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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ereader/s/ZfP57OEZ8x
E-readers are now getting the AI treatment.
Glad i did not go with these guys when i was e-reader shopping, the lack of gpl sources was enough for me.
Went with a pinenote because the timing was good, and while it has some corners I dont except the debian install to become a ccp mouthpiece 🙃
Man I’ve never heard of the pinenote. Does it have anything like send to kindle?
Its a full linux os, so you can do literally anything that can be done with existing tooling. For example, I have syncthing installed on mine so i just have to drop files into a folder on another computer of mine and they show up.
The software folks have put together a decent experience in the last few years and its rather nice out of the box.
Oh hey we got all the way to Pacific time without anyone wishing a generic Merry Christmas. May your family’s Wi-Fi work for everyone with minimal support required.
Generics greetings and happy <template T>s
it’s the holidays, it’s okay: you don’t have to go near the c++ right now
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so openai is claimed to be doing great on the FrontierMath dataset. I’ve already seen the usual sort of dipshits using this to pump ai on reddit, and here’s a post that went to the frontpage on HN:
https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/can-ai-do-maths-yet-thoughts-from-a-mathematician/
(tl;dr only a few problems from the dataset are public but if representative the problems are about 25% survivable by an undergrad; coincidentally this is the % openai says their models are completing.)
this post is by kevin buzzard. he has a let’s say not easily beloved personality, but I don’t think of him as credulous or grifty, and people in his area regard him as an excellent mathematician.
he points out but I think does not focus enough on how discrediting the secretive nature of the dataset is. the fact that you can’t make it public is necessary to run such experiments in a scientifically reasonable way, but also makes it totally impossible to run the experiment in a scientifically reasonable way. an experiment which cannot be examined or reproduced is actually the opposite of science. it’s pure grift fuel
If you release the test set, all models magically jump to 87.3% accuracy.
four thieves collective goes on 38C3 and i groan in anticipation of whatever stupid trick will they pull now https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/ASBXWW/ why they even are there
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.
JFC
go back 200 years before the “gubmint” got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now
before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since
I think there is value in giving people the tools and knowledge to make more involved decisions about their health, but using that sort of libertarian rhetoric in the covid era is at best really fucking irresponsible.
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health.
I have the feeling that they’re not a British trans person talking about the NHS, or an American in a red state panicking about dying of sepsis because the baby they wanted so badly miscarried.
maybe it’s more of a take acceptable for americans
The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. “Raw milk” pushers are cut from the same cloth.
It also prevented the Thalidomide medication from causing much damage in the usa (compared to the rest of the world) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal and prob countless more, as it is a bit hard to cause problems if the problems are caught before it being brought to market. And I do worry that the “the fda is too cautious” pushers are actually motte baileying for the total removal of the fda.
@Soyweiser Thalidomide was mostly a British problem (that led to the UK’s CSM getting teeth). The FDA in the USA really got rolling after the Elixir Sulfanilamide poisonings in 1937: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir/_sulfanilamide
there were also a couple of cases since where DEG replaced glycerine in syrups, either by negligence by manufacturer of syrup, manufacturer of intermediate, or knowingly as a cost cutting measure, last one in 2022
Ah right, thanks! Weren’t there also a lot of German victims?
idk what went wrong there but village industry of altmed clinics seems to be an actual thing, and from what i understand it’s apparently legal in some of red states
why they even are there
(from observation over some years) congress orga more than occasionally fucks up on paradox of tolerance by letting shit like this through
it’s been a thing I’ve noticed and have wanted to actually discuss with some folks, but never really gotten to yet on account of life stuff
there were also the much, much less grey-area instances a couple of years back where they were far too open to a number of abusers (this was around the time the appelbaum shit hit wide daylight), so there is a possibility that the issue runs deeper (in a structural sense, at best; personal sense, at worst) too but I possess insufficient information to know one way or the other what exactly may constitute the problem here
I don’t wanna pull national stereotypes here but aren’t Germans really quite open about stuff like homeopathy? “be your own pharmacist” sounds like right up that alley
Yes, I can confirm this is true. Homeopathy is really accepted here and is even covered by most health insurances.
There is even a passage in the pharmaceutical law that specifically excludes homeopathic shit from having to prove its effectiveness (they only have to prove it’s not hurting anyone, and the rules for that are much laxer than for other medicine). It’s absolutely baffling.
Theres a long rich history of German alt med. also (postwar) witch trials, if I can find the book I read on all this I’ll try to post.
Edit: think it was this one https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/128/2/1015/7204469?login=false
whoah that looks interesting, how can I access it (semi-)legally?
Its on annas and amazon.
also on my fav book torrent tracker - even has an audiobook version!
I haven’t really got enough information about that side of it, the details I have to go on are mostly about things particularly around the values CCC has tried to hold/build (and even there I am absolutely not intimately familiar, for reasons of distance and exposure and such)
never heard of them before. from skimming their wikipedia, it seems their grift is glossing over the details in the “science” part?
From what I heard: Skimming over science, best practices, risks of contamination, risk of producing horror chemicals, problems of sourcing materials, storing materials, storing the final product etc etc.
Here is a bsky thread from the last time they were in the publics eye (more here if you dont have an account) (the latter articles are clearly working on a diff definition of capitalism than I use so I chose not to be too annoyed with the weird digs about that).
This should be a very big red flag: “Mixæl Swan Laufer worked in mathematics and high energy physics until he decided to use his background in science to tackle problems of global health and human rights.” (Ignoring all the other smaller red flags btw, I think I could point one out ever paragraph, if I had not heard about these people before, the final red pill reference would have made me think they were trolling).
interesting read, thanks. the red pill reference also had me rolling my eyes. i guess it’s more virtue signalling than actually making a change.
It is a bit weird, it has very high EA vibes to me, started and did some good (epipen in 2017 vs EAs malaria nets), but end up to have some crazy plan for which the other things are more of a smokescreen for their real plans (an easy bake chemical oven make chems at home kit vs EAs stopping our lord and saviour the robotgod) using rethoric aimed at a specific subgroup (2000-2010 anarchist libertarian hackers vs nerdy altruists)
E: I really wonder if they were influenced by the dr sleepless series from the disgraced warren ellis, and the stuff around that.
i’ve complained about them previously https://awful.systems/comment/2754222
I want someone to take this and run it in a self-feeding loop, I want to see what the limit supremum of AI Imagery looks like
Do you want agi basilisk anime girls because this is how you get agi basilisk anime girls
Honestly it’s either that or some rosewattasttone level translation errors which sounds like a pretty good risk to take for me.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Habsburg AI
full service plagiarism! bet you we’ll see whiteglove variant of it next
Past a certain point it’s easier for people to cut the genAI out of the picture and just actually draw the shit they’re being asked for rather than badger the machine into creating something satisfactory, at which point irony will be well and truly dead.
yep, have made the same critique. the way people “overcommit” on this is a fascinating interplay of sunk cost fallacy combined with some other shit
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ZITRON DROPPED (his last post for the year)
the identity-devouring worldcoin sphere ordered to delete user data by a german data protection office over gdpr noncompliance https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/12/19/german-watchdog-orders-sam-altmans-biometric-id-project-world-to-delete-data
On Thursday, the German data protection authority, the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA), concluded a months-long investigation into World and stated that its identification procedure “entails a number of fundamental data protection risks for a large number of data subjects” that does not comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
“With today’s decision, we are enforcing European fundamental rights standards in favour of data subjects in a technologically demanding and legally highly complex case,” said BayLDA president Michael Will.
is it? it’s another fucking crypto scam
They have enough money to make it complex, no matter how simple the underlying issue.
I want to say I appreciate when there’s a link to the previous one, as after a week it’s nice to see what substacks were posted since.
wizz for coading! chapter 17 is out
Put this up about 20 minutes late, so I’m starting off by saying Honey got exposed
I swear to god there was a video I watched about this years ago that already talked about how they don’t give you the best coupons and that they hijack affiliate links. I couldn’t have made that up in my head.
The most surprising thing to me was that they’re owned by PayPal? How can you have any credibility left when you’re owned by PayPal, wtf, that should’ve been the end of them. Oh, no shit, a service owned by PAYPAL is shady and not above-board?? No way man, those paragons of user centrism, PAY-fucking-PAL.
they aren’t called paypal mafia for nothing
When I was young I knew people who installed those ‘get money for moving your mouse’ things (this was a thing around 2000, prob combined with a ‘get paid to use your computer’ scam. I’m not sure if anybody even remembers this), and they never got a dime. So I always mentally ignore these things as scams. ‘it is just free money’ is quite the red flag.
Minor gripe with the video ‘if they product is free you are likely the product’ isn’t true imho. You are always also the product, unless they explicitly go out of their way to make it clear you are not the product (and even then you cannot be totally sure). You can’t pay your way out of the rot economy. In fact, as you are now a person who spends money, I’d think the value of your data actually goes up. A database filled with data of users who never spend a dime online seems like it would be almost useless to me.
I must have been living under a rock/a different kind of terminally online, because I had only ever heard of Honey through Dan Olson’s riposte to Doug Walker’s The Wall, which describes Doug Walker delivering “an uncomfortably over-acted ad for online data harvesting scam Honey” (35:43).
Well-known YouTuber Markiplier also went off on Honey back in 2019, and needless to say he felt pretty vindicated:
Wow, I’ve been saying for years that this extension is shady as fuck. Nice to see that it’s getting some attention.
I didn’t expect it to steal affiliate cookies, but that they let you control which codes it “finds” isn’t even a secret, and I thought people know this. But every time I mentioned this on Reddit I was downvoted and called a liar.
As someone who’s never even considered interacting with any part of this whole system, this is really funny honestly. It’s like a matryoshka of shady business practices.
Making money via stealing commissions from affiliate links, tbf, wasn’t the business model I was suspecting from Honey. I always thought they were scamming but I thought it was going to be from selling your browsing data or something similar. Then again, they still might do that.
Holy shit. Managed to never run into them due to sponsorblock but the ways mega corps find ways to extract money out of everyone never ceases to amaze
I remember when the Dark Reader addon was advertising them years ago, they were doing their shit for a pretty long time
