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

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

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

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    6 months ago

    A well-respected terminal emulator for the Mac decides to slather on AI sauce, and most users are not happy. But there are others who are outraged that slathering AI sauce onto a product is even seen as a negative. Let’s take a break from HN to take a look at the tortured souls on lobste.rs who won’t let this aggression stand, man:

    https://lobste.rs/s/7aglnr/psa_iterm2_now_has_chatgpt_integration

    archive link in case mods decide to nuke it

    Personal favs:

    This is the sort of hatred and resentment that is uncomfortable to see on a public forum.

    Hi, this is the internet, you must be new here.

    I’m mostly checked out of here as a result until the mods get it under control.

    Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

    Edit as a bonus, here’s the HN discussion. Same situaton there, the promptfondlers are surprised everyone is mad

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      6 months ago

      I don’t like AI hype either but I don’t feel the need to use Lobsters to rally groups of people to mass punish projects who add optional AI-friendly features. That is quite disturbing.

      ok. I tried writing something sarcastic and sneery but alas, I don’t think I can mock this person hard enough to satisfy my ethical obligation.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          6 months ago

          Soon they will discover that they can use AI to autogenerate new minority definitions for them and we on the left will be powerless to stop them.

          (We will mock them for it, and tell them this new made up thing doesn’t count, but we cannot stop them).

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      6 months ago

      Saw this update yesterday and it pissed me really off. I’ve been using iTerm for almost 20 years at this point and it’s a really good and well-integrated terminal application for Mac OS, and no one asked for it to add spicy autocomplete.

      There’s a fork already, lol.

      Or maybe I’ll just move over to Alacritty. I use that one my Linux machines and it’s actually good, but the attitude of some of the developers when it comes to feature requests and contributions really makes me like it less than I could.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      tbh the enforced civility and de facto ban on social issue discussion on lobste is not helping. (but after last “polite discussion” i had with the moderator i’m not going to bring it up anymore, just suspend the account or wait to be banned.)

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        yeah frankly that sort of shit is why I haven’t even tried to get a lobsters account

        bullshit should be called out as bullshit at any point in time. dressing it up in niceties is playing the wrong game, and has been abused by the worst people around for years

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      6 months ago

      Noooooooooooooo! Argh, I’ll have to seriously consider using the fork FML.

      EDIT: Not strictly required since apparently you have to provide an API key for it to be enabled, still it’s not encouraging that the main developer thought this would be a good idea.

      You’ve got to love the prompt jank: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/755dc2ed881d853f495ffaea2498452915e5e8cd?diff=split&w=0

      EDIT 2: Given direct access to bad AI code to a dev workstation is bad enough, but given that the console is a primary way to connect to servers, where more havoc could be wrought, this is terrifying, I mean sure devs were already capable of bricking enviromnents, but supercharging “knowing just enough to be dangerous” is NOT a good idea.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      for people who thought this might not be related to the llm brainworms, the reasoning of the iterm2 author for inclusion of the feature (when promptedy by @gerikson@awful.systems) :

      I got a number of requests. I also got tired of copy-pasting things to ChatGPT. Usually if I find a feature useful, other people do, too.

        • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          6 months ago

          The whole debacle astounds me. Is there a more universally privileged application users frequently use than the shell? As a general rule it can elevate privs to full control far more aggressively than any other commonly used application, with minimal sandboxing at most.

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            6 months ago

            Inorite? Even if there was the requirement of an API key being enabled that was only revealed after some time. If smeone says “my terminal has GPT now” of course your mind goes to it outputting sudo rm -rf / for some random prompt.

            Edit nevertheless I am thankful because I’ve had a lot of fun identifying promptfondlers on lobste.rs and pointing and laughing at them.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      Update 4 days later, the main Karen in charge of the promptfondlers is calling for the banning of users impertinent enough to flag their comments.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      thanks for mentioning this, I’m definitely going to have to nack that update and send a gfy mail

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        6 months ago

        query mail sent

        hell, if anyone else is curious to also poke:

        I presume I'm not the first nor (will I be the last) to ask about this,
but for the weight of the argument it's still worth asking

are you planning on keeping the openai garbage directly integrated in
iterm2? and "just turn it off with a setting" isn't a good answer tbh

I don't want it in the terminal I use. I don't want it in any software I
touch. openai are a deceptive abuse company led by an abusive liar, and
it saddens me to see yet another good thing get taken up in the hype
these charlatans drive

no "I've been $x for $y" pleading arguments here, I don't want to try
bend your ear with any number of platitudes and such you've heard from
others - just straight-up asking the above
  • fiat_lux@kbin.social
    20·
    6 months ago

    GNU+Linux user just wonders whether medical technology is bad for humanity’s long term survival because hereditary diseases can be survived and spread, but wouldn’t want anyone to misunderstand.

    It’s nice to know we have looped back to the point in history where we casually consider which people should have agency over their reproductive rights. Oh wait, no it’s not nice at all, but somehow still totally acceptable and commonplace.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        6 months ago

        Sorry, im a habitual contrarian about this movie (good for that poster that they commit to not do an idiocracy and use tools that helps people, for example searching for the name of a movie), but reminder that that movie is basically utopian as it takes place 500 years in the future, and the American way of life is still going strong, and the problem of the food crisis is basically solved in a week.

        • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
          12·
          6 months ago

          I think that the movie is just a shallow criticism of Bush-era conservativism and 90s “trash TV” (that was already in decline by this time). Interrogating the implications of its scifi premise feels like not meeting the movie where it’s at, which is an optimism (alien to me) that the USA is fundamentally sound and only needs a nominally reasonable Joe American to keep the levers of power away from Those Guys.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            6 months ago

            It is. It isn’t that deep I know, just wanted to point out a small thing which the people who hyperfocus on the semi-eugenics argument seem to always miss in the ‘cbt (link SFW, some links on that page are not however) is funny’ movie.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      6 months ago

      Also someone bringing up “population collapse” which is a recent(?) right-wing/techbro trope. Everything about everyone expressing worries about “sub replacement birth rates” screams “we must prevent people with wombs from making their own decisions about whether to have kids”.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      I don’t know anything about evolution or genetics, and I’m pretty sure this guy doesn’t either. Why would everyone become disabled because more disabled people survive and pass on their genes to their kids? We don’t stone gingers to death and yet we are not all having red-headed kids.

      The repeated use of the word “weak” (as opposed to “sick” or “disabled”) seems revealing.

      • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        6 months ago

        I can’t say for sure that he thinks of genetics as bloodlines, and is concerned about its purity, but I can have my suspicions.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      extremely weird shit across the board from that user. account claims to be “18M” and running “manjaro and mint”, and then has a shell on sdf.org? along with the posts, “Yes, I’d prefer not being resuscitated. If I am finally dead, let it stay that way” just from that thread (and a number of other choice entries elsewhere in their history)

      like come the fuck on, can it be more sus

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          6 months ago

          just fishy in aggregate. I wouldn’t say so much “because for olds” as “it’s far more likely for old(er)s to want something like that”. combine that with the wide array of other posts the account has engaged with, and the bio just wholly looks like bullshit to me

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            9·
            6 months ago

            I mean I did fuck around on some public VAX hosted things and such in the early 00s, so it’s not impossible for this to be a true thing, but yeah. just smells off

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            6 months ago

            I agree that it’s fishy in this instance, but dig around in the “smol web” subculture (gemini protocol, etc) and you’ll find plenty of youngs who live in shells… cf. tilde.town

  • jax@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    6 months ago

    reporter: This AI development is a Big Deal™.

    me: y tho?

    reporter: Oh, I’m so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!

    me: y tho?

    reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!

    me: sorry, y tho?

    reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let’s not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!

    me: begins weeping

    reporter: Don’t cry! At least we’re all in this together, right???

    While AI being “in” a computer might sound as obvious as blue being “in” the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an “AI computer”, meaning the technology is in-built. It’s the company’s latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest.

    What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven’t worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we’re the rats. Perhaps there’s some comfort in knowing we’ll all find out together.

    edit: oh no, this is the same author I sneered at for quirkwashing e/acc. nothing personal, I just die a little inside every time I read something like this, and a little death is always better shared!

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      I started pre-hurting in 2018-2019 when I saw SoC vendors pitch things as AI chips because you could natively run accelerated models on them for speech and image recognition. Yes, really, that was the total pitch. It’s AI because you could run models. Where to train the models, what the total scope of capacity was, total execution space, total throughput, etc? No no, not practically touched at all in those docs

      And where I said pre-hurting? At the time I thought “oh god”….you can imagine how quaint that memory feels in retrospect right now

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        oh yeah doing embedded dev that was always the worst. my RISC-V SoC has an AI accelerator on it! cool, what does the datasheet say it does? TensorFlow lite and nothing else. ok maybe I can use that silicon for something else at least? nope, there’s no documentation on its capabilities or how it works at all, it just does TensorFlow lite. shit well ok, what can I do with TensorFlow lite? you can load the example model we’ve provided and make a shitty voice activation trigger or try to train a model but there’s no docs. well fuck me then.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          6 months ago

          And don’t you dare ask about the intended binary representation, that’s obviously some illegal hacker shit

          Just render it out with lite! What do you mean about in 3-5y? Software doesn’t change, you scrub. We have a golden master toolchain right here on our ftp, it’s at ftp://nonssl.http25.pub.norsou-semi-sometimes.xyz/pub/archive/noindex feel free to download and develop your own applications!

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      6 months ago

      I mentioned this in the last weekly thread, but check out the 5th citation in their example paper (the one that says nothing in particular about type 2 diabetes)

      T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.

      I left a HN comment that they got the names wrong for Hermina Jakupović, Germán D Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, and Tuomas O Kilpeläinen. They thanked me for my “thorough” review (read: I glanced over it for giggles at like 2 AM).

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      All of AI is just this. A boring person’s idea of creativity. A manager’s idea of programming. A stupid person’s idea of science.

  • carlitoscohones@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    6 months ago

    Scam investigator Coffeezilla is working on the Rabbit AI guy, and he’s off to a good start. Most of the other press is about the device not working, while this focuses more on the scammy NFT / crypto past of the founder.

    YouTube link

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      the follow-up video is fucking scathing, and I’d like to take a moment to remember all the orange site posters who were fucking wrong when they pretended the rabbit leak was fake

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      Dude, if the product wasn’t safe, I wouldn’t be using it myself, giving it to my girlfriend, and giving it to my friends.

      Love to give off snakeoil salesman vibes in a weird faux friendly legal threat.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      Surprise Aella reference in those HN comments! (well, surprise that one commenter noted “the Bay Area’s most overrated escort”, and a replier directly inferred it was her)

      Now I wonder if there’s an app rating Bay Area escorts…

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        It’s a well recognized rule that every time Lumina comes up, someone has to mention that Aella is connected to the project. Then, someone must make a joke about Lumina adding anti-toothbrushing to her anti-showering arsenal. HN hasn’t caught up to the last bit yet.

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      6 months ago

      Tedium and logorrhea in the substack comments, as intended. I wonder how often people on LW use “ink spilled” and “column inches” to describe themselves.

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        lol @ this austin chen guy, who seems to be an investor in Lumina, as well as a user of the project going like “dude just get on the phone with him, I’m sure he totally won’t corner you with threats and such, he’s a great guy I swear bro!”

  • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    6 months ago

    So who is going to be first to set up a grifty EA think tank where the thinking is admittedly all done by LLMs, and why shouldn’t it be us.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      6 months ago

      Pull a Rabbit AI and use Playwright to operate an Emacs instance running Eliza. Say that buying more infrastructure will yield better results. Pocket the money that was for supposed infrastructure investment. Profit!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      Bold of you to think we have not already started doing this to mess with the EA/LW minds. Why do you think we suddenly talk less about all the outrageous weird shit they say on LW? We don’t want to out ourselves. For example

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    6 months ago

    Kevin Beaumont got access to Copilot+ and hoo boy it’s even stupider than it sounds:

    I got ahold of the Copilot+ software.

    Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.

    It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.

    The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.

    The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        you know what really fucking gets me about this thing? even “before” all of the security and DV etc arguments (and, really, they are all valid)

        consider the average consumer-human (present version of) windows desktop/laptop/workstation that has survived for more than a year or so without having been re-imaged. those are already often an unusable nightmare of built-up cruft in sticky corners

        and now there’s going to be something that’ll do constant capture and analysis every fucking moment it’s running?

        how the fuck is this not going to go wrong? imagine the first time that sqlite table shits the bed. a dodgy character format goes into it, or a bit of disk corruption hits, or a file locking (lololol) issue hits, or …

        I just … I just really can’t imagine any of this is going to go very well at all in the real world

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
        11·
        6 months ago

        love how the MS shill eventually reaches:

        Okay, here’s a question; when has the casual consumer ever cared about privacy?

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          6 months ago

          every fucking time! and the answer seems to be: they care enough that privacy’s a core part of Apple’s marketing, but microsoft’s core competency is still managing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs enough that their users are on average just barely more inconvenienced by switching operating systems than they are dealing with whatever new shit’s being sprung on them (and this latest new shit’s gone from annoying to actively dangerous, so the tactic is to convince users it’s irrelevant to them until it’s made mandatory, as Microsoft does, and then the pain of suddenly switching operating systems will be even greater)

        • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          6 months ago

          As someone who did come to love a lot of microsoft products despite the way I felt about them in the 90’s, their slow slide into whatever they are now makes me hate them more, not less. Microsoft genuinely spent a lot of the oughts making genuinely good general purpose stuff, and they absolutely dominated at accessibility for 20 years. So when people simp for them as they destroy everything I found great about their products, instead of holding them to account, it’s awful.

          Guess who bought the dictation software I rely on for everything I do and then basically abandoned the useful consumer product and is now sticking gippity-4 into it? Stick it in GitHub, stick it in Windows, add it to your complete breakfast, wear it on your head.

            • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              6 months ago

              My Windows machines have all been skinned to work like XP for 20 years, and sometimes I have to use other people’s computers and I don’t even understand how they get anything done. My start menu is predictable and the items in it are in the same place and with the same keystrokes every day. There’s no ads in it. It doesn’t tell me the weather or the sports scores when I don’t ask for them. My taskbar shows me the names of all the windows I have open. This should all be normal.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        LOL, the first thing I saw of these new lappys was a breathless Verge article saying “finally MS will release the Macbook Air killer” and the very next thing is the poisoned chalise that is “you want a fast efficient Windows machine? well you just have to accept the AI recording everything you do on it”. Fucking own goal.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          6 months ago

          the incredible efficiency of writing OCRed screenshots to SQLite constantly

          so Linux on laptops is frequently a shitshow in terms of power management, but bespoke Linux hardware that comes tuned (like the Steam Deck or laptops from Linux vendors) seems to do a lot better than Windows for efficiency. I’m hoping this is an area where shit gets better for Linux as hardware vendors start to take it more seriously.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      6 months ago

      Meanwhile some of the comments are downright terrifying, also the whole “research” output is overly-detailed yet lacking any substance, and deeply deeply in fantasy land, but all the comments a debating in favour of or against what is perceived as “real work”, and in terms of presentation “vibes”.

      I mean my parents always said that fascist/cultish movements have issues distinguishing signified and signifier, but good grief. (Yes too much Lacan in the household)

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        6 months ago

        I love the guy who goes in and says “but you really should give this guy money! I know he has produced absolutely no research or work worthy of a second glance but he’s my friend and I promise he SOUNDS suuuuper smart! btw I read the Sequences once. funding now??”

        I wonder what Peter Thiel would think about using disability benefits. Does he fly Ayn Rand style, where it’s okay to benefit from it while actively campaigning against it?

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      None of the commenters seem to think keeping a safe work environment is part of work.

      EA overdue to all be wiped out from a disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      Please hire me for AI safety, I create active work place hazards around me and therefore small children and animals are not safe around me, but I really work hard (unless it is cleaning up).

      Wonder if he is single.

      This post also reminds me of the story I heard about a brilliant but weird math professor who had a tendency to touch walls when he walked around in the building. Eventually, in supreme cargo cult behavior, students also started to touch walls in an unconscious hope this would improve their math skills. Anyway this guys hopes and dreams to be hired would be shattered if he ever hears the people hiring him are a fan of Taleb.

      Good that the communities first reaction is saying this is a mh red flag. (It is also a workplace red flag)

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          6 months ago

          I have worked with a couple of these eager shitwits over the years, and they are awful. they’ll effortgraft waaaay into a thing that they think is totes the solution, “deliver” it as “done” (aka “here’s a branch that already does all that, we can take it live now”), which all so handily allows them to frame any questions/criticism/etc as “don’t you think we need ${problem} to be solved?”

          the. fucking. worst.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            6 months ago

            sudden flashback to when $eagerdev pushed a branch that implemented test-infra steered by ansible… in which you needed to write secondary, entirely separate, roles/specs for the test-infra thing to “verify”

            (didn’t even try to hook ansible definitions (frankly I wouldn’t want to either (but if ansible weren’t so fucking shit at what it does _that whole thing wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place)))

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 months ago

      Back when I used reddit, r/badmathematics would feature weirdos that posted REAMS of shit just like that guy’s whiteboard pictures. There, we called them cranks.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        you know what

        a not-insignificant element of the TPOT cluster is the “cozy”/“vibes” aspect

        and for some reason your reply just made me think the thought “while they espouse their shitty views they want to be comfortable, to maximize feeling unchallenged, to really get into it”

        on the one hand it feels like an obvious realisation, but I also hadn’t really thought of it specifically like that before

        (admittedly I’m briefly jumping from “rats -> postrats” there by referencing the TPOT cluster, but as is known the latter haven’t really changed their beliefs just their rendering)

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    not much of a sneer but a passing chuckle:

    Received: from <snip>.net (unknown [snip])
Subject: ***SPAM*** Binance Distribution of MyEtherWallet (MEW) Airdrop

    my spamtrap addresses get these every now and then. I’m still amazed that I get that type of subject line in tyol 2024 - spammers are usually far more agile

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    utterly off-topic but to usher in the weekend (and because I’ve dropped Spotify): what’s some music

    no wrong answers just start listing artists and albums you like