Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025
a year ago by BlueMonday1984 to c/techtakes
Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Oh what the fuck why can Mozilla not just STOP. Just... STOP. Honestly sick of this shit.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I did paid work in Japanese translation once, I stopped because the ungodly amount of work wasn't worth what they pay you. The tech people really have no idea what they're breaking by moving fast here.
Boss at new job just told me we’re going all-in on AI and I need to take a core role in the project
They want to give LLMs access to our wildly insecure mass of SQL servers filled with numeric data
Security a non factor
😂🔫
Sounds like the thing to do is to say yes boss, get Baldur Bjarnason's book on business risks and talk to legal, then discover some concerns that just need the boss' sign-off in writing.
Heartbreaking: I work in the cesspool called the Indian tech industry
They will stonewall me and move forward regardless. I’m going to do what I can, raise a stink and polish my CV
KeepassXC (my password manager of choice) are “experimenting” with ai code assistants
I'm a KeePassXC maintainer. The Copilot PRs are a test drive to speed up the development process. For now, it's just a playground and most of the PRs are simple fixes for existing issues with very limited reach. None of the PRs are merged without being reviewed, tested, and, if necessary, amended by a human developer. This is how it is now and how it will continue to be should we choose to go on with this. We prefer to be transparent about the use of AI, so we chose to go the PR route. We could have also done it locally and nobody would ever know. That's probably how most projects work these days. We might publish a blog article soon with some more details.
The trace of petulance in the response… “we could have done it secretly, that’s how most projects do it” is not the kind of attitude I’m happy to see attached to a security critical piece of software.
It definitely feels like the first draft said for the longest time we had to use AI in secret because of Woke.
I also learned Bitwarden bought into AI reading this. They don't appear to have let vulnerability extruders ruin their code as of this writing, but any willingness to entertain the fascism machines is enough for me to consider jumping ship.
@BlueMonday1984 @rook iirc they're only doing an agent that can read credentials from bitwarden, not use the thing to generate code – or did something change?
Here is what I could find. It isn't problematic enough to get me to switch to self-hosting, but I am open to being wrong about this (read: I perused the shared links and then did a line of copium --- here's hoping BW is internally saying "enough people want this, here is how we can provide it to these dipshits" and not "let's hop on the train y'all")
https://bitwarden.com/blog/bitwarden-mcp-server/
To help drive secure authentication forward, Bitwarden introduces its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which provides the infrastructure for secure AI agent integration with password management. The new Bitwarden MCP server allows AI assistants to access, generate, retrieve, and manage passwords through a local-first architecture where credentials remain on a user’s machine, maintaining zero-knowledge encryption.
IMPORTANT SECURITY NOTE
MCP servers are on the frontier of the AI wave, enabling new, to-be-imagined applications. At the same time, frontiers, when not explored carefully, can be risky. Users of the Bitwarden MCP server are encouraged to keep security and care in mind. Some examples that Bitwarden demonstrates may not be appropriate for all users and use cases. It is strongly recommended to leverage a local self-hosted LLM option when using the MCP server.
@Seminar2250 that was what i remembered; this i can live with. (uneasily, but still.)
sigh
anyone got a good replacement?
Kinda, but nothing I’m entirely happy with. We use bitwarden at work, at my suggestion, but I don’t like the tools as much as I do keepassxc, and even though you can self-host the network service that stores the data, you still have to host something whereas keepassxc is standalone and you can sync the password vault over some file sharing service, or carry it on a usb stick, etc. there have been a couple of incidents whereby user license data wasn’t processed correctly and people got locked out of bitwarden vaults, which is pretty serious even if it was only temporary. That can’t happen with easily-backed-up-and-restored local databases.
They’ve also had some “license controversies” which should also give you pause for thought if you were interested in a free and open system: https://www.techradar.com/...
The original keepass project is still alive, and maybe I’ll have a look at that. The current maintainer is a bit odd, and the project has had some historical security issues, but I suspect that all password managers (at least on windows) will have the exact same problems. It is unlikely to have the same range of features, but it is written in a memory safe language (C#) rather than in C++, which keepassxc uses (and I’ve never been entirely happy with).
In short, everything is awful, and I will probably stick with xc for my own purposes for now, as there isn’t quite a replacement for me yet. I’d buy a mooltipass (https://www.mymooltipass.com/) except I’d want a backup, and that means an outlay of a good £300 which is a bit painful. And they’re often out of stock 😕
thanks, yeah we use bitwarden at work and i really don't like the ux. plus the simplicity of just having a file to sync is very convenient to me.
i might try authpass soon, seems to look nice enough.
helpful post, ty - I’ve also been halfheartedly looking at bitwarden (possibly with vaultwarden server) and I haven’t pulled the trigger yet because extra yaks. so knowing some of the other happenings there… oof
(including pulling the trigger I’d want to have it hosted on an island instead of directly exposed, which adds other requirements and steps)
the only other option is (gnu) pass, but it sucks pretty majorly ito clients. it really isn’t a good time in password managers :|
There’s an interesting mastodon thead from back in July where someone was unhappy with the state of bitwarden and looked at a bunch of alternatives:
https://transfem.social/notes/aa2w3yuz3tfz0hdp
This also seems to have been around when keepassxc started using coding assistants, so it isn’t quite clear to me why the issue has suddenly surfaced now.
So, today in AI hype, we are going back to chess engines!
Ethan pumping AI-2027 author Daniel K here, so you know this has been "ThOrOuGHly ReSeARcHeD" (tm)
Taking it at face value, I thought this was quite shocking! Beating a super GM with queen odds seems impossible for the best engines that I know of!! But the first * here is that the chart presented is not classical format. Still, QRR odds beating 1600 players seems very strange, even if weird time odds shenanigans are happening. So I tried this myself and to my surprise, I went 3-0 against Lc0 in different odds QRR, QR, QN, which now means according to this absolutely laughable chart that I am comparable to a 2200+ player!
(Spoiler: I am very much NOT a 2200 player... or a 2000 player... or a 1600 player)
And to my complete lack of surprise, this chart crime originated in a LW post creator commenting here w/ "pls do not share this without context, I think the data might be flawed" due to small sample size for higher elos and also the fact that people are probably playing until they get their first win and then stopping.
Luckily absolute garbage methodologies will not stop Daniel K from sharing the latest in Chess engine news.
But wait, why are LWers obsessed with the latest Chess engine results? Ofc its because they want to make some point about AI escaping human control even if humans start with a material advantage. We are going back to Legacy Yud posting with this one my friends. Applying RL to chess is a straight shot to applying RL to skynet to checkmate humanity. You have been warned!
LW link below if anyone wants to stare into the abyss.
One of the core beliefs of rationalism is that Intelligence™ is the sole determinant of outcomes, overriding resource imbalances, structural factors, or even just plain old luck. For example, since Elon Musk is so rich, that must be because he is very Intelligent™, despite all of the demonstrably idiotic things he has said over the years. So, even in an artificial scenario like chess, they cannot accept the fact that no amount of Intelligence™ can make up for a large material imbalance between the players.
There was a sneer two years ago about this exact question. I can't blame the rationalists though. The concept of using external sources outside of their bubble is quite unfamiliar to them.
two years ago
🪦👨🏼➡️👴🏼
since Elon Musk is so rich, that must be because he is very Intelligent™
Will never be able to understand why these mfs don’t see this as the unga bunga stupid ass caveman belief that it is.
cos it implies that my overvalued salary as an IT monkey fo parasite companies of no social value is not because I sold my soul to capital owners, it's because I've always been a special little boy who got gold stars in school
@swlabr @lagrangeinterpolator Rat calvinism lol
I was wondering why Eliezer picked chess of all things in his latest "parable". Even among the lesswrong community, chess playing as a useful analogy for general intelligence has been picked apart. But seeing that this is recent half-assed lesswrong research, that would explain the renewed interest in it.
Unstoppable IP enforcers meet unmovable slop generator?
Plus, the authors currently suing OpenAI have gotten their hands on emails and internal Slack messages discussing their deletion of the LibGen dataset - a development which opens the company up to much higher damages and sanctions from the court for destroying evidence.
Still think it is wild they used the libgen dataset(s) and basically gotten away with it apart from some minor damages only for US publishers (who actually registered their copyright). Even more so as my provider blocks libgen etc.
Watching another rationalist type on twitter become addicted to meth. You guys weren’t joking.
(no idea who - just going by the subtweets).
NotAwfulTech and AwfulTech converged with some ffmpeg drama on twitter over the past few days starting here and still ongoing. This is about an AI generated security report by Google's "Big Sleep" (with no corresponding Google authored fix, AI or otherwise). Hackernews discussed it here. Looking at ffmpeg's security page there have been around 24 bigsleep reports fixed.
ffmpeg pointed out a lot of stuff along the lines of:
- They are volunteers
- They have not enough money
- Certain companies that do use ffmpeg and file security reports also have a lot of money
- Certain ffmpeg developers are willing to enter consulting roles for companies in exchange for money
- Their product has no warranty
- Reviewing LLM generated security bugs royally sucks
- They're really just in this for the video codecs moreso than treating every single Use-After-Free bug as a drop-everything emergency
- Making the first 20 frames of certain Rebel Assault videos slightly more accurate is awesome
- Think it could be more secure? Patches welcome.
- They did fix the security report
- They do take security reports seriously
- You should not run ffmpeg "in production" if you don't know what you're doing.
All very reasonable points but with the reactions to their tweets you'd think they had proposed killing puppies or something.
A lot of people seem to forget this part of open source software licenses:
BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW
Or that venerable old C code will have memory safety issues for that matter.
It's weird that people are freaking out about some UAFs in a C library. This should really be dealt with in enterprise environments via sandboxing / filesystem containers / aslr / control flow integrity / non-executable memory enforcement / only compiling the codecs you need... and oh gee a lot of those improvements could be upstreamed!
The ffmpeg social media maintainer is an Elon fan so when he purchased Twitter and made foolish remarks about rewriting it all in C and how only hardcore programmers are cool that write C/assembly they quickly jumped on it.
Ya maybe it’s a way to attract more contributors or donation money. Felt a bit weird after Elon was shitting on all the people who built Twitter and firing them.
🙃🙃🙃
“I think the AI slop is great. I think culturally, it’s a good thing that it happened, because one of the things that drove people to start really caring about artists again in 2024 was the AI slop. I think everything happens for a reason,” she said in a recent interview with Time. “Most of the album is sort of about me being a bit of a Diogenes about the ills of modernity while still celebrating them.”
JFC what world does she live in
Grimes was married to Elon Musk and performs at events for 'heretical truth-tellers' sponsored by Peter Thiel
When she's not attending the weddings of people like Curtis Yarvin.
as someone who identifies greatly with diogenes, i say: do not trust anyone who compares themself to diogenes
Big Yud posts another "banger"[1], and for once the target audience isn't impressed:
I skimmed it. It's terrible. It's a long-winded parable about some middling chess player who's convinced he's actually good, and a Socratic strawman in the form of a young woman who needles him.
Contains such Austean gems as this
If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington -- measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation -- it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
In the end, both strawmen are killed by AI-controlled mosquito drones, leaving everyone else feeling relieved .
Commenters seem miffed that Yud isn't cleaning up his act and writing more coherently so as to warn the world of Big Bad AI, but apparently he just can't help himself.
[1] if by banger you mean a long, tedious turd. 42 minute read!
Some juicy extracts:
Soon enough then the appointed day came to pass, that Mr. Assi began playing some of the town's players, defeating them all without exception. Mr. Assi did sometimes let some of the youngest children take a piece or two, of his, and get very excited about that, but he did not go so far as to let them win. It wasn't even so much that Mr. Assi had his pride, although he did, but that he also had his honesty; Mr. Assi would have felt bad about deceiving anyone in that way, even a child, almost as if children were people.
Yud: "Woe is me, a child who was lied to!"
Tessa sighed performatively. "It really is a classic midwit trap, Mr. Humman, to be smart enough to spout out words about possible complications, until you've counterargued any truth you don't want to hear. But not smart enough to know how to think through those complications, and see how the unpleasant truth is true anyways, after all the realistic details are taken into account." [...] "Why, of course it's the same," said Mr. Humman. "You'd know that for yourself, if you were a top-tier chess-player. The thing you're not realizing, young lady, is that no matter how many fancy words you use, they won't be as complicated as real reality, which is infinitely complicated. And therefore, all these things you are saying, which are less than infinitely complicated, must be wrong."
Your flaw dear Yud isn't that your thoughts cannot out-compete the complexity of reality, it's that it's a new complexity untethered from the original. Retorts to you wild sci-fi speculations are just minor complications brought by midwits, you very often get the science critically wrong, but expect to still be taken seriously! (One might say you share a lot of Humman misquoting and misapplying "econ 101". )
"Look, Mr. Humman. You may not be the best chess-player in the world, but you are above average. [... Blah blah IQ blah blah ...] You ought to be smart enough to understand this idea."
Funilly enough the very best chess players like Nakamura or Carlsen will readily call themselves dumbasses outside of chess.
"Well, by coincidence, that is sort of the topic of the book I'm reading now," said Tessa. "It's about Artificial Intelligence -- artificial super-intelligence, rather. The authors say that if anyone on Earth builds anything like that, everyone everywhere will die. All at the same time, they obviously mean. And that book is a few years old, now! I'm a little worried about all the things the news is saying, about AI and AI companies, and I think everyone else should be a little worried too."
Of course this a meandering plug to his book!
"The authors don't mean it as a joke, and I don't think everyone dying is actually funny," said the woman, allowing just enough emotion into her voice to make it clear that the early death of her and her family and everyone she knew was not a socially acceptable thing to find funny. "Why is it obviously wrong?"
They aren't laughing at everyone dying, they're laughing at you. I would be more charitable with you if the religion you cultivate was not so dangerous, most of your anguish is self-inflicted.
"So there's no sense in which you're smarter than a squirrel?" she said. "Because by default, any vaguely plausible sequence of words that sounds it can prove that machine superintelligence can't possibly be smarter than a human, will prove too much, and will also argue that a human can't be smarter than a squirrel."
Importantly you often portray ASI as being able to manipulate humans into doing any number of random shit, and you have an unhealthy association of intelligence with manipulation. I'm quite certain I couldn't get at squirrel to do anything I wanted.
"You're not worried about how an ASI [...] beyond what humans have in the way of vision and hearing and spatial visualization of 3D rotating shapes.
Is that... an incel shape-rotator reference?
Yud: “Woe is me, a child who was lied to!”
He really can't let down that one go, it keeps coming up. It was at least vaguely relevant to a Harry Potter self-insert, but his frustrated gifted child vibes keep leaking into other weird places. (Like Project Lawful, among it's many digressions, had an aside about how dath ilan raises it's children to avoid this. It almost made me sympathetic towards the child-abusing devil worshipers who had to put up with these asides to get to the main character's chemistry and math lectures.)
Of course this a meandering plug to his book!
Yup, now that he has a book out he's going to keep referencing back to it and it's being added to the canon that must be read before anyone is allowed to dare disagree with him. (At least the sequences were free and all online)
Is that… an incel shape-rotator reference?
I think shape-rotator has generally permeated the rationalist lingo for a certain kind of math aptitude, I wasn't aware the term had ties to the incel community. (But it wouldn't surprise me that much.)
If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington – measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation – it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
How do you write like this? How do you pick a normal joking observation and then add more words to make it worse?
How do you write like this?
The first step is not to have an editor. The second step is to marinate for nearly two decades in a cult growth medium that venerates you for not having an editor.
First comment: "the world is bottlenecked by people who just don't get the simple and obvious fact that we should sort everyone by IQ and decide their future with it"
No, the world is bottlenecked by idiots who treat everything as an optimization problem.
@sinedpick @awful.systems @gerikson @awful.systems
The world is hamstrung by people who only believe there is one kind of intelligence, it can be measured linearly, and it is the sole determinant of human value.
The Venn diagram of these people and closet eugenicists looks like a circle if you squint at it.
The dumb strawman protagonist is called "Mr. Humman" and the ASI villain is called "Mr. Assi". I don't think any parody writer trying to make fun of rationalist writing could come up with something this bad.
The funniest comment is the one pointing out how Eliezer screws up so many basic facts about chess that even an amateur player can see all the problems. Now, if only the commenter looked around a little further and realized that Eliezer is bullshitting about everything else as well.
42 minute read
Maybe if you're a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in "Skewers", Washington, vs. "Forks", Washington, as made famous by Twilight.
Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yud's stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!
My summary:
Part 1. A chess player, "Mr. Humman", plays a match against "Mr. Assi" and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, "Socratessa", or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are "Mr. Chimzee" and "Mr. Neumann".
Both "Humman" and "Socratessa" are strawmen. "Socratessa" is described as thus:
One of the less polite young ladies of the town, whom some might have called a troll,
Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:
"Oh, my dear young lady," Mr. Humman said, quite kindly as was his habit when talking to pretty women potentially inside his self-assessed strike zone
I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so here's what I'll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that it's completely transparent that Yud doesn't want you to like this guy. Yud's methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments/johns you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I don't like this character, but not because of Yud's intent.
Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. That's it. It's unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. He should have just said she was gallant.* She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another. Of course, Humman disagrees, and as the goofus, must be wrong.*
The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yud's whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.
E: if you were wondering, yes, there is eugenics in the story.
E2: forgot to tie up some allusions, specifically the g&g of it all. Marked added sentences with a *.
eugenics
Yes, the bit about John von Neumann sounds like he is stuck in the 1990s: "there must be a gene for everything!" not today "wow genomes are vast interconnected systems and individual genes get turned on and off by environmental factors and interventions often have the reverse effect we expect." Scott Alexander wrote an essay admiring the Hungarian physics geniuses and tutoring.
yud’s scientific model is aristotlean, i.e. he thinks of things he thinks should be true, then rejects counter-evidence with a bayesian cudgel or claims of academic conspiracy. So yeah genes are feature flags, why wouldnt they be (and eugenics is just SRE ig)
Meanwhile he objects to people theorycrafting objections (Tessa's dialogue about the midwit trap and an article for the Cato Institute called "Is that your true rejection?") That is an issue in casual conversations, but professionals work through these possibilities in detail and make a case that they can be overcome. Those cases often include past experience completing similar projects as well as theory. A very important part of becoming a professional is learning to spot "that requires a perpetual motion machine," "that implies P = NP," "that requires assuming that the sources we have are a random sample of what once existed" and not getting lost in the details; another is becoming part of a community of practitioners who criticize each other.
and don't even get me started on splice variants
Yeah, after establishing a deeply tortured chess metaphor and beating it to death and beyond, Yud proceeds to just straight-up bitching about how nobody is taking his book seriously. It just fucking keeps going even as it dips into the most pathetic and hateful eugenics part of their whole ideology because of course it does.
I hope Yud doesn't mind if I borrow Mr. Assi for my upcoming epic crossover fic, "Naruto and Batman Stop the Poo-Pocalypse"
Wait a minute, what do you mean, it's not supposed to be that kind of ass?
I couldn't even make it through this one, he just kept repeating himself with the most absurd parody strawman he could manage.
This isn't the only obnoxiously heavy handed "parable" he's written recently: https://www.lesswrong.com/...
Even the lesswronger's are kind of questioning the point:
I enjoyed this, but don't think there are many people left who can be convinced by Ayn-Rand length explanatory dialogues in a science-fiction guise who aren't already on board with the argument.
A dialogue that references Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, no less. But honestly Lem was a lot more terse and concise in making his points. I agree this is probably not very relevant to any discourse at this point (especially here on LW, where everyone would be familiar with the arguments anyway).
And: https://www.lesswrong.com/...
Reading this felt like watching someone kick a dead horse for 30 straight minutes, except at the 21st minute the guy forgets for a second that he needs to kick the horse, turns to the camera and makes a couple really good jokes. (The bit where they try and fail to change the topic reminded me of the "who reads this stuff" bit in HPMOR, one of the finest bits you ever wrote in my opinion.) Then the guy remembers himself, resumes kicking the horse and it continues in that manner until the end.
Who does he think he's convincing? Numerous skeptical lesswrong posts have described why general intelligence is not like chess-playing and world-conquering/optimizing is not like a chess game. Even among his core audience this parable isn't convincing. But instead he's stuck on repeating poor analogies (and getting details wrong about the thing he is using for analogies, he messed up some details about chess playing!).
Thoughts / notes on Nostr? A local on a tech site is pushing it semi-hard, and I just remember it being mentioned in the same breath as Bluesky back in the day. It ticks a lot of techfash boxes - decentralized, "uncensorable", has Bitcoin's stupid Lightning protocol built in.
nostr neatly covers all obsessions of dorsey. it's literally fash-tech (original dev, fiatjaf, is a right-wing nutjob; and current development is driven by alex gleason of the truth dot social fame), deliberately designed to be impossible to moderate (“censorship-resilient”); the place is full of fascists, promptfondlers and crypto dudes.
I tried making one a few years back, maybe time to update it.
(arrow keys to scroll)
gleason is also responsible for soapbox, which is pleroma frontend (or maybe fork?) used as far as i know exclusively by nazis (which also makes defederation easier)
exploding-heads, openly trumpist lemmy instance, fucked off there when admin got bored of baiting normal people, make of that what you will
flashback: even back then handful of regulars objected that nostr is packed with cryptobros and spam, so it's like that for 2y minimum
Jack Dorsey seems to like throwing money at it:
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has endorsed and financially supported the development of Nostr by donating approximately $250,000 worth of Bitcoin to the developers of the project in 2023, as well as a $10 million cash donation to a Nostr development collective in 2025.
Some changes to adventofcode this year, will only have 12-days of puzzles, and no longer have global leaderboard according to the faq:
Why did the number of days per event change?
It takes a ton of my free time every year to run Advent of Code, and building the puzzles accounts for the majority of that time. After keeping a consistent schedule for ten years(!), I needed a change. The puzzles still start on December 1st so that the day numbers make sense (Day 1 = Dec 1), and puzzles come out every day (ending mid-December).
Scaling it a bit down rather than completely burning out is nice i think.
What happened to the global leaderboard?
The global leaderboard was one of the largest sources of stress for me, for the infrastructure, and for many users. People took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest; some people even resorted to things like DDoS attacks. Many people incorrectly concluded that they were somehow worse programmers because their own times didn't compare. What started as a fun feature in 2015 became an ever-growing problem, and so, after ten years of Advent of Code, I removed the global leaderboard. (However, I've made it so you can share a read-only view of your private leaderboard. Please don't use this feature or data to create a "new" global leaderboard.)
While trying to get a fast time on a private leaderboard, may I use AI / watch streamers / check the solution threads / ask a friend for help / etc?
If you are a member of any private leaderboards, you should ask the people that run them what their expectations are of their members. If you don't agree with those expectations, you should find a new private leaderboard or start your own! Private leaderboards might have rules like maximum runtime, allowed programming language, what time you can first open the puzzle, what tools you can use, or whether you have to wear a silly hat while working.
Probably the most positive change here, it's a bit of shame we can't have nice things, a no real way to police stuff like people using AI for leaderboard times. Still keeping the private one, for smaller groups of people, that can set expectations is unfortunately the only pragmatic thing to do.
Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles?
No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind.
It's nice to know the creator (Eric Wastl) has a good head on his shoulders.
I feel like the private leaderboards are also more in keeping with the spirit of the thing. You can't really have a friendly competition with a legion of complete strangers that you have no interaction with outside of comparing final times. Even when there's nothing on the line the consequences for cheating or being a dick are nonexistent, whereas in a a private group you have to deal with all your friends knowing you're an asshole going forward.
only have 12-days of puzzles
Obligatory oh good I might actually get something job-related done this December comment.
A redditor posted the latest Pivot to AI propaganda to r/betteroffline, where it currently has around 560 votes. This upset and confused a great many prompt enthusiasts in the comments, which goes to show that a kicked dog yelps.
Pls dont kick dogs 😭
It’s everyone’s favourite alternate browser developer back again, lamenting how mean some tech folk are and how cruelly they threaten and oppress certain groups of people.
Which groups? Oh, you know the ones 😉
spoiler
A screenshot of a twitter post by Andreas Kling, reading:
In recent years l've attended multiple software conference talks that had unrelated extreme political rhetoric in slides, such as "fuck [name]" and "punch [group]".
Whenever this happened, some of the audience would clap and cheer, l'd roll my eyes, and the talk would get back on topic.
Fast-forward to today, and look at how many people in our industry are openly celebrating the murder of someone they decided was a "nazi" and "fascist". Turns out these people were more serious than I thought.
As someone who's repeatedly been called a "nazi" and "fascist" myself for disagreements with far-left ideology, I know how easily those labels get thrown around. And honestly, this is making me seriously reconsider which conferences I attend.
There's a hateful rot within our industry. It shouldn't be socially acceptable to cheer for murder. We need to do more than roll our eyes.
Some fediverse links from non-mastodon sites can’t be loaded directly, it seems… if I stick the url into my mastodon client’s search field it’ll take me to the actual post, because it’ll do the request via the fedipub api. Anyway, I appreciate that’s a pretty poor UX for most people, so I’ll try and check my links more carefully in future!
I saw the post linked yesterday, fwiw. I’m annoyed I didn’t spot that it was missing a timestamp, as that’s usually a sign of suspicious tweets.
More wiki drama: Jimbo tries to both sides the gaza genocide
E: just for clarity. Jimbo is the canon nickname of founder Jimmy Wales.
And just to describe a little more of what has happened, as far as I can tell: Wales is reportedly being interviewed about Wikipedia (probably due to the grookiepedia stuff). He was asked in a "high profile media interview" (his words, see first link) about the Gaza genocide article, and said that it "fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention". Part of that attention is that they've locked the article, and Jimbo has joined the talk page. His argument probably boils down to this comment he left:
Let's start with this quote from WP:NPOV: "Avoid stating seriously contested assertions as facts. If different reliable sources make conflicting assertions about a matter, treat these assertions as opinions rather than facts, and do not present them as direct statements." Surely you aren't going to argue that the core assertion of the article is not seriously contested?
The "core assertion" is contained in the lede:
The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war.
i.e. that there is a genocide happening at all.
Gizmodo article, in case this comment sucks in some way and you wanted to read a different report.
in terms of zitron fallout, there used to be a comment section at his blog, it's not there anymore
previous stubsack https://awful.systems/comment/9235549 i don't think too hard about it, because to a degree all pr people are professional liars in the first place, but bluesky didn't like it
There's a Charles Stross novel from 2018 where cultists take over the US government and begin a project to build enough computational capacity to summon horrors from beyond space-time (in space). It's called The Labyrinth Index and it's very good!
So anyway, this happened:
Also, this:
What's a government backstop, and does it happen often? It sounds like they're asking for a preemptive bail-out.
I checked the rest of Zitron's feed before posting and its weirder in context:
Interview:
She also hinted at a role for the US government "to backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen", but did not elaborate on how this would work.
Later at the jobsite:
I want to clarify my comments earlier today. OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments. I used the word "backstop" and it mudlled the point.
She then proceeds to explain she just meant that the government 'should play its part'.
Zitron says she might have been testing the waters, or its just the cherry on top of an interview where she said plenty of bizzare shit
"I don’t think there’s enough exuberance about AI"
Tinkerbell needs you all to wish harder, boys and girls
@Architeuthis @o7___o7
“I don’t think there’s enough exuberance about AI"? Wow.
What’s a government backstop, and does it happen often? It sounds like they’re asking for a preemptive bail-out.
Zitron's stated multiple times a bailout isn't coming, but I'm not ruling it out myself - AI has proven highly useful as a propaganda tool and an accountability sink, the oligarchs in office have good reason to keep it alive.
Sounnds like she used her internal voice externally
Between this and the IPO talk it seems like we're looking at some combination of trying to feel out exit strategies for the bubble they've created, trying to say whatever stuff keeps the "OpenAI is really big" narrative in the headlines, and good old fashioned business idiocy.
fyi over the last couple of days firefox added perplexity as search engine, must have been as an update
wild article about content scraping nonprofit common crawl
https://www.theatlantic.com/...
tl;dr they've been faking deleting data upon request (in ways that I find very funny) and their head is noxious even for a tech bro
also is it just me or does SV have a particular gift for perverting the nonprofit concept
He said that Common Crawl is “making an earnest effort” to remove content but that the file format in which Common Crawl stores its archives is meant “to be immutable. You can’t delete anything from it.”
makes me wonder if it's some crypto hangover
In 2023, he sent a letter urging the U.S. Copyright Office not “to hinder the development of intelligent machines” and included two illustrations of robots reading books.
cheerleaders for creepiest weirdos in sv try to deflect criticism by becoming impossible to parody
sv does have for some time a peculiar understanding of this and also some other terms, like "consent", "ownership", "privacy", "safety",
wasn't common crawl the one that pulled a similar trick to goog's "if you label a thing as $x we won't include you"[0]? I could swear I heard their name in association with some derpshit intake management stuff above and beyond the typical fundamental "free/open scraper set" problems
[0] - a tactic google first pulled with Streetview cars pulling in a pile of wifi beacons and tying it to location - "if you don't want it just rename your AP to '{prefix} - {apname}'". a reply that was just dumb and aggravating but also it fucking sucks that basically no standards have taken this problem to heart in the ~15y hence
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 It enrages me that early on in the article, the founder states that ‘Fair use’ a US construct for US copyright law only, means they can apply it to the Worlds data. The USA signed up to the Berne convention. It’s imperfect, but dammit, the signatories are meant to uphold copyrights of every country who signed up. Not ignore it and decide US copyright is the only law.
Aaand breathe.
Anyone knows who's (presumably) Tor from the "Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities" Youtube channel and what's up with his ideological commitments? Somebody recommended me this video on some Wikipedia grifter, I was enjoying it until suddenly (ca. 23:20 ) he name-drops Scott Alexander as “a writer whom I’m a big fan of”. I thought, should somebody tell him. Then I looked up and the guy has an entire video on subtypes of rationalists, so he knows, and chose to present as a fan anyway. Huh. However as far as a cursory glance goes the channel doesn't seem to bat for, you know, "human biodiversity". (I haven't watched the rat video because I don't want to ruin my week)
apologies for just linking to my own bsky post but I'm lazy: https://bsky.app/...
tl;dr I've gotten a bit suspicious that "AI users will be genocided" posts on reddit are a nazi op
not outside of the fascist playbook to claim that they are the real victims. The example that comes to mind is the myth of white genocide, but also literally any fascist rhetoric is like that.
It’s well trodden ground to say that genAI usage and support for genAI resonates with populist/reactionary/fascist themes in that it inherently devalues and dehumanises, and it promotes anti-intellectualism. If you can be replaced by AI, what worth do you have? And why think if the AI can do it for you?
So, of course this stuff being echoed in spaces where the majority are ignorant to the nazi tilt. They can’t and don’t understand fascism on a structural level, they can only identify it when it’s trains and gas chambers.
It's been a while since I used Reddit. Is the thesis that subscribers to ChatGPT will be rounded up and killed? By whom? For what stated reason? It sounds like a weird inversion of victimhood, considering the number of GenAI user (even if they're just casual users) and the massive money and hype around GenAI by companies and way too many govs.
frankly that's the most detailed I've seen it get. usually it's more like this
this is weird. My first thought is that it's just another vector of normalization for the idea that people who are afraid of and Post about genocide or other forms of discriminatory violence are not to be taken seriously. By putting a variety of insane victimhood appropriating subcultures into the internet milieu, it allows people to ignore what's happening (and what may be about to happen) in the real world, where groups of people actually are subject to fascistic violence.
That is my thought as well. It's like the "you call everyone you disagree with a Nazi" argument from the 90s and 00s - discrediting attempts to call out fascist and genocidal ideas creates a lot of cover for those ideas to spread without being appropriately checked. It helps create a situation where serious and respectable people can keep arguing that things aren't that bad all the way until they get pushed onto a cattle car.
Probably one part normalisation, one part AI supporters throwing tantrums when people don't treat them like the specialiest little geniuses they believe they are. These people have incredibly fragile egos, after all.
curious, that art style in that reply strongly matches the image I saw on this toot drifting by in my timeline earlier
I haven't touched image generators and idk how different their products are, if at all. but I think of this as the default AI "illustrated" style. very low on detail outside of the objects of focus, heavy line work, flat, rounded, muted colors
@gerikson @techtakes It's classic DARVO gaslighting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
Checked back on the smoldering dumpster fire that is Framework today.
Linux Community Ambassadors Tommi and Fraxinas have jumped ship, sneering the company's fash turn on the way out.
I just saw this. I sent an email to Framework a few days ago asking if they would delete my account and letting them know this was the reason.
Sam Altman got subpoena’d live on stage.
"An investigator from the San Francisco Public Defender's Office lawfully served a subpoena on Mr. Altman because he is a potential witness in a pending criminal case," spokesperson Valerie Ibarra said in a statement to SFGATE.
In a post on X, the group wrote that one of their public defenders had managed to serve Sam Altman with a subpoena, requiring him to testify at their upcoming trial. They explained that the case involves their previous non-violent demonstrations, including blocking the entrance and the road in front of OpenAI's offices on multiple occasions.
"All of our non-violent actions against OpenAI were an attempt to slow OpenAI down in their attempted murder of everyone and every living thing on earth."
So it's not because he's being prosecuted.
Oh yeah, it’s not the particular kind of good news we’d all like, but it is still entertaining.
Also, it is worth noting that this isn’t the normal way people get served. It’s a right hassle compared to just visiting someone at home or at the office or whatever. This sort of action is taken when the person being subpoenaed was actively evading it, but is also an egotistical idiot who is incapable of keeping a low profile.
More flaming dog poop appeared on my doorstep, in the form of this article published in VentureBeat. VB appears to be an online magazine for publishing silicon valley propaganda, focused on boosting startups, so it's no surprise that they'd publish this drivel sent in by some guy trying to parlay prompting into writing.
Point:
Apple argues that LRMs must not be able to think; instead, they just perform pattern-matching. The evidence they provided is that LRMs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning are unable to carry on the calculation using a predefined algorithm as the p,roblem grows.
Counterpoint, by the author:
This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.
As someone who already knows the algorithm for solving the ToH problem, I wouldn't "fail" at solving the one with twenty discs so much as I'd know that the algorithm is exponential in the number of discs and you'd need 2^20 - 1 (1048575) steps to do it, and refuse to indulge your shit reasoning.
However, this argument only points to the idea that there is no evidence that LRMs cannot think.
Argument proven stupid, so we're back to square one on this, buddy.
This alone certainly does not mean that LRMs can think — just that we cannot be sure they don’t.
Ah yes, some of my favorite GOP turns of phrases, "no unknown unknowns" + "big if true".
This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.
"I don't understand recursion" energy
We regret to inform you that one of Google's "AI leader"s is a transphobe:
https://www.theinformation.com/... (paywall)
https://bsky.app/... (screenshot of relevant section)
Hey it's the character.ai guy, a.k.a. first confirmed AI assisted kid suicide guy.
I do not believe G-d puts people in the wrong bodies.
Shazeer also said people who criticized the removal of the AI Principles were anti-Semitic.
Kind of feel the transphobia is barely scratching the surface of all the things wrong with this person.
I think he is stating that people don't have an invisible eternal Gender like a Christian thinks people have an invisible eternal Soul. I am a materialist so I don't think either exists. Shazeer goes on to complain about "sterilizing children" which is a red flag of transphobia (ie. people who post a lot about that tend to have a screw loose).
There is no need to give transphobes the benefit of the doubt really.
You don't believe in gender? I mean you're wrong IMO but we're cool. But if someone says the words "I don't believe have an attribute called gender" as part of a bunch of totally obvious anti-trans dog-whistles when butting into a discussion about transgender day of remembrance? Now it's a problem.
People who get angry about trans people and trans theory remind me of Dawkins and friends, because what starts as a factual/philosophical concern (there are probably no gods / the idea that people have a true gender inside them sounds mystical) gets twisted in a reactionary direction. I don't have to understand why trans or nonbinary people feel the way they do to support them as they explore ways of being humans in the world.
I think that gender is a collection of roles in a specific society which people perform and have performed on them. Its not something which exists outside that context, any more than "being the king" exists outside of a legal system. Of the three statements on BlueSky, its the third (the statement about sterilizing children) which makes me think he has been consuming angry things about trans people online.
Indeed, we also don't have an attribute called friendship, nor does money have a value attribute or stuff like that. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It shows a total lack of understanding of what people are talking and arguing about, just what looks like a very dumb attempt at a gotcha, while butting into a conversation that has been had for years now (which isn't even about him).
Time to derail conversations about computers by saying you don't believe in digital ones and zeros because of the volt values are not one or zero. I'm reminded of Dawkins book where he magics away altruism by redefining the word away.
Its also one of the authors of "Attention Is All You Need", one of the founding texts of the AI ideology.
As far as I can tell there's absolutely no ideology in the original transformers paper, what a baffling way to describe it.
James Watson was also a cunt, but calling "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" one of the founding texts of eugenicist ideology or whatever would be just dumb.
what a baffling way to describe it
this is a recurring problem with them/their posts; if you look across history you can see a continual pattern of “de jour grumpword a la $somecommunity” leak forth
I have on occasion asked them to try to make better posts. they don’t seem to give a fuck to do so tho
to the latter part of my comment: both my own and also other peoples’ criticisms just turn into a dead avenue. the applicable poster just ghosts that subthread while happily posting elsewhere
guess there’s no desire to do better!
Some legitimate academic papers and essays have served as fuel for the AI hype and less legitimate follow-up research, but the clearest examples that comes to mind would be either "The Bitter Lesson" essay or one of the "scaling law" papers (I guess Chinchilla scaling in particular?), not "Attention is All You Need". (Hyperscaling LLMs and the bubble fueling it is motivated by the idea that they can just throw more and more training data at bigger and bigger model). And I wouldn't blame the author(s) for that alone.
Impending availability of fully-functional Casio ring watches:
Casio and their target market are my kind of nerds. Taking a silly idea and an iconic design and pushing the engineering to its limits entirely for the bit is absolutely unhinged and I'm so happy they did it.
I have an analog Casio G-Shock that's the perfect beater watch - radio controlled, solar charging, I can discern the hands in the dark without glasses, and almost indestructible. It wasn't terribly expensive either.
I think Casio is threading the needle quite well with new technology. I'm sure they're exploring pure smart watches, but the core ideal is "no maintenance" - you don't have to change the battery or set the time[1]. This naturally leads to tough, energy-concious engineering, and as they make millions of watches, they have economies of scale.
The newer models have BT low energy so you can use the admittedly fiddly controls with an app. But you don't need to. It's just a complement.
[1] obviously this only applies to the more expensive models, and if your local time source supports DST
All 3 of the major Japanese manufacturers (Casio, Seiko, Citizen) have solar-powered radio sync models, but so far Casio is the best in my experience, and has the widest range of models. The Casios tend to have an auto-DST setting that relies on an internal calendar as well as the time signal. I have a chonky Seiko solar-atomic pilot's watch (with rotary slide-rule bezel!), but it doesn't have auto-DST so I have to bounce it back and forth between time zones. And it also doesn't seem to be as adept at receiving the WWVB signal as my Casios; it needs to be next to a window, while the Casios don't seem to care as long as there's not too much building mass to the east. I haven't had a chance to try a Citizen yet, but they now have solar-atomic moon-phase watches, which is tempting.
I have an analog radio-controlled solar powered watch from both Casio and Citizen. The Casio has stepper motors for the hands, which is so cool when you see the minute hand advance 1/6 tick each 20 seconds. When the second hand is used as an indicator, the minute hand doesn't move. It does on the Citizen.
That said, I'm keeping an eye out for a used or good deal on a GPS watch from Citizen. I appreciate the styling more.
Edit I used to be a watch nerd and I still follow the news for entertainment, but for personal use a solar powered, externally synced quartz watch is ideal.
Guys, the reason we don't see working AI out in the world is because all the "frontier AI labs" are keeping the good stuff for themselves!! It's totally not that this shit doesn't work
Lmaou thats some good cope right there
Google is space data-center curious, too:
Part of me wants to see Google actually try this and get publicly humiliated by their nonexistent understanding of physics, part of me dreads the fact it'll dump even more fucking junk into space.
how do you want to get butlerian jihad without kessler syndrome?
Considering we've already got a burgeoning Luddite movement that's been kicked into high gear by the AI bubble, I'd personally like to see an outgrowth of that movement be what ultimately kicks it off.
There were already some signs of this back in August, when anti-AI protesters vandalised cars and left "Butlerian Jihad" leaflets outside a pro-AI business meetup in Portland.
Alternatively, I can see the Jihad kicking off as part of an environmentalist movement - to directly quote Baldur Bjarnason:
[AI has] turned the tech industry from a potential political ally to environmentalism to an outright adversary. Water consumption of individual queries is irrelevant because now companies like Google and Microsoft are explicitly lined up against the fight against climate disaster. For that alone the tech should be burned to the ground.
I wouldn't rule out an artist-led movement being how the Jihad starts, either - between the AI industry "directly promising to destroy their industry, their work, and their communities" (to quote Baldur again), and the open and unrelenting contempt AI boosters have shown for art and artists, artists in general have plenty of reason to see AI as an existential threat to their craft and/or a show of hatred for who they are.
i think you need to be a little bit more specific unless sounding a little like an unhinged cleric from memritv is what you're going for
but yeah nah i don't think it's gonna last this way, people want to go back to just doing their jobs like it used to be, and i think it may be that bubble burst wipes out companies that subsidized and provided cheap genai, so that promptfondlers hammering image generators won't be as much of a problem. propaganda use and scams will remain i guess
The "daylight as a space-based service" bullshit is even worse.
Found a high quality sneer of OpenAI from Los Angeles Review of Books: Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities
Like a complete fucking idiot, I paid for two years of protonmail right before discovering they are fascists. I would like to move to another provider. I have until August. I have been considering Forward Email. Anyone have thoughts on this provider or recommendations?
haven't seen them before, but a short tour around their infra/systems providers isn't particularly exciting - depending on both your threat model and what-you-want in a vendor
some parts/pages do provide some detail in encouraging depth, but I'd have to do a much more full review to give you a good answer
there's been a couple of "where email" threads over the last year, tuta's still one of the top options on that but you can check the threads if you want to see some of the other promising options
I am using posteo.de. They are good but I dislike that they have no option for using your own domain which makes switching provider really annoying. If I had to choose a provider again I would probably go with mailbox.org.
I'm in the same boat. From what I've read I am planning on migrating to tuta when it runs out.
An obit for James Watson and his Dawkins- or Pinker-like path from a scientist to a bitter reactionary https://www.statnews.com/...
Op banned??
BlueMonday has had a tendency to go off with a half-assed understanding of actual facts and details. Each individual instance wasn't ban worthy, but collectively I can see why it merited a temp ban. (I hope/assume it's not a permanent ban, is there a way to see?)
Thanks!
So it wasn't even their random hot takes, it was reporting someone? (My guess would be reporting froztbyte's criticism, which I agree have been valid if a bit harsh in tone)
froztbyte’s criticism crossed the line by a bit for a couple of admins who weighed in, and they’ve been warned to ease up. reporting a post like that isn’t bannable; we’ve got more context for a report like that than we do for some rando doing a drive-by report for a tone rule that doesn’t exist, for example.
blue misused the report system in a way that wasn’t accidental or incidental, and we felt the best course of action was a cooling off period. given that they’re welcome back in less than 4 days, I’d prefer to leave it at that.
Via Emily M Bender, "AI's capabilities may be exaggerated by flawed tests, according to new study"
Another deep-dive into DHH's decline has popped up online: DHH and Omarchy: Midlife crisis:
@mlen @BlueMonday1984 decline as in he's gone full white supremacist (and openly supports “tommy robinson”/stephen yaxley-lennon)
@mlen @BlueMonday1984 he went through the “dumbass ceo annoyed that employees talk back to him”→“full fascist” pipeline faster than you can say ohforfuck'ssake.
It amazes me they all think they can be open about it. Amd all because they think because of Trump/Musk they have some vital momentum. (Bit shocked there were so many crypto/proto fascists, but still doesnt seem like they have the numbers or the sustainable momentum, see how Yarvin/Banning are afraid already).
This looks like a rebranding of Urbit: Radiant Computer
Has AI in its guts but not something they mention on the front page. Slop images throughout tho
https://radiant.computer/system/os/ - "It’s an AI-native operating system. Artificial neural networks are built in and run locally. The OS understands what applications can do, what they expose, and how they fit together. It can integrate features automatically, without extra code. AI is used to extend your ability, help you understand the system and be your creative aid."
https://radiant.computer/system/network/ - "Radiant rejects the Web as a general purpose software platform, while embracing the Internet protocols as the powerful substrate on which sovereign technologies like Tor, BitTorrent, Gemini and Bitcoin are built."
Looks like a hobby project of someone who has very particular views about computers.
I'm not sure what kind of neural network are they planning to run on a custom FPGA based GPU with 4GB RAM shared with CPU
Heck the AI/crypto stuff is awful but I would actually be interested in a RISC computer running a low-energy-use minimalistic OS that opts out of the Web by foregrounding Gemini protocol and dedicated apps for traditional, older Internet protocols (email, irc, telnet/ssh etc.)
I regret to inform you that the creator is a coiner
also all-in on AI
Being that and saying stuff like :
Computers today are designed around engagement and surveillance business models rather than user needs.
Is something. Esp as they say the biggest problem is advertising and surveillance online.
More bias-laundering through AI, phrenology edition! https://www.economist.com/...
I couldn't actually read the article because paywall, but here's a paper that the article is probably about: AI Personality Extraction from Faces: Labor Market Implications
Saying the quiet part out loud:
First, an individual’s genetic profile significantly influences both their facial features and personality. Certain variations in DNA correlate with specific facial features, such as nose shape, jawline, and overall facial symmetry, defined broadly as craniofacial characteristics
Second, a person’s pre- and post-natal environment, especially hormone exposure, has been shown to affect both facial characteristics and personality
To their credit the paper does say that this is a terrible idea, though I don't know how much benefit of the doubt to give them (I don't have time to take a closer look):
This research is not intended, and should not viewed, as advocacy for the usage of Photo Big 5 or similar technologies in labor market screening.
It sounds a little like “natural language is an awful way to unambiguously specify systems… but what if there was a special computer language that you could use to create computer programs in? 🤯” combined with a something that sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/... which already exists, but I guess represents a new frontier for vibe coding distributed systems, which are famously amenable to yolo development.
"Talking with all these marbles in my mouth holds huge promise, but also exposes some longstanding flaws in communication"
Also ironically enough they seem to be claiming that natural language is the future of ambiguously(?) specifying systems:
Specifications are back, even if they are now called “prompts.”
I would assume nothing stops them but I would love to get an analysis of why they may not be looking into this from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Best I can come up with from a complete layman's perspective is that they're concerned about the valuation they'd end up with. Not sure if the retail market had enough juice to actually pay for a company that is hypothetically one of the most valuable companies in the world, and puncturing that narrative might bring the whole bubble down (in a way that costs a lot of normal investors their shirts, of course).
@awful.systems
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
go to feed...
@awful.systems
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
go to feed...
Mozilla destroys the 20-year-old volunteer community that handled Japanese localization and replaces it with a chatbot. It compounds this by deleting years of work with zero warning. Adding insult to insult, Mozilla then rolls a critical failure on "reading the room."
https://support.mozilla.org/...
save