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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I have to share this one.
Now donāt think of me as smug, Iām only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: Iām pretty good at Vim. Iāve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. Iāve pulled off some impressive stunts with Vim macros. But here I sat, watching an LLM predict where my cursor should go and what I should do there next, and couldnāt help but admit to myself that this is faster than I could ever be.
Yeah, flex your Vim skills because being fast at editing text is totally the bottleneck of programming and not the quality and speed of our own thoughts.
The world is changing, this is big, I told myself, keep up. I watched the Karpathy videos, typed myself through Python notebooks, attempted to read a few papers, downloaded resources that promised to teach me linear algebra, watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym.
Wow man, you watched 3blue1brown videos at the gymā¦
In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the universityās AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldnāt give less of a shit about the things I had been concerned about. Was this code written with Pure Vim, was it written with Pure Emacs, does it not contain Artificial Intelligence Sweetener? They donāt care. Theyāve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldnāt they? Next question. Concerns about āis this still the same programming that I fell in love with?ā seemed so silly that I didnāt even dare to say them out loud.
SIDE NOTE: I plea the resident compiler engineer to quickly assess the quality of this manās books since I am complete moron when it comes to programming language theory.
The books look alright. I only read the samples. The testimonials from experts are positive. Maybe compare and contrast with Lox from Crafting Interpreters, whose author is not an ally but not known evil either. In terms of language design, thereās a lot of truth to the idea that Monkey is a boring ripoff of Tiger, which itself is also boring in order to be easier to teach. Iād say that Ballās biggest mistake is using Go as the implementation language and not explaining concepts in a language-neutral fashion, which makes sense when working on a big long-lived project but not for a single-person exploration.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense that somebody writing a lot of Go would think that an LLM is impressive. Also, I have to sneer at this:
Each prompt I write is a line I cast into a modelās latent space. By changing this word here and this phrase there, I see myself as changing the lineās trajectory and its place amidst the numbers. Words need to be chosen with care, since they all have a specific meaning and end up in a specific place in latent space once theyāve been turned into numbers and multiplied with each other, and what I want, what I aim for when I cast, is for the line to end up in just the right spot, so that when I pull on it out of the model comes text that helps me program machines.
Dude literally just discovered word choice and composition. Welcome to writing! I learned about this in public education when I was maybe 14.
Words need to be chosen with care, since they all have a specific meaning and end up in a specific place in latent space once theyāve been turned into numbers and multiplied with each other
If I am ever that pompous, please just deliver me to the farm upstate
As someone not versed in the relevant deep lore, did emacs vs vim ever actually matter? Like, my experience is with both as command line text editors, which shouldnāt have nearly as much impact on the actual code being written as the skills and insight of the person doing the writing. I assumed this was a case where you could grumble through working with the one you didnāt like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.
Theyāve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them.
Is that the same AI thatās been available for barely two years?
What a drama queen.
Video of interview with opās old nemisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc&t=172s
Of course, like everyone else present at the Big Bang, I clapped and was excited and tried everything I could think of ā from translating phrases to generating poems, to generating code, to asking these LLMs things I would never ask a living being.
āLike everyone else in my social circle, which I confuse with the entirety of the world, I am easily distracted by jangling keysā
New 404 Media article: Elon Muskās Grok AI Will āRemove Her Clothesā In Public, On X
So we can add āfully automatic sexual harassmentā to the list of reasons Twitter can die in a fire
It didnāt hit me until now, but āfully automatic sexual harassmentā acronymises to āFASHā, and that is pretty fitting for something like this
whoops e_thread
so it looks like openai has bought a promptfondler IDE
some of the coverage is ⦠something:
Windsurf brings unique strengths to the table, including a seamless UI, faster performance, and a focus on user privacy
(and yes, the āeditorā is once again VSCode With Extras)
New piece from Soatok/Dhole Moments: Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI
If youāve heard of him before, its likely from that attempt to derail an NFT project with porn back in 2021.
ETA: Baldur Bjarnason has also commented on it:
This is honestly a pretty sensible take on this all. That it comes from somebody with a āfursonaā shouldnāt surprise anybody who has been paying attention.
Leopard nibbles at venture foundersā faces in a new way - OpenAI researcher canāt get green card
(will they reconsider their wholehearted support for trump tho? also no)
A Reddit uses Grok to solve Baseball
Edit: I am reliably informed that I have missed the joke!
I think this sub might be satirical and that this post is under that umbrella, investigating!
E: post is tagged as humor
Whoops, thanks for the heads up! They got me good
Core Strategy: We define the probability of victory, PvictoryP_{\text{victory}}Pvictoryā, as: Pvictory=( C B A^2+āāĪØPāt)Ć(Ncā c2)P_{\text{victory}} = \left( C B A^2 + \hbar \frac{\partial \Psi_P}{\partial t} \right) \times (Nc \cdot c^2)Pvictoryā=(CBA2+āātāĪØPāā)Ć(Ncā c2). (Someone told me this is āLateXā? I think you need to copy it to ChatGPT to see the equation.)
Yeah itās time to delete LaTeX. Weāre done. We donāt deserve it anymore
\begin{equation} /\!\! \curlywedge \circledcirc_{\,\smallsmile\!\smallsmile} \! \circledcirc \curlywedge \! \backslash \end{equation}
spoiler
deleted by creator
Apparently MIT is teaching a vibe coding class:
How will this yearās class differ from last yearās? There will be some major changes this year:
- Units down from 18 to 15, to reflect reduced load
- Grading that emphasizes mastery over volume
- More emphasis on design creativity (and less on ethics)
- Not just permission but encouragement to use LLMs
- A framework for exploiting LLMs in code generation
Fuckinā dammit. At least itās not my old department⦠yetā¦
From the class guide:
We ask that students do not use laptops or phones in class. Research suggests that students who do so unwittingly spend much of the time surfing the internet leading to worse educational outcomes, and that taking notes by hand is much more effective. You may use laptops during class exercises, and you may also use a tablet to take notes.
lol
A tangent: the tablet.
Why is the tablet ok for taking notes? Is it banned from the wifi? Does it lack a browser? Or are todays students unaware that most sites can be visited without an app?
because if they try to ban accessibility they will get in trouble
Update on my comment from yesterday: it seems I fell for satire (?). (I donāt know the people involved, so no idea, but it seems plausible.)
Satire-brackets-questionmark is a whole industry now, isnāt it?
Looks like elon and the others fell for it tbh, not so much you. (Note his screenshot showed he liked and retweeted it).
More big āwe had to fund, enable, and sane wash fascism b.c. the leftist wanted trans people to be aliveā energy from the EA crowd. We really overplayed our hand with the extremist positions of Kamala fuckin Harris fellas, they had no choice but to vote for the nazis.
(repost since from that awkward time on Sunday before the new weekly thread)
I hate this position so much, claiming that itās because āthe leftā wanted ātoo muchā. Thatās not only morally bankrupt, itās factually wrong too. And also ignorant of historical examples. Itās lazy and rotten thinking all the way through.
Thereās so much to hate with this, but for some reason what really irks me is the āoverplayed their handā b.c. she was a poker player so she has to view all human interaction through the lens of gAmE tHeOrY instead of, you know, believing people should have human rights.
Like you just know in a parallel universe sheās yapping about how āthe West has fallen b.c. leftist pushed their pawns too farā or āI have to vote for elon for president b.c. the leftās clerics exhausted all their healing manaā
25+ years⦠i.e. Bush II instituted a new Golden Age but it was betrayed by (checks notes) radical Marxists??
At least set the start of āWestern society solidityā at 1989ā¦
I keep forgetting so many people online are very, very young.
Big chance this person is <25 and this is just the reactionary yearning for a better past that never was. Also interesting how they always blame the āLeftā, and not just somebody like Reagan who had actual power, actually caused a measurable shift etc. (Not saying it was great before him, I wasnt there in time and place) But nope popular culture controls the world. Thanks cartoon Obama.
I checked out their profile. the person is (one of?) the host(s?) of this trash
Ah yes one of those great ideas to change the world by changing nothing podcasts.
Zuck, who definitely knows how human friendships work, thinks AI can be your friend: https://bsky.app/profile/drewharwell.com/post/3lo4foide3s2g (someone probably already posted this interview here before but I wasnāt paying attention so if so here it is again)
In completely unrelated news: dealing with voices in your head can be hard, but with AI you can deal with voices outside of your head too! https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
(No judgement. Having had a mental breakdown a long long time ago, I canāt imagine what it would have been like to also have had access to a sycophantic chat-bot at the same time.)
i retain a pretty dismal view of AI for just about any use case, but had some distant friends / people i follow on social media say they used it as a rubber duck for troubleshooting a problem they had, or a place to just dump emotions into. i figured this, at the very minimum, could and should be harmless. i guess i wasnāt cynical enough
I found this quote interesting (emphasis mine):
He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the characterās persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads āseemed so impossible.ā āAt worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,ā Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.
I would absolutely believe that this is the case, especially if like Sem you have a sufficiently uncommon name that the model doesnāt have a lot of context and connections to hang on it to begin with.
That couple have been in the white house to brief the president on their one thing ig
I could have sworn they were siblings
Yeah. They are like midbosses of this side of the internet.
Iām annoyed they still have relevancy somehow.
I knew the exact couple you were talking about before I read any additional comments. They seem to show up in the news like clockwork⦠do they have a publicist or PR agent looking for newspapers in need of garbage filler puff pieces? If anything, going to the white house is a step up from there normal pattern of self promotion.
Theyāre Internet Native/Terminally Online, so they can SEO their own appearances, plus now they are fully plugged-in to the right-wing hype machine so theyāre probably turning down appearances instead of chasing them.
theyāre Thiel creatures. This is why (a) theyāre in all the papers all the fucking time (b) no other pronatalist couple is
they have billionaire bank rollers. since the reality of our media system is that you hear a lot about whatever billionaires want you to hear about, they are covered
What
I tried being too vague to avoid giving the pronatalist couple more clout, and I guess the bit bombed.
Also: I fact checked myself and it turns out I committed the grave sin of posting old news.
āGross thrice-married orange man wants you to bonk moreā is gonna be a hard sell but rest assured, his pals in tech will make sure their ad selection supports it.
shinzo abe but not assassinated yet
I donāt know anything about Abe apart from him being a right-winger. Was he also very very worried about Japanās birthrate (just like Hackernews is)?
Without going into too much detail (because I am not well read on this and am likely to be wrong about a lot of it), one of the many issues that Abe addressed during his leadership was Japanās declining birthrate. Thereās a bit of a conspiracy amongst many people who consume Japanese popular culture (at a deep-ish level) that Abe pushed pronatalist themes in pop culture, as well as tropes like NEETs/hikikomori escaping their isolation from society and entering romantic relationships. This has become a huge meme, where any time a romantic development happens in a manga or anime, many people are quick to say things along the lines of āAbe would be proudā.
E: From the knowyourmeme page on Abe:
Japan has seen a declining birthrate and population in recent years, which has been blamed on young people in Japan being uninterested in having sex. However, due to sexual content in many anime, including shows like Darling in the Franxx whose plots seem to encourage procreation, people have joked that Abe is using anime to encourage Japanese young people to have sex and start families. These are particularly popular on Tumblr. For example, Tumblr user justintaco posted a photoshopped image of Abe superimposed on a screenshot of Darling in the Franxx, gaining over 36,000 notes (shown below, left). User freyjaofthenorth made a similar post about the anime Conception, gaining over 2,900 notes (shown below, right). There is also a mock Tumblr for Shinzo Abe devoted to this joke.
Without going into too much detail (because I am not well read on this and am likely to be wrong about a lot of it), one of the many issues that Abe addressed during his leadership was Japanās declining birthrate.
Presumably, he didnāt address it by dealing with how Japanese work life makes starting a family damn-nigh impossible.