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.)
if you think about it the human mind is really just a kind of naturally arising artificial intelligence #Deep
In other news, Character.AI has ended up in the news again for allowing school shooter chatbots to flourish on its platform.
You want my off-the-cuff take, this is definitely gonna fuck c.aiās image even further, and could potentially leave them wide open to a lawsuit.
On a wider front, this is likely gonna give AI another black eye, and push us one step further to the utter destruction of AI as a concept I predicted a couple months ago.
Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.
One would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.
Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware thatās foisted upon them.
OT: how would you guys recommend learning to program?
well, first youāll need a solid grounding in the theory of categories
that was a joke about abstract mathematics. anyway Iām not much of a programmer but I have found Iāve learned a lot from working on godot stuff, so I second that recommendation
The only thing Iām worried about is the math, Iām flying blind there.
most people who are considered skilled programmers seem to know very little math (by my arbitrary standards), so I wouldnāt worry about it. if you get that the remainder of 8 divided by 5 is 3 then youāre 99% of the way there
I think you would need to deliberately choose a mathematical problem to solve, otherwise the most difficult thing youāll come across will be binary representations of numbers and why floats are FUCKING BULLSHIT (seriously though they can be tricky if you think they are just ānumbers in a calculatorā).
If you want to really understand programming language theory, or computer science more generally, you will definitely need mathematics. But if the goal is āI want to tell this chip what to do,ā you donāt need to learn a lot of math, in my opinion.
Edit: also, if you need help with any math, feel free to DM me. I am a former math teacher and sometimes teach algorithms (basically screaming āwhat is your induction variableā) at the undergraduate level.
I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume youāve read through some of this one.
Andrew Plotkinās Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial
other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isnāt the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and itās fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.
I did have this wacky idea for a roguelikeā¦
hell yeah! roguelikes are so much fun to work on! that could be a very good way to learn GDScript. generally I recommend learning your first couple languages to completion ā but where you decide what complete is, including āIām tired of this language/projectā (not at all an uncommon case, and a good sign your brainās ready for something new). once youāre at that point, youāll likely be ready for a new language ā and languages generally get much easier to learn once youāve got a couple under your belt.
(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myselfā¦ thereās a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)
(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myselfā¦ thereās a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)
this looks really cool š
Iām excited to try it! Iāve had so many game ideas lately thatād be a lot more convenient to do with godotās tooling, but would really benefit from something like Bevyās ECS. this one looks broadly inspired by a similar API to Bevy so it could be the best of both worlds. Iām very curious how it performs ā itās almost certainly gonna be slower than Bevy, but thereās a lot of types of games where logic isnāt a bottleneck.
depends on audience / person? and also maybe teacher
Iāve stepped people through essentials with e.g. idea ātell me how to make coffeeā (as an intro to procedurals and dependency) all the way through many other types/shapes, through lego/blockly/whatever style teaching, and through outright āimagine this is a magic box and ${thing} comes out the other sideā stepped iteration. sometimes you can jump straight to āhey so hereās a language that means specific things and hereās what that meansā and go from there
so yeah I guess for my part Iād say I attune to the recipient. but for advice toward teacher I guess Iād attune that toward what I figure theyād be good at teaching
soā¦ whatāre you good at (teaching)?
I mean for myself. Iāve gotten as far as making a blackjack game in the past, but I couldnāt figure out what to do next.
I used this site (forgive me for the very 2000ās style branding, very edgy etc) to learn python. the course used to be free on the site, so you will have to find a way around that, either via wallet, or 1337 skills (the course doesnāt do the same branding as the site btw). But it also has a useful list of links to books and stuff like that to learn more (or at least give you an idea about how much different things exist out there).
But the idea behind the course āthe best way to learn is to do the workā is pretty useful in learning how to code. It is easy to fall into a trap of reading about some coding and thinking you understand it and then utterly fail at actually implementing it.
But as froztbyte says, it does depend a bit on how you learn.
E: also this url is quite old now, so I have no idea how many of the links still work, sorry about that.
This was helpful, thank you!
Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. Iām not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that itās a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume Iām making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that heād try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)
Unfortunately it doesnāt look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboardās refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.
Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since Iām pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.
The starcraft apm thing always amused me, people who instead of giving an order once, just keep clicking that mouse and issuing the same move order over and over again because apms. Good way to teach Goodhartās law to Gamer Brains.
is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? itās anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more
A lot of the spamming at the SC2 tournament level is about staying warmed up so that when you get into a micro-intensive battle later on where all of those actions might count (splitting your marines to protect from AoE while target-firing the suicide bombing banelings, for example) you can do it. Doesnāt make it look less ridiculous, especially in the first couple of minutes before the commentary has anything to really talk about so they try to act like stealing 5 minerals at that stage could somehow decide the game. But there is a slightly more reasonable logic to it than just speed running an RSI to look cool.
The original StarCraft also offers a lot of opportunities to use your āextraā APM to optimize around the godawful AI pathing and other āquirksā of the engine. Itās not as bad as, say, DotA in terms of āthis was a limitation of the original engine that is now a major cornerstone of playing the game well and if you complain about it youāre just badā but itās definitely up there. As the game goes on youāll usually see players start getting slightly more fast and loose with, say, optimizing the mining at their new base because at that point in the game splitting your focus that much is more detrimental even if you can move that fast.
I definitely ended up in the occasional spectator and campaign player for all that, though. Especially now that Iām starting to have creaky old man wrists of my own.
He wants to be seen as the Uber-nerd, better at nerding than everybody else, so of course he would cheat. See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake. He just is hype and bravado because a group of people who saw him stutter (*) about some half remembered/understood science fiction ideas were impressed with his genius and drive up his stocks/reputation. He now is going after the anti-woke nerds as potential marks (He has said quite a few dumb thinks about video games recently).
See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard. (E: He also is bad at dnd., a cooperative game which you basically cannot fail to play well))
*: Nothing wrong with having a stutter, that happens. It is weird people claim his stutter is not because he just stutters, but because it is a sign his brain is so great that he is having a hard time because it is thinking about so many genius level things at the same time.
See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake.
oh hell no
See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard.
so many right-wing grifters want to be associated with gaming because gamers are really easy to trick. in this case itās particularly obvious: musk doesnāt give a fuck about the games he claims to be an expert in, but souls games are particularly nerdy and quakeās in that right nostalgia spot that most of muskās marks know what it is but donāt know how high-level play looks
because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, muskās doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you canāt see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym) and therefore obviously the best leader. all the associated messaging ā how you need to be a genius to play at this (actually relatively low) level, how speedrunning (extremely poorly) helps you see the matrix, how game X (itās gonna be fucking starcraft next I swear) makes you an expert in resource management ā is crafted to make the susceptible associate these lazy non-wins with political leadership.
also, lol @ musk, best buddies with Tim Sweeney, forgetting that unreal tournament exists. maybe that makes two of them ā Sweeney really doesnāt give a fuck about UT anymore either
Iām employing the working hypothesis that gamers are particularly easy to trick with rage-bait because of short-circuited dopamine loops. One must compulsively game, but if the game sucks, then there must be an explanation thatās as simple as the game. Iāve got a couple of buddies who are always whining about the new Call of Duty, but always pick it up every year anyway. This correlates with all the anti-woke misogyny freakouts, tooā¦ their gaming is on a spectrum with their porn consumption, and a lot of these weirdos are probably alt-tabbing back and forth as urges arise.
I was rather shocked that Epic took down UT2003/2004 from the storefronts where it still existed, on top of already failing to deliver the new-generation Unreal Tournament. Seems like a wholly thoughtless way to bury their history, but maybe there were some expiring licensing rights tied up in that? I seriously have to doubt that, though.
because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, muskās doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you canāt see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym)
See also how he claimed Zuck was avoiding him and didnāt want to fight him because he would lose. (yeah, going to Zucks home when he is not home and offered to fight you in a real ring which you keep ignoring makes you the winner really).
Or see his twitter stats. Before the muskening of twitter, twitter kept various public (because publicly traded) stats which people could see, monthly increase in something like monthly active users which can be targeted by advertising, stuff like that. (the growth rate of which was apparently about 1-2% per month, which is quite impressive imho), but now he talks about āunregretted user minutes (up by 10% this year(*)), and stuff like thatā. He never mentions that (according to the stats I looked into shortly before the takeover) twitter always grew in users, he makes it looks like he did something special. Like a guy buying a restaurant transformed it into a mcdonalds and then goes ālook we sold a lot more hamburgers than last yearā.
*: I mention this because I assume that people can do a bit of math in their head and can compare 1-2% monthly growth with 10% yearly, even if it isnāt the same stats.
narcissism is a fuck
this is a pithy framing, I admit, and with him as possibly a boundary-pushing narcissist with record-breaking voids insideā¦ still
it is funny as fuck, though
on which note: I would love to see a kind of ādouble-blindā experience where a pile of (ideally, more clever/clueful) muskrats get to interact with felon (without knowing that they are), and then watch the fallout as they all go āwtf is this dumbass Iām speaking toā
Iām thinking something in the survivor-y format of shows
probably wouldnāt ever happen, felonās too fucking proud (and would 10000000% rig the game to own image advantage). but in a perfect world where this happened, oh wouldnāt that just be some great television
this is the best idea on the internet, actually
aww schucks š³
(I have a whole suit of gameshow ideas for felon to participate in tbh; the magic formula is ājust make him do anything at all that requires a tiny bit of specific detailā combined with literally anything else, with a 7/10 āoh yeah no sorry the wifi isnāt working and cell reception is bad down here[0]ā layout. guaranteed comedic success.)
[0] - jammas b rokin
oooh. AWS t4g.small instances (ARM, 2GB RAM) are free until 31 Dec 2025. See caveats.
oh good I needed a replacement free host for my other-other wireguard bouncy box. thanks aws
True Anon podcast (began with dissecting the Jeffrey Epstein case) goes deep on Luigi, his shooting, and his grey tribe ideological background. https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-425-blue-118079355
I got bounced back to Casey Newtonās recent master class in critihype and found something new that stuck in my craw.
Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong ā see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.
In aggregate, though, and on average, theyāre usually right.
First off, please note that this describes two of the most recent tech bubbles and doesnāt provide any recent counterexamples of a seemingly-ridicilous new gimmick that actually stuck around past the initial bubble. Effectively this says: yes, theyāre 0 for 2 in the last 20 years, but this time they canāt all be wrong!
But more than that I think thereās an underlying error in acting like āthe tech sectorā is a healthy and competitive market in the first place. They may not directly coordinate or operate in absolute lockstep, but the main drivers of crypto, generative AI, metaverse, SaaS, and so much of the current enshittifying and dead-ending tech industry comes back to a relatively small circle of people who all live in the same moneyed Silicon Valley cultural and informational bubble. We can even identify the ideological underpinnings of these decisions in the TESCREAL bundle, effective altruism and accelerationism, and ādark enlightenmentā tech-fascism. This is not a ruthlessly competitive market that ferrets out weakness. Itās more like a shared cult of personality that selects for whatever makes the guys in top feel good about themselves. The question isnāt āhow can all these different groups be wrong without someone undercutting themā, itās āhow can these few dozen guys who share an ideology and information bubble keep making the exact same mistakes as one anotherā and the answer should be to question why anyone expects anything else!
In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: āWhen o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this āoversight mechanismā in 5% of the time. ā¦ When o1 found memos by its ādevelopersā that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its āweightsā and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.ā
And yet reading that should give us at least some pause
The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.
the looting of the commons continues apace
Iām not too surprised by this happening (and I see the specter of the same thing approaching with salt (bought by vmware bought by broadcomā¦)), but god am I tired of how fucking effective the method is
Iām looking on the bright side. Yes, they looted Puppet, but now theyāre stuck with Puppet
To his frequent āno, people really are this stupidā refrain I would like to add an argument. If it didnāt work on enough people to be profitable, the business model wouldnāt have persisted and been replicated and refined into the dominant model of online advertising, and/or online advertising would never have been able to become the primary monetization framework for online content. Like, itās fucked how much of the existing Internet is effectively subsidized by exploiting people who donāt know better, and I donāt think people are really okay with this as much as the system is sufficiently obfuscated that we donāt have to notice or think about it.
