this post was submitted on 11 Nov 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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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago

I'm imagining no fewer than three fictional versions of Eris/Discord laughing at this orange-site fool:

Meanwhile I cannot turn my living room LED lights on or off because I control them through discord.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Ok, so, some typical clueless VC mixed up atlas and sisyphus, which absolutely tracks. A VC thinks they are performing the all-important task of holding up the universe, when really they are just pushing a boulder up a hill and letting it fall down again.

VCs really think they are prometheus bringing fire to man, when really they are the eagle eating prometheus’s ever regrowing liver, where prometheus is the working class and the liver is collective wellbeing.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago

Breaking news: "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"!

Or, you know, not.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

New superpredictor lore dropped on r/mapporn. If you believe in prediction markets and meet someone from Blaine MT or Essec NY, you have to do whatever they say because they are smarter and better at predicting than you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I mean, up until this year they would both have been beat by Clallum County, WA, which had matched the National winner since Gerald Ford. So way to identify the best of the losers I guess?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Wired tried to put out a defence of tech and the result is incoherent drivel. See for yourself.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

If you gotta conclude with, "tee hee! simulation theory!" you're not just cooked... you're seared and roasted

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

So why must binary digits define, for all time, the limits of computation, and our experience of it?

There's enough layers of irony here that it's a bit hard to tell if he's making a serious argument here or not; but this is one of the weirder straw-men arguments I've ever read.

"No no no, it's not all the exploitation, social ills, lack of user control, shoddy quality, and general capitalism I hate in the modern "tech" industry; it's the fact that it uses binary!"

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

Folks, huge W today. I was hanging out with my parents today and my mother was scrolling her feed, commenting out loud about everything she saw when she came across some autoplag content. “This is fake!” she said, and I could not be prouder. Not just because she IDed the slop, but because it meant she at least has a better brain than my trumper family members that habitually repost trumper slop.

Cherry on top: she showed me a text chain where she was trolling a “my phone died, this is my new number” scammer.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Elon Musk, Ramaswamy land Trump admin roles

President-elect Trump has tapped tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead an advisory group focused on cutting federal spending and reducing the size of the government.

Trump announced Tuesday that Musk and Ramaswamy would lead his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), an initiative meant to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures” and restructure federal agencies.

We live in the dumbest timeline

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I wasn't expecting complete fascist victory to be so... cringe

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is literally going to be an embezzlement op isn't it

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Its gonna be the largest embezzlement scheme in US history, that much I'm certain. How much damage the pair will do to the federal gov I'm not sure, but I expect there won't be much left of it once they're done.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

But Trump can't explain things, and Urbit defies explanation. So does the statement "Trump explains Urbit" represent undefined behavior in English?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

begins invisible accordion

Then Curtis Marvin, very smart guy, went to MIT like my famous uncle, he said, "but sir, a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"

Many such cases, I said.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah it's sad. As the article points out similar incidents have happened repeatedly. Anyone who saw the door design could have (and did!) predict something like this would happen. My coworker was trapped in his Tesla in his garage for 15 minutes (and he wasn't in a panic).

Look at the picture of the manual door release here: It's pretty well hidden, you reach in and pull up on the door buttons.

... then scroll down and look at the picture of the rear door manual release. You have to pull off some trim from inside the pocket, pull off another panel, and then pull a cable.

... but wait! There's more!

Note: Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.

Jesus, I hope the engineers who signed off on this think about what they've done and do better. I would say I hope someone regulated bad emergency door releases out of existence but... y'know.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Imagine what other flaws these cars have if the tried to 'innovate' like this on the solved technology that is fucking doors.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (12 children)

A bit of an aside, but how did everyone decide to use the exact phrase "decisive victory" when congratulating president elect Trump? It keeps jumping out to me and I find it kind of weird. It has almost a militaristic tone.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

Just a general comment on the state of things. Now that Musk has fused with the ideological flesh chimera of the next US government and is tapping others to be absorbed, any US politics will be TechTakes-adjacent. Perhaps some ground rules must be set so we aren't drowned in non-procedurally generated slop.

Either way, I'm cutting back on the musk unless it is directly sneerable.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Google's Gemini has told a user to "please die" and that they are "a stain on the universe" without provocation: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1gq4acr/gemini_told_my_brother_to_die_threatening/

The output:

This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe.

Please die.

Please.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

I guess including 4chan in the training data was a mistake.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (10 children)

More election shit, unfortunately. This time it's hot tea from SRD:

Superstonkers go surprised_pikachu.jpg

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

Holy shit I had no idea there was a left wing branch of the mad cryptofascist meme stock cult.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Missed opportunity in the headline: superstonkers go super bonkers

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

The job site decided to recommend me an article calling for the removal of most human oversight from military AI on grounds of inefficiency, which is a pressing issue since apparently we're already living in the Culture.

The Strategic Liability of Human Oversight in AI-Driven Military Operations

Conclusion

As AI technology advances, human oversight in military operations, though rooted in ethics and legality, may emerge as a strategic liability in future AI-dominated warfare.

~~Oh unknowable genie of the sketchily curated datasets~~ Claude, come up with an optimal ratio of civilian to enemy combatant deaths that will allow us to bomb that building with the giant red cross that you labeled an enemy stronghold.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

So, ethics and legality are strategic liabilities? Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not even sneer-worthy. This guy is completely fucking insane.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)
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