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)

  • @selfA
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    282 months ago

    remember all the fucking rubes saying Proton’s LLM wasn’t a problem cause only business and visionary accounts had access to it? well, only one month later of fucking course they went back on that and now it’s included with duo and family accounts, and my soon to be cancelled unlimited account just popped an ad for it on the compose window trying to get me to opt into the free trial for the fucking thing (and also the button’s purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)

    • @BlueMonday1984
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      142 months ago

      Why do I get the feeling we’re gonna see a colossal tech crash

    • @o7___o7
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      112 months ago

      is this the bad place?

    • Sebastian/S.T. Veje
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      72 months ago

      @self I wonder what “popular demand” and “overwhelming number of requests”. Are there actually a lot of people asking for this? Are there more than there are people begging them not to? Maybe I just live in an anti-AI bubble, because I sure don’t encounter a lot of pro-AI views.

      • @selfA
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        82 months ago

        it’s not just you — I can dig up the posts if you’re curious, but Proton wrote their last user survey so it was impossible to say no to this LLM crap directly, and they still got caught massively fudging the numbers to make this needless bullshit look popular. I can promise you it’s just the same people doing that again, except this time there’s no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over

        • Sebastian/S.T. Veje
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          62 months ago

          @self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Proton’s users to be exactly the type of person who’s against this. But of course it’s easy to fudge with numbers.

          • @selfA
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            72 months ago

            I would expect most of Proton’s users to be exactly the type of person who’s against this

            that’s very true! unfortunately, we’ve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Proton’s board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too — that’s why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)

            we’re not sure if something changed that suddenly made them go all in on their bad ideas, but the initial communication around Scribe was how much Proton’s business users wanted it — and the survey was very much crafted to get what looked like a pro-LLM response from that demographic. Proton has essentially admitted that they’re doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; it’s a shame they’re willing to burn their business down for that kind of short-term gain. I can only imagine them enabling the LLM for all their paid accounts this quickly is either a desperation move because the feature didn’t do the numbers they hoped for, or it’s a sign that Proton’s otherwise compromised.

        • David
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          52 months ago

          @self It’s probably the same folks who wanted the Bitcoin wallet.

    • noodle
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      2 months ago

      @self @zogwarg
      Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.

      Who isn’t huffing this nonsense?

      • @BlueMonday1984
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        72 months ago

        Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.

        Its worse for me - I’ve got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, I’m not using them for anything particularly important.

      • @froztbyte
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        62 months ago

        from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that aren’t, although there’s not really anyone with feature match on some of proton’s features afaik

        • @selfA
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          52 months ago

          I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and they’ve promised (for what that’s worth) they don’t have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I can’t truly recommend it — as always, I have to point out that Tuta is still a single point of failure like Proton, and one day I hope we’re able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isn’t gpg or anything like it — imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming they’re not the same person) to use that kind of thing)

        • noodle
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          52 months ago

          @froztbyte
          I forgot I’m using their VPN too, and they accept bitcoin (not a big deal, but useful). I was aware of Tuta and fastmail when I chose Proton.

          For now I’ll prioritize moving to a self managed domain to make swapping provider easier in future.

            • Mii
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              2 months ago

              Posteo is from Germany and they’re reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so it’s not as batteries included as what Proton offered.

              I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.

              Another option like that is mailbox.org. They’re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.

              • @V0ldek
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                42 months ago

                Posteo is from Germany

                That’s significantly less comforting than Proton’s Switzerland. It’s in 14 Eyes after all.

                • Mike
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                  62 months ago

                  Switzerland may not be in 14 Eyes, but it’s still got its own surveillance apparatus and Swiss companies are still required to respond to lawful requests from the Usual Agencies. It’s also a signatory to various mutual aid treaties. So I’m not sure how much difference this actually makes in practice beyond “marketing”.

  • @selfA
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    223 months ago

    via mastodon

    image description

    a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:

    lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :

    are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.

    but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.

    but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.

    maybe you’re not being negative enough

    • @o7___o7
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      2 months ago

      Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      92 months ago

      Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.

      Anyway it’s not that great but here’s my attempt at the sneer you asked for:

      “Additionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions.”

      • @V0ldek
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        62 months ago

        Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN

    • @swlabr
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      82 months ago

      Like a century of science: yeah we’re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. There’s no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.

      MSFT: hold my beer

  • @swlabr
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    2 months ago

    When [musk’s new] supercomputer gets to full capacity, the local utility says it’s going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes per year.

    • @o7___o7
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      72 months ago

      The locals might get ornery about this, and I’d be willing to make the trip to help.

  • @gerikson
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    183 months ago

    Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be “analyzing” the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”

    https://awful.systems/comment/4649129

    Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke

    • @istewart
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      73 months ago

      It’s remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He’s worked on that, but it’s clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn’t very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I’m thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.

      But you can’t convince me that you’re really the world’s best technical interviewer if you’re also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you’re suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who’s financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they’re concerned about where he might end up otherwise?

      • @bitofhope
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        83 months ago

        The only thing I’ve seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.

      • @corbin
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        73 months ago

        Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what they’re saying. I gather that it’s easy to empathize with and doesn’t require listeners to actually learn much since they’re essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.

        • @aio
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          53 months ago

          I don’t think it’s very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new “AI” major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that “computation” is more important than electrical engineering.

      • @sinedpick
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        73 months ago

        Lex hasn’t optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee’s and the (implicitly) listener’s ego.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      53 months ago

      some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be “inflation”

      Someone’s been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).

      • @gerikson
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        3 months ago

        The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.

        Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasn’t really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.

        • @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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          93 months ago

          It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it’s a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it’s a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it’s so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don’t the people we keep electing to fix it just… do that?

          • @gerikson
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            83 months ago

            Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn’t started using it and outcompeting everyone?

            There’s only 2 answers to that:

            1. the gold standard doesn’t work in the modern economy, the one that has lifted millions out of poverty and created untold wealth (to great environmental damage, sure)
            2. the gold standard is being kept from them by (((they)))

            Answer 2 is obvious if you’re a fascist.

            • Mike Knell
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              43 months ago

              @gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.

            • David GerardMA
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              3 months ago

              Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.

              I’m familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they can’t print money and the populace doesn’t trust them to print money - so every year it’s more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.

              So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.

  • @maol
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    3 months ago

    I told one of my college professors I’d been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said “can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it” and without thinking I said “why would I use chat-gpt? It’s rubbish” and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.

    This was after he’d said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.

  • @rook
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    163 months ago

    One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.

    Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.

    This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.

    • @Soyweiser
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      82 months ago

      Every day? I dont think I have read that post at all. (This is both a joke and not a joke, as I had not read it, I did now and I was amused, so thanks).

    • @V0ldek
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      82 months ago

      I immediatelly knew who and what you were talking about without even clicking.

      May the fact that he also lives inside my head rent-free be some solace to you.

  • @Architeuthis
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    2 months ago

    OpenAI manages to do an entire introduction of a new model without using the word “hallucination” even once.

    Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its ‘reasoning’ when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, it’s not really clear.

    Can’t wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don’t exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.

    • @BigMuffin69
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      162 months ago

      Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:

      bless you Melanie.

      Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you

      Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesn’t understand the rules of chess

      ^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)

      Dog tax

    • @o7___o7
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      92 months ago

      Would there ever be a way to tell that they didn’t just feed the answers into the training data?

    • @swlabr
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      92 months ago

      Pay no attention to the three LLMs stacked together behind the curtain!

        • @froztbyte
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          62 months ago

          felon: the most divorced man to ever live

          sammy: the most swirly-short edgelord to ever walk

          that tweet is as unhinged as felon tweets tho

        • @gerikson
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          52 months ago

          You just might be a techbro if you’re worth billions and still can’t resist mouthing off on Xhitter.

          • @Soyweiser
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            2 months ago

            Mouthing off in a way that makes me go ‘ow god it IS all a scam and he knows it!’ all hype and showmanship. I wonder if he practices this type of writing like this stance was also so obviously practiced.

            (When it all implodes and the final step of the grift is the drama movies about it, I’m at least happy that Rick Gomez will make a passable Sam Altman (No idea why that blog didn’t use a normal picture of Sam, but they decided to put Sam and Rick in the teleporter))

  • Sailor Sega Saturn
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    3 months ago

    Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.

    A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) “if you think that’s bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱”.

    Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.

    • @selfA
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      3 months ago

      quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isn’t doing it:

      Do you have any references/examples of this?

      tons

      rapid7 for example use LLMs to analyze code and identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.

      Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this.

      must’ve been another company then which i got confused with the name

      Good thing you have tons of examples.

      Right?

      e: you’ll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steve’s other posts are about

    • @selfA
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      123 months ago

      Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.

      a new source of anxiety has formed

      in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I don’t think Lemmy’s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but it’s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed

      • @froztbyte
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        awful’s probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and they’re one of the bigger operations around

        pro-tip: do not learn things about how TLDs work (and I mean the bit beyond dns architecture), it is cursed knowledge you can’t unlearn

        and with that warning delivered, y’all may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late it’s a gateway drug

        regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. AP’s identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/

        (e: good lord I was out of it when I wrote this post)

      • @Soyweiser
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        .mobi? They became the admins of the file format? And they paid for it? Good luck with that. ;)

        E: me after reading the article. Ow god nothing fucking works indeed, that is dire. I actually checked the date to see if this wasn’t some old post. Nope 9/11 2024. Buffer overflow + lapsed domains.

    • @bitofhope
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      62 months ago

      Fuck it, we’re going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.

      • @selfA
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        42 months ago

        you have no idea how much I’ve been tempted to do UUCP

    • David GerardMA
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      63 months ago

      I liked this comment on the HN post:

      Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.

    • @V0ldek
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      113 months ago

      2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution

      • Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
      • Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
      • Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements

      ah good, we’re still on schedule for that I guess

    • @Soyweiser
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      103 months ago

      Somebody played cookie clicker.

    • @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      72 months ago

      you left the best one:

      First successful experiments in “temporal arbitrage” using quantum prediction models

      not only they know about “temporal arbitrage experiments” but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment

      • @jaschop
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        82 months ago

        Frankly, it just didn’t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.

  • @froztbyte
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    153 months ago

    new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about “ontologically, is ‘superhuman prediction’ the same class as superintelligence?”

    why? oh, y’know, just things:

    • @BigMuffin69
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      I’ve clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn’t just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You’d prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I’m fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!

    • @gerikson
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      123 months ago

      You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.

    • @swlabr
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      113 months ago

      BRB training an LLM to be a super-goalpost-mover

    • @bitofhope
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      93 months ago

      Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.

      I’ll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.

      • @Soyweiser
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        93 months ago

        As zero cannot exist as a chance, there is a chance this will happen.

        • @zbyte64
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          22 months ago

          That’s why I vote 3rd party in presidential elections.

          • @froztbyte
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            42 months ago

            how to spot the US angst:

    • @V0ldek
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      I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.

      Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?

      How did you go from “predict the future”, an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??

      • @froztbyte
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        73 months ago

        obvies they’re just 30% better at predicting the future than you

        • @V0ldek
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          113 months ago

          I’ll cut you with a Y axis I swear on me mum

    • @Soyweiser
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      ‘This tool can do X at a superhuman level’ is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.

    • @Soyweiser
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      From the reactions:

      “With enough garbage the model will become sentient”

      “I mean thats how humans are raised tho”

      AAAAAAAAAAAA

      (There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).

      As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. “Holy shit, I think therefore I am!”

      • @swlabr
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        123 months ago

        diminish humans and humanity

        AKA tell on themselves

    • @mirrorwitch
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      103 months ago

      how’s the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?

      • @selfA
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        93 months ago

        we have some dedicated Nix threads on FreeAsm, our community for open source stuff that might give you a good recap of the latest stuff. where I’m sitting as a former Nix contributor and advocate is — nothing is fixed, all this obvious fash shit worked so well it’s being tried in other open source communities, and I really would like a nice alternative to NixOS so I can finally release a lot of the Nix stuff I’ve been sitting on (and also because nixpkgs keeps breaking — so many maintainers left that some of the further corners of the package set I use are already showing a lot of rot)

    • David GerardMA
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      93 months ago

      Lix fixed it last month of course