this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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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.

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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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

choose your silicon valley thinkboi

edit: goddammit istewart got in first because we both saw this on the zitron discord

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Not sure where this came from, but it can't be all bad if it chaos-dunks on Yudkowsky like this. Was relayed to me via Ed Zitron's Discord, hopefully the Q isn't for Quillete or Qanon

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

each of them needs a scale (logarithmic) showing how much adderall they take

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I recognize everyone except Leopold. Increase my suffering by telling me who it is.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

https://xcancel.com/leopoldasch Leopold Ashenbrenner, some chart maker and ~~substack~~ blog haver with twitter account. swallows all openai marketing materials hook line and sinker, i had enough of abyss gazing duty today won't tell you more

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

his academic output is funny, he has 2 arxiv preprints, an article (?) published not in any normal journal, but instead on some other dude's blog (??), and an article at somewhere called unjournal, which claims that it's not a journal, (???) but instead it's a nonprofit packed with EAs. and that nets him 230 citations (that's looking up in google scholar, not going to fire up scopus just for that)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

He retweeted Ivanka praising him... 🤢

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

this logo in corner is for something called overfit qs, they have instagram page and that image was posted there

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

via this I just learned that google's about[0] to open the taps on fingerprinting allowance for advertisers

that'll go well.

I realize that a lot of people in the rtb space already spend an utterly obscene amount of effort and resources to try do this shit in the first place, but jesus, this isn't even pretending. guess their projections for ad revenue must be looking real scary!

edit [0] - "about", as in next month. and they announced it last month.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

The Google post appears to be Updating our platform policies to reflect innovations in the ads ecosystem.

I have no idea what the heck those words mean (it appears to be some bizarro form of English), so I diffed the policy itself. Here are the parts I found notable.

This will be removed:

You must not use device fingerprints or locally shared objects (e.g., Flash cookies, Browser Helper Objects, HTML5 local storage) other than HTTP cookies, or user-resettable mobile device identifiers designed for use in advertising, in connection with Google's platform products. This does not limit the use of IP address for the detection of fraud.

This will be removed:

You must not pass any information to Google [...] that permanently identifies a particular device (such as a mobile phone's unique device identifier if such an identifier cannot be reset).

This will be added:

You must disclose clearly any data collection, sharing and usage that takes place in connection with your use of Google products, including information about the technologies used, such as your use of cookies, web beacons, IP addresses, or other identifiers. This applies for data collection, sharing and usage on any platform, surface or property (e.g., web, app, Connected TV, gaming console or email publication).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

you just gotta love how vacuously pointless the wording is

You must disclose

google-rfc "must": "we want something we can bend you over a barrel with if you're caught out by one, but that's all we'll bother committing because otherwise it eats into our lovely extortion profits"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Also I'm having a fun time imagining an accurate device fingerprinting disclosure from someone who was really really thorough.

Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD may collect the following information:

Don't worry none of it is a cookie :D

  • Your User-Agent
  • Your browsers language / locale
  • The state of the service-worker associated with Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD's website
  • Whether your "mouse" movements look more like a mouse, trackpoint, gamepad, joystick or touchscreen according to our heuristics
  • The current JavaScript time
  • Whether your browser prefers dark mode or not
  • Whether your browser reports itself as screen or print media
  • The device size, device pixel ratio, frame size, and frame position reported by your browser
  • Your browser's HTTP request headers
  • The success or failure of fetching a URL included in the Easylist ad-block list
  • Whether or not an element associated with the Easylist element hiding list was hidden or not
  • Your IP address
  • The result of tracerouting your IP address from one of our servers
  • Browser Local and/or Session Storage
  • The state of the WebSQL and/or IndexedDB database for our website
  • The state of the OPFS filesystem store associated with our website
  • Whether or not there was an HTTP cache hit for our website
  • Whether or not there was a DNS entry cached for our website
  • A hash of the pixels in a WebGL and/or WebGPU scene
  • The browser's default styling
  • The browser's minimum font size
  • The browser's default font family
  • The font file chosen for a variety of character (or ligature) and font-family combinations
  • A hash of the pixels of a canvas with a variety of font families and shapes written into it
  • A report on the presence or absence of various browser CVEs in your browser
  • Information about any other open tabs that happen to include technologies from Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD
  • What video, audio, and/or image codecs are supported by your browser
  • Whether or not your browser enables video auto play (and whether or not it's muted by default)
  • Whether your browser supports MathGL or not
  • Whether your browser recognizes any origin trials that Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD happens to have opted into at any given time
  • The behavior of your browser against various web standards edge cases or the presence or absense of features in draft web standards (e.g. Web Platform Tests or Can-I-Use tests)
  • Whether or not your browser supports Widevine video DRM
  • Various browser performance characteristics
  • All key press events
  • Various form auto-fill data (if triggered)
  • Any mouse down, mouse move, or mouse up events
  • A rough geolocation calculated by examining the relative latency of fetches to a number of geographically distributed web servers
  • The presence or absence of various browser plugins developed by, purchased by, or affilated with Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technlogies LTD (and any data therein as agreed to by the extension permissions dialog -- up to and including microphone, webcam, or full page DOM)

Some stuff in this list is me being silly, but overall it shows that the talk about "privacy-enhancing technologies" is premature on the web platform. The web has been trying to have better privacy defaults over time; but there's a long legacy of features from before this was considered as much, as well as Google tossing around their weight in the web standards and browser space.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Nobody outside the company has been able to confirm whether the impressive benchmark performance of OpenAI's o3 model represents a significant leap in actual utility or just a significant gap in the value of those benchmarks. However, they have released information showing that the most ostensibly-powerful model costs orders of magnitude more. The lede is in that first graph, which shows that for whatever performance gain o3 costs over ~$10 per request with the headline-grabbing version costing ~$1500 per request.

I hope they've been able to identify a market willing to pay out the ass for performance that, even if it somehow isn't over hyped, is roughly equivalent to an average college graduate.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

I'm wondering about the benchmark too. It's way above my level to figure out how it can be gamed. But, buried in the article:

Moreover, ARC-AGI-1 is now saturating – besides o3's new score, the fact is that a large ensemble of low-compute Kaggle solutions can now score 81% on the private eval.

The most expensive o3 version achieved 87.5%

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

if all of that $1500 cost is electricity, and at arbitrarily chosen but probably high electricity price of $0.2/kWh, that's 7.5MWh per request. could be easily twice that. this is approx how much electricity four 4-person households consume in a year in poland. or about half of american one. six tons of TNT equivalent, or almost 2/3 ton of oil equivalent if you prefer

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Actually wait I'm pretty sure it's even worse because I'm terrible at reading logarithmic scales. It's roughly halfway between $1,000 and $10,000 on their log scale, which if I do the math while actually awake works out closer to $3,000.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

ellison wants to compete with thiel for title of chief boot-wielder https://archive.is/cOnPx

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I can't help but feel like for Ellison in particular, he must have given himself no choice but to believe this stuff is more capable than it is. He's 80 years old now, and if building towards honest-to-god "real AI" wasn't what his whole career was about, then what was the point? The twilight of the older generations of tech executives is going to be its own special kind of pathology.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago

Not that I expect anything better from the fucking lawnmower but the flippant attitude on display is little short of amazing. How bad is it when Business Insider of all publications calls your vision a "surveillance dystopia"?

Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person.

Body cam footage of the officer-involved shooting was not available, as the AI system supervising the involved officers was coincidentally disregarding its previous instructions and instead writing a minstrel show routine at the time of the event.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I have landed on a "you can get fucked if you make this annoying for me, I don't need your product anyway" response to everything. The silver lining is that I will be dealing with way more bullshit while being just as angry all the time at everything.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal year--

Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering

Huh. I guess it'll be another weird one.

(I know I know, low effort post, I'm sick in bed and bored)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Hey, at least there’s no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?

Never mind.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Sure, you know what, let's go with that. While obviously I don't condone terrorism, I agree with Nic here that if you are going to do a car bombing, blowing up a Cybertruck is preferable to other cars. Because it contains the blast better or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (2 children)

They are also spinning it into "the car is so great you cant do terrorism with it due to how strong it is", which considering the several vehicle terrorism acts recently seems very unwise.

Also 'it would be different for the bystanders' i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely) and still 7 people were hurt (and the driver died). Id wait a bit with drawing further conclusions.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Steel, like a pressure cooker

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Somebody pointed out that I might have been wrong and steel might be a perfect shield for anything.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

chalk it down to perp incompetence. single direct hit with old 155mm shell (7kg explosive) can destroy a normal modern tank, nevermind a car. no amount of shitty panels would contain anything at least mildly substantial. there were cases of suicide vests with bigger charge than that (10kg) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66355032

i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely)

symbolic building (??) still makes sense as a target for terrorist attack

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Sure but id expect the perp to first use the cybertruck to ram into the building, or at least move closer, and not park nicely, otoh, if he was a terrorists what do I know, dont exactly know what goes through their mind shortly before things at high speeds go through their mind.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

parking like this raises less suspicion. maybe he wasn't sure enough about whatever igniting mechanism he had, he could end up stuck in a wall unable to get out to look it up

instead of high speed disassembly dude just burned down in automatically locked death trap, i guess he found that anticlimatic. not like isis (guessing) recruits brightest minds out there

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Yeah the story is about to get weird. Your isis guess might not be far off. See this same military base as the guy who drove into the crowds.

Writers of 2025: "Somehow isis returned." (I know isis never left, media just looked less at it, but thought it would be a funny joke).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

i've seen that news piece on how they were in the same base and how they were deployed in afghanistan around the same time previously and that's what i based this guess on

still, so far it could be anything else including complete coincidence. it's like dude forgot everything, he was radioman but couldn't make remote controlled detonator and didn't use efficient charge for some reason

not only isis never left, i guess they controlled some territory at least until last month even if it was only a couple of villages in desert

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Don't worry about the low effort post, even the writers of 2025 are phoning it in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

this isn’t surprising at all, but some of the details are interesting: Server found in apartment funded by Russian government used AI to interfere with 2024 US elections

LLMs really are designed for this kind of thing, aren’t they?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (8 children)
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