Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025
https://awful.systems/post/3436005
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Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:
Scott Alexander was accused of being secretly a right-wing racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled, and I think a bunch of his followers believed it, and now they’re shocked and hurt that he’s actually the sincere center left guy he said he was the whole time.
(Via.)
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really enjoying (?) the implication that anything less than extreme genocidal resentment is considered left of centre these days
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Anybody can be left of center if the overton window shifts enough far right. He doesnt want to sterilize all minorities so clearly he is an ally.
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Also, I don’t know that people are particularly concerned about the left/right spectrum as much as the explicitly racist and tacitly authoritarian sentiments. Like, if your vision of “the left” includes Scott, AOC, and Karl Marx then you have basically defined the left/right spectrum to be meaningless.
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Her talk of people being “desperate” for Scoot to be racist suggests a dismally gamified view of life. I mean, he’s a racist. However I feel about that, it doesn’t change the basic fact. She’s playing for a weird gotcha of some kind that could only ever make sense if you (a) regard writing as point-scoring and also (b) accept Richard Lynn-ism as science.
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A sincere centre left guy who is also blazingly furious at feminists for no reason.
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The use of the word sincere here bothers me.
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Somebody pointed out that HN’s management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it’s the sort of thing Dan might blank:
but I don’t want to get hellbanned by dang.
Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It’s caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices – the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.
I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.
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d’ya…d’ya think they’ll make it all the way along the path, to the realization?
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no
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The ones who walk towards Omelas.
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"
Why Don’t We Just
Kill the Kid In
the Omelas Hole
by Isabel J. Kim"
clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/
"
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Finally it turns out torturing the kid was unnecessary and spreading out the suffering would have worked fine. All Omelas had to do was raise their income tax a little bit.
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Somewhat related I was thinking about how different this blog post from a DOGE “employee” reads after Elon Musks coup attempt: vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-wi… – it was discussed here but no one really knew what was coming at the time.
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wow the sanewashing of trump in those threads is insane
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Penny Arcade weighs in on deepseek distilling chatgpt (or whatever actually the deal is):
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“Wow, this Penny Arcade comic featuring toxic yaoi of submissive Sam Altman is lowkey kinda hot” is a sentence neither I nor any LLM, Markov chain or monkey on a typewriter could have predicted but now exists.
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The blue check reaction to the totally cracked treasury zoomers showcases a complete rejection of the importance of domain knowledge. It’s 10x software engineer syndrome metastasized.
They’re saying that the ice cream hair kid - who has never worked on a real world system because he’s STILL IN COLLEGE - is going to do us proud because he translated a greek scroll in high school? Good for him, but so what? Ben Carson split babies in half like Solomon and he’s still a moron.
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Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.
(One of my pet peeves in software is bad documentation (always fun when the comments and the documentation contradict, and after an hour of digging through the email archives you discover both are wrong, and nobody every cared to update either, as the email was enough), but lol if that is what saves the US gov (and look at how bad it has gotten, I’m rooting for the US gov now. If I ever want to be seen as worthwhile I will try to hire Musk to get mad at me, it worked for Zuck (a little bit))).
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Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.
Oh why would they. They will just rewrite it from scratch in a weekend, right? And reading the original code would only pollute the mind with historic knowledge, and that stands in the way of disruptive innovation.
(btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)
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(btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)
I once fucked those up and people got mad. (I kid, they pointed out I usually use them correctly). I mostly use parentheses to note that im going a bit offtrack, which keeps happening, it is a bad habit.
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balancing parentheses is why I draft all my comments in emacs
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Thank you for implicitly reminding me to take my ADD meds.
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Myself I’ve learned to embrace the em dash—like so, with a special shoutout to to John Green—and interleaving ( [ { } ] ).
On mac and linux conveniently short-cutted to Option+Shift+‘-’, windows is a much less satisfying Alt+0150 without third party tools like AutoHotKey.
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I write – for “en dash” and — for “em dash” and I end up looking like an asshole in emails a lot. However, they appear to work correctly here:
en: – en: –
em: — em: —
Also, Gnome Characters can be useful, though I have been looking for a good replacement.
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I like to use – in plain text too! LaTeX user high five…?
Although I read somewhere recently that some people consider usage of em-dashes as a sign of AI-generated text. Oh well.
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LaTeX user high five…?
I need to finish crying over all my underfull hboxes, can we high-five in the evening?
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this feels like a pattern too — so many naturally divergent or non-standard (from the perspective of a white American who thinks they own the English language) elements of writing are getting nonsensically trashjacketed as telltale signs that a text must be generated by an LLM. see also paully g trashjacketing “delve” for purely racist reasons and the authors of the Nix open letter having the accusation of LLM use leveled at them by people who didn’t read the letter and didn’t want anyone else to either.
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I wonder if one of the reasons they’re so young is that’s the age you’d have to be to not realize in how much legal trouble they might be putting themselves in. (Bar an eventual pardon from Trump.)
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Also the age where you are easily impressed by a supposed genius, actual billionaire, ‘meme lord’ who sort of speaks your language (but due to your age you have not noticed only in the most shallow way), who showers you with attention. While also filled with the righteous fury of wanting to act on your ideology.
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in which karpathy goes “eh, fuckit”:
skipping past the implicit assumption of “well, just have a bunch of money to be able to keep throwing the autoplag at the wall until something sticks”, the admissions of not giving a single fuck about anything, and the straight and plain “well, it often just doesn’t work like we keep promising it does”, imagine being this fucking incurious and void of joy
I’m left wondering if this bastard is running through the stages of grief (at being thrown out), because this sure as fuck reads like despair to me
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So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now “not too bad for throwaway weekend projects”. Wow, great. Let’s fire all the programmers already!
Apart from whatever the fuck that process is, it is not engineering.
And to think that people hated on Visual Basic once… in comparison to this stuff, it was the most solid of solid foundations.
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So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now
on the level of a ‘build your own website’ site. They are the wysiwyg users now.
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that’d be easily terawatt-hours i think. just musk’s server farm’s generators are 100MW, and draw who knows how much from grid, and if it runs for a year and two months at that power that’s 1TWh. and there’s google, ms, amazon, whatever chinese are cooking,
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This reinforces my judgment that the ultimate customers for code-completion models are people who don’t actually want to be writing code in the first place.
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I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it
this is so much slower (in both keystrokes and raw time, not to mention needing to re-prompt) and much more expensive than just going into the fucking CSS and pressing the 3 buttons needed to change the padding for that selector, and the only reason why this would ever be hard is because they’re knee deep in LLM generated slop and they can’t find fucking anything in there. what a fucking infuriating way to interact with a machine.
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come on don’t you like waiting 1s+ for every single action you ever want to take? it’s the hot new thing
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React has entered the chat (don’t try talking to it yet though, it has to “asynchronously” load every individual UI element in the jankiest way possible)
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OAI announced their shiny new toy: DeepResearch (still waiting on DeeperSeek). A bot built off O3 which can crawl the web and synthesize information into expert level reports!
Noam is coming after you @dgerard, but don’t worry he thinks it’s fine. I’m sure his new bot is a reliable replacement for a decentralized repository of all human knowledge freely accessible to all. I’m sure this new system doesn’t fail in any embarrassing wa-
After posting multiple examples of the model failing to understand which player is on which team even though the information is publicly available on the web, Professional AI bully Colin continues: “I assume that in order to cure all disease, it will be necessary to discover and keep track of previously unknown facts about the world. The discovery of these facts might be a little bit analogous to NBA players getting traded from team to team, or aging into new roles. OpenAI’s “Deep Research” agent thinks that Harrison Barnes (who is no longer on the Sacramento Kings) is the Kings’ best choice to guard LeBron James because he guarded LeBron in the finals ten years ago. It’s not well-equipped to reason about a changing world… But if it can’t even deal with these super well-behaved easy facts when they change over time, you want me to believe that it can keep track of the state of the system of facts which makes up our collective knowledge about how to cure all diseases?”
xcancel link if anyone wants to see some more glorious failure cases:
xcancel.com/colin_fraser/…/1886506507157585978#m
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“Aligning people is hard too” a thing that only a literal sociopath would think and only a special kind of sociopath would utter publicly
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Remember when Scott wrote the ‘dont talk like robots ya nerds’ article? Good times.
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it’s amazing how intensely these assholes want to end Wikipedia and pollute all other community information sources beyond repair. it feels like it’s all part of the same strategy:
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looking for advice/suggestions:
anyone seen anything yet (uBlock ruleset, {tamper,grease}monkey scripts, etc) that can block the “talk to our prompt” widgets that have started showing up on too many fucking webpages? I’m getting sick of the things, and I haven’t really yet found an exhaustive list of this shit from which to build up a list
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@froztbyte@awful.systems cc @tante @fasterandworse maybe too
(I see @davidgerard already got it; fast trigger finger over there)
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sorry, I can’t think of a way that wouldn’t require a lot of effort and vigilant maintenance to keep up. Truly a scourge.
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oh yeah much like other filterlists I expect this would be a collaborative/community thing! at this stage I’m just trying to find out if there is any work towards it that anyone knows of (or whether that needs to be started)
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Would they all resolve to a small set of GPT api providers? Or is that all abstracted away server-side?
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the handful that I’ve looked into all operate on their own domains (even if their backing is likely chatgpt or whatever), but I’d guess pretty much a bunch of shapes and sizes
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maybe we just need to block GTM and be done with it. 99% of these would be plugged in by a suit along with all the other tracking shit
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@froztbyte @dgerard you have an example of those?
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of things I’ve found in the space that do address this somewhat includes this (a list of domains of either explicitly full of slop or heavily supporting slop)
brave supposedly has something as well but, well, it’s brave so it’s a non-starter
this is a now-archived project that maintained a list of chat widgets
regarding instances of widgets, off the top of my head some places where I’ve seen chat prompts unhelpfully placed: pluginboutique.com, hetzner.com, most aws doc and product pages (“Explainer”). I think hydro.run also had some trash popping up (I have a block for it), but can’t recall under which section
(DDG also pops some up constantly unless you have the cookies set, but that fails in fresh browser instances)
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new class of kook just dropped
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This community is for those willing to bring wisdom and compassion into the world. It is not for those easily duped by what they find in their minds or online.
no red flags there
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It is not for those easily duped by what they find in their minds or online.
fuck I hate when my own brain dupes me into getting on the internet
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1990s: barely only once
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existing class of kook - hooks into the Zizians
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how do you reckon? admittedly I haven’t gotten to dive full depth on the zizians but the bits I did get to so far struck me as what would happen if adolescent spock became a logical extremist
I was struck by the outright “hey we’ve got cult camp” kitted out in whatever-the-fuck they’ve done to (one of the strands of?) buddhism while also pitching this on-surface as “people are cyborgs now”
although it did remind me of how much buddhist and related reading+pondering I saw in the postrat scenes, and now I’m wondering if that’s a thing that I missed in others of this before
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Buddhist thinking has always been a big undercurrent (at least compared to the rest of the western world) in the hacker/computer science world, so doesnt have to come from anything LW related.
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it’s above-baseline among the tpots
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Compared to the hacker baseline that is odd indeed.
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text/gemini