- 3 Posts
- 32 Comments
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025English7·1 day agoHuh, I had missed the part in 2020 when Peter Thiel just flat out stated outright that it only makes sense to be in favour of capitalism if you’re a capital owner.
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•OpenAI offers to buy the Chrome web browser from Google. Uh huh.English4·2 days agoWe live in hellworld, please don’t get my hopes up…
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025English12·29 days agojesus fucking christ I think that IDF tweet is the worst thing that has ever existed
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025English9·1 month agooh no :(
poor strange she didn’t deserve that :(
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025English12·1 month agoWhile you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving “as a language model…” cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land “AIs” are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:
https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd March 2025English11·1 month agoThe problem with FOSS for me is the other side of the FOSS surplus: namely corporate encircling of the commons. The free software movement never had a political analysis of the power imbalance between capital owners and workers. This results in the “Freedom 0” dogma, which makes everything workers produce with a genuine communitarian, laudably pro-social sentiment, to be easily coopted and appropriated into the interests of capital owners (for example with embrace-and-extend, network effects, product bundling, or creative backstabbing of the kind Google did to Linux with the Android app store). LLM scrapers are just the latest iteration of this.
A few years back various groups tried to tackle this problem with a shift to “ethical licensing”, such as the non-violent license, the anti-capitalist software license, or the do no harm license. While license-based approaches won’t stop capitalists from using the commons to target immigrants (NixOS), enable genocide (Meta) or bomb children (Google), this was in my view worthwhile as a rallying cry of sorts; drawing a line in the sand between capital owners and the public. So if you put your free time on a software project meant for everyone and some billionaire starts coopting it, you can at least make it clear it’s non-consensual, even if you can’t out-lawyer capital owners. But these ethical licenses initiatives didn’t seem to make any strides, due to the FOSS culture issue you describe; traditional software repositories didn’t acknowledge or make any infrastructure for them, and ethical licenses would still be generically “non-free” in FOSS spaces.
(Personally, I use FOSS operating systems for 26 years now; I’ve given up on contributing or participating in the “community” a long time ago, burned out by all the bigotry, hostility, and First World-centrism of its forums.)
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsOPto TechTakes@awful.systems•The broken search bar is symbiotic with the bullshitting chatbotEnglish11·1 month agoI hate programming but if I wanted to waste any time programming stuff my idea would be something akin to Yahoo! Directory from before Google, or del.icio.us from the 2000s, but distributed, and tied to a PGP-like web of trust system.
You search for a topic, you get links saved with that tag by people you personally validated and trust first, and then by people they trust, and people you don’t know but added as probably fine, and so on. Dunno how doable it would be to do something like this.
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th March 2025English4·1 month agoYes to all that, plus the browser thing: How annoying the browsers are with expired certificates. I mean it has to be super hard to allow me to guess that the admin just forgot to renew the certificate, or it wouldn’t protect me from the very common threat model of… ähm… uh…
(it’s to protect the CA business model, of course.)
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025English8·2 months agosmall domino: Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” (2003)
…
big domino: “AI” “art” “realism”
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Official Israeli AI Twitter bot backfires, makes pro-Palestinian posts, trolls other official accountsEnglish2·3 months agoI see someone else also just learned of this from the bonus episode of the “Bad Hasbara” podcast that’s just been made public
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025English10·4 months agoNo, I’m with you. Bad feeling about where this is going.
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025English12·4 months agoI find it impressive how gen-AI developed a technology that is fine-tuned to generate content that looks precisely passably plausible, but never good enough to be correct or interesting or beautiful or worthwhile in any way.
Like if I was trying to fill the Internet with noise to ruin it, on purpose, I couldn’t do better than this. (mostly on accounr of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still). It’s like the ideal infohazard weapon if your goal is to worsen as many lives as you can
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024English12·4 months agoSeems like everybody got that email, my account is semi-abandoned and still got it. I love the reek of desperation in the morning
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024English9·4 months agoI’m looking on the bright side. Yes, they looted Puppet, but now they’re stuck with Puppet
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 2024English14·5 months agoOK so we’re getting into deep rat lore now? I’m so sorry for what I’m about to do to you. I hope one day you can forgive me.
LessWrong diaspora factions! :blobcat_ohno:
https://transmom.love/@elilla/113639471445651398
if I got something wrong, please don’t tell me. gods I hope I got something wrong. “it’s spreading disinformation” I hope I am
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 27 October 2024English15·6 months agoWhat I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•MIT review selling a horrifying dystopia where an AI will monitor your rectum 24/7 and you repair your own fridge using AR glasses and haptics or somethingEnglish32·7 months agoFuturism articles really make me feel how these people are not living in the same reality as I.
Looking from now into 2149 and war is a nonfactor in Baby’s life. “Genocide” isn’t mentioned once, or “fascism”, or “borders”. No food or water scarcity. No mention of what happens to insects or wildlife or people in island countries or near the Equator. The only mention of “ecosystem” is in the expression “Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems”. The only mention of “climate change” is to say that it will lead us to a “reconfigurable architectural robotic space”. Somehow people have all the energy in the world to power AI girlfriends and moveable robotic walls and menstruation-sensing tech panties. The human body, the animal that is the human being, doesn’t really matter in this world where Microsoft VR smells your anxiety in your deathbed and comforts you with self-warming textiles. Where does the food that sustains the flesh comes from, what is our relationship to the plants and animals and insects and bacteria who we depend on for food and air and shelter, who builds all this stuff and under which conditions—considerations that do not even cross the mind of this person when they think of the question: “What does the future hold for those born today?”
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024English17·7 months agotranslate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Grindr proposes ‘AI wingman’ to optimize away the gay sex bitEnglish23·7 months agoThe representative of the fascist party in Germany says she’s “lesbian but not queer”. I think it’s the same case.
If you’re in Germany I like the Mühle Grande a lot. I use it with any random foam from DM and with Astra blades which cost 10€ for a pack of 100. The blades last me over a year.