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.)
And whilst we’re in that liminal space where no-one reads the old stubstack but the new one hasn’t yet surfaced, here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.
Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.
it doesn’t get any cheerier, and wraps up with
It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined
Oof.
That’s pretty long and you should definitely repost it in the next sack. I lightly skimmed it and will read it in full later.
RE, the LLM of it all: Wonder how many times this has already happened:
“AI, please invent a new project management ideology for me, improving on agile and waterfall!”
“Certainly. Here’s AgileFall, a linear combination of the two. What the fuck were you expecting here?”
https://iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf “We simulated 131 million human beings using LLMs and found 11% of jobs could be done by AI instead of humans” I can’t tell what’s real with LLMs anymore. I wonder if that’s the point.
deleted by creator
Tomorrow Grimes will DJ a livestream of immortality influencer Bryan Johnson tripping on shrooms to determine its effect on longevity. Mr. Beast and the CEO of Salesforce will be there too.
Now, folks out there are calling this a Biblically accurate blunt rotation, but to be fair, it’s missing Aella.
I’ll tell you what, it is fantastic to be clean and sober today
I was tempted to gawk but then I realised… the guy’s just going to see some shapes in the light and it’s going to be boring as shit
(not in any way meaning to stan the weirdo) at that dosage it might be more than that, but also it’s ??? to me to consider taking that much while also being exposed to a bunch of people like that around me
and that it’s even the dosage it is feels like it tells you a hell of a lot about the extent of his baseline intake too
these creeps are doing a better job at antidrug messaging than any propaganda I ever saw
I dont know much about dosage numbers etc, care to mention a bit more how much is normal and how much he is off the baseline?
(I just recall some old friends who once tried shrooms and didnt seem to notice much so they went to a disco and for one of them it hit at the middle of the dancefloor so he stood there like a statue (the guy was also tall and a metalhead, so quite a sight). And before it became illegal (some tourist got himself killed by using shrooms and drinking and they blamed the shrooms) to give others spores or something I managed to get some from someone as a promo/anarchist thing. Never did anything with them).
(Fine if you dont want to, or if talking about it exposes you/others to risk etc, dont. Just curious).
I dont know much about dosage numbers etc, care to mention a bit more how much is normal and how much he is off the baseline?
“normal” is a bit of a fucked term when dealing with this stuff, in part because we really don’t have good human-wide data (hi can you see what ghoulfuck is playing off of?). why don’t we have that? oh y’know that entire little multidecade war on drugs things perpetetrated by the selfsame government that is…[…breathe]
that said, psychonautwiki is a more informative starting point than I could concisely be. that also said, part of the fucky bit is that you get different strains of shrooms, with different effective concentrations of psychoactive compounds (eg psilocybin cubensis vs psilocybin cyanescens)
beyond that, I don’t really think that awful is a place for psychedelic discussion (and I wouldn’t try to make it one). there are often conversations to be had, but here ain’t the where
Thanks! And of course there is a wiki for it.
E: unrelated to the talks about shrooms. Didn’t Grimes talk to Aella about how they felt cheated by people around them who were a lot more evil than they pretended to be, wonder why this doesn’t seem to have caused a change of heart/scenery.
re your edit: it hasn’t changed because those words are just a front, a way to try save face as they get caught out with their bullshit. both of them have a choice, and have had a choice this whole time. they keep choosing to be where they are, what they say
Indeed.
That’s about twice a ‘normal dose’ and in the realm of what Terrence McKenna would call a ‘heroic dose’.
Mushrooms vary a lot in real potency but at that level of dosage ego death is almost guaranteed, and it’s likely that the user will spend at least 30 minutes to an hour unable to articulate language.
it’s likely that the user will spend at least 30 minutes to an hour unable to articulate language.
This presumes Johnson was able to articulate language in the first place, which given that his brain has melted at an incredible pace since 2020 may be a bit of a stretch.
this post is more accurate than most
This doubly disappoints me because in a professional capacity I strive for being incredibly intentional and accurate while recreationally I aspire to shitposting, and “more accurate than most” satisfies neither. I really need to get my blood boy to write better material.
I love the phrase ego death because everyone I’ve heard describe the experience sounds like the most egotistical mf in the universe with how impressed they are by their own self-enlightenment.
Chasing links landed me here:
Grimes used to come to my club nights in Vancouver, and one time a guy who didn’t know who she was saw her dancing like an attention starved, crystal-gripping idiot, and he said to me “That’s the kind of chick who would take a shit on your chest if you asked.”
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:mpc62tgblkwndximirue5dxg/post/3lh7kznna3k2y
Someone needs to offer Erin Patterson a Suicide Squad deal
Btw, im a bit afraid to ask, as I should actually have googled this first (but I’m also becoming weary of google, tried to find some code related things yday and it was giving me wild results, it used to be better at that), but is there a sort of guide on blacksky, like what does joining one of those sites imply (I think I should join the ‘blacksky for non-poc’ variant, at least I got that was a thing) but how well does it interact with the main bsky, how easy is it to switch, consequences for interactions/follows/followers, etc etc. Anybody have a guide on that? In an attempt to migrate away more from bsky which is making a few questionable moderation decisions. (I also know that due to how the whole system is setup, migrating doesn’t actually get you away from those decisions, so I’m also asking out of curiosity, so take that into account regarding how much effort to put into my question, also means ignoring/not reacting is fine. Just shooting a shot, and trying to be clear about intentions, and my feelings re reactions).
I used https://tektite.cc/ to migrate off Bluesky, and picked the myatproto.social option from the drop-down list. This may be a good start: https://leaflet.pub/000b57de-78dc-4939-8c66-79227d010cce
Thanks, I’ll give it a read and see how it all works.
Promptfans still can’t get over the Erdős problems. Thankfully, even r/singularity has somehow become resistant to the most overhyped claims. I don’t think I need to comment on this one.
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1pag5mp/aristotle_from_harmonicmath_just_proved_erdos/
alt text (original claim)
We are on the cusp of a profound change in the field of mathematics. Vibe proving is here.
Aristotle from @HarmonicMath just proved Erdos Problem #124 in @leanprover, all by itself. This problem has been open for nearly 30 years since conjectured in the paper “Complete sequences of sets of integer powers” in the journal Acta Arithmetica.
Boris Alexeev ran this problem using a beta version of Aristotle, recently updated to have stronger reasoning ability and a natural language interface.
Mathematical superintelligence is getting closer by the minute, and I’m confident it will change and dramatically accelerate progress in mathematics and all dependent fields.
alt text (comments)
Gcd conditions removed, still great, but really hate the way people shill their stuff without any rigor to explaining the process. A lot of things become very easy when you remove a simple condition. Heck reimann hypothesis is technically solved for function fields over finite fields. But nowadays in the age of hype, a tweet post would probably say “Reimann hypothesis oneshotted by AI” even though that’s not true.
Gcd conditions removed
So they didn’t solve the actual problem?
Stuff like this is particularly frustrating because this is one of they places where I have to grudgingly admit that llm coding assistants could actually deliver… it turns out that having to state a problem unambiguously and having a way in which answers can be automatically checked for correctness means that you don’t have to worry about bullshit engines bullshitting you so much.
No llm is going to give good answers to “solve the riemann hypothesis in the style of euler, cantor, tao, 4k 8k big boobies do not hallucinate” and for everything else the problem then becomes “can you formally specify the parameters of your problem such that correct solutions are unambiguous” and now you need your professional mathematicians and computer scientists and cryptographers still…
Noted for the amusing headline: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03506-6
Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.
Do note that it appears to be an advert for ai peer review detection services, but I was still tickled by the whole “why are there leopards at our face-eating conference” surprise being expressed.
Robin Hanson has a sneerworthy level of hubris that has lead to him falling for all sorts of BS over the years (he’s long argued that being an economist makes him more rational and better at working out the truth than domain experts at all fields of science, apparently because only economists have heard of incentives) but I was still surprised to learn he’s now a UFO conspiracy nut.
Presumably he caught some History channel rerun of Ancient Aliens and was struck by how much more plausible it was than his “Age of Em” theory.
What’s more plausible, that I made a bad assumption in my fermi estimation or that all the world’s governments have been undertaking the most wildly successful coverup for nearly a century with no leaks or failures? Clearly the latter.
Also credulously reiterating Trump’s stupid “Department of War” rebrand… makes me think his writing is narrowly targeted at a certain group
Whats your P(Yakub)
0 isnt a real probability, so i gotta give it the gentleman’s 50:50
Hanson into conspiracies, Goertzel into parapsychology, going well on the rational/transhuman side.
E: seems ssc is pushing miracles now as well : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more
That popular piece on why it’s dumb to build (GenAI-scale) in space hit lobste.rs, and while most commenters agreed it is indeed dumb, fascist Flask founder felt the need to “well ackstually” for some stupid reason
duh ofc there are computers in space, there are computers everywhere, but the whole fucking point of the piece is you can’t take thousands of racks of GPUs and launch them into space and expect them to work
what i actually want to see in space are billionaires doing extended evas. not necessarily suited up, too.
Just wanted to say that I’m thankful for all yall.
From the r/SunoAI subreddit: “Sick of having to come up with prompts”.
Hey y’all, looking for some tips here. I like what I’ve made so far with Suno but now I’m kind of hitting a wall with ideas for prompts. Why doesn’t Suno also have a feature to write prompts for you? Like just hit a button the says “new prompt” and then hit make song when it comes up with something that sounds interesting! Thoughts?
(Via Dan of the Year.)
Next step: “I’m sick of having to press the ‘new prompt’ button, why doesn’t …”
Found a fitting lament for our current era:
alt text: “Kinda hate that we live in a world where any new F/OSS tool or operating system that gets buzz needs to be vetted for Nazi entanglements.”
Nazi entanglements
That’s why none of the quantum computers work
I heard the same complaint from leftist metal fans.
See also goth/industrial music. The latter also has (like metal) a bit of a sexism issue.
transcript
Graham Linehan is a normal and well man.
A few hours later, he sends me an example of how he’s been using AI. It’s a “hidden role deduction” game he’s working on. At the top is the prompt he put into ChatGPT: “You are five blind lesbian adventurers out for a good night out. Slaying dragons and whatnot. But one of your number is a hulking great troll pretending to be a woman. Find the troll lesbian and then devise an amusing punishment without giving him an erection.
The CIA wouldn’t be able to torture this kinda shit out of me. Jesus, Linehan.
What the fuck
Yeah thats a kink. There prob are a bunch of sex workers he could hire who could help him with that.
E: forgot to mention, a sex worker even confirmed this is a kink.
I don’t think sex workers should be tasked with society offloading glinner
glinner should fucking suck less
Certainly. Some might want to take his service however, not going to speak for them. But doubt he would be a good client, nor that he would pass the vibe check for any who didn’t already knew who he was. So not sure if he is even able (also doubt he is mentally able as he sees women too much as objects to he saved/protected vs actual people).
But yes sorry if that came off as offloading societies problems on sex workers.
oh no
He followed his friends Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay, formerly of GB News, over here. They were hired by US comic actor Rob Schneider’s production company and put in a word for Linehan. He moved in March and works for Schneider too. Having co-created Father Ted in the 1990s and created The IT Crowd in the 00s, Linehan is co-creating a sitcom called Tenure – “Our academics are like Father Ted academics: they’re very old and musty” – with Doyle, Gourlay and British comedian Jonathan Kogan. They’ve written eight episodes.
coming soon to whatever remains of CBS with an introductory 1 hour lecture by Bari Weiss
most well adjusted terf
TIL I take the same medicine as Glinner
An unnamed OSS project had its license vandalized by AI:
Its currently unnamed to avoid naming-and-shaming any specific devs, but its probably a Mozilla project that was affected.
Bloomberg covers the disastrous impact of AI upon food recipes, while still putting an “AI overview” on the top of the page…
In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.
Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.
All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. “No matter how clever the AI is,” she said in a recent interview, “it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.”
[…]
For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”
This holiday season is on track to be Forrest’s slowest in years. She fears that if more content creators give up, the AI won’t have new content to draw from — except content generated by AI. It may get to a point where “AI is just talking to itself,” and home cooks are gambling with the results, she said.
I think we already lost the plot when we started relying on a centralized entity (Google) to “index the world’s information and make it useful”. Ad-tech already fucked up all of the incentives, making recipe sites fill their pages with bullshit in hopes of wiping my eyeballs with messages from third parties hungry for attention. I fucking hate this world.
I saw this food on social media the other day which was allegedly caused by a Chat-GPT recipe: https://www.reddit.com/r/shittyfoodporn/comments/1p60tfw/my_wife_tried_a_chatgpt_crockpot_recipe/
Out of all the documentation pages written by the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary), I think this just might be the shortest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models
Oh wow, that’s gloriously terse. I agree that it might be the shortest. For comparison, here are three other policies whose pages are much longer and whose message also boils down to “don’t do that”: don’t post copypasta, don’t start hoaxes, don’t start any horseshit either.
Dont start hoaxes
As a confession, I did that once, made up a fictional thing. The page lived for quite a long time. Untill somebody outside of my circle saw the orphaned page and promptly (and rightfully) deleted it. Was 20 years ago or so however.
It was so orphaned it didnt even get indexed by search engines.
and it made it to being an actual content guideline, not just an essay!
Semi-relevant, Matthew Garrett has won a court case against the kooks running Techrights:
https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/115581959497817474
About the only positive thing you can say about Schestowitz (and probably his wife) is that they are rabidly anti-AI, but that is only because they are also rabidly against anyone who does not subscribe to their personal purity-test vision of Free Software (basically it’s them, RMS, and maybe his parrot).
I have an unhealthy interest in them, because during the Andrew Lee putsch they were basically on his side, until he fucked even them, and I kinda drifted into their IRC server to see what was up. It was my unwelcome introduction to the toxic underbelly of FLOSS, with rampant RMS-worship, misogyny, racism and incipient techno-fascism. I ducked out quite quickly.
Tellingly, Techrights is all in on the Gemini protocol.
for what it’s worth schestowitzes don’t seem to understand that they lost a defamation case and should stop digging.
That seems potentially unwise.
such words never stopped dr. roy before.
I never heard of Techrights before, they seem rather unhinged, but I had a good laugh when I saw this article about Lunduke. Not even the floss fundamentalists like Lundukes flavor of racist Linux “journalism”.
