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)

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    56 minutes ago

    In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”

    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/mondays-campaign-11424-kari-lake-adds-ai-polls-rcna178681?icid=latestpost_bot

    Edit: Found the map she’s using:

    https://xcancel.com/IwriteOK/status/1853647442740441289#m

  • self@awful.systems
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    6 hours ago

    Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:

    Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.

    “One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”

    • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 hours ago

      A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.

      • istewart@awful.systems
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        8 hours ago

        Said it before, I’ll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    16 hours ago

    For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn’t a great rolemodel.

    (more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on ‘traditional rationality’)).

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      4 hours ago

      Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women removed thing. Miss me with that PUA shit

  • maol@awful.systems
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    16 hours ago

    Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      15 hours ago

      Carbon capture, small nuclear reactors. We stopped thinking big. To really solve climate change we need to do one easy, but big thing. Blow up the Sun.

      • istewart@awful.systems
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        8 hours ago

        Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          5 hours ago

          Don’t think we should put another space guy into politics, no matter their expertise at blowing up stars. They tend to go bad quickly.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    23 hours ago

    Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:

    • The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
    • I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
    • it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.

    Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.

    NB: am not a US voter.

    • maol@awful.systems
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      16 hours ago

      The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the “hope” that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks he’ll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        11 hours ago

        Their grindcore coverband is called Earthcofffin Hopecrusher. Their 2 minute long album with 14 songs was pretty good.

        • Steve@awful.systems
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          11 hours ago

          Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in “metal album title or emo album title?”

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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            6 hours ago

            I feel like it’s slightly more emo for sheer length, “The Earth is Our Coffin” and “Hope is a Mistake” are both awesome metal albums in their own right, but the combination can only be from the genre that brought you “A Detailed and Poetic Physical Threat to the Person who Intentionally Vandalized My 1994 Dodge Intrepid Behind Kate’s Apartment”

  • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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    13 hours ago

    You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?

    Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results are… basically abysmal:
    https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual “gameplay”.

    TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things aren’t even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer they’re using to render this.

    Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      6 hours ago

      maybe i’m a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there weren’t armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gaming… if you look at this “game” as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging

      it reminds me of other “games” like Marian Kleineberg’s Wave Function Collapse and Bananaft’s Yedoma Globula. there’s one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i don’t recall the name

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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        3 hours ago

        I do like it also, but notice how they try to hide most of these strange effects in their demo video. They’re trying to pass it off as a playable minecraft. Anything interesting about the technology is a defect to these people.

        They also claim this is “the first playable AI-generated game” when the exact same sort of thing already existed in 2022 (and it looked a lot more efficient and haunted): https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/ Maybe it doesn’t count if you call it “Neural network” instead of “AI”.

        • ebu@awful.systems
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          2 hours ago

          yeah, that “most of the internet will be Al-generated” nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.

          still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-you’re-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples

    • self@awful.systems
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      6 hours ago

      oh cool, Minecraft LSD: Dream Emulator edition

      which would be a cool concept, if the generative AI model weren’t incredibly prohibitively expensive to run, trained on plagiarized videos, and incapable of coherently tracking state (believe it or not, LSD: Dream Emulator does have a gameplay and progression loop… game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      7 hours ago

      Note that the person in the video isn’t part of the team/whoever that creates it, just someone who is reviewing it.

      See, there’s the mistake. You can’t let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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      12 hours ago

      I’ve seen this floating about quite a bit, and everyone I know is dunking on it - the most frequent comparison I’ve seen is calling it “Minecraft with dementia”.

      • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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        10 hours ago

        It also shows why those DOOM demos were only 2-3 seconds long, because that’s how long it can keep cohesion for.