Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
some numbers on recent hypewave investments in here (via techmeme)
Last year, Tom Loverro, an investor at IVP, predicted a “mass extinction event” for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs. Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the “Great Reawakening,” encouraging companies to “pour gas” on growth, particularly around artificial intelligence
jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldn’t they?
“Sam Altman canceled the recession,” joked Siqi Chen, founder of the start-up Runway Financial
one day soon I’m going to get to my project of building up a graph database of every crank and issuer of batshit statements like these, so that in times to come I can easily follow up on ‘em and see how their shit aged. but all hail sammy, the saviour! no, forget about that musk fool, no-one ever liked him! sammy is where it’s at!
I’m so sick of “if only we had more humanities in education the elites wouldn’t be fucking up the world.” that has nothing to do with reality, it never has, it never will
It really is unwarranted self importance. t humanities major
if only king leopold had been exposed to the humanities bro 😞
traveling back in time and teaching the rulers of the british empire about a little thing called literature
Two tweets and I can tell you at least 5 substacks he subscribes to
PrimalPoly was a sort of semi regular of the old sneerclub, so I can tell you a lot more than that.
he’s also figured here a couple of times too
Fr? What’s his deal?
both him and his wife are quite the pieces of work
Every day I become more convinced that this acct is an elaborate psyop being run by Yann LeCun to discredit doomers. Nobody could be this gullible IRL, right?
Amazing.
I also remember another time people did the 'let two AI’s (no idea what time it was at the time, certainly not an LLM, some other ML technique) talk to each other, but in a actual production setting (E:I was wrong on the setting, see the article for better info->), the Facebook/Meta one (First link I could find on google, didn’t read it, just a way to find out more for people who never heard about it). But then it started to produce gibberish/‘their own language’. Of course this was also a sign of it ‘waking up’.
And I note again that in the LLM experiment, the ‘AGI’s’ are still keeping perfectly fine to the bounds of the experiment, even if they do or do not directly reference the researcher. They still play into the fiction, as talking to the researcher about the other AI is part of the fiction. It would be more interesting if they did something unexpected than regurgitate video game ingame notes.
static dot dot dot emergency dot dot dot shutdown
lol
‘multiple realities’
Come on, I have written similar things while roleplaying as an AI. The first is useful when you need a quick break to go to the toilet, and the second is a good excuse because you made a mistake a real fictional AI couldn’t make.
E: also funny that they worry about the shoggoth behind the friendly face and then get freaked out when the AI’s talk in normal science fiction fluff to each other, and it doesn’t become incoherently weird. (like the example above).
I went to the study, and that’s the global market size for all sex toys annually, and just eyeballing another chart, butt plugs might be 10% of that. So butt plugs are around $3 or $4 Billion. On the bright side, unlike AI safety, butt plugs actually serve a function.
Meatloaf didn’t anticipate the budgetary implications of enlisting us all in the Armies of the Night. Thus, humanity was ill-prepared when Skynet attacked…
Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.
I’ve sat and had beer with someone (who’s worked in the space but not LLMs) who read the Bitter Lesson and got real into the idea of humans “just being universal function approximators” and had wholesale bought into the idea that we should throw everything we possibly can into this shit, no resource cost or requirement is too high or too uncertain, that it would definitely be the right thing to so
so I can tell you without no uncertainty that there are definitely people who buy into it
I poked the conversation gently, to see how far the conviction went. it was pretty comprehensively bought-in. was a somewhat surprising experience tbh
How did they respond to the counterargument that humans are simply… built different?
that was the response. and this is a person with exposure to (and their own undertakings in) creative works
it was a pretty wild conversation tbh
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YouTube recommended me this hot garbage where we judge humanities like it’s a STEM field. I want my time back or at least some quality sneers: https://youtu.be/v0eWDScWSXY?si=wgJ60AfT0YYn_4-M
Callard and Hanson, there is no way i’m watching a second of that
Considering the view counts a common thought. The amount of twitter followers vs yt subs vs actual views is funny. They even tried a tiktok.
And they are trying so hard. Andrew Tate! Hogwarts Legacy! Destiny (the streamer, not the game, betting on the wrong horse there folks) Slapping at the Oscars! Pandemics!
Dan Luu’s “A discussion of discussions on AI bias”, about techbros trying to gaslight the rest of the world into thinking ML models don’t have problems
Another example which doesn’t make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It’s just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.
the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real
I run into this exact problem so often with music: it’s extremely fucking annoying to convince search engines or other kinds of things that, yes, I do in fact want that turkish/finnish/russian/brazilian/thai/irish/…… result set from this english query, and there’s just almost zero affordance for it
they segment things into de facto solos and if you don’t already happen to have some way in which to pull on a string to lead the way there (or can input the desired query in the applicable language and spelling) you’ll have a bitch of a time. check a couple of those items from my entries on the music thread a while back for references to test with
god damn those recasting images
it will never not be hilarious how pathetic this technology/approach is
So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.
the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming
…
there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write
thanks magibook!
can’t wait for this shit to show up in usage among people who have english as an additional language at different level of fluency to their primaries. totally don’t see it causing a cascade clusterfuck in communication and comprehension.
there’s already a strain of this out there, with a lot of english-non-first students using LLMs to “make their work sound more polished”. similar as the strain using it for CVs etc
ran across a great thread on fedi a while back, will see if I can find it
It’s good that they’re offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.
I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.
Hard book have hard word and make head hurt, AI make book easy! More book read for you. No hard word. This good idea!
I want to make a zoolander riff but my brain just isn’t cooperating, so instead pretend I did (just like these people pretend their product is worth something)
Hahah lol, that was pretty good.
ah yes, the Simple English wiki filter but wrong
I can’t even
Dan Hendrycks wants us all to know it’s imperative his AI kill switch bill is passed- after all, the cosmos are at stake here!
https://xcancel.com/DrTechlash/status/1805448100712267960#m
Super weird that despite receiving 20 million dollars in funding from SBF & co. and not being able to shut the fuck up about 10^^^10 future human lives the moment he goes on a podcast, Danny boy insists that any allegations that he is lobbying on behalf of the EAs are simply preposterous.
Now please hand over your gpus uwu, it’s for your safety 🤗 we don’t allow people to have fissile material, so why would we allow them to multiply matrices?
Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(
Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated “poetry”
Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn’t it? Burn it all down.
turns out there was a good reason they wanted to turf us, we just didn’t know it yet
Ex-evangelical spotted!
What is it about growing up in insular fundamentalist communities that drives peeps straight into the basilisk’s scaly embrace?
Theres a specific word for that phenomena I believe, I just can’t remember at the moment. It certainly is a thing with all the high control group cults, say ex-JW’s.
Crank magnetism?
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When my local civilians get drawn into the conflict
via Little Bubby Child
I could hear this while reading it ahaha
Right?!
Being far from home at the moment, I really appreciate Bubby’s mountain vibes. Feels like a trip to Granny’s house.
the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data
We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.
if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result
Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.
Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.
Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.
dunno about rockets, but antenna thingy works only because you can simulate performance of antenna very reliably, precisely and quickly. This data was fed back, random small changes were made, things that were an improvement passed to the next iteration. Not sure how this approach is called but none of it is LLM
“genetic algorithm” - something I hadn’t previously seen branded as “AI”, but I guess I’m not surprised
yeah that’s it, forgot a word for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
that ST5 antenna looks like a low-poly two turn helical antenna, but how it looks like will be a function of design requirements
i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only
fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
Ugh, so many people are working the “AI will solve X problem” mill. I don’t need nor want AI to be there increasing output.
Why is he carrying books and DVDs on a baking sheet?
One is by David Brooks, so it’s guaranteed to be half baked?
He has a smart oven with AI and wants to feed it data?
FEED ME,
SEYMOURBILLY!
@BlueMonday1984 The machines are finally starting to understand art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K7aY-_b9sk
Now this is the shit. This right here. The only usecase for genAI - massively uncanny shitposts meant for consumption at 3AM in a dark corner of YouTube while on vibes enhancing substances.
This is what god wouldn’t have wanted and therefore is what we must pursue.
vibes enhancing substances
fuck yes
Biblically Accurate Gymnasts
https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/
Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.
