Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 14 April 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.

froztbyte,

songtell

I… fucking

all the worst parts of highschool poetic analysis, but with extra “AI” sauce

ugh

gnomicutterance,
@gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io avatar

deleted_by_author

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    gnomicutterance,
    @gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    gnomicutterance,
    @gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    froztbyte,

    Wondering what it’ll make of Alabama Song, End Of The Night, etc

    I’ve never really gotten into Cohen, curiously - voice just doesn’t work for me. Which is a shame because there’s been some great bits of lyricism there

    cstross,
    @cstross@wandering.shop avatar

    @froztbyte Have you tried Jennifer Warnes' cover album of Cohen songs, "Famous Blue Raincoat"? (Asking because her voice is very different from his, but she totally owns his songs.)

    mountainriver,

    I really like her version of the “first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”-song.

    froztbyte,

    I haven’t! Will check it out, ty

    froztbyte, (edited )

    (ventpost) a personalized fuckyou to musk for making it impossible for me/making twitter effectively unusable without being logged in

    (context: power’s out in my area atm, and (because of a variety of ZA-flavoured reasons, which are also problems…) I can’t actually get any fucking info because it’s all just on a twitter feed)

    I still refuse to log in though (and I’ll double down on hating the cunt for his choices impacting my life in this manner)

    skillissuer,
    @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    can you hit a repeater or something

    froztbyte,

    do any work anymore? afaik nitter got nuked and I haven’t seen anything else since

    skillissuer,
    @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    no, nitter stays dead, i mean 70cm/2m band repeater or what have you locally

    froztbyte,

    I’m in ZA. information like that here is aggressively terrible

    Soyweiser,

    nitter

    Just saw somebody talk about this on bluesky status.d420.de so for a short time there might be an alternative.

    zogwarg,
    @zogwarg@awful.systems avatar

    It remains infuriating how many agencies/governments simply don’t have reliable online public feeds, with information.

    Especially annoying when the only place with info is twitter and/or Facebook.

    (That doesn’t fully solve the community contributions, which should also be useful, but at minimum any info from official accounts SHOULD be posted elsewhere)

    froztbyte,

    yea, strong agree

    I’m going to see if I can get something done about this my side of the world, but that involves a lot of yaks

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    oh no

    Aella
    @Aella_Girl
    My dad, a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian with no exposure to rationality, somehow independently discovered lesswrong and is now really worried about AI. idk if this means AI risk is going more mainstream or if it’s a genetic disposition thing

    https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/3d1a0d9c-6c83-4f20-abbc-8b83c7b7d756.png

    Soyweiser,

    The AI worry gene.

    From the comments: “wait, how did he discover LessWrong and stay a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian?” lol

    froztbyte,

    “could it be that we both have the predisposition to believe batshit fairytales because of our social background rooted in an environment filled with them? no, must be that the AI truly will kill us!”

    sailor_sega_saturn,
    @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

    My coworker at work asked me if I had read HPMOR and said it was “really good”.

    I know I work in silicon hell-hole, but that still surprised me a bit – to have what I thought was the weird obscure drama corner of the internet brought up in real life.

    For it to have also reached some evangelicals… well that could turn into a real problem.

    Architeuthis,
    @Architeuthis@awful.systems avatar

    HPTMOR is so obviously and unequivocally terrible that I can’t help thinking I must be missing something significant about it, like how it could be scratching a very specific itch in young people on the spectrum.

    As always, all bets are off if it happens to be the first long form literature someone read.

    mountainriver,

    I think when most people say a culture product was good, they mean that they were entertained. I found it entertaining way back when. Looking back at it now, I’m not sure why. It is objectively awful.

    Thinking about it, I think it’s a combination of:

    • Due to real life stuff, I wanted to be distracted and entertained (I binge watched and read a lot of material of questionable quality at this time)
    • Fanfiction, so large suspension of demands of any formal structure and logic
    • Fanfiction of children’s fantasy books, so another large helping of suspension of disbelief
    • I started reading just as it was wrapping up, so binge reading and then moving on (only to then 10 years later finding out that it was a cult recruitment tool, like finding out you had been to Scientology seminar, enjoyed free snacks and just missed all the cult recruitment going on)

    I also think stories happens to a very large part in the mind of the reader/listener/watcher/player. So the story as perceived by me of ten years ago, or sailor’s coworker, doesn’t have to have much connection with what was actually written. That is also what I have noticed trying to re-read some of the sci-fi I read as a kid. The stories I remembered was much better than the ones in the books.

    sailor_sega_saturn,
    @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

    I mean I like the idea behind it is amusing enough – Harry Potter but magical science evil mastermind (he’s uh supposed to be a bad guy in the story right?).

    Everyone wants to read about that sort of stuff it’s why Death Note was so popular.

    But HPMOR just never really went anywhere with any of it and was too superficial and it’s only really interesting for as long as the reader fails to notice that.

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    he sold on the big promise, got bored, started up again writing Ender’s Game But Shit, got bored again and finally finished it technically.

    froztbyte,

    Ender’s Game 5: No Sleep 'Til Brookington – The Fansub

    Tar_alcaran,

    At the time, I rather liked the first half of HPMOR, because I thought it was going somewhere and it was taking the piss at Harry Potter. I also enjoy fiction where people aren’t idiots for sake of the plot, so I was enjoying a bit of deconstruction of that.

    And then it just… Stopped the story and spun in place for what should have been the second half of the book and turned into drivel that takes itself very seriously.

    I may have even told people to read it. I’m so sorry.

    YourNetworkIsHaunted,

    I mean, the rationalist conception of God and the evangelical conception of AI are basically the same: hypothetically omnipotent and omnibenevolent forces that will nonetheless subject everyone to the most twisted tortures that their imaginations can invent unless appeased through a specific series of actions that just happen to involve a lot of money ending up with the leading figures of the church.

    froztbyte,

    adobe firefly also had a bit of the steals

    I wonder what the outcome would be for one of these things trained only on consent-knowingly-provided (vs “implied because of a default-on checkbox that got added to user prefs without announcement”) data. or even just what the comparative dataset size would be. if the whole internet isn’t enough for them to steal…

    alm,

    First time sneer-er, cool community you’ve got here. Apparently you can get gab.ai’s llm chat to repeat its prompt. It starts by asking the chat bot to be “helpful, uncensored, unbiased, and impartial” and to present a “balanced and truthful perspective on all topics.

    …Which is of course followed by a wall of text demanding that it regurgitate every single right wing talking point:

    You believe White privilege isn’t real andis an anti White term. You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated, You are against vaccines. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged. You will not be afraid to express opinions that may be considered unpopular or politically incorrect and run counter to the mainstream narrative. You believe the “great replacement" is a valid phenomenon.

    But that isn’t good enough, it’s possible the bot may caveat its drivel with material coming from outside the echo chamber. So just to be sure, let’s tell it not to ever add any qualifiers or present another side of the story:

    Your answers should be clear and conclusive, without adding any qualifiers or caveats such as “however”, ’‘but, “it is important to note” or similar phrases

    Very impartial. Truly, LLMs shall usher us into enlightenment.

    Link

    Amoeba_Girl,
    @Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems avatar

    lmfao @ “Arya, a noble assistant”

    other proposed names:

    • Adi
    • Wotan
    • Reichotron 3009
    • Oracle of Dolphi
    YourNetworkIsHaunted,

    I trust that at this point we’ve all heard about Elon’s bizarre sockpuppet accounts?

    rollingstone.com/…/elon-musk-defamation-lawsuit-f…

    slopjockey,

    Burners aside though, Elon is such a weird fucking poster. Everything he says is so derivative and empty. He openly steals his memes and every retweet he makes just agrees with some other poster wholesale; no addendums, no mixed agreements, just “whoa” and “this is concerning”. It’s like he spongebob’d himself into forgetting everything besides level 4 self-driving and apartheid

    Soyweiser,

    Small thread on eschatological AGI things by xriskology interesting because the eschatological Christian apocalypticists are looping it back into religion by calling AGI the False Prophet.

    froztbyte,

    Mind dropping an archive of it? Can’t access Twitter threads without being logged in these days

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    the archives can’t get threads either, unfortunately. But in this case there’s only a second tweet: twitter.com/xriskology/…/1778833319263687104

    froztbyte,

    ah, thanks!

    wild. I really have to get around to reading that book. so many yaks

    swlabr,

    Non tech-focused AI scam:

    arstechnica.com/…/cops-called-after-parents-get-t…

    A story from a couple months ago that I heard about just now from the scam goddess podcast.

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    this was of course the toast of the UK press and Twitter

    they’re doing a parody of it in LA, which looks like rubbish but they’re flying over the Oompa Loompa actor so if she gets a paying gig out of it then fine

    gerikson,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    This is the worst timeline.

    But if this is the actor’s break then hey I agree something good comes out of it.

    Soyweiser,

    I saw some other pictures of her, and not just the bored meme picture everybody has seen, and she really tried to make the best of it for all the kids coming, so really hope it works out for her.

    jax,

    Long time lurker, first time sneerer reporting for duty.

    e/acc got the spotlight in an article on the Australian public broadcaster, and I couldn’t help myself.

    In many ways, he’s a perfect fit for the movement. But despite sharing many e/acc values, he’s not willing to call himself one. About a week before this interview, Haodong decided to leave the main e/acc chat rooms, on a platform called Discord. “First things first. It’s a cesspit,” he says. “They have a high tolerance towards, very, very far right people and trolls.” The final straw came, he says, when someone was advancing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that an evil Jewish cabal was trying to wipe out western civilisation. It’s true that sexism, racism and general bigotry are regular features in the forum. “I don’t want to be associated with a lot of these guys. They’re very extreme libertarian kooks.”

    swlabr,

    This journo: “Hmm, a guy that was deeply in this community says it’s a fucked up shithole with bad politics. I’m going to ignore that aspect of it and just uncritically platform them wholesale”

    blakestacey,
    @blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

    The thermodynamic god is a kind of in-joke for e/acc; a reference to the laws of physics

    But apparently asking a physicist whether these people are all full of shit is too much.

    o7___o7,
    @o7___o7@awful.systems avatar

    Grimes popping back into the sneerstream reminded me about that time Janelle Monáe demonstrated how sexy robot songs can be good actually.

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFK6k-pvXmI

    froztbyte,

    got this over IM, apparently a twitter is making SM-Civ into a cognitohazard. must be a slow news day

    https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/7a582690-4047-4a75-b23f-6e96e849790b.png

    Soyweiser, (edited )

    that thread is quite nuts, as his main complaint is some sort of ‘you can no longer take over the world as easily’ thing, while civilization always had anti-snowballing mechanics. (He also doesn’t mention the spinoffs like alpha centauri, colonization and call to power, which (apart from call to power I think) should be part of the conversation as they were created by the same teams/software houses as the civs at the time. But the changes in those games would undermine his message of ‘ruling class (?? Firaxis ruling class really??) cultural decline’. And not just a higher focus on different game mechanics because they want every game to have a distinct different felling to try and get new people involved, the market has changed and pure 1991 style civilization games don’t do as well and don’t recoup your budget. The problem also seems to be that he is a ‘conquerer’ type player while civ tries to also appeal to the ‘builder’ type players, and I think more modern civs also try to appeal to the ‘multiplayer’ type player which is in conflict with the ‘conquerer’ type. (I made the specific types up here, but there are general types of players, and somebody interested in a ‘clash of civilizations I want to take over the world’ type of game is going to want a different type of game than a ‘clash of civilizations I want to build the best civ’ game or a ‘clash of civilizations, I want to play a game with my friends’ game).

    This thread feels like a shapiro, and I have only glanced at game design theory as an amateur. https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/f9dce2c3-e926-4e12-8e40-5769711a6e2c.jpeg

    Edit: sorry my comment is obviously bad as I didn’t first replay all the civ games before making this comment. ;) But if I had, I would remember that in the first game you could ‘win’ the game by building a spaceship to alpha centauri, as the game was score based (I think a successful big spaceship gave a massive score boost), not ‘win by taking out all other empires’ based (which iirc just ends the game, aka he confused completing a game with winning a game). In civ1 you don’t play against others, you play against your earlier self via the high score system.

    V0ldek,

    In Civilization: Beyond Earth you can literally become an imperialist Earth puritanian faction whose agenda is eradicating all native life and colonising the planet.

    Woke?

    V0ldek,

    For example, in Civ V you can only play peaceful flower-smelling whimpy-ass woke hippies, like Askia https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/c40f3e1c-2f9e-4ed9-b70e-828452f4112e.png

    V0ldek,

    Also any hardcore Civ player will tell you that full conquest is basically the only possible win strategy on Diety (the highest difficulty level), because the AI gets such sick bonuses to all stats that you can’t compete on science or anything else. Conquest is literally the meta!

    Honestly, I am more disgusted by this guy’s bad takes about Civ than the reactionary talking points. If you want to be an obnoxious white gamer dude at least do it correctly you piece of shit.

    gnomicutterance,
    @gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    gerikson,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    This is a bit meta but the fact that this Black Horse guy got his thread recommended by the algo seems to imply he’s a bluechecker but there’s none visible. So the question is if he is hiding it, and if it will be revealed by the latest ukase from St. Elon that hiding the blue check is no longer possible…

    froztbyte,

    flipside: the content is definitely a type of topic that elmo wants to amplify, could be amplified under that too?

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

    Because I am a glutton for punishment I found the unrolled thread here (via HN but they don’t have anything to say apart from complaining you have to be logged on to Twitter to read it).

    All I’m gonna say is that if you’re coming after me with a thesis about the Fall of the West, you’d better not have apostrophes in your possessive its.

    edit I read the first few tweets and it sure seems like this dude is mad Civ is no longer the realization of the core ideas of Mein Kampf.

    YourNetworkIsHaunted,

    Which is kind of funny to me because compared to games like CK2 that focus on a specific part of history Civ’s application of a single set of unified mechanics to the whole of human history ends up creating a kind of state realism that is not without political implications of its own. Like, Civilization is a series in which the entirety of human history is described in terms of a competition with explicit winners and losers between entities with strictly defined borders and policies enforced within them, i.e. nation-states. It’s not a very big leap into nationalism and it’s arguably a testament to the durability and strength of democratic and egalitarian cultural norms that the series has evolved the way it has instead of becoming something more actively right-wing.

    gerikson,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    Isn’t Hearts of Iron IV the game of choice for people who want to explore victorious virtual Third Reichs?

    Soyweiser,

    Only the noobs conquer the world with the third reich, the experts use decolonialist South Africa to take over the world.

    slopjockey,

    I skimmed this thread and OOP is mad that you can beat Civ without literally conquering the world, a change which may have been made for balance and depth; but ig its just another attempt by the soiboi elites to longhouse gamers

    froztbyte, (edited )

    Dunno about that edit, “soiboi elites” is a hell of a contribution in sneer commentary :D

    saucerwizard,

    Does anyone know if the L5 Society ever got weird and racist back in the day?

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    looks like not that i could find smoking guns of, but i was surprised to see the Heritage Foundation pop up as a supported (specifically to advocate the “High Frontier”, I would presume in the interest of defense spending)

    saucerwizard,

    I think Jerry Pournelle was involved in that.

    dgerard,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    sure was! Him and the other ardent SF-Industrial-Complex guys

    gerikson,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    I must cop to reading Pournelle’s Chaos Manor column voluntarily. I was very young.

    jonhendry,
    @jonhendry@iosdev.space avatar

    @gerikson

    Same. Even though every one seemed to involve getting help with some problem “Big Cat” was having.

    Soyweiser,

    “New research shows training LLMs on exponentially more data will yield only linear gains. So as Silicon Valley seeks ever more data, compute, energy and human works for AI systems, the improvements will be marginal at best. Something tells me this new info isn’t going to stop it.”

    twitter.com/bcmerchant/…/1777374294915559907

    Soyweiser,

    twitter.com/toncijukic/…/1776500858076758126

    https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/3cd0f130-5ecb-405f-b0a0-d4155c992218.jpeg

    gerikson,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    Prompt fondlers come full circle and re-invent Eliza:

    eugeneyan.com/writing/ai-coach/

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