Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      32 minutes ago

      I went into this with negative expectations; I recall being offended in high school that The Flashbulb was artificially sped up, unlike my heroes of neoclassical guitar and progressive-rock keyboards, and I’ve felt that their recent thoughts on newer music-making technology have been hypocritical. That said, this was a great video and I’m glad you shared it.

      Ears and eyes are different. We deconvolve visual data in the brain, but our ears actually perform a Fourier decomposition with physical hardware. As a result, psychoacoustics is a real and non-trivial science, used e.g. in MP3, which limits what an adversary can do to frustrate classification or learning, because the result still has to sound like music in order to get any playtime among humans. Meanwhile I’m always worried that these adversarial groups are going to accidentally propagate something like McCollough stripes, a genuine cognitohazard that causes edges to become color-coded in the visual cortex for (up to) months after a few minutes of exposure; it’s a kind of possible harm that fundamentally defies automatic classification by definition.

      HarmonyCloak seems like a fairly boring adversarial tool for protecting the music industry from the music industry. Their code is incomplete and likely never going to get properly published; again we’re seeing an industry-capture research group taking and not giving back to the Free Software community. I think all of the demos shown here are genuine, but he fully admits that this is a compute-intensive process which I estimate is going to slide back out of affordability by the end of 2026. This is going to stop being effective as soon as we get back into AI winter, but I’m not going to cry for Nashville.

      I really like the two attacks shown near the end, starting around 22:00. The first attack, if genuinely not audible to humans, is likely a Mosquito-style frequency that is above hearing range and physically vibrates the components of the microphone. Hofstadter and the Tortoise would be proud, although I’m concerned about the potential long-term effects on humans. The second attack is again adversarial but specific to models on home-assistant devices which are trained to ignore some loud sounds; I can’t tell spectrographically whether that’s also done above hearing range or not. I’m reluctant to call for attacks on home assistants, but they’re great targets.

      Fundamentally this is a video that doesn’t want to talk about how musicians actually rip each other off. The “tones and rhythms” that he keeps showing with nice visualizations have been machine-learnable for decades, ranging from beat-finders to frequency-analyzers to chord-spellers to track-isolators built into our music editors. He doubles down on copyright despite building businesses that profit from Free Software. And, most gratingly, he talks about the Pareto principle while ignoring that the typical musician is never able to make a career out of their art.

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        20 minutes ago

        which I estimate is going to slide back out of affordability by the end of 2026.

        You don’t think the coming crash is going to drive compute costs down? I think the VC money for training runs drying up could drive down costs substantially… but maybe the crash hits other aspects of the supply chain and cost of GPUs and compute goes back up.

        He doubles down on copyright despite building businesses that profit from Free Software. And, most gratingly, he talks about the Pareto principle while ignoring that the typical musician is never able to make a career out of their art.

        Yeah this shit grates so much. Copyright is so often a tool of capital to extract rent from other people’s labor.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      11 hours ago

      this has been happening for a while, just getting coverage again now. first coverage was months ago. morphed/evolved pretty quickly out of the typosquatting shit

      ((a lot of people in the) security space absolutely fucking loves “giving names” to things that have been (known to be) happening before, and acting like suddenly they’re the ones who first saw the thing. see this nonsense for another good example of that happening)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    21 hours ago

    wake up babe, new Yud profile pic just dropped

    (And by “just” I mean “sometime in the past three weeks or so”. I don’t skim his exTwitter feed for sneerables very often.)

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    23 hours ago

    so like a fool I decided to search the web. specifically for which network protocol Lisp REPLs use these days (is it nREPL? or is that just a clojure thing with ambitions?)

    and the first extremely SEOed result on ddg was this bizarre blend of an obscure research lisp from 2012 and LLM articles about how Lisp is used in mental health:

    Numerous applications and tools are being developed to support mental health and wellness. Among the varied programming languages at the forefront, Lisp stands out due to its unique capabilities in cognitive modeling and behavior analysis.

    so I know exactly what this is, but why is this? what even is the game here?

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    It would appear CNN was also at the eugenics conference? Why are all these mainstream news orgs at a 200-person event where all the speakers are eugenicists and racists?

    https://bsky.app/profile/bmceuen.bsky.social/post/3lmmtefdl422j

    And in response to an Atlantic subhead saying “Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus, but the left was mostly absent at a recent pro-natalism conference”:

    yeah, weird that the left wasn’t present at the Fourteen Words conference

    https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lmmqjx3fdc2e

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    18 hours ago

    Here’s a screenshot of a skeet of a screenshot of a tweet featuring an unusually shit take on WW2 by Moldbug:

    link

    transcript

    skeet by Joe Stieb: Another tweet that should have ended with the first sentence.

    Also, I guess I’m a “World War Two enjoyer”

    tweet by Curtis Yarvin: There is very very extensive evidence of the Holocaust.

    Unfortunately for WW2 enjoyers, the US and England did not go to war to stop the Holocaust. They went to war to stop the Axis plan for world conquest.

    There is no evidence of the Axis plan for world conquest.

    edit: hadn’t seen yarvin’s twitter feed before, that’s one high octane shit show.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      Oh gosh I looked up the post and that was a mistake. Actually Mr. Yarvin there is quote tweeting someone who dared, on twitter, to say that the Holocaust was real. The replies (including Yarvin’s incorrect & off topic nonsense) being about what you’d expect from twitter nowadays. So much Holocaust denial.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        18 hours ago

        I mean, it’s not like the holocaust acceptance in that thread is much better.

        https://xcancel.com/x_apotheosis/status/1910766575923101837

        transcript

        The fight is for the inheritance of Rome. The main players are the Anglos, Deutsch, and Russians. The Deutsch are the true heir and have the highest culture. The Anglos and Russians are usurpers.

        The Holocaust cannot be taken out of context but must be understood as part of the conditions of total war and the spirit of the age. To this end we need to rethink the nature of morality and consider the true inevitability of tragedy.

        The secular Jewish elites have aligned with the Anglos. The Orthodox Jewish elites have aligned with Moscow. The Deutsch have been left to the abyss.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          5 hours ago

          so following this “logic”, the problem for the “Deutsch” is that there is no flavor of Jews willing to “align” with them?

          Whose fault is that, motherfuckers?

          • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
            2·
            5 hours ago

            I’ll just make a wild assumption that the author of that post is also a raging antisemite who thinks the jews control the world, so being jew-unaligned is probably a point of virtue in his book.

            Also I bet the non-secular jews were in actuality not that crazy about Russia either and he just means judeobolshevism.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        1 day ago

        The vibe I get is that by ‘enjoyers’ he means people who thought fighting the nazis in WW2 was morally justified.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      Unusually shit take on WW2 but not an unusually shit take from Moldbug. Just the usual level of shit.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      I think it’s accurate that the US and England didn’t join to stop the Holocaust. Sentence 3 is a little oversimplified, and sentence 4 is straight-up lunacy.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        1 day ago

        Old and busted: whitewashing hitlerism by pretending the holocaust didn’t happen.

        New hotness: pretending the holocaust just sort of happened one day, completely unrelated to the explicit ideology of the people who planned and executed it and the regime that sanctioned it, and anyway they had their hands full defending themselves against unprovoked attacks by the so-called allies, who can blame them.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        1 day ago

        I checked the link, the thread elaborates a bit more:

        to which my understanding is: this is absolutely true as well.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          1 day ago

          I found it too, it makes the point that Nazi Germany did nothing wrong in attcking other countries, stealing their products, and enslaving their people" is an argument Putin could have made.

          • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
            12·
            1 day ago

            Oh, but you see the axis powers only ever wanted to conquer most of Europe, North Africa, a bunch of islands in the Pacific, most of Southeast Asia, Korea and large parts of mainland China, which the allies would have been completely fine with. Nothing suggests they would actually go for full conquest victory. What is a “Lebensraum”? Is it a type of cheese?

            • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              1 day ago

              Now hang on how many of those conquests were for actual land grab reasons and how many were because they expected people to take issue with starting massive offensive wars for land grab reasons, especially what with the declared intent to ethnically cleanse at least all of Eastern Europe. That’s definitely distinct from planning world conquest, right?

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    Because it is nice to have something entertaining for a change:

    https://bsky.app/profile/willsmith.fun/post/3lmi2bjrao22t

    Wow, that latest chat with Adam Patrick Murray about the Nintendo Switch 2 was quite the ride! The bit on the console’s dock secrets and the MicroSD Express storage had me glued. It’s amazing to see how these tech advancements are sculpting new landscapes.

    Speaking of tech wizardry, have you thought about having Christian Perry on the show? As the CEO of Undetectable AI, he’s taken the whole generative AI world by storm, much like the Switch 2 is taking over gaming news! With over 15 million users and standing as a top AI writing tool, Christian’s insights into AI’s hidden workings promise to intrigue your audience, especially when it comes to how his tools seamlessly pass for human writing without tripping any detectors like GPTzero

    Undetectable AI, everyone. Astounding.