Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 June 2024

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

o7___o7 ,
@o7___o7@awful.systems avatar

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40611600

It will never stop being incredibly funny that in the past 24 months an untold legion of people have emerged from heroic doses of shrooms/LSD clutching a note that just has “what if u could chat with a pdf???” scrawled on it

gerikson ,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

You laugh, but people in incel circles are heralding the nascent arrival of better than real AI girlfriends.

Now I am laughing harder.

Soyweiser ,

The incels have also been crying about how the upcoming robot sexbots/ai will end women forever for a decade now so it isn't anything new. (They prob are shouting about it more, but they have been obsessed by this idea already in the past).

maol ,

All I can say is bring it on. These guys seem to assume women will be furious about being replaced in this hypothetical scenario. I imagine most women would be relieved to have more free time and greater opportunities. Losing your role is only scary if you have benefited from your social position.

dgerard Mod ,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Well would you fucking believe it: it turns out that deplatforming your horrible arseholes fixes the problems! (archive)

(well, until one of the problems scrapes together $44b and buys the platform)

every fuckin time

bsky comment:

the number of times i have seen even a small private forum or discord server go from "daily fights" to "everyone gets along" by just banning one or two loud assholes is uncountable

skillissuer ,
@skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

just read this https://www.wheresyoured.at/were-watching-facebook-die/ and realized that zucc burned on metaverse enough money to push 15 or so new pharmaceuticals from bench to market

behold, effective allocation of resources under capitalism

blakestacey OP ,
@blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

Vitalik Buterin:

A few months ago I was looking into Lojban and trying to figure out how I would translate "charge" (as in, "my laptop is charging") and the best I could come up with is "pinxe lo dikca" ("drink electricity")

So... if you think LLMs don't drink, that's your imagination, not mine.

My parents said that the car was "thirsty" if the gas tank was nearly empty, therefore gas cars are sentient and electric vehicles are murder, checkmate atheists

That was in the replies to this, which Yud retweeted:

Hats off to Isaac Asimov for correctly predicting exactly this 75 years ago in I, Robot: Some people won't accept anything that doesn't eat, drink, and eventually die as being sentient.

Um, well, actually, mortality was a precondition of humanity, not of sentience, and that was in "The Bicentennial Man", not I, Robot. It's also presented textually as correct....

In the I, Robot story collection, Stephen Byerley eats, drinks and dies, and none of this is proof that he was human and not a robot.

blakestacey OP ,
@blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

Also Yud: I can't be a cult leader, because I dress funny.

zogwarg ,
@zogwarg@awful.systems avatar

But he didn’t include punctuation! This must mean it’s a joke and that obviously he’s a cult leader. The funny hat (very patriarch like thing to have) thief should only count himself lucky that EY is too humble to send the inquisition after him.

Bless him, he didn’t even get angry.

gerikson ,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

Incredible Richard Stallman vibe in this picture (this is a compliment)

Person replying to someone saying they are not a cult leader by comparing them to another person often seen as a cult leader.

Soyweiser ,

Nobody drills down to the heart of the matter, why would this prove you are not a cult leader, and what does this say about somebody like Charles Manson, who also dressed funny and sometimes was disrespected by his cult members (he was anti drugs, and his followers well yeah, not so much) does this make him also not a cult leader?

Lol at the 'where can I join your cult?' in the replies. Also literally text written on the walls, also not very crazyperson style look.

carlitoscohones ,

🙃

Not a cult just a following. Like Andrew Tate for nerds

Soyweiser ,

AGI growth lol from twitter

xcancel.com link

Edit: somebody also Did The Math (xcancel) "I eyeballed the rough numbers from your graph then re-plotted it as a linear rather than a logarithmic scale, because they always make me suspicious. You're predicting the effective compute is going to increase about twenty quadrillion times in a decade. That seems VERY unlikely."

ebu ,

i really, really don't get how so many people are making the leaps from "neural nets are effective at text prediction" to "the machine learns like a human does" to "we're going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten years".

like it's multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. i'm no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of "intelligence", but it's also pretty obvious that all LLM's are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. i'm just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike just... completely fail at the first step of asking "so what exactly is the program doing?"

BigMuffin69 ,
@BigMuffin69@awful.systems avatar

The y-axis is absolute eye bleach. Also implying that an "AI researcher" has the effective compute of 10^6 smart high schoolers. What the fuck are these chodes smoking?

gerikson ,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

Straight line on a lin-log chart, getting crypto flashbacks.

Soyweiser ,

I think technically the singularitarians were way ahead of them on the lin-log charts lines. Have a nice source (from 2005).

carlitoscohones ,

How am I ever going to work again, knowing that page is on the internet. Instead of Timecube, it's time squared.

Soyweiser ,

I'm just amazed that they hate lin charts so much that the Countdown to SIN - lin chart is missing.

E: does seem to work when I directly go to the image, but not on the page. No human! You have a torch look down, there is a cliff! Ignore the siren cries of NFTs at the bottom! (Also look behind you, that woman with her two monkey friends is about to stab you in the back for some reason).

mountainriver ,

I can't get over that the two axis are:

Time to the next event.

Time before present.

And then they have plotted a bunch of things happening with less time between. I can't even.

BigMuffin69 ,
@BigMuffin69@awful.systems avatar

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/ae27367a-51c6-43fb-85ce-e76483b9d880.png

Not a sneer, just a feelsbadman.jpg b.c. I know peeps who have been sucked into this "its all Joever.png mentality", (myself included for various we live in hell reasons, honestly I never recovered after my cousin explained to me what nukes were while playing in the sandbox at 3)

The sneerworthy content comes later:

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/920815fd-44f7-46b5-8f81-6b0967d73384.png

1st) Rats never fail to impress with appeal to authority fallacy, but 2nd) the authority in question is max totally unbiased not a member of the extinction cult and definitely not pushing crank theories for decades fuckin' tegmark roflmaou

mii ,

"You know, we just had a little baby, and I keep asking myself... how old is he even gonna get?"

Tegmark, you absolute fucking wanker. If you actually believe your eschatological x-risk nonsense and still produced a child despite being convinced that he's going to be paperclipped in a few years, you're a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit. And if you don't believe it and just lie for the PR, knowingly leading people into depression and anxiety, you're also a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit.

BigMuffin69 ,
@BigMuffin69@awful.systems avatar

Truly I say unto you , it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to convince a 57 year old man who thinks he's still pulling off that leather jacket to wear a condom. (Tegmark 19:24, KJ Version)

BigMuffin69 ,
@BigMuffin69@awful.systems avatar

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/4f4d4c74-cc8d-46a7-85ae-6a312f10f671.png

This gem from 25 year old Avital Balwit the Chief of Staff at Anthropic and researcher of "transformative AI at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute" discussing the end of labour as she knows it. She continues:

"The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial. They grasp at the ever diminishing number of places where such models still struggle, rather than noticing the ever-growing range of tasks where they have reached or passed human level. [wherein I define human level from my human level reasoning benchmark that I have overfitted my model to by feeding it the test set] Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things. "

Ah yes, even though the synthetic text machine has failed to achieve a basic understanding of the world generation after generation, it has been able to produce ever larger volumes of synthetic text! The people who point out that it still fails basic arithmetic tasks are the ones who are in denial, the god machine is nigh!

Bonus sneer:

Ironically, the first job to go the way of the dodo was researcher at FHI, so I understand why she's trying to get ahead of the fallout of losing her job as chief Dario Amodei wrangler at OpenAI2: electric boogaloo.

Idk, I'm still workshopping this one.

🐍

mii ,

Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, […]

Holy shit, these chucklefucks are so full of themselves. To them, art and expression and invention are really just menial tasks which ought to be automated away, aren’t they? They claim to be so smart but constantly demonstrate they’re too stupid to understand that literature is more than big words on a page, and that all their LLMs need to do to replace artists is to make their autocomplete soup pretentious enough that they can say: This is deep, bro.

I can’t wait for the first AI-brained litbro trying to sell some LLM’s hallucinations as the Finnegans Wake of our age.

sailor_sega_saturn ,
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

Many will point out that magic eight balls are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things.

mii ,

So apparently Mozilla has decided to jump on the bandwagon and add a roided Clippy to Firefox.

I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, the way they present it, accessibility does seem to be one of the very few non-shitty uses of LLMs I can think of, plus it’s not cloud-based. On the other hand, it’s still throwing resources onto a problem that can and should be solved elsewhere.

At least they acknowledge the resource issue and claim that their small model is more environmentally friendly and carbon-efficient, but I can’t verify this and remain skeptical by default until someone can independently confirm it.

Eiim ,

As a rough rule of thumb, if it's running locally on a CPU with acceptable performance, the environmental impact is going to be minimal, or at least within socially acceptable bounds.

froztbyte ,

This elides whatever resources were used in training/development. Which in the cases of ML models is quite often not minimal. Even the diy things you can train yourself make a significant dent. And there’s likely to be an ongoing cost of this too, because of updates

blakestacey OP ,
@blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

Check out the big brain on Yud!

I think the pre-election prosecutions of Hillary and Trump were both bullshit. Is there anyone on Earth who holds that Hillary's email server and Trump's lawyer's payment's accounting were both Terribly Serious Crimes, and can document having held the former position earlier?

gerikson ,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

Ah yes the famous trial where HRC was prosecuted and convicted, I remember that, very analogous to Trump’s case, yes.

Big Yud has been huffing AI farts for so long he’s starting to hallucinate like one!

edit the replies once again prove that a blue check is an instant -10 point to credibility.

ahopefullycuterrobot ,

My moderate distaste for people who capitalise words To Imply Some Other Meaning without Directly Stating It knows no Bounds.

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