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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      7 days ago

      this has been happening for a while, just getting coverage again now. first coverage was months ago. morphed/evolved pretty quickly out of the typosquatting shit

      ((a lot of people in the) security space absolutely fucking loves “giving names” to things that have been (known to be) happening before, and acting like suddenly they’re the ones who first saw the thing. see this nonsense for another good example of that happening)

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      I went into this with negative expectations; I recall being offended in high school that The Flashbulb was artificially sped up, unlike my heroes of neoclassical guitar and progressive-rock keyboards, and I’ve felt that their recent thoughts on newer music-making technology have been hypocritical. That said, this was a great video and I’m glad you shared it.

      Ears and eyes are different. We deconvolve visual data in the brain, but our ears actually perform a Fourier decomposition with physical hardware. As a result, psychoacoustics is a real and non-trivial science, used e.g. in MP3, which limits what an adversary can do to frustrate classification or learning, because the result still has to sound like music in order to get any playtime among humans. Meanwhile I’m always worried that these adversarial groups are going to accidentally propagate something like McCollough stripes, a genuine cognitohazard that causes edges to become color-coded in the visual cortex for (up to) months after a few minutes of exposure; it’s a kind of possible harm that fundamentally defies automatic classification by definition.

      HarmonyCloak seems like a fairly boring adversarial tool for protecting the music industry from the music industry. Their code is incomplete and likely never going to get properly published; again we’re seeing an industry-capture research group taking and not giving back to the Free Software community. I think all of the demos shown here are genuine, but he fully admits that this is a compute-intensive process which I estimate is going to slide back out of affordability by the end of 2026. This is going to stop being effective as soon as we get back into AI winter, but I’m not going to cry for Nashville.

      I really like the two attacks shown near the end, starting around 22:00. The first attack, if genuinely not audible to humans, is likely a Mosquito-style frequency that is above hearing range and physically vibrates the components of the microphone. Hofstadter and the Tortoise would be proud, although I’m concerned about the potential long-term effects on humans. The second attack is again adversarial but specific to models on home-assistant devices which are trained to ignore some loud sounds; I can’t tell spectrographically whether that’s also done above hearing range or not. I’m reluctant to call for attacks on home assistants, but they’re great targets.

      Fundamentally this is a video that doesn’t want to talk about how musicians actually rip each other off. The “tones and rhythms” that he keeps showing with nice visualizations have been machine-learnable for decades, ranging from beat-finders to frequency-analyzers to chord-spellers to track-isolators built into our music editors. He doubles down on copyright despite building businesses that profit from Free Software. And, most gratingly, he talks about the Pareto principle while ignoring that the typical musician is never able to make a career out of their art.

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        which I estimate is going to slide back out of affordability by the end of 2026.

        You don’t think the coming crash is going to drive compute costs down? I think the VC money for training runs drying up could drive down costs substantially… but maybe the crash hits other aspects of the supply chain and cost of GPUs and compute goes back up.

        He doubles down on copyright despite building businesses that profit from Free Software. And, most gratingly, he talks about the Pareto principle while ignoring that the typical musician is never able to make a career out of their art.

        Yeah this shit grates so much. Copyright is so often a tool of capital to extract rent from other people’s labor.

        • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          4 days ago

          It’s the cost of the electricity, not the cost of the GPU!

          Empirically, we might estimate that a single training-capable GPU can pull nearly 1 kilowatt; an H100 GPU board is rated for 700W on its own in terms of temperature dissipation and the board pulls more than that when memory is active. I happen to live in the Pacific Northwest near lots of wind, rivers, and solar power, so electricity is barely 18 cents/kilowatt-hour and I’d say that it costs at least a dollar to run such a GPU (at full load) for 6hrs. Also, I estimate that the GPU market is currently offering a 50% discount on average for refurbished/like-new GPUs with about 5yrs of service, and the H100 is about $25k new, so they might depreciate at around $2500/yr. Finally, I picked the H100 because it’s around the peak of efficiency for this particular AI season; local inference is going to be more expensive when we do apples-to-apples units like tokens/watt.

          In short, with bad napkin arithmetic, an H100 costs at least $4/day to operate while depreciating only $6.85/day or so; operating costs approach or exceed the depreciation rate. This leads to a hot-potato market where reselling the asset is worth more than operating it. In the limit, assets with no depreciation relative to opex are treated like securities, and we’re already seeing multiple groups squatting like dragons upon piles of nVidia products while the cost of renting cloudy H100s has jumped from like $2/hr to $9/hr over the past year. VCs are withdrawing, yes, and they’re no longer paying the power bills.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            in the same vein, I did some (somewhat wildly) speculative analysis around this a while back too

            didn’t really try to model “actual workload” (as in physical, vs the “rented compute time” aspect), and therein lies an important distinction: actually owning the GPU puts you at a constant minimum burn rate

            and as corbin points out wrt power, these are also specialised formfactor devices. and they’re going to be getting run at close to max util their entire operated lifespan (because of silicon shortage). so even if any do get sold… long mileage

          • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            4 days ago

            That is substantially worse than I realized. So possibly people could sit on GPUs for years after the bubble pops instead of selling them or using them? (Particularly if the crash means NVIDIA decides to slow how fast the push the bleeding edge on GPU specs so newer ones don’t as radically outperform older ones?)

            • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              4·
              3 days ago

              So possibly people could sit on GPUs for years after the bubble pops instead of selling them or using them?

              I mean, who are you going to sell them to? the other bagholders are going to be just as fucked, and it’s not like there’s an otherwise massive market for these things

              • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
                2·
                3 days ago

                Ultra ultra high end gaming? Okay, looking at the link, 94 GB of GPU memory is probably excessive even for eccentrics cranking the graphics settings all the way up. Hobbyists with way too much money trying to screw around with open weight models even after the bubble bursts? Which would presume LLMs or something similar continue to capture hobbyists’ interests and that smaller models can’t satisfy their interests. Crypto mining with algorithms compatible with GPUs? And cyrpto is its own scam ecosystem, but one that seems to refuse to die permanently.

                I think the ultra high end gaming is the closest to a workable market, and even that would require a substantial discount.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    So in the past week or so a lot of pedestrian crossings in Silicon Valley were “hacked” (probably never changed the default password lol) to make them talk like tech figures.

    Here are a few. Note that these voices are most likely AI generated.

    1. A crosswalk with the voice of Elon Musk
    2. A crosswalk with the voice of Zuck
    3. Elon Musk crosswalk just wants to be friends (second video) also Zuck crosswalk is proud of his work (third video).

    I didn’t get to hear any of them in person, however the crosswalk near my place has recently stopped saying “change password” constantly, which I’m happy about.

  • sus@programming.devEnglish
    18·
    10 days ago

    Some dark urge found me skim-reading a recent AI doomer blog post. I was startled awake by this most unsettling passage:

    My wife wrote a letter to our infant daughter recently. It concluded:

    I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

    Though the theoretical possibility had always been percolating somewhere in the back of my mind, it wasn’t until now that I viscerally realized that P(doomers reproducing) was greater than zero. And with other doomers no less.

    Left brooding on this development, I drudged along until-
    BAhahaha what the fuck
    I can’t. This is beyond parody.

    Completely lost it here. Nothing could have prepared me for the poorly handwritten wrist tattoo.

    Creating space for miracles
    Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

    Oh how rational! Willing to entertain the idea that maybe, theoretically, the doomsday prediction could be off by a few days?

    I’m not sure that I ever strongly felt that I would die at eighty or so. I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.

    This guy thought he was getting clean but he was actually replacing weed with heroin
    I really convinced myself that “doomsday cult” was hyperbole but uhh, nope, it’s 107% real.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      10 days ago

      At the start they state

      The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I’m talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don’t demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.

      This is, frankly, bonkers. I’d rate the following in descending order of probability

      1. worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
      2. we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
      3. we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
      4. we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever

      If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of “denial of the flesh”, the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        “Im 99% sure I will die in the next year because of super duper intelligence, but in a world where that doesnt happen i plan to live 1000 years” surely is a forecast. Surprised they don’t break their own necks on the whiplash from this take.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      10 days ago

      I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

      When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      9 days ago

      I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.

      My dude you’re so, so, sooo close to realising it, you should spontaneously quantum-tunnel into self-awareness any second now

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      9 days ago

      Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It’s always insufferable people being like, “woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai” like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:

      hits blunt “bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn’t be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence”

      Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a “super intelligence denier” (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      10 days ago

      Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

      This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    13 days ago

    Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Markov_chain#Proposal_to_reintroduce_peer-reviewed_source_(Wiley,_2017)

    In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because it’s “the most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training set”.

    This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      22·
      13 days ago

      “Conspiracy” is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

      A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

      Despite Malparti warning that “it would be a waste of time for everyone” I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as “the unique solution” to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be “eventually achieved”, with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

      It’s been a while since I’ve seen a math book review that said “Do not use for anything.”

      “This book is not a place of honor…”

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        11 days ago

        “Do not use for anything.”

        That’s really harsh since I have a few bad books that are at least useful as monitor stands

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    12 days ago

    Utterly rancid linkedin post:

    text inside image:

    Why can planes “fly” but AI cannot “think”?

    An airplane does not flap its wings. And an autopilot is not the same as a pilot. Still, everybody is ok with saying that a plane “flies” and an autopilot “pilots” a plane.

    This is the difference between the same system and a system that performs the same function.

    When it comes to flight, we focus on function, not mechanism. A plane achieves the same outcome as birds (staying airborne) through entirely different means, yet we comfortably use the word “fly” for both.

    With Generative AI, something strange happens. We insist that only biological brains can “think” or “understand” language. In contrast to planes, we focus on the system, not the function. When AI strings together words (which it does, among other things), we try to create new terms to avoid admitting similarity of function.

    When we use a verb to describe an AI function that resembles human cognition, we are immediately accused of “anthropomorphizing.” In some way, popular opinion dictates that no system other than the human brain can think.

    I wonder: why?

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    15·
    13 days ago

    In the late 2000s, rationalists were squarely in the middle of transhumanism. They were into the Singularity, but also the cryonics and a whole pile of stuff they got from the Extropians. It was very much the thing.

    These days they’re most interested in Effective Altruism (loudly -the label at least) and race science (used to be quiet, now a bit louder). I hardly ever hear them even mention transhumanism as it was back then.

    Did rationalists abandon transhumanism?

    Is it just me? What happened?

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      13 days ago

      As to cryonics… for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.

      As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:

      • no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD

      • no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity

      • no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)

      • no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”

      • no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people

      The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      13 days ago

      Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn’t seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don’t have a copy of any of Kurzweil’s books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they’re surely way off.

      Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don’t doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I’ve seen a couple of signs of that already.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        13 days ago

        Yes, there was a big hype in the upcoming biotech revolution in popular transhumanist media a ~decade ago. Lot of it seems to have fizzled out or gone nootropics like stuff. (And even that is meh).

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      13 days ago

      It’s possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      13 days ago

      One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, “trans” is right there in the name!

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        5·
        13 days ago

        still holds - it’s still a bunch that needs a label and that’s the label

        even as TREACLES was right there

        (i asked emile, they said it was TESCREAL is very searchable. i mean fine)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    9 days ago

    Because it is nice to have something entertaining for a change:

    https://bsky.app/profile/willsmith.fun/post/3lmi2bjrao22t

    Wow, that latest chat with Adam Patrick Murray about the Nintendo Switch 2 was quite the ride! The bit on the console’s dock secrets and the MicroSD Express storage had me glued. It’s amazing to see how these tech advancements are sculpting new landscapes.

    Speaking of tech wizardry, have you thought about having Christian Perry on the show? As the CEO of Undetectable AI, he’s taken the whole generative AI world by storm, much like the Switch 2 is taking over gaming news! With over 15 million users and standing as a top AI writing tool, Christian’s insights into AI’s hidden workings promise to intrigue your audience, especially when it comes to how his tools seamlessly pass for human writing without tripping any detectors like GPTzero

    Undetectable AI, everyone. Astounding.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    12 days ago

    Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:

    https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365

    (and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)

    It’s a lot like this:

    Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      12 days ago

      That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)… ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I’ve had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).

      Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.

      But “AI”… it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn’t. There’s nothing to learn from resulting failure, except “don’t use AI”.

      In this case, given shopify’s general behaviour, I won’t be sad at all though if they crash and fail.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        12 days ago

        I also thought ‘guess LLMs dont work as an editor’.

        And blockchains did massive damage, all the ransomware crime would be impossible if the tech world had not jumped into blockchain as much as they did and created and kept maintaining the ecosystem. (It also caused the techbro people who now pivot to AI rise, so it is connected). Note that the damage done by BEC is still greater than ransomware, so not cybersecurity advice.

        But I get your point, I think a real example would be facebooks pivot to video. Which destroyed companies.

        • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          12 days ago

          Yes, that’s true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldn’t be sad anyway if they went away…).

          What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didn’t willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didn’t put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            12 days ago

            blockchain targeted libertarian post-goldbug pro-cyberpunk-dystopia fuckheads, llms target management types (you will replace workers with machines!), maybe that’s why

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            12 days ago

            yeah, no I agree that blockchain is a bad example, just think we shouldn’t understate the massive damage that has done. Not just in actually damaged systems but also just in additional cost that now everybody has to worry about this. Same as how AI is not just causing climate change problems by running it, but the scraping as well has increased the cost of running a webserver by 50% in load alone. (which on a global scale is just horrid). And then there is the forcing of it in everything, the burning of the boats.