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.)
Here’s a fun one… Microsoft added copilot features to sharepoint. The copilot system has its own set of access controls. The access controls let it see things that normal users might not be able to see. Normal users can then just ask copilot to tell them the contents of the files and pages that they can’t see themselves. Luckily, no business would ever put sensitive information in their sharepoint system, so this isn’t a realistic threat, haha.
Obviously Microsoft have significant resources to research and fix the security problems that LLM integration will bring with it. So much money. So many experts. Plenty of time to think about the issues since the first recall debacle.
And this is what they’ve accomplished.
https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/exploiting-copilot-ai-for-sharepoint/
They’re already doing phrenology and transphobia on the pope.
(screenshot of a Twitter post with dubious coloured lines overlaid on some photos of the pope’s head, claiming a better match for a “female” skull shape)
I’ve never looked into how they do the phrenology but was immediately struck by the “female” skull having larger forehead. So they say women are big brained?
That couple have been in the white house to brief the president on their one thing ig
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.
“Gross thrice-married orange man wants you to bonk more” 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 don’t know anything about Abe apart from him being a right-winger. Was he also very very worried about Japan’s 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 Japan’s declining birthrate. There’s 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 “Abe would be proud”.
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 Japan’s declining birthrate.
Presumably, he didn’t address it by dealing with how Japanese work life makes starting a family damn-nigh impossible.
New eugenics conference just dropped
“Chatham House rules” so they can happily be racist without anyone pointing fingers at them.
the genomic emancipation of humanity
ffs, the euphemisms keep piling on today.
I have to share this one.
Now don’t think of me as smug, I’m only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: I’m pretty good at Vim. I’ve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. I’ve 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 couldn’t 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 gym…
In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the university’s AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldn’t 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 don’t care. They’ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldn’t they? Next question. Concerns about “is this still the same programming that I fell in love with?” seemed so silly that I didn’t even dare to say them out loud.
SIDE NOTE: I plea the resident compiler engineer to quickly assess the quality of this man’s books since I am complete moron when it comes to programming language theory.
Of course, like everyone else present at the Big Bang, I clapped and was excited and tried everything I could think of — from translating phrases to generating poems, to generating code, to asking these LLMs things I would never ask a living being.
“Like everyone else in my social circle, which I confuse with the entirety of the world, I am easily distracted by jangling keys”
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 shouldn’t 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 didn’t like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.
It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.
