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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Whoād have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.
Maybe weāll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. Iāll write on a little piece of paper ā$35T crypto we have no debt.ā Thatās what I like.
The question (which doesnāt matter) now is, does he really understand crypto? Or did he get at the right conclusion because he thinks that everybody else, like him, is just scamming all the time?
anything that makes yglesias have a bad day is generally a good thing
but it sounds like the orange man understands the crypto market perfectly: the numbers are all made up and everyoneās lying
(at least I think itās that one? one of themās quite the bootlicker. Iām bad at names tho)
I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.
fuck thatās gross
whereād you find/run across that? canāt tell if itās a normal ad or some gig-site thing or what
Saw it posted on Reddit. Itās apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:
People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.
ah, doman name sounds like itās one of the microwork farms
Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last weekās thread instead of this one, so letās try again.
Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or heād say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didnāt pay up, so he compared them to cancer.
And now theyāre suing him.
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/
Haha I saw it from new comments view, didnāt check the thread title
Mullenwegās the same guy who publicly harassed a random transwoman on Tumblr and had a general meltdown to the point where Tumblr staff had to distance himself from him, so Iām not shocked.
(That its Tumblr is the only thing that shocks me - youād think heād have realised its queer-friendly rep was one of the main things going for it)
wait are there non-queer people on Tumblr even??
I mean, itās the same company that didnāt realize that half its traffic was porn, so itās on brand
I mean, itās the same company that didnāt realize that half its traffic was porn, so itās on brand
Granted, Appleās banhammer forced Tumblrās hand on that front (though Tumblrās complete failure on moderation did give Apple that golden opportunity).
(The whole debacle did lead to Newgrounds getting hit by two separate waves of new users - a minor wave in November after the NSFW purges kicked in, then a major wave in December after the porn ban was officially announced. I have nothing more to add, I think it was pretty funny Tumblr shat the bed that hard)
just heard a podcast ad for amazon prime saying it causes āinvoluntary deal squealsā followed by a categorization of different kinds of customer grunts and squeals according to product. not making this up
god thatās just really icky
I swear I keep seeing Amazon ads in this same icky dehumanizing ācuteā style, like some of the annoyance-based ads I vaguely remember from when I still had cable TV. is this just what ads become every time a corporation decides you have no other choice? (yes, almost every time)
I have to go run an errand soon but someone better have posted some commentary about the a16z anime blog post (as seen on the hell site) by the time I get back or Iāll be sorely disappointed.
this mfāer watched all the naruto filler and fuckinā loved it
emails SHFiguarts every week from their work address, āDeluxe Mecha-Naruto when???ā
long on keikakucoin! *
* translatorās note: keikaku means plan
all according to k5u
a1l a7g t0o k5u
nani?
Anime ā what started as a niche genre of manga and animation
Off to a strong start I see
That might actually be the most infuriatingly US-centric post Iāve ever read, and thatās really saying something! God!!!
And itās talking about āThe Worldā in the title of course!
Some notes:
-
Who told Mark Andreesen about the overlap between possible AI
suckerscustomers and weebs? Are we going to get a16zās next hot take - āFurries are eating the world?ā -
Iām sure most of the audience here can fill in their own 700+ word rant about the breadth of anime as a visual style, so Iāll leave that as an exercise to the reader. However, unlike the older trends of assuming that whichever shonen is currently most popular (the kids still like at least one Dragonball, right?) is representative or dismissing anything with the relevant aesthetic as āsome weeb shit I wonāt likeā, here the writers manage a much more impressive feat. They acknowledge the breadth of what anime contains, but completely fail to ask the basic question: āwhy do people like this?ā Similar to the original prompts for this kind of rant, theyāre assuming the art style and Japanese cultural background are the primary reasons why anyone connects with anything anime, and then expand from that premise. Iām pretty sure this is a root cause of why the whole article feels like it was written by goddamn martians.
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Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing? What little Iāve seen isnāt linked to existing stories (thatās what humans call āIPā) but rather focus on original characters who have their own shit going on. Even ignoring the attempt to shove genAI into everything (as though everyone is going to want to make their own vTuber avatar and stream it someday?) this seems like assuming that the people going to watch the finals of the local Battle of the Bands are going in the hope of getting an autograph from Kurt fucking Cobain.
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There has been some criticism of gacha games as being monstrously exploitative and basically gambling targeted at kids and/or teens, but consider just how much money it makes. These people are ghouls.
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Going back to the genAI we set aside two bullet points up, I do think anime has a unique property there. It simultaneously has a much stronger visual identity than many other aesthetics, including photorealism, but also has a massive number of scrapable examples to train off of. The more consistent style makes it easier to replicate statistically and what visual abberation you still get is less likely to fall deep into the uncanny valley. The outputs Iāve seen from even older anime genAI were better than their contemporaries, but still pretty easy to pick out. Something about shading or gradient or something, probably because since anime is drawn rather than captured like a photo thereās no detail thatās fully incidental. GenAI, of course, has no actual purpose and so all details in every output are incidental. That gives the output a weird unfocused quality I think?
In conclusion, Iām starting to suspect that VCs donāt have souls and/or donāt interact with any human being outside of potential partners-in-somehow-not-crime or potential victims.
Are vTubers playing existing characters a thing?
I think Iāve seen some people do things with Live2D models of Touhou Project characters, but that particular AY PEE is famously extremely permissive about derivative works. If you squint, you might count cases where a vtuber version of an existing character is backed by the artist or company who already owns the rights to that character, which is not unheard of.
Other than that, no. VTubers playing characters from existing anime is not a thing that happens much. If anyoneās confused why thatās the case, consider a context where a someone who isnāt a corporate robot might use the term āIPā (as in intellectual so-called property).
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Ok.
The usual lifecycle of an anime fan looks something like this: they are introduced to the format with great IP ā the Attack on Titan anime or the One Piece live action show or one of the miHoYo games.
I donāt know how things are in Japan, but Iāll be damned if I ever meet someone who gateway series into anime was a live action adaptation of One Piece.
AI companions, an evolution of classic visual novels, are the most popular for anime characters and IP.
The most popular what for anime characters and IP?
Anime studios are adopting new AI technologies to create content faster and more cost effectively, but they are also iterating on new core loops with AI-native character interactions.
Some of them probably are. Screw them.
VTubing has transformed the way millions of anime fans interact with their favorite characters in new social and parasocial relationships by allowing any fan to roleplay as the characters themselves.
You canāt just casually throw āsocial and parasocialā in there and then describe a purely parasocial relationship. Apologize to Shannon Strucci.
Also this is like saying television has allowed us to roleplay our favorite Radio announcers. They seem to be under the impression that the vtuber phenomenon is about people digitally cosplaying their favorite anime character together when itās more like an actor putting on a performance as an original character. And for the big ones, a bunch of Japanese style idol industry bullshit layered on top.
While audience inteeaction is usually a part of it, the nature of the medium remains highly asymmetric.
Ready to dive in? Letās jam.
Keep Cowboy Bebopās name out of your filthy mouth.
Anime entered the mainstream in the 2000s with popular shounen anime like Naruto, One Piece, and now Attack on Titan.
I might be behind the times but even I donāt think AoT is new. At least say Jujutsu Kaisen or something.
This affinity has led to one of the most popular use cases of AI recently ā AI waifus and husbandos.
May all your subculture in-jokes die a dignified death before a VC firm references them in a blog post.
Waifu / husbando culture derives from visual novels, and AI companions are the logical extension of these animated storybook games.
āMai waifuā was originally a funny engrish quote from Azumanga Daioh and was used to refer to any favorite character. The non tongue en cheek relationship simulation aspect merged with the meme later on.
Originally, visual novels were serialized books with anime-styled pictures in between.
This doesnāt seem to be what the linked Medium article is saying and seems like theyāre just mixing up light novels and visual novels.
While there are many practical use cases for AI-simulated human interactions ā AI as therapist, as teacher, as assistant, etc.
Practical, huh?
For instance, character.aiās top characters are all from Genshin Impact; Raiden, Yae Miko, and Hu Tao take some of the top spots at 390M, 202M, and 113M messages respectively as of the time of this blog, compared to Elon Musk at a mere 40M messages.
To be fair Iād rather take almost anyone, gacha game character or not, other than Elon Musk as my conversation partner, whether simulated or real.
The majority of top anime games and visual novels are role playing games that feature a romance mechanic, and so itās natural for fans to want to deepen their connection to their favorite IP and characters through active interactions.
Factually dubious claim aside, how hard is it to write āseriesā or at least āanimeā like a real human being with feelings instead of āIPā.
Iāve watched some anime series and felt things about them. Iāve never given a shit about an anime IP. Why would I, never owned one.
UGC Democratizes Creation for Anime Fans Anime is the new playground for content creation. Fans often engage with anime IP by creating their own versions of art, novels, and games, and innovation is happening across the stack.
Pixiv has existed for ages. Even before that was doujinshi, and people have made art, original and derivative, since before the beginning of civilization. Your idea of modding custom animu avatars for shovelware Love Plus sequels is not new.
There are a few notable reasons for the popularity of these games. The first is that thereās clear player demand against a shortage of high quality anime IP games; one example is Palworldās recent success as the āPokemon with gunsā game, selling over 25M copies in a month across Steam and Xbox Game Pass.
Palworld is evidence of a lack of high quality anime games much like all nonblack nonravens are evidence of a lack of nonblack ravens.
The second reason is that the anime IP licensing landscape is notoriously difficult to navigate for developers, creating a potential undersupply of games.
Itās actually incredibly easy to create and publish media based on anime and get away with it. You just canāt do it too professionally. If you love democratizing art so much, go to Comiket.
Also there are tons of licensed games based on anime what the hell are you talking about?
Some startups like Kasagi Labo, Layer, and Story Protocol are tackling this issue to make IP more democratized and easier to access.
Misspelled āplutocratizedā there. Also had a double take checking out the third one: āStory is the Worldās IP Blockchain, onramping Programmable IP to power the next generation of AI, DeFi, and consumer applications.ā
Beyond UGC platforms, AI models and tools are enabling first-time creators to make compelling anime content that previously would only have been possible with a team of professionals.
Iām sure I will continue to be as thrilled as I have been up to now to see more art made by people who canāt make art and filling the gap with statistical average of all art ever.
On the other side of the spectrum, professional game studios are leading the charge for high production-value consumer experiences that build on or create new IP. Anime games are some of the highest grossing in the games industry, accounting for 20% of spend on the mobile app store despite only having usage penetration of <3%.
Sounds great (not), but I heard someone say there was a lack of high quality anime IP games. Surely you canāt both be right?
There are two ways that anime game studios broaden the horizon for players. First, they usually create the highest quality games of the most popular IPs like Dragon Ball, Pokemon, or Dragon Quest.
Consistency, whatās that? Maybe invest in a bigger context window so you can remember what you generated a few paragraphs ago.
For now, weāve been covering mostly free-to-play (F2P) mobile games. However, there are several successful PC/console anime games as well: Doki Doki Literature Club, the Persona series, the Final Fantasy series, the Fire Emblem series, and Phoenix Wright, just to name a few.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a fully original freeware pay-what-you-want indie game that became a viral sleeper hit. Youāre comparing it to Final fucking Fantasy? From a business perspective? Hell, despite the art style itās not even Japanese! The only connecting thread between these games is that they have vaguely anime style art in them.
Anime is also leading the way for digital play, turning previously passive consumption of linear media into a new dynamic form of entertainment.
Itās really not.
I wish I had more updoots for this effortpost. Well done.
I agree that the Doki Doki Literature Club reference was out of place, but consider that the whole post is predicated on the assumption that anime is a radical new art form that is revolutionizing [$Product] while itself being revolutionized by the new technologies designed by a16zās stable of startups (the ones they havenāt cashed out yet). DDLC is niche enough that the intended audience will feel clever if they know about it, but successful enough that thereās a nonzero chance theyāll have heard about it.
It also has the most anime title they could find.
I knew I could count on awful.systems.
SaaS =
Storage as a ServiceSneer as a Service
iterating on new core loops
Weāre sorry, but the brainrot is too far advanced. Amputation is your only hope.
a16z anime blog post
Two nukes werenāt enough
Back in the day they let you nuke a self-styled god-emperorās fascist resource extraction empire of genocidal death cultist twice, but nowadays you canāt even spare one little warhead for a16z?
Ok maybe this sneer is a little edgy even for my own tastes. Up it goes anyway.
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Was salivating all weekend waiting for this to drop, from Subbarao Kambhampatiās group:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved block stacking abilities. It is a straight shot from here to cold fusion! ā¦ unfortunately, there is a minor caveat:
Looks like performance drops like a rock as number of steps required increasesā¦
correct me if Iām reading this wrong ā the results are that LLMs are much, much worse than classical AI at planning block placement for SHRDLU? that seems pretty damning
Yes, the classical algo achieves perfect accuracy and is way faster. There is also a table that shows the cost of running o1 is enormous. Like comically bad. Boil a small ocean bad. Weāll just 10x the size and it will achieve 15 steps inshallah.
Imo, this is like the same behavior we see on math problems. More steps it takes, the higher the chance it just decoheres completely. I canāt see any reason why this type of thing would just āclickā for the models if they are also unable to do multiplication.
I mean this just reeks of pure hopium from OAI and co that things will magykly work out. (But the newer model is clearly better^{tm}! I still donāt see any indication that one day that chart is just going to be 100s across the board.)
Large Reasoning Models
May the coiners of this jargon step on Lego until the end of days
ah yes, $42, definitely a āthe same amount of compute is usedā figure
these results are remarkably damning. I knew things were bad, but god damn this is impressively shit
I feel this shouldnāt at all be surprising, and continues to point to Diverse Intelligence as more fundamental than any sort General Intelligence conceptually. Thereās a huge difference between what something is in theory or in principal capable of, and the economics story of what that thing attends to naturally as per its energy story.
Broadly, even simple things are powerful precisely because of what they donāt bother trying to do until perturbed.
Ultimately, I hypothesize the reason why VCs like the idea of LLMs doing simple things far more expensively than otherwise is already possible, is because, They literally canāt imagine what else to spend their money on. They are vacuous consumers by design.
So what youāre saying is that Tim Apple could save us from these people by selling Marc Andreessen a billion dollar iphone?
Itās Veblen goods again, isnāt it?
Honestly, Yes. The hardest thing for a rich person to do is spend their money. Eventually this catches up with them: to spend no money is to lose it comparatively, to spend money is to risk not getting it back. So a great deal of the money world revolves primarily around persuasion, and the very odd things that happen along the way.
It also helps to recognize how much many of these people see all of this as a competition, and trying to out-unique/out-possess their peers
a twitter thread by sv ceo where comment section wants to do some recreational union busting, political assassinations and automating away longshoremen (lmao) over checks notes black friday bringing slightly less profit to mass retailers. to which i say, fuck your black friday then
and he says that itāll affect elections? specifically in ādonāt do anything visible in interest of unions or trump will winā kinda way? what kinda madhouse is this americans explain https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/1836498432510562788#m
fuck your black friday then
the institutionalisation of it is/was also just fucking nuts
and then in recent years itās slowly been creeping out into other countries too, with other vendors in other places aping āblack friday dealsā
I have no mouth and I must scream
Is this the Flexport(?) guy? Theyāre YC funded I believe.
was/is he unusually shitty or notorious for something
dunno really, heās got a lot of threads on HN where hackernews incorrect each other about logistics
I think the dude is just a wonk who happens to have gotten funding
yeah so it seems
Blast from the past, weāre kinda behind the times here in Sweden
Hidden crypto mine found in Swedish hospital (link in Swedish)
I hate how it is called mining, like it is digging up some resource from the earth. While it is just an advanced calculator.
Imagine they found a hidden iron ore mine (That is what I recall being mined in Sweden, if anybody knows something more interesting, like some precious stones, please inform me (looking at this gold/silver could also work)) under a hospital. But nope, just a hidden datacenter.
Bootleg mining was a thing in coal-bearing areas of Poland and Ukraine during times of greatest economic shitshows (early interbellum and 90s)
I wanted to make a joke about artisanal mining, but then I saw it was a thing and how mostly horrible it was.
Satoshi is/was a goldbug so itās an entirely intentional term.
I had a look and couldnāt find how it started being called mining. Satoshi started out calling it āfarmingā.
damn I misrembered the whitepaper, probably because it gave such goldbug vibes otherwise
oh totally, which is presumably why someone coined āminingā
It should be called botting or grinding, at least more than it should be called mining.
Ah, late stage capitalism at its finest.
From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:
Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.
Oh, so they publish textbooks.
āThey represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste.ā
š¶ Please allow me to introduce myself š¶
Assouline! The gasoline of ass!
So youāre saying that theyāve got books worth at least a grand which their owners are literally using to flaunt their wealth?
Iām legally obligated to say stealing is legally and morally wrong buuuuuuuut
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors arenāt getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods ā¦
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
Of course the books are just vapid art books or travel books.
now where did I leave my hammer and sickle
āā¦37%ā¦ That means nearly one in fourā¦ā
Eh, no it doesnāt, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.
I just learned about this āwonderfulā little item too
@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is āVeblen goodsā: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
āa type of luxury goodā¦ for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.ā
handy to know, ty
āComplimentary Carbon Efficient Deliveryā
Carbon Efficient evenā¦
That means that DHL driver has to take bike instead of car for this one
If there is an elevator in the apartment, the driver has to take the stairs, contractually. Of course people who order that donāt live in high rise apartments where the driver can reach the door, so everybody wins.
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