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.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also ‘AI’ is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      2 months ago

      I am attempting to track down this precise story.

      • They are gung ho on AI
      • They laid off a pile of their QA
      • They have a “virtual security analyst” which is an LLM
      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        iirc Crowdstrike does use regular ML for security, or at least a lot of security companies, I think they might have talked about it on the risky business podcast, so you might want to look at their (many iirc) crowdstrike sponsored parts. No episode directly springs to mind however.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          2 months ago

          This can also be an area where ML is an appropriate and useful tool. You’ll see it used to establish a statistical baseline for what traffic should look like and then it can flag when it detects something that doesn’t match that as suspicious and worth further investigation. In this space there is actually a lot of value in some of the statistical modeling techniques, though generative AI is obviously a very different and less useful beast.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    NASBLOL (I’m not sure this abbreviation will work out): “Investors in anti-Biden cryptocurrencies are getting absolutely destroyed.” (Source)

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    Butters and Trump are ruining my ability to get anything done in town today. Not a big fan of this dumb shit inconveniencing me IRL.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      Here’s a tweet of Winklevoss feeling snubbed by VP Harris (twitter.com)

      The Biden-Harris Administration wages all-out war on the crypto industry for 4 years. Despite all of this, Kamala is still invited to the @TheBitcoinConf in Nashville and given a chance to speak to our industry and reset the relationship. What does she do? She declines. She can’t even take the first step and show up to start mending fences. Our industry won’t forget this. We will show no mercy in November.

      and another much longer one.

      My hope is that in the not-too-distant future there are no politicians at any Bitcoin or crypto conferences. Not because they are not welcome, but because crypto is so universally accepted that it is no longer a campaign issue and therefore would be a waste of their time. Like going to a conference on whether or not email or the Internet should be legal or allowed.

      Ooh, Like the internet! I got Bingo!

      Bitcoin bros: more of this self-aggrandizing rage please. It’s so entertaining to read.

      • CautiousCharacter@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        They targeted gamers.

        Gamers.

        We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.

        We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.

        We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.

        Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.

        Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?

        These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.

        Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        Ooh, Like the internet!

        Considering the history of legislation and the internet (and the recent KOSA thing) being treated like the internet is the last thing you would want.

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      OpenAI said in its announcement that search responses will include in-line citations and that users can open a sidebar to view links to external sources. The long-term goal is to then incorporate search features into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI product.

      “The long-term goal is to reinvent the Internet of 25 years ago, but worse.”

      • self@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        what do you mean you don’t want a search engine but much less efficient and much, much worse? you don’t like progress?

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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    2 months ago

    https://bsky.app/profile/jonpennington.bsky.social/post/3kxqkmezcwe2o

    I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. He’s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

    I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called “Yarvinating.”

    He’s the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a “pickoff lord.” That is to say, he’s the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.

    Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, I’ve got at least one other person who would remember the “Yarvinating” anecdote. I’ve got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.

    I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. We’re both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody else’s Lex Luthor origin story.

    Another bit of tea… He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.

    see also https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

    Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that “No one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl.” Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvin’s participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of “touching” his performance.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      He also lies about his age.

      I also knew somebody who did that, but it was done as a joke, he obv picked an age much much younger and everybody new he was older, it was just a funny joke. (With a small layer of disliking getting older, which is understandable) From the way this is written, it seems to me this isn’t like that at all.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        I like answering ludicrously old whenever this stupid shit comes up

        or picking timestamps that make devs wonder whether they had a value handling bug (such as 1/1/1970, the asp.net default 0, etc ec)

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      I’d never looked into how old the clown is, but

      He also lies about his age. He’s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

      wait what? what does he claim? is the indicated year on wikipedia accurate? why the hell?

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    Libertarian nerds run straight into actual California, not the AI-generated dreamland they imagine

    Mercury news: “Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report”

    https://archive.ph/UbdBw

    The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience, and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”

    HN shows what they think of the 3 people with actual thoughts on the issue by downvoting them to death

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047746

    • maol@awful.systems
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      Who could have predicted this except for everybody ! There’s a reason none of these galt gulches ever get built.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      2 months ago

      which spent more than $800 million buying more than 60,000 acres of mostly agricultural land near Fairfield

      Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman, just in case anyone thought there was a difference

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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      Bosses are urging employees to increase their output with the help of AI tools (37 percent), to expand their skill sets (35 percent), take on a wide range of responsibilities (30 percent), return to the office (27 percent), work more efficiently (26 percent), and work more hours (20 percent).

      Stop working from home because AI.

  • blakestacey@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    Regarding that claimed breakthrough about AI winning the International Mathematical Olympiad: a reminder that a proof which hangs together logically is not necessarily a proof that makes sense.

    Those formalized proofs are so incredibly ugly, it’s amazing. Of course it doesn’t much of a sensible indentation, but then there are single proof steps where I have no idea what it’s even doing. […] And then there are nonsense mathematical steps. The solution of problem 2 starts with induction, before introducing any variables. It applies induction to the number 12. And it write 12 as (10)+2. Then it proceeds to do the whole proof in the base case of the induction, and notices that the induction step is trivial, since the goal is the same as the induction hypothesis (but instead of the assumption tactic it uses congr 26).

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      Also, choice sneer in the comments:

      AlphaProof is more “AlphaZero doing self play against Lean” and less “Gemeni reading human proofs”

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        Spending an unknown but potentially long amount of time to maybe get a solution of potentially minimal legibility is definitely AI’s killer app.

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          2 months ago

          movie announcer voice aaaaaand now, from the org structures that brought you Teams Doing Standup Poker, an announcement!

          heeeeeeere’s Promptfondling!

          • self@awful.systems
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            2 months ago

            the org structures that brought you Teams Doing Standup Poker

            which must be destroyed. find me who’s responsible for this (it’s the Google OKR people, isn’t it?)

            • froztbyte@awful.systems
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              2 months ago

              listen buddy if you’re not arguing about the definition of done for design phase and overspending your meeting windows by 2 hours because of points quibbling, are you even SAFe