stay tuned to the end of the linked github thread where somebody spots their endgame

this is becoming a real pattern, and it might deserve a longer analysis in the form of a blog post

[–] corbin@awful.systems 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

John "Animats" Nagle choosing the most racist angle possible to respond to problems in education. The topic is giftedness and yet Nagle needs to start with "Ashkenazi Jews".

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago

Wow, that starts bad and gets worse.

It starts with this quote, which is absolutely fine:

But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program.

Now for the expert analysis:

Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory.

Yes! This is true, following from the quote, as long as the thing that is "inherently" discriminated for is socioeconomic background. Of course, Animats immediately makes it about race.

[insert common race science stats here] There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.

AKA I disagree with the analysis and consensus that all this IQ stuff is socioeconomic rather than genetic.

(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)

Jesus fucking christ.

Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]

Nobody tell this guy that Gladwell is black.

Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.

I guarantee that in the not happening future where AI is smarter than humans, chuds like this guy will still be racist.

We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.

🙄🙄🙄

[–] mii@awful.systems 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

So there's apparently a memecoin site with the not-at-all suspicious name pump.fun and Coffeezilla made a video about it on his second channel.

Also: Epilepsy warning for that site. It's full of flashing colors and moving elements like late 90s Geocities.

I have no idea what the fuck is even going on there, but apparently people threaten to kill themselves or their animals if you don't invest in their shitcoin there, or run actual cockfights where they murder the chickens live on stream if the line doesn't go up.

[–] maol@awful.systems 2 points 2 hours ago

I click the link and the first thing I see is an Andrew Tate NFT. "Yikes" doesn't cover it

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (8 children)

This is completely off topic I think but I need you all to see this, it's important on a spiritual level

This map is infinitely sneerable, every region you look at is somehow worse than the previous one, regardless of the order in which you do that.

Tag yourself, I'm Cracked Coast, population 17.

[–] maol@awful.systems 2 points 2 hours ago

I'm scared of Big Ulster

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 9 points 20 hours ago

Ah yes Africa, the small country on the northern coast of Africa.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 4 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Kind of interested in the precise type of brainworms that result in Greece annexing Northern Epirus from Albania but think Thrace should be its own thing.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Unifying belgium and the Netherlands makes me think really bad things about the map designers. People who want that are either fools who dont know much about the region or white nationalist fascists. (They often also want SA included)

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

caucasus would be even bigger shitshow than it is now. no chechenia or ingushetia, but azerbaijan has now half of current armenian land + iranian province of the same name. that's weirdly specific and suspicious

Wait, do you mean new Armenia or Old Armenia? I'm not fluent in the region. But I'm sure Turkiye will be happy to surrender territory to Old Armenia after denying that whole affair for the last ~100 years.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

someone needs to stop paradox gamers from interfacing with the real world

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah people who make maps like this seem to miss the whole point, borders are rigid, populations are fluid. And even paradox games seem to understand this with various mechanics. (which then tend to take a bit of a genocidal undertone (see the 1 culture speedruns)). E: anyway, due to the massive population in the benelux (30m) and the relative small weak neighbors, this is the best start on this map).

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Isn't there a huge neo-nazi subculture around Paradox games, with weird mods and stuff?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

As a bit of a map painter, Paradox themselves nowadays takes a pretty anti neo-nazi stance. And most public places do so as well (this was a relatively recent change btw, people didn't seem to notice just how bad remove kebab memes etc were). There is sadly the general undertone of 'ironic' far right meme culture which is pervasive in gaming. So that will always be a problem. So neo-nazis not so much, but people making jokes about genocide, and the high risk of your fave content creator suddenly going some weird anti leftwing/culture war rant which makes it clear he (it is always a he) knows nothing yes very much. No idea how much of these people are crypto-fascists or not, as the rest of the space does seem welcoming to trans people and women. (this is my view of the general paradox gaming culture places I have been into, I'm not denying there are neo-nazi groups into paradox games, they just don't seem to be overt or liked vs the general edgelord gamer types).

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago

Thanks for expanding. I think every company that has a biggish community has to deal with nazi entryism.

This was the story I remembered about this

https://kotaku.com/the-struggle-over-gamers-who-use-mods-to-create-racist-1826606138

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There is no Poland, which unfortunately tracks, historically.

I can see Denmark having Scania now, which is what a lot of the more racist Scanians have wanted since forever. But you can't just split Sweden (Sverige, Svea Rike) into Sweden and Svealand, which isn't even historically correct (it's way too big).

Also Ulster being 50% of the island of Eire is gonna work out great.

Sweden/Svealand is one of many examples here of "where do you think the name came from?" for neighboring regions. My favorite example of this pattern is probably Finland, though. Helsinki is it's own thing, and we get both Finland and Finnmark. Truly outstanding.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I like how the Spanish coast is in Africa. Also, Kyiv and Helsinki are their own city-states (or autonomous post-state administrative zones or whatever) but Rome, London, Munich, etc. aren't.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 18 hours ago

You missed the most beautiful city-state of OSTBREST

[–] ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Why does the region around Armenia look so unchanged? Why is Transylvania in Ukraine? Italy becomes Romania, ok I've had enough

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Italy becomes Romania

Not to mention that Romania (unrelated to the modern country) was an endonym for the Constantinople-led eastern roman empire, basically Greek for Roman-land.

So yeah, the closer you look the wronger it gets.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

there are two transylvanias

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 22 hours ago

Only feed the Transylvania you want to become.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

To be fair there are lots of forests one can be on other side of in Eurasia...

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