Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Little late but just found out that Google has partnered with Movember to push Gemini.
I saw this, so now you all get to: Alex Karp performs a stationary Gatotsu with a sabre, don’t ask me why.
Databricks CEO: “we’ve already achieved AGI fam, the haters just keep moving the goalposts”
@cityofangelle.bsky.social comments:
HAHAAHHAHAAHHAAA
Anthropic has posted two jobs, both paying $200K+.
FOR WRITERS. (Looks like a policy/comms hybrid.)
ANTHROPIC.
IS WILLING TO PAY HALF A MILLION A YEAR.
FOR WRITERS.
Whatsamatter boys, can’t your plagiarism machine make a compelling case for you?
LOL. LMAO, even.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 ᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏᄏ
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Apparently they’re doing the same with video cutters, offering fairly well paid jobs for people to try and make themselves redundant.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Maybe they just need to be *really* good at writing prompts.
Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms
Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation “feature”, guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn’t get him or didn’t deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It’s such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.
Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:
It’s indeed the case that I haven’t been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it’d had Twitter’s options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven’t been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Uh, considering his recent twitter post… this sure is something. Also" “it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience” no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).
From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their “Inkhaven Residency”. Feh.
ooooh photographic matthew embarking upon his f*shtech turn out loud at last?
Small forum tyrants
deleted by creator
sorry my brain’s already clocked out for the day (/week?), so [insert sneer here]
context is this
Meanwhile, the $800 million Kraken raised across its two recent rounds of financing further solidifies the company’s balance sheet before its planned IPO next year… Prior to the two rounds, Kraken had raised only $27 million in venture capital.
simply a mere 29.6x amplification. perfectly normal. 12000000% in line with the economic market shift between checks notes Less Than A Decade Ago and now
Reeks to me of a mad dash for all-important “exit” on the part of the VC firms who invested. Especially as public-market IPOs have become so rare compared to M&A deals or SPAC bullshit.
In other news, it appears that Cloudflare has pulled a Crowdstrike
edit: looks like the problem resolved after a few hours
Claims to be against politics in the workplace, takes down rightwing websites anyway
can we print this on shirts and send it to their office(s)?
I guess the main problem is getting reaction shots with the recipients…
I would love this, lmfao
I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week.
FUCKIN
Is there already a term for the extreme opposite of impostor syndrome? Techbro syndrome maybe?
“Techbro syndrome” would be a perfect name for it, honestly.
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn’t take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don’t know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Here’s a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/
As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and … memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm “ran out of time calculating”. How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, that’s the one thing you’re supposed to know!
So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?
He will train a neural network on GM games, then memorize the algorithm and compute the moves in his head.
The Rationalists.
Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.
alt text
A screenshot of a tweet by yougov, a uk-based organisation, showing the results of a survey which say
One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams
Include in the screenshot is a response by longwall26,
Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She’d be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know?
lmao, what’s his lesswrong username?
Off topic: if the Culture novels are ever adapted for television, all of the Culture people/ships/etc should have Scottish accents.
This might be one of those “careful what you wish for” scenarios. The neutral outcome might well be that they generate dialog with training data from Scots Wikipedia. Or Scots Grokipedia I guess
@antifuchs @techtakes The Culture won’t be adapted for TV/film without input from Iain’s heirs and his literary executors. Who are all very definitely Scottish and will have Opinions …
who gets the California accents though
That hegemonizing swarm outbreak would do nicely imho
The Affront are literally the colonial British, so they’re easy
Tired: alien horrors with tentacle beards
Inspired: alien horrors with tentacle muttonchops
@dgerard And The Empire of Azad was basically modern western imperialism writ large.
subtlety is wasted on most readers
Hey, remember Grokipedia?
Its article on Newton’s law of gravity is, like, 50% rendering errors by weight.
I saw (because for some reason grokipedia is now high in google search) that grok calls Roko (from rokos basilisk) pseudo anonymous, but isnt he just using full name and face on twitter? Such a weird small error (and change to the Wikipedia page). Didnt click the link obv.
interesting writeup on detecting ai music (newgrounds bans ai content)
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-moderation/how-to-detect-ai-audio
The Audio Mods are doing God’s work keeping the portal slop-free. Its good to know there’s at least one place where human-made work is still valued.
Just had a conversation about AI where I sent a link to Eddy Burback’s ChatGPT Made Me Delusional video. They clarified that no, it’s only smart people who are more productive with AI since they can filter out all the bad outputs, and only dumb people would suffer all the negative effects. I don’t know what to fucking say.
What you say is something on this note: Oh wow I have this amazing investment opportunity for someone like you, nobody has seen it yet, but with your intelligence and business acumen, we will get rich quick…
Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)
Assuming they have any amount of good faith, I would make the illustration that using AI is like dunning-kruger effect on steroids. It’s especially dangerous when you think know enough, but don’t know enough to know that you don’t.
it sucks when you learn a thing like that about a person. it’s like blowing an efuse: generally one way, not easy to go back without a lot of work, and you may not want to bother
I tried using Fluidsynth only to find that drums don’t work. I looked around on github and found that they are toying with copilot to fix a related issue and that vibe code has already been merged 🙃
AI struggles with simple CRUD apps, but hey let’s see how it does with DSP in C/C++
I’m sure specifics and timing don’t matter. can always tune that efficient later, amirite?!
(although once again a very I am the scream at how rapidly this toxic waste is becoming rampant in the commons :|)
