Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024

Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don't quite have a snappy post in you? 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 here 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.

TinyTimmyTokyo ,
@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems avatar

Anthropic's Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/6f99be16-a89e-4a10-9ac0-f2fb552aa5fc.png

swlabr ,

A friend that wants you to have an aggressive brain tumour to make an AI look good is no friend at all

froztbyte ,

There are far too many people in this world who learned both wrong things from the “Pray tell, Mr Babbage” anecdote

froztbyte ,

“Oh, some patient data. Let me quickly casually scan this into the sv datacorp. What’s that…privacy concerns? Naaaaah I changed the filename”

dgerard OP Mod ,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

oh lol just made this a post too

Jayjader ,

"But look how convincing [it] sounds!"

.... how did we get to the point where the ai bros are un-ironically telling us, as a selling point, that their shiny toy literally gives false yet convincing-sounding medical diagnoses ?!?!?!

If I were working on Claude and wanted to hype it up, I would not talk about this experiment online or in public. If I were working on Claude and wanted to be responsible towards "the public", I would use this example as a cautionary warning, not to further hype up the tool.

This feels like the slight period at the beginning of the NFT craze when I wasn't yet comfortable dismissing out of hand anyone excited about them, because surely there was a least some useful application that wasn't for scamming people, and surely this many people couldn't all be so deluded about the same idea.

bitofhope ,
@bitofhope@awful.systems avatar

"getting rid of sweatshop labor with no replacement would lead to significantly worse conditions … sweatshops should be replaced with liberal markets"

dgerard OP Mod ,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

also a very big opinion with the rationalists and EAs

swlabr ,

The path to hell is paved with liberal markets.

sailor_sega_saturn ,
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

Someone on discord linked me to this AI generated horror-show of a "childrens" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nywBUSaHFgY (I hesitate to give them any more views, Internet Archive says youtube vids take a few days to process though)

Which appears to be a channel of entirely AI generated video paired to children's songs. And it is gosh darn creepy and gross and exploitive and unhealthy.

I hope youtube cracks down on shit like this.

gnomicutterance ,
@gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io avatar

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    froztbyte , (edited )
    • 🙅 youtube applies helpful filters and actively works to tamp down things actively gaming metrics
    • 👉 get dem tasty ad-clicks boiiiiiiiis

    it's truly a place with one of the longest-standing incentives problem configurations too, I think? I recall people both on- and off-site there complaining about this form of it going back at least 6~8y by now

    carlitoscohones ,

    Behind the Bastards had a few episodes on how AI children's books are on offer at Amazon - also creepy and unhealthy.

    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-ai-is-coming-for-your-children/id1373812661?i=1000617646703

    Amoeba_Girl ,
    @Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems avatar

    Amazingly atrocious. I think this is my favourite https://youtu.be/A26bO26VnKQ

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    just realised that Musk's angry face in the Don Lemon interview is the same face as an angry Skibidi Toilet

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    if my style isn't ridiculous-ulous-ulous-ulous

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    a lotta yall still dont get it

    AI equity holders can use multiple ZIRP juices on a single AI

    so if you have 1 OpenAI and 3 ZIRP juices you can create 3 new AI startups

    saucerwizard ,

    If I came to believe the entire tech scene at this point was all ZIRP grift would I be right?

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    at this point it's the standard analysis, so yes

    froztbyte ,

    going to choose to believe that ZIRP juices are a previously unreleased Juicero product

    swlabr ,

    How many victory points is that

    gerikson ,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.

    Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304

    'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929

    This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217

    [1] when a notable person in CS dies there's sometimes a black bar under the HN header

    self ,
    @self@awful.systems avatar

    fucking christ. it takes a lot to fuck up my day, but a quick scroll through that thread seeing how quick these vultures (including one notable person who’s the reason why I’m ashamed to talk about my lambda calculus projects) are trying to capitalize on Vernor’s legacy is absolutely doing it

    HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied.

    why in the fuck? is the famous sci-fi author with a heavy CS background not notable enough for the standards of the site whose creator is a much less notable self-help author whose CS background is failing to make a working Lisp 3 times and writing programming textbooks nobody reads?

    sinedpick ,

    can you please talk more about your lambda calculus projects?

    self ,
    @self@awful.systems avatar

    sure! there was a little bit about it in the first stubsack and I posted a bit more about it in this thread on masto (with some links to papers I’ve been reading too, if you’d like to dig into the details on anything)

    overall what I’m working on is a hardware implementation of a Krivine machine, which uses Tromp’s prefix code bitstream representation of binary lambda calculus as its machine language and his monadic IO model to establish a runtime environment. it isn’t likely to be a very efficient machine by anyone’s standard, but I really like working with BLC as a pure (and powerful) form of computational math, and there’s something pleasant about the way it reduces down to a HDL representation (via the Amaranth HDL in this case). there’s a few subprojects I’ve been working on as part of this:

    • the basic HDL implementation targeting open source FPGA synthesis and simulation
    • a hardware closure allocator and garbage collector
    • an assembler to convert lambda calculus expressions into their binary form (which starts to resemble ML with a bunch of high level capabilities, with very little code either in the assembler or in ROM on the device — that’s one part of what makes the work interesting)
    • a lazy version (Krivine machines are call-by-name, which is almost there, and the missing pieces needed for lazy evaluation look a lot like a processor cache but with more structure)
    • I have the intuition that the complete Krivine machine will be fairly light on FPGA resources, so I’d like to see how many I can synthesize onto one core with parallelism primitives, FIFOs, and routing included
    • lambda calculus machines can do arithmetic and high-level logic without an ALU, which is neat but extremely inefficient. I have some basic plans sketched up for an arithmetic unit that’d allow for a much more cycle and memory efficient representation of integers and strings, and a way to derive closures from them

    I’ve been working on some of this on paper as a sleep aid for a while, but I’m finally starting on what’s feeling like a solid HDL implementation. let me know if you want more details on any of it! some of the more far off stuff is really just a mental sketch, but writing it out will at least help me figure out what ideas still make sense when they’re explained to someone else

    self , (edited )
    @self@awful.systems avatar

    for anyone who’s fucking lost reading the above (I can’t blame ya), lambda calculus is the mathematical basis behind functional programming. this is a fun introduction. the only things you can do in lambda calculus are define functions, name variables, and apply functions to other functions or variables (which substitutes the variables for whatever they’re being applied to and eliminates the function). that’s all you need to represent every possible computer program, which is amazing

    a Krivine machine is a machine for doing what the alligators in that intro are doing, automatically — that is, reducing down lambda functions until they can’t be reduced anymore and produce a final value. that process is computation, so a Krivine machine is a (rather strange) computer

    sinedpick , (edited )

    I have a scattered interest in lambda calculus too so I'd love to follow this project. Tromp's BLC definitely hits a sweet spot of complexity/size when it comes to describing computation in a way that's deeply satisfying.

    Have you looked into interaction nets/other optimal beta-reduction schemes (there's a project out there called HVM)? Probably way too high level for now though. I am fascinated by the possibility of these algorithms making church-representations more asymptotically efficient (or even balanced ternary)

    self ,
    @self@awful.systems avatar

    I have a scattered interest in lambda calculus too so I’d love to follow this project. Tromp’s BLC definitely hits a sweet spot of complexity/size when it comes to describing computation in a way that’s deeply satisfying.

    exactly! it’s such a cool way to write a program, and it’s so much more satisfying than writing assembly for a von Neumann (or any load/store) machine. have you checked out LambdaLisp? it’s one of my inspirations for this project — it’s amazing that you can build a working Lisp interpreter out of BLC, and understanding how that was done taught me so much about Lisp’s relationship with lambda calculus.

    I plan to release my HDL as a collaborative project once I’ve got enough done to share out. currently I’ve got the HDL finished for the combinational circuit that makes bitstream BLC processing efficient with word-oriented memory hardware, and I’m doing debugging on the buffer that grabs words from memory and offsets them if they represent a term that isn’t word-aligned (which is a pretty simple circuit so I’m surprised I’ve managed to implement so many bugs). there’s quite a bit left to go! IO is still a sticking point — I know how I want to do it, but I can’t quite imagine how memory and runtime state will look after the machine reads or writes a bit.

    Have you looked into interaction nets/other optimal beta-reduction schemes (there’s a project out there called HVM)?

    that seems awesome! I really like that it can do auto-parallelization, and I want to check out how it optimizes lambda terms. for now my machine model is a pretty straightforward Krivine machine with some inspiration taken from the Next 700 Krivine Machines paper, which seems likely to yield a machine that can be implemented as circuitry. that paper decomposes Krivine-like machine models down into combinators, which can be seen as opcodes, microinstructions, or (in my case) operations that that need to be performed on memory during a particular machine state.

    once I’ve got the basic machine defined, I’d like to come back to something like HVM as a higher performance lambda calculus machine and see what can be adopted. one of their memory invariants in particular (the guarantee that each closure is only used once) maps really well to my mental model of what I imagine a hardware parallel lambda calculus machine would be like

    sinedpick ,

    I found LambdaLisp from your mastodon post and was immediately intrigued. I'm going to try and run it to get a better understanding of how the IO system works, and maybe even cook up my own BLC interpreter to run it! The hardware stuff is definitely out of my depth, but this may be a great chance to learn.

    self ,
    @self@awful.systems avatar

    that’s a great idea! the only BLC VMs I know of are written in a very obscure style (Tromp’s especially — his first interpreter was an entry into the International Obfuscated C Code Contest and he only posted the (relatively) unobfuscated one later) and I think there’s plenty of room for something written to be more comprehensible. I’m also not aware of any VM that implements call-cc from Krivine’s original paper, which has interesting applications. and of course, all the Krivine machines I know are relatively slow and very memory-inefficient — but there’s low hanging fruit here that can make things better.

    one thing I might take on is implementing a visual krivine machine — something with a GUI that shows its current state and a graph of all the closures in memory. that would be a big boon for my current work, and I might see if I could graft something like that onto the simulation testbench for my HDL implementation.

    gerikson ,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    What made me mad was them referring to the Deep* books as "hard SF". Arguable A Deepness... could be as it's set in the Slow Zone so FTL travel is impossible, but A Fire... is classic space opera.

    self ,
    @self@awful.systems avatar

    right? it’s a weird combination of these folks never engaging with the work they pretend to celebrate and trying to pretend that their AI fantasy will turn real life into a space opera. it’s fucking awful

    bitofhope ,
    @bitofhope@awful.systems avatar

    Ah damn, Justine has my respect for a bunch of cool and interesting stuff but this is just embarrassing, unless I'm missing some extremely dry satire.

    froztbyte ,

    That’s how she’s got a lot of people’s respect, with them being unaware of the other shit. There’s some history going way back to OWS, recommendations that people read Moldbug, and other off-colour shit. I don’t have a link handy immediately but it shouldn’t be too hard to find

    froztbyte ,

    https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/occupying-the-throne-justine-tunney-neoreactionaries-and-the-new-1

    Jayjader ,

    Fuck, that's disappointing. I remember being quite impressed with her "a truly universal binary execution format" blog post detailing a way to compile c code into a sort of self-executing portable archive (unless I'm mixing things up - she is the person running justine.lol, is she not?).

    Thanks for sharing those articles.

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    oh she's very good technically! also a Nazi

    jonhendry ,
    @jonhendry@iosdev.space avatar

    @bitofhope @gerikson

    She wants/wanted the US government to be replaced with a Silicon Valley CEO.

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    Justine Tunney, the literal neoreactionary?

    bitofhope ,
    @bitofhope@awful.systems avatar

    I had been mercifully spared from her nontechnical opinions until now.

    mawhrin ,
    @mawhrin@awful.systems avatar

    she's a fascist.

    bitofhope ,
    @bitofhope@awful.systems avatar

    Yeah I can tell. So much for that respect.

    Soyweiser , (edited )

    The replies to somebody aggressively (and downvoted) pointing out some of the flaws in Jarts post are bad. Damn.

    an LLM cannot be used to create a better LLM

    By that logic most humans are also not intelligent.

    No you dweeb, they are talking about model collapse, that thing what happens to this 90's tech.

    Oh, it doesn't work? That's because IT'S NOT INTELLIGENT.

    Ok, let's run this test of "real intelligence" on you. We eagerly await to see your model. Should be a piece of cake.

    This is both a weird adhom and a god is hiding in the gaps style argument. (While I have some sympathy for this Peter Watts style argument it is incredibly weak (their post history (8) is more of this very weak stuff)).

    Edit: forgot to mention what I actually initially wanted to say:

    Idiocracy

    I still think that movie actually is quite hopeful, it shows us a world where the current consumerist society in the USA can remain to exist for 500 years (that is how long he is frozen), and there is nobody invading and taking over when the USA becomes this automated and dumb. We should all hope the future is this hopeful (guess they fixed the climate, and achieved fully automated luxury capitalism (which still sucks)) and non-violent.

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    many victim impact statements about the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are harrowing.

    some are not quite so harrowing

    https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/b8c3f7dc-9e8e-43ad-a60e-b28ba28b81f6.png

    TinyTimmyTokyo ,
    @TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems avatar

    Strange man posts strange thing.

    https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/228f608f-55b1-430c-beec-715c114866f4.jpeg

    fasterandworse ,
    @fasterandworse@awful.systems avatar

    he could have just admitted he couldn't get the ai to draw a dick. Instead, a future without dicks is his idea of a surprising future

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    dude's taking non-feminising estrogen u kno

    Soyweiser ,

    Those image generators are surprisingly bad at drawing nether regions, it turns into real horror shows quickly. A thing the 'it is so over for real women' incel weirdos don't seem to talk about. (I checked it a while back no idea if it has improved since, but the conclusion was that sex workers can breathe easily (apart from them being fucked by mastercard/visa being run by cryptoprudes, governments going after them, and the general economic downturn driving the demand for sex work down but that is a different issue)).

    froztbyte ,

    I know it’s stupid to try really think about this because the idiot was only trying for engagement farming, but what the fuck did they think that image was portraying (that supported their batshit commentary)?? That we’re all gonna become the blue dude from Watchmen, but in copyright-friendly conditions?!

    sailor_sega_saturn ,
    @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

    This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

    blakestacey ,
    @blakestacey@awful.systems avatar

    The Lawnmower Man (1992), dir. Brett Leonard

    mii , (edited )

    Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-bitcoin-halving-really-is-different-this-time/ar-BB1kb6o5

    The halving will occur at block height 840,000 (a count of how many blocks have been hashed to the blockchain), and already people are predicting that will be the most valuable block to be mined to date. This is related to the point above: Ordinals works by assigning serial numbers to individual satoshis (or sats, the smallest denomination of BTC), which turns a fungible asset like bitcoin into something with provenance, identity and scarcity.

    Tristan, the founder of Ordiscan.com, which tracks Ordinals projects, predicts that collectors of these “rare sats” could value the data in block 840,000 at $50 million dollars. Under the “Rodarmor Rarity” system, which assigns value to Bitcoin protocol events like difficulty adjustments and halvings, the first satoshi in the block alone could be worth upwards of $1 million, he wrote in a blog post.

    They're turning Bitcoins satoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?

    skillissuer ,
    @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    i wasn't really a sneerclubber before, but i did hang out in r/buttcoin. i remember that this was briefly an alleged thing among cryptobros few months ago, with side effect of making seleccion of bitcoin maxis very angry, and somehow making tx even slower and more expensive

    titotal ,

    Apparently there's a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and... solve cold fusion?

    James: You can just 'feel' the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You're literally going to ask it to 'solve cold fusion' and walk away for 6 months.

    ...

    Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?

    Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.

    froztbyte ,

    James: You can just ‘feel’ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent.

    ...... fucking hell that's a few layers of quackery and far-AI promise nuttery all at once

    I'm not going to substantively touch on most of those, because by and large I think everyone here gets it

    but 'feel' the future.... it's so ... "just vibes, man". petition to crowdfund these poor dipshits some buttplug.io-compatible sex toys or something, give them something else to feel besides vibes

    froztbyte ,

    I am extremely impressed (and a little concerned) by the fact that lemmy decided that text needs syntax highlighting

    sc_griffith ,
    @sc_griffith@awful.systems avatar

    I'll give even odds that he was jacking off while writing that

    jonhendry ,

    Where are they going to find 500 people in India who are good at solving cold fusion and will do it for pennies.

    sailor_sega_saturn ,
    @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

    Who needs things like "experiments" and "data"? Surely a chatbot superintelligence can extrapolate all of physics from two frames of a video of an apple falling.

    fasterandworse ,
    @fasterandworse@awful.systems avatar

    CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/

    the website links to a "concept paper" which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that don't add up to much at all

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105858/https://www.giggleacademy.com/Giggle%20Academy%20v0.4%2020240221.pdf

    such as these under "gamification";

    Badges (NFTs), points, scores, rankings, etc.

    Early education (elementary school levels) are easier to gamify. High school subjects become more difficult as the subject becomes more complex. Hopefully by then, the kids have developed enough learning habits to sustain their on-going learning.

    or under "completely online"

    There are some drawbacks to the online approach, such as lack of peer support, group learning, etc. We won’t be able to solve all problems. We will try to address some of these issues in later iterations.

    Use AI & automation

    Scalable

    The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so there's at least some money there (?)

    anyway, dodgy af

    fasterandworse , (edited )
    @fasterandworse@awful.systems avatar

    this project intrigues me because we're able to see the brainstorm doc that he believes is shareworthy, combined with a reasonably slick website and a careers page.

    There is no open position for a "product designer" or any kind of role that would be interested in concretely working on addressing the clear problem statement in the brainstorm doc. I have to assume there isn't anyone in the group doing that already because they would not let a brainstorm doc be published like that, as if it has any value.

    This is what bothers me so much about iterative design culture and the "doing something is better than nothing" mantra. It makes out that identifying the problem/purpose is the assignment, and undermines the REAL design work of coming up with a good response to that purpose.

    If this project gets off the ground, they'll start building and they'll hire UX designers and they'll just make something that resembles an online school and focus on making sure it has blockchains and nfts and all that shit, and the whole concept of "design" will be relegated to user acceptance and finding frictions to remove.

    At no point will anyone sit down and say "how can we effectively address illiteracy in developing countries" and find out why, what, how, and all the barriers, all the realities, the complexities, the options for means to achieve certain things, all the DESIGN.

    Its no different for everything else in tech, they all start from this point where nothing was initially designed beyond throwing together an idea and iterating it into a behemoth that needs an army of staff to groom its hair and clip its toenails. The people given design titles (ux designers, product designers) are not answering to an overarching design or any principled basis for design.

    it should also be said that the giggle academy is probably a publicity thing for CZ's character

    jonhendry ,

    "Children's website launched by inmates" ought to be the end of it.

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    skibidi toilet, right, but on the blockchain

    V0ldek ,
    @V0ldek@awful.systems avatar

    I like the character arc of David learning about skibidi toilet and having his entire understanding of the universe pivoted with respect to it.

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    TELL ME I'M WRONG

    froztbyte ,

    Giggle Academy (from prison?)

    my brain latches onto this as "gigglepig" (a la Brooklyn 99), and will accept no other meanings

    saucerwizard ,

    Back during the last Sneerclub blowout I found my reddit account getting psychoanalyzed by twitter rationalists. They were very upset about the Rod Dreher thing.

    for some reason this is still hilarious

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    whaaat, do tell

    saucerwizard ,

    It you search sneerclub on twitter you might find it. Apparently the Dreher thing indicates psychopathy (how they play the ‘bullied nerd’ trope again and again is fascinating to me).

    gerikson ,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    Oh god what did Dreher do now? Last I heard he was divorced and living in Budapest.

    saucerwizard ,

    Tweeting about penises every few days. More seriously: his mental health is way not good and he’s going full woo.

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    amazed when it turned out rod dreher's wingnut welfare was ONE single patron funding him for years

    so i'm not surprised he's completely fucked now

    saucerwizard ,

    My favorite part was the ex-boyfriend revelations. Also the one picture of twinkRod - he looks like a Lost Boys extra i swear to god.

    gerikson ,
    @gerikson@awful.systems avatar

    OK thanks all for the updates. I was aware of most of them. It’s been quiet around him in the venues I frequent. I’d like to think it’s because most people recognize he’s not well and it’s punching down to make fun of him.

    jonhendry ,

    He's ensconced in Hungary nursing on Orban's teat and producing flattering nonsense.

    saucerwizard ,

    I can’t figure out how to edit my post but his dad was also revealed to be a Klan bigwig.

    swlabr , (edited )

    CW: Palestine-Israel.

    Something I’ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesn’t really surprise me, but that’s not what I’m commenting on.

    One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israel’s use of “AI” in warfare. I’m only going to link one source and I’m not going into it too deeply.

    So what I’m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.

    To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said it’s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.

    *of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.

    skillissuer ,
    @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    the old thing was use of ai in iron dome, because generally mistaking a civilian target for a rocket is pretty hard given differences in size and speed, and autonomous air defense is a thing that already exists for decades. the ai part comes from predicting if a given rocket will fall on populated area, and pointing radar-guided interceptors to those that do

    the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you're doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it's working or not you'd need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage

    people at palantir are probably making very detailed notes

    swlabr ,

    the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you’re doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it’s working or not you’d need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage

    Yeah, and I don’t think they are ever going to be explicit about how their “AI” works.

    dgerard OP Mod , (edited )
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:

    anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?

    he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshi's Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius

    anyway, he's decided it's time to flip to the non-losing side

    https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735

    https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430

    (stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)

    not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack

    db0 ,
    @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    You sent me down the rabbit hole.

    ...as for what's right for you, I dunno. The one major downside of fullnode is that there is only one developer working on it, though I think that once I move the project to reddit's github and announce that "reddit is making a wallet" we will have many more eyes and developers on the project.

    Just fucken lol.

    earthquake ,
    @earthquake@lemm.ee avatar

    And, like every other crypto guy, Ryan has pivoted to AI now. His github profile says "Building AI with AI. Founder @artintellica."

    https://artintellica.com/ Truly, a website.

    dgerard OP Mod ,
    @dgerard@awful.systems avatar

    jesus goatfucking christ

    swlabr ,

    I’ve started noticing what might be described as “filler art” being done by AI. For example, while a local restaurant was being constructed, it had boards up to obscure the goings on with AI art on it- easily distinguished by bad hands, disturbing looking noodles, and amorphous blobs resembling, uh, more morphous blobs. I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to ruin the sanctity of my phone.

    Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.

    mii ,

    Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.

    So it was at least accurate advertising on their part.

    swlabr ,

    Pizza that tasted like it was generated by AI tbh

    jonhendry ,
    @jonhendry@iosdev.space avatar

    @swlabr @mii

    Too many fingers?

    swlabr ,

    I mean I either want no fingers or all the fingers for my pizza

    skillissuer ,
    @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    this kind of filler art, ai spam, ai porn, ai seo optimized drivel, ai generated fakes, ai propaganda, ai jpegs that are generated cheaply enough that human artists can't get by on these rates, all of these are things that people don't want to make on moral, legal or some other grounds. just like with all of other automation (well there's no physical risk in making pictures). there will be more of it

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