this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy April Fool's in advance.)

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[–] corbin@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Australian chemist and videographer Explosions & Fire argues convincingly that the ongoing recent radioactive-boy-scout scandal should not result in prosecution. For context, a 24-year-old man ordered small samples of radioactive isotopes from the USA, Australia failed to intercept it at the border, and they are prosecuting him in order to avoid embarrassment over incompetence. I don't have a choice sneer; E&F is unwaveringly energized over the topic of radioactive isotopes and injustice, and the whole thing is worth watching.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

a good vibe coding sneer found in the wild

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AI Overturns Centuries of Forensic Fingerprinting Practice?

Published in Science... Advances

Probably a fair bit to sneer at in the actual study that I'm missing, and the article I first found it in is peak AI Hype. (Big Forensics is trying to keep you from knowing the Truth as found by an undergrad with a GPU) But the part that I found most concerning is that even the whole paper doesn't appear to break down their 77% accuracy index and provide the specific result ratios that go into it. In a field where each false positive represents a step on the road to innocent people being convicted of major crimes I would really like to know that number specifically.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

At a <30s glance, I'm going to guess the model is finding correlations in the artefacts of fingerprint taking, digitalisation, presentation and so on instead of fingerprints proper, like every damn time this sort of story comes up.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (14 children)

Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

"We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."

This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off

Holy smokes

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 2 days ago

there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones don't work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they don't work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat

the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, it's not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea i'm effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesn't help that thiel's people are swamped in vc money, therefore they don't have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they don't need to work at all. ukrainians don't have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesn't work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.

this is the disruption they're cooking. invest in eastern europe or something

[–] geeksam@ruby.social 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

@sailor_sega_saturn getting this in now: "I never thought *my* hed would get cut off," sobs CEO of Cuttin' Off Heds, Inc.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

I've already depicted you as the virgin Robespierre... and that's the limit of my knowledge wrt figures in the french revolution.

[–] wcbdata@vis.social 7 points 2 days ago

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 This has always been how he, and Palantir, think about the world. It's a terrible company, full of terrible people, selling horrifying products to terrible countries and companies.

[–] forthy42@mastodon.net2o.de 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Peter Thiel could be one of those who are going to lose their head in that revolution…

[–] Beachbum@mastodon.sdf.org 3 points 1 day ago

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 He is a Nazi with lots of cash.

@sailor_sega_saturn I hate how these death cult douchebros appropriate Tolkien to name their companies selling fascism in bulk to the government.

[–] geoglyphentropy@mstdn.social 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 At least one of the DOGE team has a recent criminal past, which should, in a sensible world, bar him from accessing such data: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

Of course it's the dweebiest looking one.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

Thats the same place the 764 people came out of.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago

their thesis might be right, their guess as to the subjects of the sentence however...

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984

I hear that the rich and powerful are concerned about guillotine and that makes me feel happy. They should fear us.

[–] hub@cosocial.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 we should make sure he is at the head of the line...

[–] meltedcheese@c.im 2 points 2 days ago
[–] wonka@chaos.social 2 points 2 days ago

@sailor_sega_saturn Yeah, let's start right with those who say such things!

@BlueMonday1984

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

Also the big fuckoff wave motion laser cannon thing is aimed through the ship itself.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

llama 4

with a whole 2 Ts!

taking bets on whether that's 2 terminators or whether it's the amount of USD they want to burn to make it into a machine god

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Llama 4 Maverick offers a best-in-class performance to cost ratio with an experimental chat version scoring ELO of 1417 on LMArena.

Everything on that page is silly nonsense, but this takes the cake. An Elo rating for chitchat!!!

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

I bet I could win a conversation against any LLM ant day.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

coming up soon: tacticool arena prompt fights, where they get ranked on style and guile

(as was said on whose line is it anyway: "where everything is made up and the points don't matter")

Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in "Llama Four" and it kept saying "2" so they decided to roll with it.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (8 children)

a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I've tried it and can speak authoritatively?

[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no why

i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists

i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow

i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don't know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers

at least it'll be these suckers' job to do the explaining while i rant

fuck. it's rationalist season

"imagine a perfectly spherical chud of uniform duncity..."

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 16 points 3 days ago (8 children)

@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I've been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they're larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren't entirely clear on the whole concept of "fiction".

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As a fellow Usenet junkie from way back, now I'm curious which newsgroups Yarvin hung out in.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 2 points 1 day ago

@TinyTimmyTokyo alt.peeves, alt.tasteless, probably most of the comp.* hierarchy, not sure where else.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I also legitimately can't tell the degree to which they don't understand they're LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that's why it's gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 7 points 2 days ago

@YourNetworkIsHaunted It's probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we'd all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.

You can't ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Banger meme from artist Victoria Ying

description:It’s a scene from White Lotus. A man and a woman are lying on beach chairs, having a conversation.

Panel 1, Man: ‘Why can’t you just like my generative AI “art?”’

Panel 2, Woman: ‘You have to be vulnerable enough to be bad at something to be good at it, but you’re too much of a coward.’

Panel 3, Woman: ‘Because you’re soulless.”

Panel 4: Man is speechless, visibly shook

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