BlueMonday1984

joined 2 years ago
[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Part of me wants to see Google actually try this and get publicly humiliated by their nonexistent understanding of physics, part of me dreads the fact it'll dump even more fucking junk into space.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 5 hours ago

Found a high quality sneer of OpenAI from Los Angeles Review of Books: Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Plus, the authors currently suing OpenAI have gotten their hands on emails and internal Slack messages discussing their deletion of the LibGen dataset - a development which opens the company up to much higher damages and sanctions from the court for destroying evidence.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

That’s quite a remarkable claim. Especially when the actual number of attacks by AI-generated ransomware is zero. [Socket]

If even a single case pops up, I'd be surprised - AFAIK, cybercriminals are exclusively using AI as a social engineering tool (e.g. voice cloning scams, AI-extruded phishing emails, etcetera). Humans are the weakest part of any cybersec system, after all.

The paper finishes by recommending “embracing AI in cyber risk management”.

Given AI's track record on security, that sounds like an easy way to become an enticing target.

Probably one part normalisation, one part AI supporters throwing tantrums when people don't treat them like the specialiest little geniuses they believe they are. These people have incredibly fragile egos, after all.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Checked back on the smoldering dumpster fire that is Framework today.

Linux Community Ambassadors Tommi and Fraxinas have jumped ship, sneering the company's fash turn on the way out.

 

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)

they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun

I know you're joking, but I ended up quickly skimming Wikipedia to determine the viability of this (assuming the metal heatsinks were copper, since copper's great for handling heat). Far as I can tell:

  1. The sun isn't hot enough or big enough to fuse anything heavier than hydrogen, so the copper's gonna be doing jack shit when it gets dumped into the core

  2. Fusing elements heavier than iron loses you energy rather than gaining it, and copper's a heavier element than iron (atomic number of 29, compared to iron's 26), so the copper undergoing fusion is a bad thing

  3. The conditions necessary for fusing copper into anything else only happen during a supernova (i.e. the star is literally exploding)

So, this idea's fucked from the outset. Does make me wonder if dumping enough metal into a large enough star (e.g. a dyson sphere collapsing into a supermassive star) could kick off a supernova, but that's a question for another day.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago (8 children)

The question of how to cool shit in space is something that BioWare asked themselves when writing the Mass Effect series, and they came up with some pretty detailed answers that they put in the game's Codex ("Starships: Heat Management" in the Secondary section, if you're looking for it).

That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which haven't had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobody's bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It also integrates Stake into your IDE, so you can ruin yourself financially whilst ruining the company's codebase with AI garbage

"you can set the sycophancy engines so they aren't sycophancy engines"

I'll take "Shit that's Impossible" for 500, Alex

I wonder when the market finally realises that AI is not actually smart and is not bringing any profits, and subsequently the bubble bursts, will it change this perception and in what direction? I would wager that crashing the US economy will give a big incentive to change it but will it be enough?

Once the bubble bursts, I expect artificial intelligence as a concept will suffer a swift death, with the many harms and failures of this bubble (hallucinations, plagiarism, the slop-nami, etcetera) coming to be viewed as the ultimate proof that computers are incapable of humanlike intelligence (let alone Superintelligence™). There will likely be a contingent of true believers even after the bubble's burst, but the vast majority of people will respond to the question of "Can machines think?" with a resounding "no".

AI's usefulness to fascists (for propaganda, accountability sinks, misinformation, etcetera) and the actions of CEOs and AI supporters involved in the bubble (defending open theft, mocking their victims, cultural vandalism, denigrating human work, etcetera) will also pound a good few nails into AI's coffin, by giving the public plenty of reason to treat any use of AI as a major red flag.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Checked back in on the ongoing Framework dumpster fire - Project Bluefin's quietly cut ties, and the DHH connection is the reason why.

 

Want to wade into the spooky surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, everyone!)

 

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

 

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

 

In case you haven't heard the news, Framework went and publicly sponsored Hyprland (the most toxic part of Wayland by a country mile) and openly shilled Omarchy multiple times (the pet project of fascist shithead David Heinemeier Hansson) recently.

In response to well-justified backlash against this, founder Nirav Patel responded with FOSSbro platitudes about "[creating] a big tent" for open source".

If you've got any more updates on this self-inflicted shitshow, put them here so they can be collected in one place.

(In retrospect, that AI-pilled Framework Desktop should've been a major red flag they were gonna pull this shit.)

EDIT (2): Found a solid summary of the situation, and a solid teardown of Nirav's actions - recommend checking them out.

 

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

 

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

 

A well-done mockery of the state of open-source, with a solid parody license as a bonus.

 

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

 

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

 

New blog entry from Baldur, comparing the Icelandic banking bubble and its fallout to the current AI bubble and its ongoing effects.

 

(This is an expanded version of a comment I made, which I've linked above.)

Well, seems the tech industry’s prepared to pivot to quantum if and when AI finally dies and goes away forever. If and when the hucksters get around to inflating the quantum bubble, I expect they’re gonna find themselves facing some degree of public resistance - probably not to the extent of what AI received, but still enough to give the hucksters some trouble.

The Encryption Issue

One of quantum’s big selling points is its purported ability to break the current encryption algorithms in use today - for a couple examples, Shor’s algorithm can reportedly double-tap public key cryptography schemes such as RSA, and Grover’s algorithm promises to supercharge brute-force attacks on symmetric-key cryptography.

Given this, I fully expect its supposed encryption-breaking abilities to stoke outcry and resistance from privacy rights groups. Even as a hypothetical, the possibility of such power falling into government hands is one that all-but guarantees Nineteen Eighty-Four levels of mass surveillance and invasion of privacy if it comes to pass.

Additionally, I expect post-quantum encryption will earn a lot of attention during the bubble as well, to pre-emptively undermine such attempts at mass surveillance.

Environmental Concerns

Much like with AI, info on how much power quantum computing requires is pretty scarce (though that’s because they more-or-less don’t exist, not because AI corps are actively hiding/juicing the numbers).

The only concrete number I could find came from IEEE Spectrum, which puts the power consumption of the D-Wave 2X (from 2015) at “slightly less than 25 kilowatts”, with practically all the power going to the refrigeration unit keeping it within a hair’s breadth of absolute zero, and the processor itself using “a tiny fraction of a microwatt”.

Given the minimal amount of info, and the AI bubble still being fresh in the public’s mind, I expect quantum systems will face resistance from environmental groups. Between the obscene power/water consumption of AI datacentres, the shitload of pollution said datacentres cause in places like Memphis, and the industry’s attempts to increase said consumption whenever possible, any notion that tech cares about the environment is dead in the (polluted) water, and attempts to sell the tech as energy efficient/environmentally friendly will likely fall on deaf ears.

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