- 37 Posts
- 628 Comments
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•your U Toronto CS degree has been replaced with a colour-in place mat from McDonaldsEnglish10·4 days agoFuckers betraying the basic principles of a science education…
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025English10·5 days agoWell, Timeless Decision Theory was, like the rest of their ideological package, an excuse to keep on believing what they wanted to believe. So how does one even tell if they stopped “taking it seriously”?
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025English16·6 days ago“Diamondoid bacteria” is just a way to say “nanobots” while edging
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025English10·7 days agoAnd thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the “no longer interested in Season 2” pile, but for different reasons.
The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on “a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.”
So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025English17·7 days ago“Kicked out of a … group chat” is a peculiar definition of “offline consequences”.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English4·9 days ago(thinks)
(thinks)
I get it!
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English16·10 days agoIn commenting, we did not disclose that an AI was used to write comments, as this would have rendered the study unfeasible.
If you can’t do your study ethically, don’t do your study at all.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Fake diversity: why hire a non-white DJ when you could just generate one with AI?English6·10 days agoCongratulations on your discovery of the concept of web forum moderation. Bye now.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•OpenAI offers to buy the Chrome web browser from Google. Uh huh.English2·11 days agoBuh bye now.
blakestacey@awful.systemsOPto TechTakes@awful.systems•Credulous coverage of AI slop on WikipediaEnglish1·11 days agoOK, this isn’t about AI slop, but it is complaining about Wikipedia. Its article about that kind of “amnesia” named by gobshite Michael Crichton is shoddily sourced and seemingly in violation of the site’s policies.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English8·11 days agoEven setting aside the fact that Crichton coined the term in a climate-science-denial screed — which, frankly, we probably shouldn’t set aside — yeah, it’s just not good media literacy. A newspaper might run a superficial item about pure mathematics (on the occasion of the Abel Prize, say) and still do in-depth reporting about the US Supreme Court, for example. The causes that contribute to poor reporting will vary from subject to subject.
Remember the time a reporter called out Crichton for his shitty politics and Crichton wrote him into his next novel as a child rapist with a tiny penis? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•AI-generated music accounts for 18% of all tracks uploaded to DeezerEnglish11·11 days agoI’m going to take the fact that this was downvoted independently by all three site admins as sufficient reason to escort this commenter to the egress.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English9·11 days agoThat Wikipedia article is impressively terrible. It cites an opinion column that couldn’t spell Sokal correctly, a right-wing culture-war rag (The Critic) and a screed by an investment manager complaining that John Oliver treated him unfairly on Last Week Tonight. It says that the “Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy” from 1982, which as I understand it violates Wikipedia’s policy.
By Crichton’s logic, we get to ignore Wikipedia now!
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English7·13 days agoAlso on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:
Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers
Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours
Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English11·13 days agoNOT THE (PORK-FILLED) BEES!
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English8·13 days agoIs that the tomato scale guy?
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English10·13 days ago“The man in the glowing rectangle is Mark Kretschmann, a technology enthusiast who has grown out of touch with all but the most venal human emotions. Mark is a leveller, in that he wants to drag all people down to his. But as Mark is about to discover, there’s no way to engineer a prompt for a map out of… the Twilight Zone.”
blakestacey@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025English14·13 days agoVacant, glassy-eyed, plastic-skinned, stamped with a smiley face… “optimistic”
I mean, if the smiley were aligned properly, it would be a poster for a horror story about enforced happiness and mandatory beauty standards. (E.g., “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” from the famously subtle Twilight Zone.) With the smiley as it is, it’s just incompetent.
Well, LW is only being no more wrong than Andrew Tate there, so they don’t deserve too many points.
And Yud himself went full-blown anti-seed-oil.