this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 22 points 3 days ago (1 children)

lol fandom could have been even worse

hackernews: post by languagehacker: Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 23 points 3 days ago (5 children)
[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

imagine how they could have monetized it

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:

  • The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
  • Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
  • Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle

Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.

Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to "open" castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs

that said it's not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it's not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

I will internalise this for the next time data moats come up!

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I bear news from the other place!

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/

Post content reproduced here:

autoplag image of some electronics on a table

hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but that’s what it looked like

for a subject which tells u to “analyse the deeper meaning”, “analyse the composer’s intent”, “appreciate aesthetic and intellectual value” having an AI image in which you physically can’t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, it’s just extremely ironic 😭 idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since i’m an artist, what r ur thoughts?

*NB: original post contains the text: "as an artist using AI images" but this was corrected in a later comment:

also i didn’t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, “as an artist who DOESNT use AI”

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.

I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago (4 children)

[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684?s=46](Roko gets dunked on.)

He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.

Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.

Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Okay but "Elon is not smarter than me" is a universally true statement in the exact same way as "dumb as a rock" is a universally applicable idiom.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

Indeed, it isn't that Roko is smart, it is the bar is so low.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

he's a mathematician, is or was a lecturer somewhere i think

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (10 children)

If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Quick sidenote, you cocked up the formatting on the hyperlink - you're supposed to put [text in square brackets and](the link in circle brackets) like this

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

I suspect it's the frontend on awful that fucked this up, viewing their post in plain/preview shows the correct formatting

placing my bet on the trailing .

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Me, a nuclear engineer reading about "Google restarting six nuclear power plants"

lol, lmao even

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago

Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago

Zitron's given commentary on PC Gamer's publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:

He's also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley's worst excesses. I don't have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.

[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 20 points 4 days ago (34 children)

Musk's twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn't not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script

[–] self@awful.systems 18 points 3 days ago (9 children)

the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)

given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends

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