Want to wade into the snowy 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 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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didnāt survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my accountās cake day, too, so thatās cool.)
YCombinator will let founders accept payments in butts:
pegged butts
āThey pretend to pay us, we pretend to workā
that one in which the person behind/running @FirefoxWebDevs drops the mask so fast it looks like a magic trick: gallery link
thread by @self, toots by myself and others. the poster managed to keep their civility for quite a while until I daredā¢ to highlight their lack of a reply outside of UK 5pm, at which point they immediately ramped up
(and based on some screenshots Iāve been sent, heās also been doing the classic tail-darvo moping elsewhere)
Iāll have you know weāre acting like someone whoās rude to āserving staffā right now, where serving staff is defined as a formerly chrome currently mozilla developer relations marketing guy with fucking flatlined vibes
listen here you little shit, we have a USER STUDY that proves that those who donāt even think of āserving staffā are the most virtuous humans. no you canāt see the data why would you even ask that
uhm @self can you show me where I wrote this? can you show me where I wrote these exact words? no? thatās so irrational of you.
for those who hadnāt seen before, FWD is an account that showed up on the fedi not too long ago (3~4mo?), and has been acting as a Mouthpiece (and semi consent manufacturing outlet)
across a number of āpollsā (with forced answer paths) theyāve had their replies absolutely blasted, and across literally hundreds of replies theyāve dodged the point so hard they might have invented a new sports class
earlier today I attempted to (quite lightly) check with them if they understand why their responses arenāt all-liked. it didnāt take much of long for them to go off the rails
Thanks for lighting his ass on fire. o7
OT: vehicle shopping is such a clusterfuck these days jfc. Do not recommend. Also car salesmen are on par with rationalists, I swear to god.
The āweāll save some bucks by removing physical knobs and pose this as futuristic by making some vital functions only accessible via multiple levels of menus on a touchscreenā thing is the worst and should be banned.
the last time I drove a car was in 2015 or so, and back then every car I got had no computers in them. I dread the day that I need to have a vehicle again and my friggin car will upload bullshit into the cloud or whatever. the idea of having screens of any kind on a car is repulsive to me
Navigation stuff is unfortunately (and embarrassingly) critical for me, otherwise Iād be in total agreement with you.
Iāve been deliberately learning to navigate without GPSes and tech devices, as a life skill (also on foot/public transport). Iām terrible at navigating, but Iām realising navigating is kinda like handwritingāin that itās very easy to fall into the trap of saying āIām terrible at thisā as a kind of immutable personality trait, while in fact itās perfectly expected that one is bad at a skill that one never uses, and turns out I can get better at it even with a little bit of deliberate practice. I suck at things but I can improve.
In the meantime when I use an electronic map to navigate, I still would rather stick a smartphone to the dashboard a car and use whatever navigation app I prefer, than have the screens and navigators built into the car.
OT but, though this is mostly about appreciating things in nature rather than navigating a city by car or on foot, this book has helped me a lot with not being anymore a person with a ābad sense of directionā, even when walking downtown: The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley . I really recommend it for people who hike, even occasionally.
new odium symposium episode. this one is a lot lighter than the previous two. we went back and looked at joseph swetnam, the guy the word misogyny was coined to describe, and how he got relentlessly dunked on by his peers.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/9-first-149546072, or on any platform
Found another website doing a good job keeping eye on the slop machines and their promoters: The AI Dirty List.
It also lists those who have fought against the bullshit fountains as well.
Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11ās AI overload ā scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift
- recall might be rethought, again
- copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) āunder reviewā
- no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows
Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if youāre smart what happens after the launch is someone elseās problem. I wouldnāt be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately āscaled backā.
Does (deservedly) mercilessly bullying Slopya Nadella actually work?
R3call
Buisness plan: daily reminders to Recall the Recall Recall. Itās memento mori for CEOs as a service.
Re datacenters in space:
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862222
Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170
Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435):
it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sunās power
We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sunās power. A few trillionths per year.
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
The leaps in logic are so idiotic āhe managed to land a rocket up right, so maybe he can pull it off!ā (as if Elon personally made that happen, or as if a engineering challenge and fundamental thermodynamic limits are equally solvable). This is despite multiple comments replying with back of the envelope calcs on energy generation and heat dissipation of the ISS and comparing it to what you would need for even a moderately sized data center. Or even the comments that are like āmaybe there is a chanceā, as if it is wiser to express uncertaintyā¦
SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
Truly a conundrum worthy of the XXI century
Very much āsweaty guy hovering over two buttonsā
1,604 comments jfc
Emails Show Even Epstein Thought Crypto Pumps are Unethical | Gizmodo
Crossover month for the epstein extended universe continuesā¦
The headline alone is worthy of upvoting. About halfway through the article, the author includes an embedded YouTube video of the Dilberito Flash game. Made me reflect that 20 years ago, they might simply have directly embedded the game itself. And contemplate what the Web might look like if/when external YouTube embedding craps out.
And goddamn:
his former syndicate, publisher, and professional organizations have all declined to pay tribute or even acknowledge his passing.
I didnāt realize it was quite that harsh, but so it goes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The common clay of the new west:
transcription
Twitter post from @BenjaminDEKR
āOpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you arenāt careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking āis it daytime yet?ā every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude āno, itās still night.ā Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The āHeartbeatā cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, (āremind me tomorrow to get milkā)ā
Continuation of twitter post
ā1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied āHEARTBEAT_OKā 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:
- Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
- 25 Ć $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
- Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking āis it daytime yet?ā every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude āno, itās still night.ā The problem is:
- Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
- Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
- Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking Thatās $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.ā
There are other posts of the same story that include the original ādevā learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.
https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226
Thereās also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150
Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:
- Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it mustāve done a bit more than that to get banned)
- Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
- Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.
Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, itās obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. Thatās not sustainable.
I hadnāt realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.
thankfully temporarily free
god I canāt wait for the subsidies to end
$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit theyāre eating is good?
As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.
How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit theyāre eating is good?
They think itās just that theyāre early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, whoās to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.
I guess I can check back in six months to see how theyāre doing ā¦ wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, werenāt they? Thatās a bummer.
Well, sure, but that was six months ago.
Tired: itās required to taste
Wired: itās an acquired taste
theyāre already pivoting to the narrative that ālocal models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run themā
i still think that lots of people damaged by chatbots will stop in their tracks when this vc money burning charade ends, they wonāt be able to set up it all locally because chatbots brainrotted them even if it was possible in the first place
and it will be trivially affordable to run them
ON WHAT HARDWARE BEN, DDR2 SCAVENGED FROM JUNKYARDS???
once again, the facade of the āwhoops, bad companyā falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask
transcript
a quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: āSo whatās the deal with this ghastly woman again? Sheās a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?ā
the quoted tweet by aella reads: āThereās apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?ā
also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if itās a sock
Bruh
āpro-billionaireā sorry I just threw up in my mouth a little. Also the billionaires are the ones rushing to create the thing so many rationalists claim is an existential risk, why the fuck would you support them??
Yeah, @XiWellWisher going up against Aella on X, The Everything App is well into late-SNL stages of unfunny parody
i donāt find that name too strange, itās a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth
In other news, Larry Garfield of GarfieldTech has had enough of the bullshit fountains, and put out a fury-filled sneer in response.
Larry Garfield was ejected from Drupal nearly a decade ago without concrete accusations; at the time, I thought Dries was overreacting, likely because I was in technical disagreement with him, but now Iām more inclined to see Garfield as a misogynist who the community was correct to eject.
I did have a longpost on Lobsters responding to this rant, but here I just want to focus on one thing: Garfield has no solutions. His conclusion is that we should resent people who push or accept AI, and also that we might as well use coding agents:
As I learn how to work with AI coding agents, know that I will be thinking ill of [people who have already shrugged and said āit is what it isā] the entire time.
Garfield has no solutions
He readily admitted as much when I asked him on mastodon about how to approach the subject with friends and family who are using the āit is what it isā rationalization. Then mentioned cult deprogramming research as something heās not as well versed in as he would like.
Make of that what you will/want
Donāt want to use AI because itās built on copyright infringement and literally destroying the planet? Well, I guess you canāt work in software anymore, sorry. It is what it is.
Every time someone like Jeffrey Way says āit is what it is,ā it makes it so. It is not inevitable just because Sam Altman tells his over-leveraged investors it is so. It becomes inevitable when you, you personally, decide that you just donāt want to think about the externalities or put in the work to find better alternatives.
We are making this choice. But really, that means you have already decided for me. And I curse you and the ground you walk on for it. No, Iām not joking or exaggerating. Burn in hell.
10/10 No notes.
Between this shit and the oncoming tech-inflicted recession, my wife and I are both reskilling out of tech. Iām looking into electrician and sheās looking into accounting. Two fields that are, at least in theory, sufficiently motivated by accuracy and reality to be at least somewhat protected from the rise and fall of the confabulatron.
Weāll see how it goes, but God if that āBurn in hellā doesnāt just hit me right in the soul.
Good luck. Thereās a lack of trained electricians here in Sweden, which amazes me, it sounds like a decent job for someone with a technical bent and some handiness. Better than plumbing (no disrespect to plumbers, love them, but not the work I want to do)
thereās a couple of amusing hells inside that job, you either have to deal with construction crews and contractors, jump between power poles including in cold and rain, wrangle with paperwork for permits for new lines, or fix horrors left by someone before you, it can be also dirty and people-facing
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted
You have to be a semi-contortionist to be a plumber.
