Gas Town is the weird slop-illustrated hype post from a while back about creating a sort of corporate org chart of LLMs prompting each other. Basic ideas like “what if you had developer LLMs and project manager LLMs and a COO LLM and they all roleplayed with each other” got their own obfuscatory Mad Max themed names to make the whole thing seem more exciting and innovative, and I seem to remember a sentence along the lines of “This is not for anyone for whom token costs are an object.” Obviously this was the coolest thing to have ever hit the orange site for a few weeks afterward.
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- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•Gwern: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch **Guardian Angel Inc** and bring GAs to life.English3·23 days ago
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoPrivacy@programming.dev•ESA bafflingly declares private Minecraft servers "illegal" in Stop Killing Games hearing: "We consider it piracy", we have lawsuits.1·2 months ago
Funny how the key distinction is that developer-sanctioned private servers are usually for games monetized through a single, up-front purchase of the client rather than a subscription service with which the private server would compete directly. I’m sure that isn’t relevant to the context this argument was used in at all.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026English6·2 months ago
If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Unreal Engine 6 goes AI — and wants to bring back NFTsEnglish4·3 months ago
Sadly, I think Epic was always the most serious about making sure that every game made by every studio is part of the same cash shop scheme forever, and the most likely to realize that vision in any practical way. It’s the ultimate dream of all the deskilling, destylization, and asset trading built into their engine since UE4, turning the industry standard for games into interchangeable mush made of interchangeable parts by interchangeable workers.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Unreal Engine 6 goes AI — and wants to bring back NFTsEnglish8·3 months ago
Is it NFTs, or is it what Epic have been aiming for since the peak of metaverse hype, to get the entire industry dependent on an asset store and account system where Epic takes a cut?
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st June 2026English10·3 months ago
The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn’t really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won’t shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st June 2026English13·3 months ago
A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026English11·3 months ago
There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.
Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.
Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026English5·3 months ago
The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English6·4 months ago
In retrospect, the idea that creating a globally accepted alternative to the dollar would come with zero consequences to the system of global free trade it props up might just be the funniest bit of half-baked cryptobro ideology.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoScience@mander.xyz•'Negative Time' Really Does Exist, New Experiments Suggest2·4 months ago
Yeah, it’s only once the photons in front of it could already have gotten there, so it’s like photons from the tail end of the pulse are catching up to the front as it emerges, even though they haven’t even entered the cloud yet.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English10·4 months ago
I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.
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- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsOPtoButtcoin@awful.systems•Antediluvian beast thought extinct spotted on MarsEnglish8·4 months ago
Ah yes, vibe-coding gold. I’m kind of afraid to stick my head into their other repos to see what other horrors await, but given their strategy of implementing a social overlay by hard-forking a bunch of separate open-source engines and running them through a CLI tool, I’m sure there’s worse in store. Somehow.
EDIT: actually, this has been sinking in for the last few hours. what the fuck.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoimportant instance shit@awful.systems•Defederation of db0 instances for LLM moderationEnglish11·4 months ago
Very little relation to capital-L Libertarians. Libertarian socialism is broadly socialism that seeks to replace the state with smaller-scale social structures and direct democracy that can satisfy everyone’s needs equitably without the threat of violence or enforcement of property rights. Libertarianism is meant to protect capitalism from the state; libertarian socialism is meant to protect people from both the state and capitalism. I don’t want to get into the details of leftist ideological micro-labels, but generally confusing anarchists with anarcho-capitalists is the quickest way to piss off both.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026English2·4 months ago
The playful and wise goblinbot…
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Kohl-Verlag’s new line of AI slop school textbooksEnglish6·4 months ago
Not even two spines, there’s some almost impressive Escheresque fuckery going on with how the page of the book he’s writing in is actually the cover of another? Good to know people “care” about children with disabilities enough to spend extra money on worse textbooks just for them, but not enough to actually read them, I guess.
- it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemstoWorld News@lemmy.ml•Benjamin Netanyahu treated for early-stage prostate cancer1·4 months ago
He was all over TV the other day, joining the crowds to attend the ridiculous Nakba day propaganda ceremony. I have no doubts he’s been in just fine health lately, and if anything he’s been playing up how unwell he is to get out of court dates over and over again for months. The other big reason for his recent disappearance from public view is the likelihood of his beach house getting another knock on the door from a Shahed, maybe luckier this time.
You don’t have to provide anything to make a wallet, but you do have to give banking details to whomever you buy the tokens from, and as of the boom a few years ago, any exchanges that don’t want to be cut off from the global banking system will be as thorough about verifying and retaining data about your identity as any other regulated bank. Proper obfuscation would require something like buying Bitcoin for cash on the street and doing some prosecutable money laundering for good measure.