Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.
dunno how to verify any of this, but xooglers who were there for G+ say it absolutely rings true
Not a sneer, and as such NSFW, but here is a short hbomberguy style video: I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology, featuring friend of the sneer PrimalPoly, by the talented münecat.
One of my kids is a huge fan of Dog Man by Dav Pilkey. This particular page from The Scarlet Shedder really captures the mood today.
Edit: apologies for potato image quality
Kevin Beaumont got access to Copilot+ and hoo boy it’s even stupider than it sounds:
I got ahold of the Copilot+ software.
Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.
It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.
The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.
The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.
and the anti-backlash begins, because snapdragons are magical and microsoft has never fucked over its users
love how the MS shill eventually reaches:
Okay, here’s a question; when has the casual consumer ever cared about privacy?
narcissist’s prayer speed-run
every fucking time! and the answer seems to be: they care enough that privacy’s a core part of Apple’s marketing, but microsoft’s core competency is still managing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs enough that their users are on average just barely more inconvenienced by switching operating systems than they are dealing with whatever new shit’s being sprung on them (and this latest new shit’s gone from annoying to actively dangerous, so the tactic is to convince users it’s irrelevant to them until it’s made mandatory, as Microsoft does, and then the pain of suddenly switching operating systems will be even greater)
27 years of trying to make clippy mandatory and they’re still fucking at it but surely this time they’ll listen to their users
you know what really fucking gets me about this thing? even “before” all of the security and DV etc arguments (and, really, they are all valid)
consider the average consumer-human (present version of) windows desktop/laptop/workstation that has survived for more than a year or so without having been re-imaged. those are already often an unusable nightmare of built-up cruft in sticky corners
and now there’s going to be something that’ll do constant capture and analysis every fucking moment it’s running?
how the fuck is this not going to go wrong? imagine the first time that sqlite table shits the bed. a dodgy character format goes into it, or a bit of disk corruption hits, or a file locking (lololol) issue hits, or …
I just … I just really can’t imagine any of this is going to go very well at all in the real world
holy shit this is terrifying. is there any reason the tv is even doing this?
I’d bet on just buggy implementation. my bet is based on the fact that I’ve seen (multiple) hisense TVs do another thing: a MDNS query + publish, with the record having a newline in the fucking record. like,
tvname-{macstring}\n.local.to be clear: they both ask for and answers to that record. to their own request.
there are some extremely hilariously terrible things in a lot of these yoloboxed android solutions
I’m calling it, when this bullshit gets deployed widely a bunch of absolute shitheads are going to dismiss Kevin’s post with “that was the prototype, they changed everything for the real version” and the only thing that’ll change is they’ll superficially encrypt the SQLite file
Bit of an update with more from Kevin: https://doublepulsar.com/recall-stealing-everything-youve-ever-typed-or-viewed-on-your-own-windows-pc-is-now-possible-da3e12e9465e
People simping for Microsoft makes my '90s-kid brain boggle.
As someone who did come to love a lot of microsoft products despite the way I felt about them in the 90’s, their slow slide into whatever they are now makes me hate them more, not less. Microsoft genuinely spent a lot of the oughts making genuinely good general purpose stuff, and they absolutely dominated at accessibility for 20 years. So when people simp for them as they destroy everything I found great about their products, instead of holding them to account, it’s awful.
Guess who bought the dictation software I rely on for everything I do and then basically abandoned the useful consumer product and is now sticking gippity-4 into it? Stick it in GitHub, stick it in Windows, add it to your complete breakfast, wear it on your head.
@gnomicutterance @blakestacey the new guard trying to reinvent the world with Windows 11, and completely ignoring multiple screen layouts, doesn’t understand that Windows is a workstation OS.
Or maybe they don’t want that market anymore? Which seems short sighted.My Windows machines have all been skinned to work like XP for 20 years, and sometimes I have to use other people’s computers and I don’t even understand how they get anything done. My start menu is predictable and the items in it are in the same place and with the same keystrokes every day. There’s no ads in it. It doesn’t tell me the weather or the sports scores when I don’t ask for them. My taskbar shows me the names of all the windows I have open. This should all be normal.
utterly off-topic but to usher in the weekend (and because I’ve dropped Spotify): what’s some music
no wrong answers just start listing artists and albums you like
Fish in a Birdcage just released Rule #34 (it is indeed about sex) and Rule #35, Rule #4 (also titled Fish in a Birdcage) is his most famous and Rule #13 is also very good.
Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, Fatima Mansions, Telefís). His solo album Black River Falls is beautiful (The Ghost of Limehouse Cut, Black River Falls, Frankfurt Cowboy Yodel)… To say nothing of Microdisney or the Fatima Mansions.
Actually one of the songs on his last album with Telefís was a mockery of TESCREAL beliefs. Space Is Us: “I will live forever in those racks of tin”
i don’t have any idea what you’d like so i’ll drop some moderately to widely spaced things, all electronic, 90s to now
- Sarin - Daevas
- X-Dream - Irritant and X-Dream - Radio, also Midimiliz - Non Standards
- Rikhter - Ufimzew from Rikhter - Doma, this album is pretty uneven and that track was used as a promo; some bits and pieces from that general area RIK1 RIV1 In Verruf - Rush New Frames - Eigengrau
- Gesaffelstein - Variations
i’ve started using soulseek recentlyish and everything is there
BABYMETAL x Electric Callboy: https://youtu.be/EDnIEWyVIlE
https://l-a-n-a-r-k.bandcamp.com/track/metallur
https://exwiish.bandcamp.com/track/resident-deceiver
https://paurro.bandcamp.com/track/jingu-kogo-emperatriz-jingu-5
Lots of things by монеточка, such as Русский ковчег, for pure outright fun jams.
I have alllllll kinds. Being able to share music in an easy manner is actually a fucking disaster of a problem in recent years. Just try to copy a fucking track name out of something like Spotify or Apple Music.
It’s a problem I want to solve.
some more:
Redhook - Bad Decisions
https://kutiman.bandcamp.com/album/kutiman-feat-melike-ahin-sakla-beni-ep
https://mrspiss.bandcamp.com/album/self-surgery (<- very cool collab album)
Some rather wonderful synth work: https://schlindwein.bandcamp.com/album/journey-to-the-sky-solo-synth-works (I have the accompanying moon orb print thingy)
All of this but especially track 2 which makes a remarkably accurate audio representation of what medicating adhd feels like: https://circadianrhythmsrecs.bandcamp.com/album/marwa
https://badafrorecords.bandcamp.com/album/our-days-mind-the-tyme whole album for the feel of it in aggregate. I stumbled across it by hearing track 10 first
A number of things by Silversun Pickups (Panic Switch, all of Swoon, Lazy Eye)
White Lies - Farewell To The Fairground, To Lose My Life
Kontrust - End Of The World
Rival Consoles - Howl
Sleep Party People - Heap of Ashes
Nathan Fake - Drowning in a Sea of Love
Model/Actriz - Dogsbody
Katie Alice Greer - Barbarism
Blanck Mass - World Eater
Yves Tumor - Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)Some albums, mostly electronic, mostly experimental, that I’ve been enjoying.
I like recommending slightly obscure stuff to give it a bit more exposure.
Crushes Bones, especially their song Nightshade Drips is a real banger.
Alternative rock band from California, but one of the main people behind the project is the creator or a super obscure but really cool and well-made ARG called House of Aberdeen from a few years back that has since been deleted. I don’t like most ARGs but I really enjoyed that one and was sad when it was all deleted, and then I found out she’s making music now.
Completely different, but the album Haunted by Poe, sister of author Mark Danielewski, is cool. It’s meant as an accompanying piece to his novel House of Leaves, which I recently read again.
cardiacs
I got no Spotify, and I buy a lot off bandcamp.
- Nate Borofsky, formerly of Girlyman, made a soundtrack for a community theater production of Romeo & Juliet
- Mint Green
- Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
- Kimya Dawson
- John Prine
- Rhiannon Giddens
- Maria Ka, a Polish, non Jewish singer who performs mostly in Yiddish.
- “Fuck the Tories”. Happy fourth of July.
- “FTP in der gasn”, a Yiddish and English arrangement of a nineteenth century song that got there before N.W.A.
- Amber Rubarth and Paper Raincoat (YT link)
I had never heard of Girlyman until this morning, and now I’ve seen two references in one day.
You saw another reference to girlyman? There was a period a decade ago when I played their music constantly and went to every show I could.)
There’s an Instagram account called sexchange.tbt that posts trans ephemera from the past ~40 years - website screenshots, articles, old zines. Anyway, they posted the music video for “Young James Dean” by Girlyman.
Oh man. All the real boys / in their black jeans / called me crazy.
I’d never heard the song before, and it kind of reminded me of a really fascinating essay about James Dean and butch identity.
the voice for OpenAI’s Sky got taken offline because they tried to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for it (she voiced the AI in Her) after she repeatedly told them no (via this mastodon post which links the original NPR article):
A well-respected terminal emulator for the Mac decides to slather on AI sauce, and most users are not happy. But there are others who are outraged that slathering AI sauce onto a product is even seen as a negative. Let’s take a break from HN to take a look at the tortured souls on lobste.rs who won’t let this aggression stand, man:
https://lobste.rs/s/7aglnr/psa_iterm2_now_has_chatgpt_integration
archive link in case mods decide to nuke it
Personal favs:
This is the sort of hatred and resentment that is uncomfortable to see on a public forum.
Hi, this is the internet, you must be new here.
I’m mostly checked out of here as a result until the mods get it under control.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Edit as a bonus, here’s the HN discussion. Same situaton there, the promptfondlers are surprised everyone is mad
Update 4 days later, the main Karen in charge of the promptfondlers is calling for the banning of users impertinent enough to flag their comments.
Saw this update yesterday and it pissed me really off. I’ve been using iTerm for almost 20 years at this point and it’s a really good and well-integrated terminal application for Mac OS, and no one asked for it to add spicy autocomplete.
Or maybe I’ll just move over to Alacritty. I use that one my Linux machines and it’s actually good, but the attitude of some of the developers when it comes to feature requests and contributions really makes me like it less than I could.
Noooooooooooooo! Argh, I’ll have to seriously consider using the fork FML.
EDIT: Not strictly required since apparently you have to provide an API key for it to be enabled, still it’s not encouraging that the main developer thought this would be a good idea.
You’ve got to love the prompt jank: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/755dc2ed881d853f495ffaea2498452915e5e8cd?diff=split&w=0
EDIT 2: Given direct access to bad AI code to a dev workstation is bad enough, but given that the console is a primary way to connect to servers, where more havoc could be wrought, this is terrifying, I mean sure devs were already capable of bricking enviromnents, but supercharging “knowing just enough to be dangerous” is NOT a good idea.
for people who thought this might not be related to the llm brainworms, the reasoning of the iterm2 author for inclusion of the feature (when promptedy by @gerikson@awful.systems) :
I got a number of requests. I also got tired of copy-pasting things to ChatGPT. Usually if I find a feature useful, other people do, too.
The latest beta has options to turn the shit off totally. The text mixes metaphors with wild abandon but I think it’s safe to say the promptfondling was not huge success
The whole debacle astounds me. Is there a more universally privileged application users frequently use than the shell? As a general rule it can elevate privs to full control far more aggressively than any other commonly used application, with minimal sandboxing at most.
Inorite? Even if there was the requirement of an API key being enabled that was only revealed after some time. If smeone says “my terminal has GPT now” of course your mind goes to it outputting
sudo rm -rf /for some random prompt.Edit nevertheless I am thankful because I’ve had a lot of fun identifying promptfondlers on lobste.rs and pointing and laughing at them.
tbh the enforced civility and de facto ban on social issue discussion on lobste is not helping. (but after last “polite discussion” i had with the moderator i’m not going to bring it up anymore, just suspend the account or wait to be banned.)
yeah frankly that sort of shit is why I haven’t even tried to get a lobsters account
bullshit should be called out as bullshit at any point in time. dressing it up in niceties is playing the wrong game, and has been abused by the worst people around for years
I don’t like AI hype either but I don’t feel the need to use Lobsters to rally groups of people to mass punish projects who add optional AI-friendly features. That is quite disturbing.
ok. I tried writing something sarcastic and sneery but alas, I don’t think I can mock this person hard enough to satisfy my ethical obligation.
Smearing the developer as “ai-brained” is hateful.
wake up babe new slur just dropped
Putting the “evangelist” in product evangelist.
Scam investigator Coffeezilla is working on the Rabbit AI guy, and he’s off to a good start. Most of the other press is about the device not working, while this focuses more on the scammy NFT / crypto past of the founder.
the follow-up video is fucking scathing, and I’d like to take a moment to remember all the orange site posters who were fucking wrong when they pretended the rabbit leak was fake
somehow missed this previously, but: Redhat Chatbot Linux!
Today, Red Hat announced a developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), a foundation model platform to seamlessly develop, test and run best-of-breed, open source Granite generative AI models to power enterprise applications. RHEL AI is based on the InstructLab open source project and combines open source-licensed Granite large language models from IBM Research and InstructLab model alignment tools, based on the LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots) methodology, in an optimized, bootable RHEL image to simplify server deployments.
the “LAB methodology”. I wonder if someone broke out the rack and thumbscrews to get a name that tortured
given what I’ve seen people do to ubuntu-based machines to make their kerases and tensorflows run, combined with redhat’s historical trend of extremely bullshit repo pains, I have to wonder what nightmare experience this will result in
Oh great I mentioned in another context that Linux would be the only LLM-free zone and someone with RH connections just laughed pityingly at me.
don’t worry, there’s no way it’ll end up in a distro anyone would willingly use
unless they make it a mandatory component of systemd alongside the other shit they’ve put in there
systemd is a microsoft product now, so
What??
(As in, could you kindly elaborate?)
lennart poettering works for microsoft
Oh, alright. The original creator works for Microsoft (presumably on Linux related things?), but systemd itself is still OSS
the fuck? any of you happened to have seen this?
I don’t know if I’ll get it on my one droid (both because I’ve turned near every setting and tracker and whatnot off in advance, and because ZA - less likely to get shit like that in advance) but loooool
they’re all just shoving this shit into every damn input control
coming soon: mousegpt?
coming soon: mousegpt?
unfortunately, logitech’s ahead of you on that one, and of course it’s the type of lazy shit you could design in an afternoon, so that means they’re gonna sell you a $50 AI Edition mouse:
Logitech Signature AI Edition mouse: $49 @ Logitech
This is a new version of the Logitech M750 wireless mouse that comes with a new teal button on top specifically intended to be used for the AI Prompt Builder. Of course, you could likely remap it using Logitech’s software to do whatever you want.
and I realize the article I linked is essentially a paid undisclosed advertisement, but holy fuck:
I just tested Logitech’s new shortcut to ChatGPT — and it’s a big time-saver
Get ready to summon ChatGPT with the press of a button
it’s a fucking macro key that opens a popover that pastes text into ChatGPT running in a browser get the fuck over yourself
fuck me this is why I make peripherals from components these days instead of buying keyboards and mice fucking laden with this bullshit. when my current (no-name) vertical mouse kicks the bucket I’m gonna have to see what repairable mouse kits are available to replace it
Thank god I can have a button on my mouse to open ChatGPT in Windows. It was so hard to open it with only the button in the taskbar, the start menu entry, the toolbar button in every piece of Microsoft software, the auto-completion in browser text fields, the website, the mobile app, the chatbot in Microsoft’s search engine, the chatbot in Microsoft’s chat software, and the button on the keyboard.
when my current (no-name) vertical mouse kicks the bucket I’m gonna have to see what repairable mouse kits are available to replace it
If you like trackballs, Ploopy is great. They’re open source all the way down, mostly 3D-printable, and actually better than most commercially available trackballs.
They also have a mouse kit, but I can’t speak for that.
A friend saw this on LinkedIn.
haha yeah that happened last year sometime
the best shred I’ve seen is ripping it by “AI = 0” in full math proof
It’s nice to know we have looped back to the point in history where we casually consider which people should have agency over their reproductive rights. Oh wait, no it’s not nice at all, but somehow still totally acceptable and commonplace.
You should watch the movie Idiocraty.
Grim stuff in that thread.
Sorry, im a habitual contrarian about this movie (good for that poster that they commit to not do an idiocracy and use tools that helps people, for example searching for the name of a movie), but reminder that that movie is basically utopian as it takes place 500 years in the future, and the American way of life is still going strong, and the problem of the food crisis is basically solved in a week.
I think that the movie is just a shallow criticism of Bush-era conservativism and 90s “trash TV” (that was already in decline by this time). Interrogating the implications of its scifi premise feels like not meeting the movie where it’s at, which is an optimism (alien to me) that the USA is fundamentally sound and only needs a nominally reasonable Joe American to keep the levers of power away from Those Guys.
extremely weird shit across the board from that user. account claims to be “18M” and running “manjaro and mint”, and then has a shell on sdf.org? along with the posts, “Yes, I’d prefer not being resuscitated. If I am finally dead, let it stay that way” just from that thread (and a number of other choice entries elsewhere in their history)
like come the fuck on, can it be more sus
How is having an SDF account weird? Because it’s for olds? Or they’re hardcore BSDers?
just fishy in aggregate. I wouldn’t say so much “because for olds” as “it’s far more likely for old(er)s to want something like that”. combine that with the wide array of other posts the account has engaged with, and the bio just wholly looks like bullshit to me
Finally the realization that academia is just an industry producing artifacts (published papers) and not anything as abstract as “science” and “knowledge” gets the tool it deserves
Github - data-to-paper: AI-driven scientific research
I’m sure this will be fine and not cause any issues whatsoever.
All of AI is just this. A boring person’s idea of creativity. A manager’s idea of programming. A stupid person’s idea of science.
reporter: This AI development is a Big Deal™.
me: y tho?
reporter: Oh, I’m so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!
me: y tho?
reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!
me: sorry, y tho?
reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let’s not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!
me: begins weeping
reporter: Don’t cry! At least we’re all in this together, right???
While AI being “in” a computer might sound as obvious as blue being “in” the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an “AI computer”, meaning the technology is in-built. It’s the company’s latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest.
What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven’t worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we’re the rats. Perhaps there’s some comfort in knowing we’ll all find out together.
edit: oh no, this is the same author I sneered at for quirkwashing e/acc. nothing personal, I just die a little inside every time I read something like this, and a little death is always better shared!
So who is going to be first to set up a grifty EA think tank where the thinking is admittedly all done by LLMs, and why shouldn’t it be us.
Pull a Rabbit AI and use Playwright to operate an Emacs instance running Eliza. Say that buying more infrastructure will yield better results. Pocket the money that was for supposed infrastructure investment. Profit!
