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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[–] corbin@awful.systems 14 points 5 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.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 5 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.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago

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

Or, you know, not.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 5 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.

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?

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

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

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 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!"

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Shorter HN: wasting gigawatts of power to increase VC valuations - fine. Discarding 80k pounds of butter because of missing allergen information is the worst thing to happen since the burning of the library of Alexandria

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150991

I was watching an old Day9 stream today and this story is bouncing off of some comments he made about the importance of degenerate players to competitive design. Like, this is a pretty dumb outcome of regulation, but at the same time if you try to define regulations to create an exception for what "everybody knows" is in something suddenly that process gets taken advantage of by self-interested manufacturers who will figure out how to convincingly argue that "everybody knows" their generic shampoo contains peanuts and shellfish or whatever. And in the context of this kind of regulation that degenerate play will get people killed.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Gasp

This is just like the fall of Rome.

E: eurgh the people arguing against regs that help people with allergies.

[–] s3p5r@lemm.ee 13 points 6 days ago

Crossposting this thread from nottheonion@lemmy.world with the fortune article "Elon Musk’s AI turns on him, labels him ‘one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X’". The article itself is nothing much, but it does have this quote:

The smackdown from his own AI system, ironically, came soon after Musk touted the system to his followers in a tweet reading “Use Grok for answers that are based on up-to-date info!”

A little delicious irony is fine as a treat.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

looks like the autoplag bullshit is causing a "fun" new frontier in the hellscape of youtube copyright fuckery

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Some techbro proposes "HumaneRank" as a distribution system in the post-AI era and while HN finds it disturbingly like a global popularity system at least "it's better than Communism":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42140664

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

same type of people who call everything a communist social credit score btw

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

TL;DR:

AI will take over the economy for reasons so humans will have no economic value for reasons which is terrifying for reasons and also we can't just have males sitting around because y'know so we need to make a pretend economy because communism. So anyway y'know PageRank? Well don't be shocked but humans have relationships too. So yeah basically let's distribute ownership of all the world's resources once a month proportionally to how many likes they receive (no I am not a vtuber why do you ask?).

What the heck did I just read?

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

youtube poop, apparently

[–] istewart@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago

Competitive college admissions and tech-industry hiring practices really have done permanent damage to these people, haven't they

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Whuffie, but worse

also, I thought these guys loved The Culture...

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 22 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.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 20 points 1 week ago (13 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

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

[–] ahopefullycuterrobot@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Fascists were always cringe. Himmler was a weird occultist. Goering was a drug addict still high on his glorious from World War I. Hitler was a profoundly lazy man with terrible taste in art. There were normal fascists (there had to be), but the leadership was always cringe. Unfortunately, being cringe doesn't stop a movement from killing vast numbers of people.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

This Adolf guy kinda had me when he was just a dude traumatized by war who liked buildings and was kinda shit at drawing them, but his political takes were full on yikes and he quickly lost me when it came to the arts as well.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 19 points 1 week ago (5 children)
[–] istewart@awful.systems 17 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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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 18 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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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 20 points 1 week ago (6 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.

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