this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023

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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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we had the misfortune of having to write up Sam Altman's adventures with the real Paperclip Maximiser (amycastor.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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[–] self@awful.systems 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced early on Monday morning that Microsoft would be starting its own AI unit — with Sam at the helm. Microsoft would also hire Greg Brockman, the former OpenAI president who was also booted from the board and quit his job in solidarity with Sam.

yall remember all those fucking weirdos who appeared around when windows 10 released and couldn’t stop talking about how Microsoft isn’t evil anymore, it’s a different company now that they contribute code to linux and own GitHub? I wonder if any of those fuckers are even aware that this is Microsoft trying to own the entire open source theft and consent violation machine outright.

At OpenAI’s 2022 holiday party, held at the California Academy of Sciences, Sutskever led employees in a chant: “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” The phrase itself was popular enough that OpenAI employees created a special “Feel the AGI” reaction emoji in Slack.

fucking cringe. my disappointment is only magnified by the fact that Sutskever seems to have gone back to bootlicking for Sam in record time. I want to see the worst people I know viciously fight until everything they’ve built is gone, for fuck’s sake

[+] gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

nah, there’s nothing selfish about that. it’s fucking embarrassing how bad Linux is with accessibility, especially when the distro model gives it the ability to specialize an entire OS around those kinds of concerns from the ground up. I’ve also stopped hearing good things about macOS for accessibility, which doesn’t feel like a good sign.

how has GitHub been for accessibility since the recent changes they’ve made? I’ve had a lot of trouble with them aggressively fucking with my browser’s keyboard navigation bindings, but if there are accessibility benefits to what they’re doing then I can’t be too critical of the effort

[–] anyhow2503@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it’s fucking embarrassing how bad Linux is with accessibility

It's not. It's entirely to be expected, because the focus of the vast majority of kernel development was not desktop usage. Gnome honestly has become quite good at implementing accessibility concerns and they take advantage of the desktop environment philosophy to do that, which seems to be what you expect distro developers to do.

Of course, if by "accessible" you mean "like Windows" since that is the most popular desktop by far, then everything that's not Windows is going to suck for your usecase.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Explaining why it's bad doesn't really excuse it.

Here's a semi-related rant where one of the developers of Darktable finally lost it and launched his own damn app: https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralenti/

UX/a11y is a specialized skill, which might look easy to pick up from the outside, or is dismissed as "soft" by hardcore C hackers, but if you don't think deeply about it or listen to those that know their shit, you get situations where the color of the clock in the dock is almost indistinguishable from the background (yes this has happened to me, and no, I don't want to learn how to fix it), or how you can literally lose image information because "user choice" (==being able to reorder modules just they way you like them) is seen as more important than enforcing correct usage.

[–] anyhow2503@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Explaining why it's bad doesn't really excuse it.

No, but it does explain it. There's nothing to excuse in the complete abscence of any promises.

I also explained why it's not all bad, so unless you have semi-recently used a desktop environment that tries to be accessible instead of catering to power users, then maybe you wouldn't dismiss my comment with an unrelated rant about Darktable's UI and C-nile Unix greybeards reordering their modules every couple minutes. Believe me, I understand the frustration of nearly every app UI being a thoughtless mess, but you're acting like big-FOSS sold you Linux™ - the Desktop OS under the pretense of it being an accessible interface for even the most casual computer user.

I can rant all day too about Windows UI design inconsistencies if you want, like the most basic settings being split across 2-3 different generations of UI design in 2-3 separate levels of "basic" to "advanced" which you navigate to by clicking really inconspicuous blue lines of text, which are randomly placed on the bottom of a dialog page or in a sidebar to the right.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My experience is with whatever Gnome-centered desktop ships with Ubuntu. It's on a headless box that I shut off today for ¤reasons, so I have no clue what it's called.

And thank god I am hale and hearty and sighted and a nerd, and it's not my daily driver, so I have not yet been cut to ribbons on the sharp edges. I do however have a blind partner, whom I know better than to try to impose Linux on. Her daily experience with the shit webdev/mobdev pumps out daily is not good, so yeah, there's plenty of blame to go around.

[–] anyhow2503@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My experience is with whatever Gnome-centered desktop ships with Ubuntu. It's on a headless box that I shut off today for ¤reasons, so I have no clue what it's called.

I have no idea what Canonical calls it either. It's basically just a skin that makes Gnome look a bit more shit as far as I can tell.

Her daily experience with the shit webdev/mobdev pumps out daily is not good

I thought this was about C-niles, but apparently all mobile and web devs are shit as well. I'm sure that random mobile and web apps are somehow very relevant to Linux DEs being accessible or not, but since you already "know better", there's no need to discuss this further really.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Accessibility is shit everywhere, much like Linux reply guys apparently.

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

behind almost every shit linux design decision, there’s a handful of reply guys with nothing but the time and energy to defend it to the death, to the detriment of everyone involved

[+] gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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[–] anyhow2503@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, your Windows user experience is super relevant to the point about Linux desktop environments being accessible or not.

And this whole thread started when I was expressing fear that AI-mania was overwhelming all of Microsoft’s prior first order concerns.

This discussion was started by me after someone called the Linux desktop accessibility a "fucking embrassment" and I responded very clearly to that specific point. I'm not interested in scoring imaginary points in some misguided attempt to treat comment sections like a team fight for/against the linked article or whatever.

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

holy fuck shut the fuck up

as always, the most fucking embarrassing part of linux is the reply guys

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago

in a weird way, they demonstrated my point for me — I’d fucking hate linux if all I could use was a shitty version of my least favorite desktop environment, with no real ability to customize anything or even drop into a vt to fix it when it breaks

and why in fuck is gnome of all things the layer where any of this shit gets implemented? why (other than the functionality being a bad clone of what windows and macOS have) is a desktop and mouse considered ideal for accessibility? there are a wide array of accessibility needs but the Land of a Thousand Tiling Window Managers has decided that windows but shitty is the only achievable goal

and fuck me I guess for implying that maybe the distro system could be a great way to have these needs met out of the box? nah distros can only ship yet another shitty identical package manager and your choice of gnome or KDE, cause linux reply guys are actually fucking terrible at linux and can’t function in it unless it’s actually just windows

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I browse comments by new so somehow missed they’d necro’d a week old thread ffs. Gonna be more discriminating in the future.

[–] self@awful.systems 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that is absolutely one of the tactics shit reply guys use to avoid moderation, so don’t be hard on yourself (also check their post history, reply guying is basically all they do on their suspiciously fresh account)

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

One of the more disturbing things that happened at work when using MS Word, was the automatic addition of alt-text images. I didn't ask for that, I didn't click any "Please send my images to the cloud, possibly leaking sensitve material, so inference can be run there, to add potentially unhelpful descriptions"

Is document editing really a task that benefits from AI?

An example of unhelpfulness:

I'm torn between at almost praising meek half-assed attempt at accessibility, and shrieking to the heavens about this unweclome shoe-horned addition.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Microsoft's goal is to have the monopoly on something they sell to enterprise. Windows and Office are still going strong, but there's always more monopolies out there.

[–] maol@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago

This website perpetually relevant

If Bill Gates really wants to reduce the dangers of climate change, he should call up his old company and ask them to pull back from the massively energy-intensive, socially useless AI boondoggle......

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

Whelp, looks like the wild-eyed non-profit AGI doomers were overruled by the Lords of Capital, as foretold. If this is the key to the robot god being created and enslaving us all, it is no more than fitting. Marx was wrong: the end stage of capitalism is a paperclip maximizer.