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)
Tasteful organic advertising time: the video Q+A that Amy and I did last month is now up for the public and not just our patrons. See and hear us in full rant!
lol, your own boom? or did you acquire/hire one for this?
(e: your video frame, david! maniac)
Lex Fridman: “I’m going to do a deep dive on Ancient Rome. Turns out it was a land of contrasts”
I’m doing a podcast episode on the Roman Empire.
It’s a deep dive into military conquest, technology, politics, economics, religion… from its rise to its collapse (n the west & the east).
History really does put everything in perspective.
(xcancel)
Elon Musk in the replies:
Have you read Asimov’s Foundation books?
They pose an interesting question: if you knew a dark age was coming, what actions would you take to preserve knowledge and minimize the length of the dark age?
For humanity, a city on Mars. Terminus.
Isaac Asimov:
I’m a New Deal Democrat who believes in soaking the rich, even when I’m the rich.
(From a 1968 letter quoted in Yours, Isaac Asimov.)
Also, the whole point of the foundation series (one of them) was that overconfidence in psychohistory is bad, actually. Like, foundation and empire opens with a pretty clear allegory for Bellisarius and Justinian, but the whole rest of the book is about “actually it turns out that there are circumstances outside of our model that can fuck shit up because we didn’t predict that psychic powers would be a thing and now it’s all fucked!”
For someone who supposedly read a lot of sci-fi I don’t know that he actually read them.
It also has interplanetary coal trade. (predating the netflix cut of Rebel Moon by decades), which considering the tech levels of interplanetary trade, and the energy density of coal is quite silly, and def not to be taken literally. (This is a little bit important as it shows how much the space civilization(s) in the Foundation series are not really constrained by real life resource constraints, a thing which would be a problem if you were to take the series literally and were to say create a city on Mars intending to reboot civilization)
that didn’t take long https://blog.kagi.com/announcing-assistant
my favourite thing about kagi is how when you click on the kagi logo on the kagi.com home page you get a 404
I knew Kagi was kinda screwed the moment the CEO went off like Castle Bravo, but jeez
Have you ever thought to yourself “I wish I could read Yud’s Logorrhea but in the form of a boring yet pretentious cartoon-- like a Rationalist Cinematic Universe!”?
Well boy oh boy do I have a link for you:
https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1832452673867546802
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVN_5xsMDdg
TBH I thought the whole star blinking plot point was kind of neat when I was a teenager, but thought the story got a bit muddled by the end. Of course at the time I was trying to read it as a sci-fi story and not a P(doom) propaganda piece. My mistake.
I didn’t want to watch the cartoon because I thought I could just skim the story faster, and that’s how I read the “Hurr durr AI can derive general relativity in three frames, nothing personnel, kid” story in full for the first time. It sucks that people didn’t nip Yud in the bud early enough by telling him he lacked sci-fi chops, though I suspect that wouldn’t have slowed him down at all.
The story itself is an allegory1 about AI processing information fast2. Yud wasn’t thinking of himself as a sci-fi writer when writing this; he probably thought he was the messiah delivering a sermon, which… is exactly how I’ve come to understand Yud anyway.
- the fact of which is explicitly spelt out in the middle third when it drops out of the narrative entirely to do so
- see hurr durr description in paragraph above
Oh yay my corporate job I’ve been at for close to a decade just decided that all employees need to be “verified” by an AI startup’s phone app for reasons: https://www.veriff.com/ Ugh I’d rather have random drug tests.
Our combination of AI and in-house human verification teams ensures bad actors are kept at bay and genuine users experience minimal friction in their customer journey.
what’s the point, then?
One or more of the following:
- they don’t bother with ai at all, but pretending they do helps with sales and marketing to the gullible
- they have ai but it is totally shit, and they have to mechanical turk everything to have a functioning system at all
- they have shit ai, but they’re trying to make it better and the humans are there to generate test and training data annotations
I don’t see the point of this app/service. Why can’t someone who is trusted at the company (like HR) just check ID manually? I understand it might be tough if everyone is fully remote but don’t public notaries offer this kind of service?
Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?
Depending on where you’re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. I’m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 §1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.
They advertise a stunning 95% success rate! Since it has a 9 and a 5 in the number it’s probably as good as five nines. No word on what the success rate is for transgender people or other minorities though.
As for the algorithm: they advertise “AI” and “reinforced learning”, but that could mean anything from good old fashioned Computer Vision with some ML dust sprinkled on top, to feeding a diffusion model a pair of images and asking it if they’re the same person. The company has been around since before the Chat-GPT hype wave.
Given thaty wife interviewed with a “digital AI assistant” company for the position of, effectively, the digital AI assistant well before the current bubble really took off, I would not be at all surprised if they kept a few wage-earners on staff to handle more inconclusive checks.