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.

5 points
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Summary of the recent crowdstrike report: 🧵https://infosec.exchange/@munin/112916974811882522

Munin wonders if the weird writing style of the report might be because crowdstrike used an LLM to generate a summary of several source documents, which would be funny-yet-depressing if true.

The actual causes of the incident probably won’t suprise anyone… “didn’t bounds-check, didn’t test parser on bad data, didn’t stage rollouts” in order of should-have-done-this-first-ness.

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5 points

Minor, but it’s CrowdStrike not cloudstrike

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7 points

It’s a really weird name for a product. A crowd strike sounds like a terrorist tactic, not something that brings “security” to mind.

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9 points

Tom Clancy’s CrowdStrike sounds like the kind of military fiction I’d accidentally buy from the thrift store

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5 points

there’s a whole strain of extreme terribleness in the wider infosec industry ito naming and references, it’s so goddamn bad

the most recently visible form of this is post-heartbleed how lots of researchers/groups now fall over themselves to give vuln publications Branding (logo, catchy name, etc), but also all kinds of other things that they constantly mix some terminology soup up

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8 points
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I think ClownStrike is the name they deserve

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7 points

Completely agree, that’s why I nit, since “CloudStrike” sounds like an actual name for an actual product and I will not have that stand!

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8 points

Oops, I’ve been trying to avoid calling it “clownstrike”, and didn’t quite manage to fix that initial syllable.

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6 points

People are so trained to shout at Cloudflare for protecting the neo-nazi sites that this is every understandable.

Image description

Simpsons cartoon, Marge shouts ‘Cloudflare, no!’ to her left. Bart, with the Cloudflare logo on his head walks in from the right, ‘What?’. Marge apologizes to Bart, ‘Sorry force of habit’. Marge shouts ‘Crowdstrike, no!’.

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6 points

while that’s also a problem, doesn’t really seem that’s what happened here

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15 points

Regarding the paper “Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning”, a comment by e. e. arroyo:

“Yes! we can make explainable predictions of compounds with AI now!”

  • They could only explain 15% of predictions
  • They could only understand 9% of those explanations
  • 60% of those were wrong
  • The 4 active compounds left are probably, arguably, not even a novel class
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6 points

“for SBV values of explaining”

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11 points

i’m not reading all that, at least now, but i’d just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development

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10 points

I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the “spare” cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

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14 points

this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)

this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now

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6 points

I’m really not a fan of Python (in general; the whole philosophy of that language is kinda opposite to my idea of programming) but I have to admit the project does look interesting at first glance.

And after glancing at the Lemmy codebase a few times I think that an alternative or at least competition is a good thing.

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6 points

I just half-wrote a post in this textfield then snipped it

will dm elsewhere

(largely snipped because I’m too fucking out of spoons today to format it without edgepruning (which it probably deserves))

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17 points

Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0

These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/

Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.

Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.

I’m sure!

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@hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they’ve previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.

This is extra crap because I’d already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn’t have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.

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9 points

Idea: a Pivot to AI video series hosted by an avatar that’s, like, a talking polyhedron in the style of Mind’s Eye/Body Wars era CGI.

This would require effort and thus is a terrible idea, but I find the mental image amusing.

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13 points

using Hatsune Miku but with my voice would save on having to maintain a video setup

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4 points

Hatsune Miku but with my voice

Thanks, this will be my dreams now for the rest of the month

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7 points

we need to bring back machinima

I call dibs on being represented by the left pong paddle, lovingly recorded from the analog output of an Atari Pong TTL standup (or FPGA equivalent)

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13 points

They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.

Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

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9 points

Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

They prob should do a video on this effect as shown by the early ELIZA experiments. That even the smartest people could get fooled by a dumb program. Doubt they will though if they are into EA stuff.

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8 points
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I still maintain that ChatGPT’s main draw is as a Ouija board for weird nerds.

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10 points
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Some ‘scientists’ cough Yud/Rob/Kokotajlo cough believe in FOOM. Anyways, let’s not question this fundamental assumption so we can engage in fear baiting and mental masturbation for the remainder of our show. It’s bonkers that people keep citing Kokotajlo as an AI researcher, like, I have serious doubts this man knows what a computer is. Pretty good at grifting though. Also why is Rob Miles still listed as a PhD student. Like cant he hurry up and fuckin graduate already? Christ.

As an aside, I remember watching a PBS space time and seeing sponsored by Open Philanthropy (or some other EA organization) and I was like no not my beloved PBS!! I know it feels :(

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1 point

Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it’s important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.

The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It’s fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman’s “last invention” is wrong because most, unfortunately, most “smart people’s” view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.

In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.

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5 points

I’ve never heard of this outfit. Is it a sort of skepticsphere darling?

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9 points

more a sort of ‘I love science’ youtuber I think.

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10 points

Kurzgesagt

Yeah I’m not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as “all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s”.

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15 points

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14 points

Surely the words being put into the son’s mouth should be “What’s his TikTok?”.

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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13 points

I’m embarassed for the person wearing that shirt, and the people who made it, and us all for having seen that.

No wait something is wrong… This is the torture simulation!

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10 points

Dammit, you caught me again! Time for another go-round…

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7 points
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i assume the shirt is ironic haha

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5 points
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As I’m no longer able to pronounce gif correctly (I started calling it jif ironically) I’m a firm believer in you will eventually turn into that which you pretend to be.

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10 points

I think you’re right but I’ve also learned to never underestimate the level of cringe some people are capable of.

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