this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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TechTakes

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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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

you'd think that $200+ entertainment would be better

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You have my sympathy! Is the worst part that you have to review the slop or its general presence at all?

Asking because at my workplace it will be allowed soon, and some coworkers are unfortunately looking forward to it, and I'm horrified, especially by the thought of having to do code review then...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

It’s more the latter. I can’t really stop anyone from using it, and playing the game of “can you tell if this snippet of code was LLMed” is a fools errand, so I have to choose to ignore that part of it. Testing de-risks bad code, but there is never enough testing… well, there’s only so much I can do within my pay grade.

I’ve since asked this person to stop talking about their copilot usage, so this issue has been resolved, for now.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

I have added your coworker to the list of people I will imagine being tortured in the future. Im no robotgod but it is the best I can do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up

that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subject..

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Oh no it's more US politics.

So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it's the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA's email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)

user HardboiledHack

also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex

i'm sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people

the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW

from http://joliverconroy.net/

I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.

by "about", he means "for"

I'm a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: [email protected].

I'm also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Zizians' beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.

I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.

Thanks very much.

i've also warned over at the old place

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Do the Zizians fit in the "rationalist/EA/risk community"? Gosh and golly gee.

Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the "narcissism of small differences" than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)

From what I've been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. I'm not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Roko's Basilisk being a concern.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

However, I do think that the unfolding of this story presents an object lesson in why "always escalate to the max" is a wildly stupid idea. It turns out that even when you have guns (metaphorical or otherwise) and a complete disregard for the consequences of failure the average group of citizens is still at a decided disadvantage to the state at higher points on the escalation ladder.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

You misunderstand, they escalate to the max to keep themselves (including selves in parallel dimensions or far future simulations) from being blackmailed by future super intelligent beings, not to survive shootouts with border patrol agents.

I am fairly certain Yud had said something very close to that effect in reference to preventing blackmail from the basilisk, even though he tries to no-true-scotchman zizians wrt his functional decision 'theory' these days.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

No nibbles here.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

People have worked out how to cram DeepSeek onto a Raspberry Pi

Anyways, here's a quasi-related sidenote:

Part of me suspects DeepSeek is gonna quickly carve out a good chunk of the market for itself - for SaaS services looking for spicy autocomplete or a slop generator to bolt on to their products, DeepSeek's high efficiency gives them a way to do it that doesn't immediately blow a massive hole in their finances.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Kelsey Piper bluechecks thusly:

James Damore was egregiously wronged.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

Wow, the story is so much more troubling when you lie about it!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (10 children)

Neo-Nazi nutcase having a normal one.

It's so great that this isn't falsifiable in the sense that doomers can keep saying, well "once the model is epsilon smarter, then you'll be sorry!", but back in the real world: the model has been downloaded 10 million times at this point. Somehow, the diamanoid bacteria has not killed us all yet. So yes, we have found out the Yud was wrong. The basilisk is haunting my enemies, and she never misses.

Bonus sneer: "we are going to find out if Yud was right" Hey fuckhead, he suggested nuking data centers to prevent models better than GPT4 from spreading. R1 is better than GPT4, and it doesn't require a data center to run so if we had acted on Yud's geopolitical plans for nuclear holocaust, billions would have been for incinerated for absolutely NO REASON. How do you not look at this shit and go, yeah maybe don't listen to this bozo? I've been wrong before, but god damn, dawg, I've never been starvingInRadioactiveCratersWrong.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

you can get banned on facebook now for linking to distrowatch https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-linux-topics-as-cybersecurity-threats-posts-and-users-being-blocked and from distrowatch https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews

but it's not as bad as you think, it's slightly worse. it's not only distrowatch and linux groups got banned too

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I screenshot this the other day and forgot to post it. Well, enjoy.]

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

Screenshot of an insta post of a screenshot of a tweet

Tweet:

I can’t believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

(Reposting from the last thread)

Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment

P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read "Uber for AI code data" so now you do too.

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