self @ self @awful.systems Posts 38Comments 951Joined 2 yr. ago

the F22 is the C++ of military planes and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible
where the fuck is his left foot
also, did Scott fuck up and not notice this one is plagiarism? not just of the original painting, but however many art class portraiture recreations of the painting the model trained on
most likely including a particularly awful one I was behind the camera for! but because it’s art class and not assholes doing plagiarism, the point of the exercise isn’t that it’s original or even good (and under no circumstances are you pretending you came up with an original work) — it’s to explore the elements that made the original good. I remember we put a lot of effort into getting the light and shadow around the left shoulder and head just right, which are elements the generative knockoff just entirely fucks up because of course it does (also what the fuck is on his forehead?)
holy fuck, I can’t stop picturing it
it may be possible to reconfigure lemmy’s markdown renderer to shunt anything (within reason) between $
s to mathjax; I wouldn’t mind looking into that once we restart development on Philthy.
in the meantime, as an inadequate compromise, you can enable mathjax on gibberish.awful.systems blogs and get better rendering for a long-form math-heavy article there. the unfortunate trade-off is you’ll lose the ability to upload images and they’ll have to be PRed into the frontend repo if you want them local (yes, that’s really the recommended way to do it in bare WriteFreely, unless you’re on their paid flagship instance where they spun up a private imgur clone to handle it).
if there’s interest and PRing images in (or using an upload service elsewhere) isn’t doing it, we can look into doing a basic authenticated upload into object storage kind of service. (or maybe there’s a way to hack pict-rs into doing it? I don’t like pict-rs, but it is our image cache)
I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways, and have them provide the genetic material. I think that it would be immoral not to, and that it is impossible not to think this way after thinking seriously about it.
we’re definitely not a cult, I don’t know why anyone would think that
Consider it from your child’s perspective. There are many people who they could be born to. Who would they pick? Do you have any right to deny them the father they would choose? It would be like kidnapping a child – an unutterably selfish act. You have a duty to your children – you must act in their best interest, not yours.
I just don’t understand how so many TESCREAL thoughts and ideas fit this broken fucking pattern. “have you thought about
<normal thing>
? but have you really thought about it? you must not have cause if you did you would agree it was<severe crime>
!”and you really can tell you’re dealing with a cult when you start from the pretense that a child that doesn’t exist yet has a perspective — these fucking weirdos will have heaven and hell by any means, no matter how much math and statistics they have to abuse past the breaking point to do it.
and just like with any religious fundamentalist, the child doesn’t have any autonomy. how could they, if all their behavior has already been simulated to perfection? there’s no room for an imperfect child’s happiness; for familial bonding; for normal human shit. all that must be cope, cause it doesn’t fit into a broken TESCREAL worldview.
my strong impression is that surveillance advertising has been an unmitigated disaster for the ability to actually sell products in any kind of sensible way — see also the success of influencer marketing, under the (utterly false) pretense that it’s less targeted and more authentic than the rest of the shit we’re used to
but marketing is an industry run by utterly incompetent morally bankrupt fuckheads, so my impression is also that none of them particularly know or care that the majority of what they’re doing doesn’t work; there’s power in surveillance and they like that feeling, so the data remains extremely valuable on the market
fucking imagine coming back to a place you’re not welcome with this “eeehhh you’re being a bit aggressive tbh” shit
I think your response is a bit aggressive TBH.
nah, an aggressive response is me telling you to fuck yourself as I ban you for a second(!) time for making these exact terrible fucking posts
I’ve saved many hours of work with it, in languages I don’t really even know.
maybe by next ban you’ll figure out why your PRs keep getting closed
congrats on asking jeeves
is it bad to be bad at a system designed for exploitation? maybe your grandma had a point
what’s wild is in the ideal case, a person who really doesn’t have anything to hide is both unimaginably dull and has effectively just confessed that they would sell you out to the authorities for any or no reason at all
people with nothing to hide are the worst people
maybe it was a mistake to lionize a corporate monopolist to the level where we ostracized people for not being “good” at using their trap of a product
the marketing fucks and executive ghouls who came up with this meme (that used to surface every time I talked about wanting to de-Google) are also the ones who make a fuckton of money off of having a real-time firehose of personal data straight from the source, cause that’s by far what’s most valuable to advertisers and surveillance firms (but I repeat myself)
the linked Buttondown article deserves highlighting because, as always, Emily M Bender knows what’s up:
If we value information literacy and cultivating in students the ability to think critically about information sources and how they relate to each other, we shouldn't use systems that not only rupture the relationship between reader and information source, but also present a worldview where there are simple, authoritative answers to questions, and all we have to do is to just ask ChatGPT for them.
(and I really should start listening to Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 soon)
also, this stood out, from the OpenAI/Common Sense Media (ugh) presentation:
As a responsible user, it is essential that you check and evaluate the accuracy of the outputs of any generative AI tool before you share it with your colleagues, parents and caregivers, and students. That includes any seemingly factual information, links, references, and citations.
this is such a fucked framing of the dangers of informational bias, algorithmic racism, and the laundering of fabricated data through the false authority of an LLM. framing it as an issue where the responsible party is the non-expert user is a lot like saying “of course you can diagnose your own ocular damage, just use your eyes”. it’s very easy to perceive the AI as unbiased in situations where the bias agrees with your own, and that is incredibly dangerous to marginalized students. and as always, it’s gross how targeted this is: educators are used to being the responsible ones in the room, and this might feel like yet another responsibility to take on — but that’s not a reasonable way to handle LLMs as a source of unending bullshit.
Lack of familiarity with AI PCs leads to what the study describes as "misconceptions," which include the following: 44 percent of respondents believe AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic; 53 percent believe AI PCs are only for creative or technical professionals; 86 percent are concerned about the privacy and security of their data when using an AI PC; and 17 percent believe AI PCs are not secure or regulated.
ah yeah, you just need to get more familiar with your AI PC so you stop caring what a massive privacy and security risk both Recall and Copilot are
lol @ 44% of the study’s participants already knowing this shit’s a desperate gimmick though
per capita: your mom
fuck me that is some awful fucking moderation. I can’t imagine being so fucking bad at this that I:
- dole out a ban for being rude to a fascist
- dole out a second ban because somebody in the community did some basic fucking due diligence and found out one of the accounts defending the above fascist has been just a gigantic racist piece of shit elsewhere, surprise
- in the process of the above, I create a safe space for a fascist and her friends
but for so many of these people, somehow that’s what moderation is? fucking wild, how the fuck did we get here
a better-thought-out announcement is coming later today, but our WriteFreely instance at gibberish.awful.systems has reached a roughly production-ready state (and you can hack on its frontend by modifying the templates
, pages
, static
, and less
directories in this repo and opening a PR)! awful.systems regulars can ask for an account and I'll DM an invite link!
most of the dedicated Niantic (Pokemon Go, Ingress) game players I know figured the company was using their positioning data and phone sensors to help make better navigational algorithms. well surprise, it’s worse than that: they’re doing a generative AI model that looks to me like it’s tuned specifically for surveillance and warfare (though Niantic is of course just saying this kind of model can be used for robots… seagull meme, “what are the robots for, fucker? why are you being so vague about who’s asking for this type of model?”)
another absolutely fucked thing about the gotcha interview is, they never stop at just one. if you somehow read the interviewer’s mind and asspull the expected (not “correct”, mind you) answer, they’ll just go “huh” and instantly pivot to a different instant-fail gotcha. the point of the gotcha interview isn’t candidate selection; the point is that the asshole interviewer has power over the candidate, and can easily use gotchas to fabricate technical-sounding reasons for rejecting suitable candidates they personally just don’t like.
shit like this is one reason our industry is full of fucking assholes; they select for their own by any practical means. it’s reminiscent of those rigged, impossible “literacy tests” they used to give voters in the south (that is, the southern US), where almost every question was a gotcha designed so that a poll worker could exclude Black voters at effectively their own discretion, complete with a bullshit paper trail in case anyone questioned the process.
(also, how many of these assholes send candidates down a rabbit hole wasting time answering questions unrelated to the position when they don’t get the gotcha right? I swear that’s happened to me more than once, and I can only imagine it’s so nobody asks why most of the interviews are so short)
I start every new day by screaming this is the remix
, as required by law