I know nfts are old news now, but:
lol, decentralisation.
alt text
A screenshot of some boardape nfts on opensea. All the actual images are replaced with an error message saying “this nft is not available due to an ongoing AWS outage”
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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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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All participants in the Stubsack, including awful.systems regulars and those joining from elsewhere, are reminded that this is not debate club. Anyone tempted by the possibility of debate-club behavior is encouraged to touch your nearest grass immediately. We are here to sneer, not to bicker: This is a place to mock the outside world, not to settle grand matters of ideology, unless the latter is done in an extraordinarily amusing way.
I need to lurk more, feel like I missed some good drama 🍿
US engaging in quantum socialism:
New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. [...] 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content
And yet the BBC still has a Programme Director for "Generative AI" who gets trotted out to say "We want these tools to succeed". No, we don't, you blithering bellend.
@blakestacey @BlueMonday1984 I also want my Perpetual Motion Machine and Circle-Squaring Algorithm to succeed, but what are ya gonna do? 🤷♀️
New paper on LLMs just dropped, titled LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot"!
Currently a novelty at this point, but could prove useful to make the likes of Iocaine and Nepenthes more effective - especially since the paper notes:
the damage is multifaceted in changing the reasoning patterns and is persistent against large-scale post-hoc tuning.
It does also suggest doing some actual quality control to prevent damage to the LLMs, but that sure ain't happening
Watched a debate between Emily M. Bender and Sébastien Bubeck
an OpenAI researcher
from March. As usual, Dr. Bender fucking rules. Bubeck struck me as an idiot and kind of an ass.
Another attempt to platform fascists has cropped up in FOSS, and Drew DeVault's talked all about it. Featuring our good friend Curtis Yarvin.
god damn it. i guess the name of the founder might have been a hint, only one letter away from our favorite roman saluter.
i use immich, one of the projects they seem to have actually funded in a big way. it's a very good selfhosted replacement for google photos. at least the license is actually open source, as opposed to grayjay, so here's hoping it has a future in case the fascists try to fuck with it.
i guess the problem though isn't with the funding and/or control of individual projects, it's with the long-term influence in the foss community they seem to be after.
of course the organization I know primarily for platforming fascists and astroturfing on YouTube was secretly an even worse grift and somehow tied in with Yarvin, why wouldn’t it be
given that Rossmann’s at the head of this thing too, I’m starting to regret not taking GrapheneOS (who, notably, were also a target for this grift) seriously when they said Rossmann’s involved in a bunch of terrible shit. the right to repair deserves a better figurehead.
fuckin pisses me off, given his clippy campaign is helping move pivot shirts
sigh
I WILL NOT CHANGE, CLIPPY SUCKED FIRST
hadn't been aware that rossman's into dodgy stuff (knew fairly little about him outside of some repair stuff on his channel), but ugh
also clicking through into FUTO's projects and it's all a bit gravitating around a point, "built on polycentric". so I wonder what that means?
Polycentric is an open-source, distributed social network that lets you publish content to multiple servers.
already at "I'm interested" because it's interesting to see what other work happens in this space.
and then very next sentence we get to
If you’re censored on one server, your content remains accessible from other servers
ah. I see. the "opt-out moderation" is also telling - how does it work? who knows! it's got a paragraph under introduction but seems to not be mentioned anywhere else in the docs.
extra frustrating to see because the projects these fucks are taking on (like the open cast thing) are items that sorely need stronger options in the open space. but not like this. never like this.
Haven’t seen this skeet posted here. Skeet:
It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4
who's the basilisk now?
The idea that AI will be a boon for searching the mathematical literature is undermined somewhat by how it shits the bed there too.
Every time I hear a moderate AI argument (e.g. AI will be an aid for searching literature or writing code), it's like, "Look, it's impressive that the AI managed to do this. Sure, it took about three dozen prompts over five hours, made me waste another five hours because it generated some completely incorrect nonsense that I had to verify, produced an answer that was much lower quality than if I had just searched it up myself, and boiled two lakes in the process. You should acknowledge that there is something there, even if it did take a trillion dollars of hardware and power to grind the entire internet and all books and scientific papers into a viscous paste. Your objections are invalid because I'm sure things are gonna improve because Progress."
I am doubly annoyed when I turn my back and they switch back to spouting nonsense about exponential curves and how AI is gonna be smarter than humans at literally everything.
Closely related is a thought I had after responding to yet another paper that says hallucinations can be fixed:
I'm starting to suspect that mathematics is not an emergent skill of language models. Formally, given a fixed set of hard mathematical questions, it doesn't appear that increasing training data necessarily improves the model's ability to generate valid proofs answering those questions. There could be a sharp divide between memetically-trained models which only know cultural concepts and models like Gödel machines or genetic evolution which easily generate proofs but have no cultural awareness whatsoever.
Wouldn't f(x) = x^2 + 1 be a counterexample to "any entire (differentiable everywhere) function that is never zero must be constant"? Or are some terms defined differently in complex analysis than in the math I learned?
entire always means holomorphic on the whole complex plane
I've never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it is zero at i.
It's worth noting that, unlike a real function, a complex function that is differentiable in a neighborhood is infinitely differentiable in that neighborhood. An informal intuition behind this: in the reals, for a limit to exist, the left and right limit must agree. In C, the limit from every direction must agree. Thus, a limit existing in C is "stronger" than it existing in R.
Edit: wikipedia pages on holomorphism and analyticity (did I spell this right) are good
flaviat explained why your counterexample is not correct. But also, the correct statement (Liouville's theorem) is that a bounded entire function must be constant.
Or Picard's little theorem, which says that if an entire function misses two points (e.g. is never 0 or 1), then that function must be constant.
Who is flaviat? I don't see that handle on this lemmy or Greg Egan's mastodon account, and Egan just re-tooted someone who gives x^2 + 1 as a counterexample.
Does this link work for you to see the comment? https://awful.systems/comment/9163259
now it works! I do not understand the two sentences "I’ve never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it (what? - ed.) is zero at i."
I believe those sentences can be paraphrased as, "The term entire function is only used in complex analysis. The function f(z) = z^2 + 1 is zero at z = i."
Thanks, i don't speak english natively
the poster is referring to the function f(z) = z^2 + 1
I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it but AI is shitting all over the tattoo industry. Listening to a podcast rn (Beneath the Skin) and the hosts are really not keen on the LLMs lol.
(I’m a week out from my next one woo)
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