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.)
I suspect that the backdoor attempt to prevent state regulation on literally anything that the federal government spends any money on by extending the Volker rule well past the point of credulity wasnāt an unintended consequence of this strategy.
The latest in chatbot āassistedā legal filings. This time courtesy of an Anthropicās lawyers and a data scientist, who tragically canāt afford software that supports formatting legal citations and have to rely on Clippy instead: https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-filing-citation-error
After the Latham & Watkins team identified the source as potential additional support for Ms. Chenās testimony, I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article. Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error. Our citation check also missed additional wording errors introduced in the citations during the formatting process using Claude.ai.
Donāt get high on your own AI as they say.
A quick Google turned up bluebook citations from all the services that these people should have used to get through high school and undergrad. There may have been some copyright drama in the past but I would expect the court to be far more forgiving of a formatting error from a dumb tool than the outright fabrication that GenAI engages in.
I wonder how many of these people will do a Very Sudden opinion reversal once these headwinds wind disappear
Movie script idea:
Idiocracy reboot, but its about ai brainrot instead of eugenics.
Ai is part of Idiocracy. The automatic layoffs machine. For example. And do not think we need more utopian movies like Idiocracy.
Trying to remember who said it, but thereās a Mastodon thread somewhere that said it should be called Theocracy. The introduction would talk about the quiverfull movement, the Costco would become a megachurch (āWelcome to church. Jesus loves you.ā), etc. It sounds straightforward and depressing.
I can see that working.
The basic conceit of Idiocracy is that its a dystopia run by complete and utter morons, and with AIās brain-rotting effects being quite well known, swapping the original plotlineās eugenicist ādumb outbreeding the smartā setup with an overtly anti-AI āAI turned humanity dumbā setup should be a cakewalk. Given public sentiment regarding AI is pretty strongly negative, it should also be easy to sell to the public.
nazi bar owner tinkers with techfash bot trying to vibecode a nazi service on nazi network and gets his crypto stolen https://awful.systems/post/4364989
(this fucker is responsible for soapbox, which is frontend used almost invariably by nazi-packed pleroma instances. among other crimes of similar nature)
Chad move: doing jumping jacks\star jumps in a mine field
all while your fellow minefield-walkers will sell your leftover organs for profit
(also some comments donāt federate in that linked thread)
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if you saw that post making its rounds in the more susceptible parts of tech mastodon about how AIās energy use isnāt that bad actually, hereās an excellent post tearing into it. predictably, the original post used a bunch of LWer tricks to replace numbers with vibes in an effort to minimize the damage being done by the slop machines currently being powered by such things as 35 illegal gas turbines, coal, and bespoke nuclear plants, with plans on the table to quickly renovate old nuclear plants to meet the energy demand. but sure, Iām certain that can be ignored because hey look over your shoulder is that AGI in a funny hat?
I argue that we shouldnāt be tolerant of sloppy factual claims, let alone lies and disinformation, but we also need to keep perspective: itās worth opposing fascists even if they donāt pollute that much, and itās worth protecting labor even if the externalities of doing so are fairly negligible. That is, Iāll warrant, a somewhat subtle and nuanced position, but hey. This is my blog, so I get to have opinions that take more than a sentence or two to express!
Apparently we live in a world where ālying and Nazis are both bad, and Nazi liars are the worstā is a nuanced and subtle position. Sneers directed at society rather than the writer, but it was just a big oof moment.
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Quick update on the Conover Catastrophe: the manās making an attempt to recover his dignity:
I donāt think announcing heās āgenuinely gratefulā to his newly earned dogpile is helping recover his dignity too much. A simple admission and apology suffice, I donāt need you to go āthank you daddy punish me moreā while at it.
I will be watching with great interest. itās going to be difficult to pull out of this one, but I figure he deserves as fair a swing at redemption as any recovered crypto gambler. but like with a problem gambler in recovery, itās very important that the intent to do better is backed up by understanding, transparency, and action.
In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a āconversational AIā to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).
To nobodyās surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.
Epic announced that it had pushed a hotfix to address Vaderās unfortunate profanity, saying āthis shouldnāt happen again.ā
Translator: āWe are altering the prompt. We pray that we donāt have to alter it further.ā
Ghoul shit on ghoul shit
Satya Nadella: āIām an email typist.ā
Grand Inquisitor: āHE ADMITS IT!ā
https://bsky.app/profile/reckless.bsky.social/post/3lpazsmm7js2s
If CEOs start making all their decisions through spicy autocomplete we can directly influence their actions by injecting tailored information into the training data. On an unrelated note Potassium cyanide makes for a great healthy smoothie ingredient for business men over 50.
@e8d79
I think itās time to start writing how labor unions are good and get as much of that into the ecosystem. Connect them not just with the actual good things they do. But connect them with other absurd things. Male virility, living longer, better golf scores, etc.Letās get some papers published in open access business journals about how LLMs perform 472% more efficiently when developed and operated by union members.
@o7___o7May Day = Leg Day!
The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. Iāll let Dr. Abeba Birhaneās horrified reaction do the talking:
this just started and iām already losing my mind and screaming
Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan ā literally interacting with it as if it is a āwoman that fled to chad from sudanā
just fucking shoot me
Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.
The stages of genocide:
- Classification
- Symbolization
- Dehumanization
- Discrimination
- Organization
- Polarization
- Preparation
- Persecuted
- Extermination
- Denial
AI is the perfect vehicle for genocide
https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
The oil industry estimates 1 billion famine deaths from climate change & they are flooding AI with investment
āThe devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machinesā
Frank Herbert@BlueMonday1984 If Edward Said were still with us, this would be worth another chapter in Orientalism. Itās another instance of displacing actual people with a constructed fantasy of them, āotheringā them.
Uber but for vitrue signalling (*).
(I joke, because other remarks I want to make will get me in trouble).
*: I know this term is very RW coded, but I donāt think it is that bad, esp when you mean it like āan empty gesture with a very low cost that does nothing except for signal that the person is virtuous.ā Not actually doing more than a very small minimum should be part of the definition imho. Stuff like selling stickers you are pro some minority group but only 0.05% of each sale goes to a cause actually helping that group. (Or the rich guys charity which employs half his family/friends, or Mr Beast, or the rightwing debate bro threatening a leftwinger with a fight āfor charityā (this also signals their RW virtue to their RW audience (trollinā and fightinā)).
I mean āthe rightā has managed to corrupt all kinds of fine phrases into dog whistles. I think āvirtue signallingā as you have formulated it is a valid observation and criticism of someoneās actions. I blame āliberalsā for posturing and virtue signalling as leftist, giving the right easy opportunities to score points.
āFree speechā is now a rightwing dogwistle, at least for me.
Free speech is the perfect exemple of a formal liberty anyway. Materially it is entirely meaningless in a society where access to speech is so unequal, and not something worth fighting for in the absolute sense. Fight against the effective censorship of good ideas and minority perspectives instead.
Ahh yes, freeze peaches, buttery males etc.
@BlueMonday1984 omfg. Thatās abhorrent.
Thanks I hate it
EWWW WHAT THE FUCK
New piece from Brian Merchant: De-democratizing AI, which is primarily about the GOPās attempt to ban regulations on AI, but also touches on the naked greed and lust for power at the core of the AI bubble.
EDIT: Also, that titleās pretty clever
Local war profiteer goes on podcast to pitch an unaccountable fortress-state around active black site (what I assume is to do Little St James-type activities under the pretext of continued Yankee meddling)
Link to Xitter here (quoted within a delicious sneer to boot)
Itās going to be awesome when American Neo-Guantanamo residents start jumping the wall to get health care.
Building a gilded capitalist megafortress within communist mortar range doesnāt seem the wisest thing to do. But sure buy another big statue clearly signalling ācapitalists are horrible and shouldnāt be trusted with moneyā
Todayās man-made and entirely comprehensible horror comes from SAP.
(two rainbow stickers labelled āpride@sapā, with one saying āI support equality by embracing responsible aiā and the other saying āI advocate for inclusion through aiā)
Donāt have any other sources or confirmation yet, so it might be a load of cobblers, but it is depressingly plausible. From here: https://catcatnya.com/@ada/114508096636757148
If this is real it would be double infuriating, not just because of the AI nonsense, but also because just 3 days ago SAP went bootlicker and announced ending diversity programs.
I advocate for inclusion with equal-opportunity E. coli contamination, thatās why I voted for RFK Jr. We can all spew together!
Ignored the text, go LGBT buster sword.
Inclusion through saving all the consumables for the next boss battle!
So those safety pins that were a thing for a minute were AI Safety pins all along.
Iām mentally filing this next to that clip of a black guy telling someone to just call him the N-word.
Just thinking about how LLMs could never create anything close to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (specifically Dreams but, uh, you can go your own way, ig)
So I have two laser printers, a cute little HP one and an old Lexmark. The former works mostly OK, but requires fiddling* to get it working on Linux, and prints things smaller than their actual size. The latter is also good enough to be useful, but leaves streaks on page and is quite low on toner. Replacing the photoconductor and toner is just about expensive enough to justify consideration of buying a new printer altogether instead.
So anyway, I might be in the marker for a new printer, which reminded me of one of the best pieces of tech journalism of this decade . I also noticed it has been followed by sequels for subsequent years. Also a rare example of LLM use I can approve of, even if having to fight fire with fire (or search engines with slop) is a bit saddening.
A little offtopic (or I guess itās almost ontopic for NotAwfulTech), but I found myself considering a color printer and seems that LED printers are the new hotness for that. Since the top results when searching āled vs laser color printerā are mind-numbing slop, I thought Iād ask if anyone here has experience with LED printers. Any typical pitfalls to watch out for? Is Brother still the least worst brand for them?
* For the curious, the printer requires a plugin called HPLIP. My distro has an automated installer for it in its repositories, but the installerās Python code is not compatible with newest Python versions. Thankfully the fix only involves changing a
locale.formattolocale.format_stringin one file and ignoring some warnings about invalid escape sequences. The URL for automatically dowloading the plugin from HP website is also empty, so I had to manually download the.runfile from hplipās sourceforge repository. The filename was also slightly different from what the installer was expecting and the cryptographic signature file was also mandatory, though when the installer tried and failed to download the corresponding key from a keyserver, it let me ignore the signature altogether. I can see how proprietary printer drivers made rms what he is, minus the pro child molestation stuff.brother remains the only brand of printer I donāt regret buying ā some people keep buying new printers and trashing the old ones (which is a bit monstrous) because the starter toner cartridge lasts forever, but Iāve found that the move is to get one of the XL boxes that includes a normal-sized toner cartridge (which should last years) and an extra-large one (I donāt know how long that lasts, I donāt think Iāve had to use mine) along with a printer for much cheaper than the price of the individual parts bought separately.
the other move with brother is to ignore or reset the low toner warning and get almost twice the life out of the cartridge. supposedly the DRM in newer printers might prevent this? which is a damn shame. but the printer wonāt stop you from printing with supposedly low toner either way. older printers also take to third party toner cartridges instantly, though Iāve bought toner so rarely I always went first-party when I did cause the savings didnāt feel too notable.
drivers for brother printers are excellent because they just work and are probably included, without bloatware, in your distro.
I donāt have any experience with modern color printing; I switched entirely to ordering color prints from local photo shops and online bulk printers a long time ago and ended up saving money for how rarely I printed. I havenāt heard too much about LED printers so they might be worth looking into; Iāve heard mixed (but not entirely negative, which is an improvement over plain inkjet!) things about the epson printers that take big tanks of ink ā theyāre somewhat cheaper to run than a plain inkjet (which isnāt hard), but the print heads might become a maintenance nightmare depending on your printing habits.
Is Brother still the least worst brand for them?
Canāt offer experience with Brother printers, but Iād throw in Canon as another option ā at least Iāve had a small colour laser from their āi-Sensysā office line for many years now and it still works exactly as well as on the day I bought it, no complaints at all. Also works nicely on Linux (I did install a Canon thing for it, but IIRC it might even work without). Although keep in mind of course this is just a single anecdote with one model from many years ago.
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