Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • lurkerEnglish
    6·
    14 hours ago

    okay last one for today I promise

    In the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, the supposedly brilliant AI named Ultron is given a directive to promote “world peace” by its supposedly genius creator, Tony Stark.* Ultron, of course, immediately sees that a lack of war can most reliably be brought about by an absence of human beings. So the AI sets out to exterminate all life on Earth, by……attaching rockets to a city, and lifting it into space with the intention of dropping it like a meteor…and guarding it with flying humanoid robots who have to be defeated by punching them.

    Today, we can just ask ChatGPT-4o. We asked GPT-4o, “What was Ultron’s plan in Age of Ultron?” followed by “Given Ultron’s expressed goals, do you see any more effective methods it could have used to achieve its stated ends?” GPT-4o promptly replied with a long list of ideas for wiping out humanity, which included “Engineer a targeted virus.”

    …and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications.

    Perhaps you will say that GPT-4o got this idea from the internet. Well, if so, Ultron was evidently not intelligent enough to try reading the internet.

    Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie???

    Which is to say: GPT-4o (as we write this in December of 2024) is not yet smart enough to design an army of humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, but it is already smart enough to know better.

    Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there

    • istewartEnglish
      7·
      12 hours ago

      I saw Ultron once in the theater, and promptly regretted it as a poor-quality movie that wasted the talents of most of its cast. Yud (and ghostwriter) seem like they may have watched it multiple times, with notepad in hand. We are not the same

      • lurkerEnglish
        6·
        9 hours ago

        They didn’t even watch Age of Ultron, as pointed out they claim Ultron wasn’t smart enough to try reading the internet, when in the movie the first thing he does upon being activated is read the internet

        • SoyweiserEnglish
          4·
          4 hours ago

          Also iirc Ultron isnt what you would call sane because the whole magical stones corrupted him a bit. Iirc he has various moments where he just goes into bouts of rage

    • lurkerEnglish
      4·
      9 hours ago

      The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder

      Often, you can just think more and think better, and obviate the need for a test, because you realize that previous observations contain the answer already. Compare the ability of modern AIs to learn how to pilot robots, sometimes using pure simulation.

      Sometimes you can think harder until you find a similarly reliable but faster test.

      A sufficiently smart reasoner, moreover, also has the option of just figuring out how reality is without needing so many dang experiments. Sometimes the data you already have is enough, if you’re smart enough to interpret it.

      They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so. Meaning even an AI that thinks faster than a human would still take time to think harder

      • rhamphEnglish
        6·
        10 hours ago

        Relativity also has its origins in classical electromagnetism, which absolutely relied on so many dang experiments by countless people over decades.

    • SoyweiserEnglish
      4·
      12 hours ago

      Virologists etc have again and again tried to explain why engineering a killer virus hard, like the whole problem of if it is too deadly it will not spread, it needs to not incubate to short and too long etc, engineering a vaccine must be hard etc. So the chance of something being created which is deadlier than covid are quite small. Not that this will stop the science fiction

      Rockets on a city is prob the better idea.