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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

11 points
2 points

@bitofhope @BlueMonday1984 Maybe he’s going to rewrite AI in a weekend to make it good!

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6 points

Apparently the 1x engineer is taking weekends instead of working 24/7.

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9 points

It’s also incredibly misleading, maybe it was possible to “completely” re-write the UI back in 2005—never mind that most of the value would come from, the underlying geographic data being mostly correct and mostly correctly labeled—there is no way in hell that the same would achievable in 2024. (Also the notion it would take any coder 2 * 1000 / (365 * 5/7) = 7 years to achieve a comparable result is proposterous)

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12 points
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  1. Just wanted to say thanks again to the admins and community for maintaining this oasis of sanity.

  2. How do you all suppose the Great Bullshit Implosion is going to interact with our incoming US government? When it becomes clear that the money is running out, will OpenAI be able to talk the Trump government into bailing them out, or will the fash kick them when they’re down, since tech will be a nice fat scapegoat for the economy hitting the shitter?

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9 points

I don’t think Trump’s presence changes much regarding the AI bubble. It’s still massive capital and operational expenditure, with ??? revenue to show for it. Trump very likely faces a big stock market correction in 2025 or no later than 2026, just as surely as Harris or Biden would have.

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3 points

and they just added Nvidia to the indexes, replacing Intel in at least one

nvidia will be fine - they know damn well this is a bubble - but number is going to take a beating

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4 points

Doesn’t hurt them to strike while the silicon is hot.

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9 points

it looks like they’re trying to delay either of those in most ghoulish way possible https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/safe-ai-champ-anthropic-teams-up-with-defense-giant-palantir-in-new-deal/

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9 points
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OpenAI you stand accused of the crime of being woke. To make the case, we call in the expert on everything woke: James A. Lindsay.

Which is my way of saying, it will be very dumb and very paranoid, and not even wrong.

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7 points

How do you all suppose the Great Bullshit Implosion is going to interact with our incoming US government? When it becomes clear that the money is running out, will OpenAI be able to talk the Trump government into bailing them out, or will the fash kick them when they’re down, since tech will be a nice fat scapegoat for the economy hitting the shitter?

Kicking them whilst they’re down would be an easy win when “the cruelty is the point” is your unofficial motto, and there’s plenty of anti-tech sentiment for Trump to work with. And, of course, they’re a piss-easy scapegoat - AFAIK tech’s managed to piss off both political wings here.

He’s probably gonna kick them whilst they’re down.

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11 points
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the ones ending up being kicked down in this scenario have more money than god and ear of trump, not to mention that some of these were likely donors to his campaign. maybe sutskever or even saltman might be ceremonially burned at stake for posterity, but thiel and musk are gonna be safe

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8 points

I’m 100% down for a “Let them fight” moment

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11 points

I know this shouldn’t be surprising, but I still cannot believe people really bounce questions off LLMs like they’re talking to a real person. https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/47183/are-llms-unlikely-to-be-useful-to-generate-any-scientific-discovery

I have just read this paper: Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli, “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”, submitted on 22 Jan 2024.

It says there is a ground truth ideal function that gives every possible true output/fact to any given input/question, and no matter how you train your model, there is always space for misapproximations coming from missing data to formulate, and the more complex the data, the larger the space for the model to hallucinate.

Then he immediately follows up with:

Then I started to discuss with o1. [ . . . ] It says yes.

Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which o1 says yes [ . . . ]. Then it says [ . . . ].

Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which it says yes too.

I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.

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12 points
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I’m not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.

When I was a lab demonstrator in university, one of the lab exercises was somewhat hard to get right, and our team noticed a huge raft of plagiarism. Not only were multiple students using the exact same code, but it was code that didn’t even work! The course had a policy of instant failure with evidence of plagiarism, which was made clear at the start of the course, and yet this just kept happening. To top it all off, the lab exercises didn’t change from year to year, so the same code kept showing up! This plus a number of other incidents broke me and made me realise I didn’t have it in me to be this kind of educator.

It would be great if this was all a big psyop by big tech to gaslight educators into ending their careers for some kind of mass brainwashing conspiracy, because at least there would be some intention behind it. Instead, we’re poisoning collective consciousness with cyberslop because we think one day the virtual dumbass will reach enlightenment. We don’t actually have a way for that to happen, so we’re just going to metaphorically bash our own heads against rocks in hopes we glitch ourselves into the singularity.

So yeah in short my head would explode too.

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11 points

the writer’s room is [open]

that’s dasha the laptop, she used to work in a corporation but is sick of that and retired to be a writer

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16 points
3 points

I don’t blame Saltman for this one, since it’s just a more specific version of the general pathology that assumes the markets are basically Gods.

"In our top story today, the rapture has drawn the souls of the faithful into heaven and we have entered what experts are calling a “final tribulation”. We’re also receiving reports that Dread Cthulhu has awoken from his deathly slumber in his house at R’lyeh, and environmental groups are claiming that increased sightings of wolves and frost giants could herald the arrival of Fimbulwinter and through it Ragnarök.

The stock market, however, seems to be taking the literal end times in stride, with strong performances from Raytheon and other manufacturers countering a downturn in other sectors."

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3 points

you see, air defense is very useful against supernatural horrors beyond human comprehension

(also they recently changed name to RTX after merger. surely no fucked up managerial cancer would spread from there, like with Boeing-McDonnel Douglas merger. not like they make anything of absolutely critical importance for Ukrainians)

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