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.

21 points

Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - they’ve switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.

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9 points
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Sounds like a good idea to piss off your primary user base, because at this stage I feel the only people singing Firefox’s praise are privacy advocates who won’t touch Chrome & friends with a ten-foot pole.

(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)

It’s also enabled in the dev builds, by the way. I just checked.

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8 points

(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)

it definitely reads like the same shithead, but I’ve had them blocked on mastodon for some time so I can’t say for sure if it was for rampant LLMery or for doing the “without advertising the modern web would die and you don’t want that do you” thing advertisers do constantly

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9 points
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Lol what an absolute tool. That’s the same shit the marketing bozos at my job say when I inform them that, no, I can’t auto opt-in our customers into whatever stupid Facebook ad campaign they’re pushing this week because it’s literally against the GDPR and our privacy laws.

But I guess that’s the logical next step if your whole business model depends on lazy deceiving people into clicking the button with the flashiest color in the cookie popup without reading the label.

P.S. the modern web can die in a fucking fire.

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7 points

and because it feels like it’s worth screaming this into the void in case there’s any marketing assholes reading: fuck yes I’m here to kill the modern web

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8 points
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this is quite infuriating, i had a number of mozilla/firefox people telling me that this feature wouldn’t work with opt-in (it’s bullshit though) because too few users would enable it, and neither fucker asked himself : “wait, if we’re afraid we can’t convince our user base to buy-in, perhaps we shouldn’t develop the feature?”

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6 points
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Well, I needed an excuse to use Supermium - no better excuse than this.

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8 points

I don’t really know if any chromium-based options are a real solution - there’s so much code in there that a lot of times won’t get caught (cf. brave etc for this very thing), and goog is actively working to push their own agenda and they have a lot more dev-hours than anyone else to churn shit out

ladybird and servo seem like the most promising alternative paths right now, and ladybird less so because chuds -_-

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2 points

Ladybird isn’t going anywhere. The web standards move too fast and they’re not going to be able to catch up. I wish it was another way, but there’s no way a couple of million $ is going to move the needle here when (probably) tens of billions have been poured into chromium/FF.

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6 points
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Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didn’t like the feel of Chromium.

I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went “fuck it, I’m sticking with Libre”.

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3 points
19 points

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02218-7

Might be slightly off topic, but interesting result using adversarial strategies against RL trained Go machines.

Quote: Humans able use the adversarial bots’ tactics to beat expert Go AI systems, does it still make sense to call those systems superhuman? “It’s a great question I definitely wrestled with,” Gleave says. “We’ve started saying ‘typically superhuman’.” David Wu, a computer scientist in New York City who first developed KataGo, says strong Go AIs are “superhuman on average” but not “superhuman in the worst cases”.

Me thinks the AI bros jumped the gun a little too early declaring victory on this one.

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13 points

See, in StarCraft we would just say that the meta is evolving in order to accommodate this new strategy. Maybe Go needs to take a page from newer games in how these things are discussed.

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11 points

this is simple. we just need to train a new model for every move. that way the adversarial bot won’t know what weaknesses to exploit

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10 points

In chess the table base for optimal moves with only 7 pieces takes like ~20 terrabytes to store. And in that DB there are bizzare checkmates that take 100 + moves even with perfect precision- ignoring the 50 move rule. I wonder if the reason these adversarial strats exists is because whatever the policy network/value network learns is way, way smaller than the minimum size of the “true” position eval function for Go. Thus you’ll just invariably get these counter play attacks as compression artifacts.

Sources cited: my ass cheeks

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9 points

i don’t think that can be quite right, as illustrated by an extreme example: consider a game where the first move has player 1 choose “win” or “hypergo.” if player 1 chooses win, they win. if player 1 chooses hypergo, begin a game of Go on a 1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000,000 board, and whoever wins that subgame wins. for player 1, the ‘true’ position eval function must be in some sense incredibly complicated, because it includes hypergo nonsense. but player 1 strategy can be compressed to “choose win” without opening up any counterattacks

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8 points

60% of the time, it works 100% of the time.

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17 points

Funniest fuckin’ sentence I have read today:

First off, if you’ve read The Singularity Is Near, which was published 19 years ago in 2005, you should be aware that the sequel book is a lot less technical.

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17 points

Wait, this guy published “is Near” twenty years ago and then UNIRONICALLY published “is Nearer”?

Come the fuck on, this has to be satire?

The sequel to “Apocalypse Now”, “Apocalypse Even More Presently”

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12 points

Asymptotically approaching the Singularity.

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7 points

Gooning for rats

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9 points

@V0ldek

Buy my new book “You’re older than you’ve ever been”.

Twenty years pass

Buy my new book “And now you’re even older”

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7 points

iirc he predicted the singularity somewhere in 2040 so it does make sense, even if it looks weird.

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12 points

Oh gosh, hopefully I live to see “Singularity Is Still Near, Just Not as Near as I Thought: Trust Me Bros” released in 2041

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8 points

tl;dr is upset that Kurzweil is not as much of a doomer as they are

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17 points

And in other news:

Muse is a new creative platform that can create your own AI-generated series so you can dive into a new world of storytelling without the need for personal content creation.

Who the fuck are these people and why do I not have a button that spreads Lego bricks across their floor?

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10 points

Yeah, I always hated the part of art and storytelling where there was always a tiny and sometimes misshapen window into the human soul there. Better to do away with that and replace it with an endless parade of #sponsoredcontent. That way there’s no risk of suddenly developing empathy or accidentally connecting with the people I’m exploiting as a billionaire VC.

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6 points
Deleted by creator
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17 points

https://xcancel.com/kitten_beloved/status/1810709361175691474

In which TPOT unites to yell at scooter because he isn’t down with mental health apartheid schemes.

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16 points
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“disorderly cities are required by the state religion”

When they are absolutely sure the tweet will not escape containment, they will just take assumptions like “a certain percentage of people has incurable Criminal Mind” as given and go from there.

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11 points

that twitter account is absolutely something

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12 points

looks at profile ‘adorable and harmless’ and then 2 tweets later, turns out they are racist.

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9 points

cozy twitter TPOT all over

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9 points

I’m always shocked to see someone to Milkshake Duck themselves this hard within a single post.

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8 points
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tangent: these screencaps are from scott? he doesn’t mention long acting injectable antipsychotics (one shot every 2-4 weeks or so, no pills needed; needs consent ofc, result is vastly increased compliance) is that not a thing over there?

e: he mentions it but doesn’t discuss it for whatever reason

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9 points

Depot injections are ‘leftism’ it seems.

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7 points

Scott: ‘left thought’ okayyy

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