self

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[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 17 minutes ago

the richest boy in the world sued to stop The Onion from turning infowars into a parody of itself on the grounds that he thinks infowars’ twitter accounts shouldn’t be transferred as part of the bankruptcy even though that’s something that happens constantly and also wouldn’t impact the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings even if it were grounded in anything resembling fact

Musk has also tweeted occasionally that he believes The Onion is not funny.

it’s getting really hard to adequately describe how funny musk isn’t. it’s not just try-hard shit like the weird sink thing, the soul-sucking cameos, or the fact that he’s literally throwing his money into stopping a comedy site from existing — it’s everything taken as a whole. I’d call him anti-comedy, but he’s so much less interesting than that implies

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

a system where you can get priority at traffic lights, so they turn green faster

the US has this too (you can watch the stoplights suddenly reprioritize as an ambulance or cop car with their lightbars and sirens running approaches) and I’m honestly not sure why I haven’t ever seen it abused by some shithead with a HackRF or similar. maybe the penalties make it safer to just willingly run a red light?

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

other than interop, the big problem I have with this is security. car modding for performance is already a big thing, and a car mod that makes other cars slow down, stop, get out of your way, or otherwise malfunction would be incredibly popular with assholes of all varieties, and car modding has many. the current state of automotive is that security is a fucking shitshow, but I can’t figure out any kind of security model for this that isn’t vulnerable to a wide variety of obvious attacks. even a perfect inter-vendor attestation chain (good fucking luck) is vulnerable to hooking an ECU (or whatever the ruggedized monitoring microcontroller unit for a magic self-driving EV is) and radio up to a variety of fake sensors and crafting inputs such that the thing starts transmitting “wait no stop here” signals to all the surrounding cars

but then again, all of this is probably intentional because it creates a privileged class of people who can afford to fuck with self-driving car networking and not worry about any associated fines, and an unprivileged class who just have to put up with everything being so much worse. in a world where you can roll smoke into a Subway with relatively few consequences (not to mention all the other horseshit Truck Guys get away with), it’s not a hard outcome to imagine.

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago

imagine having an opinion

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Spines’ pitch is heavy on resentment-based marketing: “… you will receive the feedback you so long for from the publishing world: a personal touch.”

holy shit. I learned a new term today (resentment-based marketing) and I’m fascinated by how this could possibly work

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

the F22 is the C++ of military planes and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

I didn’t need to look to know most of your post history is fucking awful generative AI “art”

I hope the $60k helps you become less mediocre as a person! now fuck off

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

where the fuck is his left foot

also, did Scott fuck up and not notice this one is plagiarism? not just of the original painting, but however many art class portraiture recreations of the painting the model trained on

most likely including a particularly awful one I was behind the camera for! but because it’s art class and not assholes doing plagiarism, the point of the exercise isn’t that it’s original or even good (and under no circumstances are you pretending you came up with an original work) — it’s to explore the elements that made the original good. I remember we put a lot of effort into getting the light and shadow around the left shoulder and head just right, which are elements the generative knockoff just entirely fucks up because of course it does (also what the fuck is on his forehead?)

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

holy fuck, I can’t stop picturing it

[–] self@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

it may be possible to reconfigure lemmy’s markdown renderer to shunt anything (within reason) between $s to mathjax; I wouldn’t mind looking into that once we restart development on Philthy.

in the meantime, as an inadequate compromise, you can enable mathjax on gibberish.awful.systems blogs and get better rendering for a long-form math-heavy article there. the unfortunate trade-off is you’ll lose the ability to upload images and they’ll have to be PRed into the frontend repo if you want them local (yes, that’s really the recommended way to do it in bare WriteFreely, unless you’re on their paid flagship instance where they spun up a private imgur clone to handle it).

if there’s interest and PRing images in (or using an upload service elsewhere) isn’t doing it, we can look into doing a basic authenticated upload into object storage kind of service. (or maybe there’s a way to hack pict-rs into doing it? I don’t like pict-rs, but it is our image cache)

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

I’d say we should start calling this computer science affinity fraud shit “O(0) algorithms”, but knowing the space it’ll be like 2 months before crypto twitter starts using it ironically and maybe 6 months if we’re lucky before it shows up in a whitepaper cause the affinity grifters realized it’d make mediocre engineers buy more fraudcoins

[–] self@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways, and have them provide the genetic material. I think that it would be immoral not to, and that it is impossible not to think this way after thinking seriously about it.

we’re definitely not a cult, I don’t know why anyone would think that

Consider it from your child’s perspective. There are many people who they could be born to. Who would they pick? Do you have any right to deny them the father they would choose? It would be like kidnapping a child – an unutterably selfish act. You have a duty to your children – you must act in their best interest, not yours.

I just don’t understand how so many TESCREAL thoughts and ideas fit this broken fucking pattern. “have you thought about ? but have you really thought about it? you must not have cause if you did you would agree it was !”

and you really can tell you’re dealing with a cult when you start from the pretense that a child that doesn’t exist yet has a perspective — these fucking weirdos will have heaven and hell by any means, no matter how much math and statistics they have to abuse past the breaking point to do it.

and just like with any religious fundamentalist, the child doesn’t have any autonomy. how could they, if all their behavior has already been simulated to perfection? there’s no room for an imperfect child’s happiness; for familial bonding; for normal human shit. all that must be cope, cause it doesn’t fit into a broken TESCREAL worldview.

 

this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

 

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

 

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

 

as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company.

A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
 

who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

 

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

 

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

 

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

 

(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

 

(via mastodon)

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