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)
As anyone who’s been paying attention already knows, LLMs are merely mimics that provide the “illusion of understanding”.
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lol fandom could have been even worse
data moat
ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:
- The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
- Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
- Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle
Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.
Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @[email protected] for better commentary*
Me, a nuclear engineer reading about “Google restarting six nuclear power plants”
lol, lmao even
Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”
Zitron’s given commentary on PC Gamer’s publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:
He’s also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley’s worst excesses. I don’t have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.
v light, only weakly techtakes material, but I’m immature enough to want to share:
spoiler
I just got a sales email from “Richard at Autodesk” titled “Hear from the probing experts”
Does anyone read these things before or after they’re sent?
Does anyone read these things before or after they’re sent?
It sounds like spam - by my guess, they usually aren’t read at all.
Thanks to the power of Technology™ we can have an LLM generate spam, an automailer send it out to millions, where an automated spam filter can identify them and hide them in a separate inbox to be automatically deleted in a couple of days. Of course the technology isn’t perfect and sometimes someone sees one of these ads and, I assume, spends money on a product. But I have faith that these problems are solvable and we’ll be able to totally automate email spam to no longer interact with human beings at any point. Once that’s done we can apply the same methodologies to weekly internal memos, daily team meetings, and even unsolicited dick pics. Imagine never needing to take or see pictures of a stranger’s junk ever again while still massively scaling up the number of unsolicited dick pics in flight at any given time.
and even unsolicited dick pics.
But what about the dck pcks?
Musk’s twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer
twitter gon’ have nothin’ left but the cranks
Just guys like that and guys like this
the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends
have implemented jwt (used the library, first in the company)
so uh, they keep self-fellating on Twitter about how they invented their own CAD program over the objections of the haters
here it is, it’s an extremely thin wrapper around the typescript version of manifold with live reloading on changes. note that not only is manifold already a CAD library, they already have a web-based editor that reloads the model on code changes, and kache’s live reloading is just
nodemon. the server part looks like it’s barely modified from a code example. the renderer is just three.js grabbed from a CDN.it’s so weird they didn’t take the necessary 2 weeks to learn how to write the CAD parts of the CAD system they made!
hackers and builders (both in the a16z definition of) are some of the fucking worst things out there today
the absolute worst type of coworker from my cubicle days: heard about a technology at a conference, decided they invented it
This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.
I need to look up what auth protocols this guy has worked on so I can stay away from them.
conversely, it might be a rich vein of toctou
kache miss
and hitting all the Ls
Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that’s not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.
Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.
(MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)
I almost want to go Twitter diving to see if kache has the requisite unhinged rant about how universities are only making quantum physics hard to get money/because of woke or whatever
e: holy shit I already regret this
oh, cool, they also claim to be a twitter engineer. that’s probably telling too (if true)
yeah don’t do it to yourself. I forget how I originally noticed this weirdo, it may have been through amolitor99’s continuous anthropology safari of TPOT freaks. Speaking of which, somebody needs to get that guy over here
dammit now I’m going to have to look at twitter
tpot fresh on my mind, too. just yesterday i was telling someone about how one of the people semi in that cluster had me going 🤨 and then had to explain a little about some of the highlights of tpot
whoa…on second thought, maybe this dude is having a manic episode or something? yeesh!
yeah, 3b1b animations can take you through all of undergrad math in probably a month if it all existed and you used anki
We could bottle this arrogance and sell it as an emetic.
And besides, we all know that mathematics videos peaked with the Angle Dance.
as one of many people here who has undergone undergrad math, i reckon a month of youtube and anki might not be enough for even intro to linear algebra. I’m even saying this as someone who skipped all lectures and crammed before all the tests.
Oh. He retweets Cremieux.
Speaking of twitter shit, I’m sad that it’s back online in Brazil.
New pair of Tweets from Zitron just dropped:
I also put out a lengthy post about AI’s future on MoreWrite - go and read it, its pretty cool
Boo! Hiss! Bring Saltman back out! I want unhinged conspiracy theories, damnit.
It feels like this is supposed to be the entrenchment, right? Like, the AGI narrative got these companies and products out into the world and into the public consciousness by promising revolutionary change, and now this fallback position is where we start treating the things that have changed (for the worse) as fair accompli and stop whining. But as Ed says, I don’t think the technology itself is capable of sustaining even that bar.
Like, for all that social media helped usher in surveillance capitalism and other postmodern psychoses, it did so largely by providing a valuable platform for people to connect in new ways, even if those ways are ultimately limited and come with a lot of external costs. Uber came into being because providing an app-based interface and a new coat of paint on the taxi industry hit on a legitimate market. I don’t think I could have told you how to get a cab in the city I grew up in before Uber, but it’s often the most convenient way to get somewhere in that particular hell of suburban sprawl unless you want to drive yourself. And of course it did so by introducing an economic model that exploits the absolute shit out of basically everyone involved.
In both cases, the thing that people didn’t like was external or secondary to the thing people did like. But with LLMs, it seems like the thing people most dislike is also the main output of the system. People don’t like AI art, they don’t like interacting with chatbots in basically anywhere, and the confabulation problems undercut their utility for anything where correlation to the real world actually matters, leaving them somewhere between hilariously and dangerously inept at many of the functions they’re still being pitched for.
Eigen “Turn the Homeless into Soylent” robot strikes again
arggghhh no one can make me feel blind rage like this smarmy nazi piece of shit can
You know, I can’t tell if this is supposed to be “I know you’re saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but it’s more complicated than that” or “I know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and I’m honestly okay with that”.
Gonna guess the latter given where it’s coming from and the fact that the actual “more complicated” is a salad of non sequiturs.
eigen is squarely in the tpot crew
it’s definitely not coming from a good place
Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.
As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
The first clause of the opening line, and we’ve already hit a “citation needed”.
He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize “science, technology, and the economy”.
You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.
The first image in that second link is perhaps the most incoherent political cartoon I’ve ever seen. Why is Uncle Sam as played by Angry Jeff Bridges wearing the Chinese flag as a cape??
After he started rambling about his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, it was obvious his brain was cooked.
As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
Arrow of time and all that, innit? And God help me, I actually read part of the post as well as the discussion comments where the prompt fondlers were lamenting that all it takes is one rogue ai code to end the world because it will “optimize against you!” I assume Evil GPT is constructing anti matter bombs using ingredients it finds under the kitchen sink.
I remember he went on julia galef’s podcast to talk about the MUH and she was like “but what does that mean” and simple questions like that and he flailed, it was painful to hear
This is just straight-up gossip, but why not:
Tegmark used to go around polling physicists at conferences about which interpretation of quantum mechanics they prefer. A colleague of mine said that they were sitting near Tegmark and saw him fudging the numbers in his notes — erasing the non-Many Worlds tallies from those who said they supported Many Worlds as well as others, IIRC.
A tally mark that has been shifted unethically in order to win a nerd fight is now called a tegmark.
Bless. You know I’m here for the hot goss.
