Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 05 May 2024

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

Soyweiser,

Bostrom did a weird authoritarian longtermist suggestion.

(this is why im not a huge fan of the tescreal term, as this muddies the water quite a lot as this is a longtermist ‘what about the tiny existential risk’ thing rubbing against the transhumanist biohacking style stuff).

Sorry no nitter as I forgot the correct url (and also I heard the people behind the new nitter might suck a lot, as in they might be far right, but only heard that once so please don’t take that as a confirmation, and more a me asking about it).

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

yeah, poast are nazis

Soyweiser,

Ah thanks

earthquake,

there are few non-poast nitter instances barely limping along, but unless it actually comes back I think the best policy is to link normal twitter and let individuals manage what nitter instances, if any, they want to use:

status.d420.de

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…/libredirect/

sinedpick, (edited )

fuck me what

edit: LOL they had a data breach. Seems like that’s a hard req to be a right-wing forum these days. globalextremism.org/post/poast/

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

TIL that Neoreaction A Basilisk has a tag on AO3. Only two works so far, but I’m sure we can improve on that.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Jacob Silverman:

If you went to Effective Altruism parties in Berkeley in last 10-12 years, I’d like to talk to you. Glad to speak on background. Thanks.

Jacob is at jacobsilverman@gmail.com. I can personally recommend him as a good guy and honourable journalist. He co-wrote “Easy Money” with Ben McKenzie, the story of the recent crypto bubble.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

www.reddit.com/r/CyberStuck/ is an absolute delight

veganes_hack,

Unity has a new CEO

here’s the cliffnotes:

  • he’s a former EA executive, responsible for their mobile business
  • after that, he was COO of Zynga, a very good very ethical company making mobile games
  • he wants to "help accelerate the Company’s revenue growth and profitability"
  • Unity recently laid off about 25% of their workforce (1800 people)

I sure wonder what great changes he will implement, exciting times ahead for UnityGodot!

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

some fucking wild promptfondlers commenting on an LWN article about Gentoo banning AI pull requests. Thankfully LWN has enough readers who know how a computer fucking works to answer them correctly.

zogwarg,
@zogwarg@awful.systems avatar

I like the beautiful tangents into linguistics and arguing about how many present tenses English has, and of the dubious merit of distinguishing definiteness in articles.

Trying to invoke LLMs as a tool to pierce these supposedly pointless elements of the English language, for the benefit of non-native (or maybe non-confident native) speakers.

Where really this is exactly the sort of mistakes that LLMs can bring, it’s not just choosing between a non-standard and a standard spelling of a word (like for basic autocorrect) it’s choosing between valid forms depending on context and Intent, which no machine can divine.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Effective Altruists still trying to psych each other up to shoot Torres (archive)

this is the “Mark Fuentes” article again, evidently he thinks it didn’t get enough traction

the comments are amazing and yet utterly predictable. Torres is being bad faith in accusing the one-issue pseudonymous account of being bad faith. EAs are very left wing u kno. Race science is well worth our time to consider. etc. they’re gonna beat the accusations by enthusiastically confirming every one

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

The “survey” purporting to show most EA’s are “left-wing” was run and hosted by Astral Codex Ten??? Are you fucking kidding me?

Soyweiser,

A lot of things there are just amazingly odd. Helen Pluckrose is such a nice liberal woman (who complains a lot about the left and helped the horrible James Lindsay gain fame), the part about Cowen is ‘Torres misrepresents Cowen as saying he cares about the rich over the poor, but that is not fair to Cowen, Cowen just wants to take money away from the currently poor, to give to the currently rich, so the current rich can help the future poor via trickle down economics’.

Soyweiser, (edited )

This had me wondering, how common is the name Fuentes at all? Cause I keep having a small brainfart and thinking about Nick and I really hope that is a problem between my keyboard and chair and not intentional.

E: also EA/LW shooting the messenger, as is tradition.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

394th most common surname in the US in 2010, for 81,000 people

skillissuer,
@skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

so one in 4k or so. not terribly uncommon

Soyweiser,

But also not super rare, so prob a coincidence.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

The Post Millennial hacked, FUCKING WHOOPS

text of tweet from vx-underground:

====

Yesterday evening The Post Millennial, a Canadian conservative news website, was compromised. The landing page was defaced, displaying the transgender flag, as well as making a satirical post mocking conservative author and social media commentator Andy Ngo.

The Threat Actor(s) responsible for the compromise leaked information on 39,850 subscribers to the website. The leaked information includes:

  • Gender
  • Name
  • Display name
  • Nick name
  • E-mail address
  • Phone number
  • Address
  • Password
  • Subscriber details (payment information)
  • ‘Daleted’ – a boolean field incorrectly spelled
    and more…

Passwords are in plain text. Payment information does not display credit card information. Payment information displays preferred payment method (e.g. PayPal, Credit Card, Debit Card) and currency used (e.g. CAD, USD). Some fields are optional such as telephone number or address. Additionally, this leak unveils some information on government representatives across the globe – including United States government personnel. This displays their contact information in plain text.

Also, the Threat Actor(s) leaked information on authors for The Post Millennial editors. We are not sure on the validity of this data, unless this website has 761 editors. Editor information disclosure shows:

  • Username
  • IP Address
  • Phone number
  • Country
  • Email address
  • Name

Image 1. Snippet of leaked subscriber information
Image 2. Snippet of leaked editor information
Image 3. Defaced website and satirical post

Note:

  • No Threat Actor(s) have taken credit for the compromise
  • Individuals reviewing the data suspect the parent company, Psyclone Inc, may have been the initial access point. Evidence supporting this is debug data present in The Post Millennial database dump as well as adjacent website HumanEvents going offline – however this still remains speculation.
  • The compromise of The Post Millennial is clearly politically motivated. Please be civil.

====

and in conclusion: lololol

they also got humanevents.com and bonginoreport.com

carlitoscohones,

Passwords are in plain text. Payment information does not display credit card information. Payment information displays preferred payment method (e.g. PayPal, Credit Card, Debit Card) and currency used (e.g. CAD, USD).

People actually pay money for the fucking Post Millennial.

froztbyte,

Wish VXUG would post on fedi, it’s one of the things I’m missing since I stopped using twitter :|

dgerard, (edited )
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

for all your life size cardboard cutout Sam Bankman-Fried needs

standeestore.com/…/copy-of-aaron-judge-ny-yankees…

(that URL sure tells a story in itself)

spotted by swlabr

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/96fde459-bb3a-48c4-bb56-35a3ab22d67a.png

witty,
@witty@mstdn.social avatar

@dgerard I saw the first post and did not realize one could actually buy this...

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

surprisingly affordable too

o7___o7, (edited )
@o7___o7@awful.systems avatar

CW: embarrassing srs take:

The way LLM boosters talk about GPTs reminds me of how one of my kids tried to convince himself that his stuffies are really alive.

The same desire to believe in adults is so unsettling to me. They’re desperately trying to fill a hole in their life where family, friends, culture, or religion should be. My first instinct would be compassion if it weren’t for all of the economic dislocation and fascism.

mlen,

I’d rather drop the religion from that list. Some religions propagate harmful ideas too and historically sided with fascists.

pyrex,

Show HN: I’m 16 and building an AI based startup called Factful with friends

In which the Orange Site is a very bad influence on some minors:

How do you evaluate “factuality” without knowing all the facts, though? That’s the downfall of all such services - eventually (or even immediately) they begin to just push their preferred agenda because it’s easier and more profitable.

Hi there, thank you for your feedback! I think we could potentially go down the route of a web3 approach where we get the public consensus on the facts.

…

Your first meta-problem to solve is to get people to care about the facts, and to accept them when they’re wrong. There is an astonishing gap between knowing the truth and acting accordingly.

Yea, that’s why we also added in an grammar checker, even if they dont care about facts, they can get something better than gram marly that checks for way more for way less.

carlitoscohones,

we also added in an grammar checker

parody?

o7___o7,
@o7___o7@awful.systems avatar

“Trolling is a art”

veganes_hack,

to nobody’s surprise, the rabbit r1 is just a shitty one-purpose android phone

froztbyte,

And from the “it’s the same grifters with a new focus” department, an update

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

my god, make this a post

slopjockey,

The craziest part is that it works as well on a standard phone.

We didn’t bother testing out any other functionality, such as Spotify integration, Vision, etc., but we wouldn’t be surprised if some of them didn’t work.

froztbyte,

The craziest part is that it works as well on a standard phone.

I’m not terribly surprised by this - vendors (and especially rapid-integrators rushing to get to market) are often extremely lazy with this sort of thing. sometimes just by downloading an app (from whatever resource) and poking at it for a small amount of time, you can get it to register and be issued tokens and all kinds of shit

a lot of entities spend most of their efforts on surface things, things users will see. very, very few allocate to foundational parts.

froztbyte,

if you want an example of this, set up mitmproxy on your computer, run it in socks5 mode, and set your system’s proxy settings to socks everything through the mitmproxy daemon. you might be surprised how many applications Just Work with barely a mention of a changed certificate (nevermind entirely objecting to it)

sinedpick,

guys, the robot can type rm -rf /, it’s so over

zogwarg,
@zogwarg@awful.systems avatar

The article almost looks like satire.

If all script kiddies waste their time trying to use generative AI to produce barely functional malware, we might be marginally safer for a while ^^. Or maybe this is the beginning of an entirely new malware ecology, clueless development using LLMs falling prey to clueless malware using LLMs.

sailor_sega_saturn,
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

How it started:

it has to be behavior-based detection. I didn’t want to build a script that was only useful to detect and mitigate the specific ransomware executable I created for this blog. Signature-based detection is only useful for a particular file. The second a single byte changes, the file will have a new hash.

(which is not exactly how AV signatures work but anyways…)

How it’s going:

[…] scans any file in the /home director, for the strings “cryptography”, “cryptodome”, “ransom”, “locked”, “encrypt”.

pikesley,
@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@sailor_sega_saturn @sinedpick

> For some background on my programming ability, I can read, write, and edit basic scripts in Python, Rust, and Go. I’m far from a seasoned developer.

Wait I think I worked for this guy once

froztbyte,

An interesting turn

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

froztbyte,

impending thonkpieces about “obstructive regulation” getting in the way of them stripmining people no matter the side effects “the free market”

maol,

Is it an offence against the church for a group of lay theologians to ordain an AI? no idea. It is very funny though

Soyweiser,

Not if they first claim to be an antipope

sinedpick,

as an outsider clicking through all those links… wow. Wtf is the holy see? Wtf is apostolic episcopal jurisdiction? Who let these people cook?

Soyweiser,

Larpers took any game they could get in the Roman Empire.

maol,

these people said “what if we had a church that was also a country with a monarchy” and then cooked for like 800 years

edit: although I think the actual borders only got defined in like the 20th century?

earthquake,

The pope was king of a large chunk of central Italy for 1000 years until the unification of Italy took away almost all of that territory. The Popes insisted he should have all of Rome and refused to acknowledge the situation from 1870 to 1929, only finally coming to an agreement (with the fucking fascists, hmm).

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

I’m pretty sure that the position of the papacy after the fall of Rome was that they should have temporal power not only over the city of Rome but of all the territories of the Papal States that had been annexed by the Kingdom of Italy.

Also note that the popes were terrible secular leaders. The papal states were shitty places to live, even considered by the standards of 19th century Italy, and the popes lived in constant fear of their own subjects. In fact the only thing keeping Rome from finally falling was a garrison of French troops, that had to be withdrawn during the Franco-Prussian war. When the citizens of Rome were given the option to join the Kingdom, they won in a plebiscite. The people who wanted a temporal papacy were the elites and foreign ultramontanes.

earthquake,

Very true. Of course they voted to join in the plebiscite, they had recently overthrown the Pope in 1849 to make a short-lived republic. Unfortunately France under Louis Napoleon (who had personally participated in an 1831 rebellion against the Pope) crushed that Republic to appease those ultramontanes.

gerikson, (edited )
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

The history of the reaction in the 19th century is fascinating. I can recommend this book:

  • Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848 by Adam Zamoyski

Metternich was so scared of radical students he basically ensured that the universities in Austria-Hungary were hamstrung by political meddling and censorship. This was a great foundation for the war with Prussia later on! /s

sinedpick,

God damn history is cool. I have nothing interesting to say but thanks for this. I might actually go pick up that book, do you think it’s suitable for someone who has basically read zero real history books?

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

I’d say it’s a bit on the advanced side but if you can find it “off the back of a truck” then it’s worth giving it a try.

mountainriver,

If I remember correctly, Josef Ressel, one of the inventors of the propeller (there was severa, but he was in Austrial), was arrested as an anarchist after a steam engine powering a propeller exploded.

I am not in favour of exploding engines, but it always struck me as a bit on the paranoid side. Not that better ships for the Austrian navy would have helped against Prussia.

But then again, another propeller inventor, John Ericsson, came up with both the Monitor, a torpedo boat, and a mobile artillery that he tried to sell to Napoleon III, so you never know what propeller inventors can come up with if you don’t arrest them as anarchists.

jonhendry,

Could be worse, they could be English.

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

I’m no Catholic but if I were I’d take offense at a site with the URL catholic.com.

maol, (edited )

The actual Vatican seems to use its own .va domain name, which neatly sidesteps the .com vs .org dilemma…but doesn’t explain why they let randomers use catholic.com and catholic.org.

carlitoscohones,

The Vatican could start a side hustle marketing vanity websites to Virginia tourism.

maol,

Back in the day (i.e 2015), .vu custom domains were pretty popular with Tumblr bloggers - I think Vanuatu gave away free urls?

o7___o7,
@o7___o7@awful.systems avatar

Naw, they didn’t do anything really awful like ordaining a woman.

–the regular suspects, probably

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