Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 05 May 2024 - eviltoast

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post, thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    14Ā·
    8 months ago

    that was quick! the CEOā€™s denial is very funny for a number of reasons, but the jigā€™s up ā€” the supposed point of this device (the assistant) just straight up works on an Android phone, and their modifications to AOSP are almost certainly relatively trivial shit (permissions hole-punching for app interoperabilityā€¦ I canā€™t actually name a second thing theyā€™d need).

    but speaking of that denial:

    We are aware there are some unofficial rabbit OS app/website emulators out there. We understand the passion that people have to get a taste of our AI and LAM instead of waiting for their r1 to arrive. That being said, to clear any misunderstanding and set the record straight, rabbit OS and LAM run on the cloud with very bespoke AOSP and lower level firmware modifications, therefore a local bootleg APK without the proper OS and Cloud endpoints wonā€™t be able to access our service.

    hoo boy, in detail:

    • what unofficial emulator? this is the APK the device runs.
    • what rabbit OS? the fucking thing runs an AOSP fork locally.
    • it seems to access rabbitā€™s cloud endpoints just fine in the video. they even make an account with the device.
    • is the response here really that it isnā€™t an Android phone cause all the functionality is in the cloud? cause that really doesnā€™t sound like something that needs bespoke hardware to me.
    • pyrex@awful.systemsEnglish
      8Ā·
      8 months ago

      My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldnā€™t have worked)

      I donā€™t want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

      The code is open source with licensing requirements, so Iā€™m therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

      • For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
      • For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

      I can imagine him responding in three ways:

      • ā€œSure, here is another lieā€ ā€“ and then heā€™s locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
      • ā€œWe donā€™t think we have to do thatā€ ā€“ and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
      • <no reply> ā€“ and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.
      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        4Ā·
        8 months ago

        oh wow, thatā€™s a good point I hadnā€™t considered. I looked around and thereā€™s no open source releases or disclosures associated with rabbit at all (unsurprisingly, they donā€™t even admit the thing runs on AOSP in any material I can find). interestingly, a DuckDuckGo search for a rabbit r1 source disclosure digs up a deleted backend source leak from an account named rabbitscam before anything else (mod note: for obvious reasons, nobody should link the archived contents of that source leak, even though they seem fucking hilarious)

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            7Ā·
            8 months ago

            thatā€™s a pretty big hint as to how someone got the APK ā€” they most likely just dumped the device, and I look forward to an analysis of the contents of the full ROM dump.

            most of the orange site thread is absolute garbage, but their CTO posted this incoherent crap on discord (of course itā€™s discord):

            If someone spends enough time with the login minions they can extract these code. But these code are locked down and are sanitized. LAM lives elsewhere. This is someone looking at the rabbit hole not understanding how it works. And tries to be smart.

            whatā€™s fucking wild is a lot of the orange site posters just take this indecipherable bullshit as fact? like a bunch of the thread just starts criticizing the leak because thereā€™s no LLM model in it but like, thatā€™s the fucking point? according to the leakā€™s README, the LAM is just a thin and ridiculously insecure way to hook GPT up to a tiny selection of third-party services without even using a proper API. itā€™s mostly just a ridiculously fragile test automation that wonā€™t scale, triggered by GPT (or, letā€™s go stupider, itā€™s probably actually activated by a fuzzy match on the transcript of the userā€™s voice input). so many orange site posters are trying to talk past the fucking point of the leak, and for fucking what? an overpriced ugly orange cell phone that isnā€™t actually useful for anything.

            and not to talk past the elephant in the room myself: you can extract the fucking node backend source from rabbitā€™s login ā€œminionsā€ (services?) if you just spend enough time with them? what in the fuck?