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)
this isn’t surprising, but it turns out that when tested, LLMs prove to be ridiculously terrible at summarizing information compared with people
I’m sure every poster who’s ever popped in to tell us about how extremely useful and good LLMs are for this are gonna pop in realsoonnow
If those kids could read they’d be very upset
Fellas, my in laws gave me a roomba and it so cute I put googly eyes on it. I’m e/acc now
please be very careful with the VSLAM (camera+sensors) ones, and note carefully that iRobot avoided responsibility for this by claiming the impacted people were testers (a claim the alleged testers appear to disagree with)
thanks for the tip! 🙏
On bsky you are required to post proof of cat, here at e/acc you are required to post proof of googly roomba
Take a look w/ your own googly eyes
Even better than I had thought, I expected smaller eyes. Thanks, it is glorious. That smile.
e/vac
Interview with the president of the signal foundation: https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in there, the observation that LLMs and the broader “ai” “industry” wee made possible thanks to surveillance capitalism, but also the link between advertising and algorithmic determination of human targets for military action which seems obvious in retrospect but I hadn’t spotted before.
But in 2017, I found out about the DOD contract to build AI-based drone targeting and surveillance for the US military, in the context of a war that had pioneered the signature strike.
What’s a signature strike?
A signature strike is effectively ad targeting but for death. So I don’t actually know who you are as a human being. All I know is that there’s a data profile that has been identified by my system that matches whatever the example data profile we could sort and compile, that we assume to be Taliban related or it’s terrorist related.
this mostly uses metadata as inputs iirc. basically somedude can be flagged as “frequent contact of known bad guy” and if he can be targeted he will be. this is only one of many options. this is also basically useless in full scale war, but it’s custom made high tech glitter on normal traffic analysis for COIN
Thanks for sharing this. <3
Read the original Yudkowsky. Please. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
This holiday season, treat your loved ones to the complete printed set* of the original Yudkowsky for the low introductory price of $1,299.99. And if you act now, you’ll also get 50% off your subscription to the exciting new upcoming Yudkowsky, only $149 per quarter!
*This fantastic deal made possible by our friends at Amazon Print-on-Demand. Don’t worry, they’re completely separate from the thoughtless civilization-killers in the AWS and AI departments whom we have taught you to fear and loathe
(how far are we from this actually happening?)
This reminded me, tangentially, of how there used to be two bookstores in Cambridge, MA that both offered in-house print-on-demand. But apparently the machines were hard to maintain, and when the manufacturer went out of business, there was no way to keep them going. I’d used them for some projects, like making my own copies of my PhD thesis. For my most recent effort, a lightly revised edition of Calculus Made Easy, I just went with Lulu.
