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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)

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[-] mii@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

So there's apparently a memecoin site with the not-at-all suspicious name pump.fun and Coffeezilla made a video about it on his second channel.

Also: Epilepsy warning for that site. It's full of flashing colors and moving elements like late 90s Geocities.

I have no idea what the fuck is even going on there, but apparently people threaten to kill themselves or their animals if you don't invest in their shitcoin there, or run actual cockfights where they murder the chickens live on stream if the line doesn't go up.

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[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago

This is completely off topic I think but I need you all to see this, it's important on a spiritual level

This map is infinitely sneerable, every region you look at is somehow worse than the previous one, regardless of the order in which you do that.

Tag yourself, I'm Cracked Coast, population 17.

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

Ah yes Africa, the small country on the northern coast of Africa.

[-] maol@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago

I'm scared of Big Ulster

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago

Unifying belgium and the Netherlands makes me think really bad things about the map designers. People who want that are either fools who dont know much about the region or white nationalist fascists. (They often also want SA included)

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

caucasus would be even bigger shitshow than it is now. no chechenia or ingushetia, but azerbaijan has now half of current armenian land + iranian province of the same name. that's weirdly specific and suspicious

Wait, do you mean new Armenia or Old Armenia? I'm not fluent in the region. But I'm sure Turkiye will be happy to surrender territory to Old Armenia after denying that whole affair for the last ~100 years.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

someone needs to stop paradox gamers from interfacing with the real world

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Yeah people who make maps like this seem to miss the whole point, borders are rigid, populations are fluid. And even paradox games seem to understand this with various mechanics. (which then tend to take a bit of a genocidal undertone (see the 1 culture speedruns)). E: anyway, due to the massive population in the benelux (30m) and the relative small weak neighbors, this is the best start on this map).

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago

Isn't there a huge neo-nazi subculture around Paradox games, with weird mods and stuff?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

As a bit of a map painter, Paradox themselves nowadays takes a pretty anti neo-nazi stance. And most public places do so as well (this was a relatively recent change btw, people didn't seem to notice just how bad remove kebab memes etc were). There is sadly the general undertone of 'ironic' far right meme culture which is pervasive in gaming. So that will always be a problem. So neo-nazis not so much, but people making jokes about genocide, and the high risk of your fave content creator suddenly going some weird anti leftwing/culture war rant which makes it clear he (it is always a he) knows nothing yes very much. No idea how much of these people are crypto-fascists or not, as the rest of the space does seem welcoming to trans people and women. (this is my view of the general paradox gaming culture places I have been into, I'm not denying there are neo-nazi groups into paradox games, they just don't seem to be overt or liked vs the general edgelord gamer types).

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

Thanks for expanding. I think every company that has a biggish community has to deal with nazi entryism.

This was the story I remembered about this

https://kotaku.com/the-struggle-over-gamers-who-use-mods-to-create-racist-1826606138

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[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Kind of interested in the precise type of brainworms that result in Greece annexing Northern Epirus from Albania but think Thrace should be its own thing.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

There is no Poland, which unfortunately tracks, historically.

I can see Denmark having Scania now, which is what a lot of the more racist Scanians have wanted since forever. But you can't just split Sweden (Sverige, Svea Rike) into Sweden and Svealand, which isn't even historically correct (it's way too big).

Also Ulster being 50% of the island of Eire is gonna work out great.

Sweden/Svealand is one of many examples here of "where do you think the name came from?" for neighboring regions. My favorite example of this pattern is probably Finland, though. Helsinki is it's own thing, and we get both Finland and Finnmark. Truly outstanding.

I like how the Spanish coast is in Africa. Also, Kyiv and Helsinki are their own city-states (or autonomous post-state administrative zones or whatever) but Rome, London, Munich, etc. aren't.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

You missed the most beautiful city-state of OSTBREST

[-] ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 4 days ago

Why does the region around Armenia look so unchanged? Why is Transylvania in Ukraine? Italy becomes Romania, ok I've had enough

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Italy becomes Romania

Not to mention that Romania (unrelated to the modern country) was an endonym for the Constantinople-led eastern roman empire, basically Greek for Roman-land.

So yeah, the closer you look the wronger it gets.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 4 days ago

there are two transylvanias

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

Only feed the Transylvania you want to become.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

To be fair there are lots of forests one can be on other side of in Eurasia...

[-] maol@awful.systems 22 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Eugenics in action:

Danish parenting tests under fire after baby removed from Greenlandic mother

Psychometric tests are widely used in Denmark as part of child protection investigations into new parents, and have long been criticised by human rights bodies as culturally unsuitable for Greenlandic people and other minorities.

In a 2022 report, the institute said that because the tests were not adapted to take cultural differences into account, Greenlandic parents ran “the risk of obtaining low test scores, so that it is concluded, for example, that they have reduced cognitive abilities, without there being actual evidence for this."

Psychological assessments of her were made by a Danish-speaking psychologist. Kronvold, whose first language is Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), is not fluent in Danish.

[-] slopjockey@awful.systems 17 points 5 days ago

Oh man that is so grim

Kronvold, 38, was given an FKU test in 2014 before the birth of her second child, a boy, and again recently while pregnant with her third child. Speaking through an intermediary, she told the Guardian that on this last occasion she was told it was to see if she was “civilised enough”.

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[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago

currently in vc delusion, the public just doesn’t understand how to move about efficiently

the levels of not-even-wrong from these dipshits continue to be astounding

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 16 points 4 days ago

Also, this plan has a very much a fuck disabled people and old people factor. And what a lonely world they live in.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago

If you asked people what they wanted, they would say a car that drives itself

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[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 5 days ago

If I mathed right that'd be one waymo every 350 feet of road on average. Is that a lot? It sounds like it might be a lot. Especially since self-driving cars greatest weakness appears to be driving in the vicinity of other self-driving cars.

I think the idea is to solve that by networking all the self-driving cars together. I'm sure the long history of trying to get vendors to agree on a standard when they all benefit individually from the lock-in of proprietary systems has nothing to teach us about this prospect.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Complexity theoretical, security and latency wise this sounds like a great plan. Can wait for people being stuck in cars for days because the freeway offramps are causing livelocks. (Like the example of the waymo cars all honking at each other at the parking lots).

Wonder if they are going to use the routing solutions used in tcp and then discover that cars are heavier and slower than data and suddenly waste a lot of peoples time and money.

E: small little detail which I don't know if other countries also have it, but in the dutch traffic system, emergency services and busses (and perhaps a few hackers who really want to be in trouble with the law (but I always heard this described as a 'this exist, but we don't mess with it' system)) have a system where you can get priority at traffic lights, so they turn green faster. Wonder if other countries have this, and how much they realize this will not work for waymo systems.

[-] self@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

a system where you can get priority at traffic lights, so they turn green faster

the US has this too (you can watch the stoplights suddenly reprioritize as an ambulance or cop car with their lightbars and sirens running approaches) and I’m honestly not sure why I haven’t ever seen it abused by some shithead with a HackRF or similar. maybe the penalties make it safer to just willingly run a red light?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

There recently was a bit of a 'hackers can/are abusing this scare here' and well, I think most people don't want to abuse the system like this and understand the risks/and consequences of this. And there is also a factor of, how would you get caught? So I assume a few people who know how this would work don't actually advertise it. They might have also updated it to actually use some form of encryption. However it used to (from what I heard) not be encrypted (no idea about logging either). There is also the whole thing that messing with traffic lights vs messing with speed traps feels like a very different thing.

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[-] self@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

other than interop, the big problem I have with this is security. car modding for performance is already a big thing, and a car mod that makes other cars slow down, stop, get out of your way, or otherwise malfunction would be incredibly popular with assholes of all varieties, and car modding has many. the current state of automotive is that security is a fucking shitshow, but I can’t figure out any kind of security model for this that isn’t vulnerable to a wide variety of obvious attacks. even a perfect inter-vendor attestation chain (good fucking luck) is vulnerable to hooking an ECU (or whatever the ruggedized monitoring microcontroller unit for a magic self-driving EV is) and radio up to a variety of fake sensors and crafting inputs such that the thing starts transmitting “wait no stop here” signals to all the surrounding cars

but then again, all of this is probably intentional because it creates a privileged class of people who can afford to fuck with self-driving car networking and not worry about any associated fines, and an unprivileged class who just have to put up with everything being so much worse. in a world where you can roll smoke into a Subway with relatively few consequences (not to mention all the other horseshit Truck Guys get away with), it’s not a hard outcome to imagine.

Im sure they'll try to incorporate an LLM into the stack somewhere, leading to at least one car that's exposed to the "pretend to be a fire truck" attack.

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[-] ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 5 days ago

My organic chemistry professor used ChatGPT to write a lab procedure. My other chemistry professor's daughter is VP of AI at Microsoft. AAAAA

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[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I woke up and immediately read about something called "Defense Llama". The horrors are never ceasing: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/24/defense-llama-meta-military/

Scale AI advertised their chatbot as being able to:

apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities

However their marketing material, as is tradition, include an example of terrible advice. Which is not great given it's about blowing up a building "while minimizing collateral damage".

Scale AI's response to the news pointing this out -- complaining that everyone took their murderbot marketing material seriously:

The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago

On the one hand, that spectacular failure could potentially dissuade the military from buying in and prolonging this bubble. On the other hand, having an accountability sink for war crimes would be a tempting offer to your average army.

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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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