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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Aw man, Natasha Lyonne is going AI. Notably she is partnering with a company, Moonvalley, that claims to have developed an āethicalā model, Marey, trained on ācleanā data- i.e. data that is owned or licensed by Moonvalley and whoever else they are partnering with.
I mean I appreciate the attempt to mitigate one of the many problems with genAI, but I would expect the smaller dataset to make a model that confabulates even more and is gonna be even harder to work with than something like Sora. Like, Iām sure a decent director will be able to make something with it but I canāt see how itās going to be better results or more time/money/labor efficient than human VFX pipelines even if you pay the poor bastards decently.
And thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the āno longer interested in Season 2ā pile, but for different reasons.
The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on āa teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.ā
So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.
Update on the University of Zurichās AI experiment: Redditās considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
In terms of depreciating assets, an AI data center is worse than a boat.
In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.
so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school itās the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
Iāve been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
I like Babbel. Itās not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
Unfortunately, Babbel has slop integration too.
no idea, sorry. āfind some wordpals onlineā maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
itās just so fucking frustrating
after Iāve previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have āchat to a buddyā as a non-skipable step in course iteration
the ābuddyā is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions āMemBot - powered by AIā at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but thatās a dead link
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Canāt avoid slop reading translated books, canāt learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. Itās the microplastics of the internet age.
Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Not-so-fun fact: thatās a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using whatās called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customerās TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customerās TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasnāt even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no oneās surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators theyād had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
Iāve logged a support ticket.
Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just donāt work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyoneās done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on ācorrectingā my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
On the (slim) upside, itās an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably itās more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). Iāve had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibriumā¦ sometimes itās still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.
Ecosa? The australian mattress in a box company?? (jk)
Apparently they offer an AI chatbot alongside their services, soā¦
the shunning is working guys
āKicked out of a ā¦ group chatā is a peculiar definition of āoffline consequencesā.
āThe first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media postā- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
I have no idea where he stood on the bullshit bad faith free speech debate from the past decade, but this would be funny if he was an anti cancel culture guy. More things, weird bubble he lives in if the other things didnāt get pushed back, and support for the pro trans (and pro Palestine) movements. He is right on the immigration bit however, the dems should move more left on the subject. Also āBlutarskyā and I worried my references are dated, that is older than I am.
heās a centrist econ blogger whoās been getting into light race science
And he is brave enough to say that:
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There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.
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Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.
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Trans people are not people.
Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.
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Five Things the āNuclear Brosā Donāt Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
sinks like a pellet of uranium on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43825285
edit flagged and dead
Still sad the SMRs will not work out but good you posted it here. Lol at the HN guy going āthese are strawmenā, buddy you build websites perhaps the guy in the field (with a physics phd) knows a little bit more.
Less a standard piece and more āEd Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutesā this time around
Said revenue estimates, as of 2026, include billions of dollars of ānew productsā that include āfree user monetization.ā
If you are wondering what that means, I have no idea. The Information does not explain.
Probably something to do with their recent ramblings about getting an openai social network off the ground.
throwback uni game!
Edit:
From the article: I apologize, this is going to be a little less reserved than usual.
From: The Sentry Team <noreply@sentry.io> Subject: Update to Sentryās List of Subprocessors ... - Google LLC (Google Cloud Services) and OpenAI, L.L.C. are now reflected as subprocessors for all Sentry products, instead of select features only; and - Anthropic, PBC is now added as a subprocessor.sigh
they do still have user-specified controls (and appear to respect them), butā¦ sigh
Couple of days late but when your ideology is so pure, you canāt connect The Thing to The Consequences of The Thing. The solution? Monetize the rot!
Check quotes and replies for quality sneers (and more sneerable content)
These people probably think Karl Marx is Satan, but my god at least he was able to understand and respect Adam Smith better than whoeverās trying to magick wealth out of this absolute idiot soup! Looks like capitalism the ideology is just as unsustainable as capitalism the economic system.
That Michael Kove guy is one un-self-aware twat. Apparently all millennials work in high paying tech jobs.
āThe millenials were so well paid in tech jobs during the boom that they nevered bothered to invest in homesā is ā¦ a take
Gonna copy this in because thereās a lot to unpack, and I donāt want to do it alone.
Text of the Thielmail in that first tweet:
From: Peter Thiel Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen Subject: RE: Milennials There are many themes that could be developed more here; let me make a few quick points for now: Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.- Part of me wishes that the font were just a little bigger. This way, the word wrap would come to 10 syllables a line, and we could pretend this was a lost Shakespeare monologue.
- Iām almost disappointed by this. Thiel, suggesting that it might not, in fact, be the children that are wrong? Whereās your ideological purity, Thiel? Didnāt know you started reading r/GenZedong.
- Also, itās Peter fucking Thiel lecturing Nick fucking Clegg, former leader of the lib dems in the UK, on paying lip service to socialist policy in order to stymie any real societal progress???
Not gonna lie got a bit jump scared by woke Peter Thiel here. Of course Iām pretty sure his actual solution involves giving young people houses confiscated from those perfidious brown people of one stripe or another. The problem canāt be an inherent injustice in a system that allows for both Peters Thiel and (insert your favorite broke person here) to exist in the same market.
Huh, I had missed the part in 2020 when Peter Thiel just flat out stated outright that it only makes sense to be in favour of capitalism if youāre a capital owner.
A whole generation is leaning more socialist because homeownership is unattainable and student debt is crushing. The solution is whatever is the latest big tech fad.
Just like all of gen Xās problems would have been solved with more .com, right?
which reminds me, Iāve wanted to post this as a NASB
The replies are a long sequence of different stupid takesā¦ someone recommending cryptocurrency to build wealth, blaming millennials for not investing in homes, a reply literally blaming too much spending on starbucks, blaming millennials overreacting to the 2008 crisis by not buying homes, blaming millennials being socialists, blaming millennials going to college, blaming millennials for not making the big bucks in tech. About 1 in 10 replies point out the real causes: wages have not grown with costs or with real productivity and capitalism in general favors people holding assets and offering loans over people that have to borrow and rent.
Iām a Millenial (even if I think these labels are dumb) and I find these kinds of things fascinating. Esp when they describe things I do not recognize in any way in my peers, re them talking about the causes of people disliking capitalism. Sure Iām in a more progressive/leftwing bubble (of which Iām prob the most extreme nowadays in various ways), but I know a lot of people who are looking into buying houses/have bought houses who still are not fans of musk/tesla etc. Seems like they forget people can have principles, and just look at a simplistic view of āmaterial conditionsā (I hope people paid attention to the recent bsky shit on what this actually means in historical context). Flashbacks to r/ssc talking about āleftwing polticians not thinking about Xā while the leftwing politicans I knew irl were actively talking about it. Feels very like im looking at an alternative world. (Prob also quite true as im Dutch, and this is about the US (with right wing fan fave Poland having a honorable mention)).
Do think it is amusing Millenials get blamed for everything still. The punching bag generation. Poor Gen Z, for which this is now starting up.
I will never forget a conversation in High School where our resident young conservative sneered about how āsure $Welfare_Program sound nice, but youāll be paying for it with your taxesā and we all responded with some variant of āI mean, yeah? Thatās how that works, isnāt it?ā
Image description:
A tweet from āMikeā: āBernie Sanders should be forced to give away 90% of his birthday cake #HappyBirthdayBernieā
Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.
The insistence on blipping out anything even vaguely sexual (like the word orgasm) to appease the kami of the algorithm is really off putting after a while.
I thought he might be doing a bit but it doesnāt feel like it. Also he speaks like old comic word balloons where they would randomly bold every third noun to show intensity.
OT: does anyone else get David and David Gerrold confused all the time?
Also Iām in Viljandi!
