Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!
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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
How do you deal with ADHD overload? Everyone knows that one: you PILE MORE SHIT ON TOP
https://pivot-to-ai.com - new site from Amy Castor and me, coming soon!
thereās nothing there yet, but weāre thinking just short posts about funny dumb AI bullshit. Web 3 Is Going Great, but itās AI.
i assure you that we will absolutely pillage techtakes, but will have to write it in non-jargonised form for ordinary civilian sneers
BIG QUESTION: whatās a good WordPress theme? For a W3iGG style site with short posts and maybe occasional longer ones. Fuckinā hate the current theme (WordPress 2023) because it requires the horrible Block Editor
How do you deal with ADHD overload? Everyone knows that one: you PILE MORE SHIT ON TOP
how dare you simulate my behavior to this degree of accuracy
but seriously Iām excited as fuck for this! Iāve been hoping you and Amy would take this on forever, and itās finally happening!
how dare you simulate my behavior to this degree of accuracy
@AcausalRobotGod frantically taking notes
molly is delighted that people might stop telling her to
arguably we shoulda done it last year, but better late than never
I wouldnāt even call yāall late; public opinion towards AI is just starting to turn from optimism to mockery, so this feels like the perfect opportunity to normalize sneering in a way thatās easier for folks without context to consume than SneerClub or TechTakes.
when I write the blockchain stuff, itās like, hereās one paragraph of the actual thing going on, and hereās another thousand words to make it comprehensible
So much yak shaving involved with blockchain.
Or any of this for that matter, I imagine you have already once answered the question of āhow are you involved with twitter being bought by Muskā, āwell in 1995, Scientology ā¦ā
Really appreciate you and Amy! o7
I just passed a bus stop ad (in Germany) of Perplexity AI that said you can ask it about the chances of Germany winning Euro2024.
So I guess itās now a literal oracle or something?? What happened to the good-old ādog picking a food bowlā method of deciding championships.
I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.
I asked my phone charger about the chances of the same
didnāt get an answer I could bet with, tho :<
People are so, so, so bad at telling whatās a bot and whatās real. I know social media is swarming with bots, but if youāre interacting with somebody whoās saying anything more complicated than āP o o s i e I n B i oā itās probably not a bot. A similar thing happens in online games, too, and itās usually the excuse people use before harassing someone else
But damn the lengths people will go to to avoid admitting they were wrong. This comment chain just keeps going on with somebody whoās convinced
{origin="RU"}{faith="bad"}{election_manipulation="very yes"}must be real because something something microservices: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1dlg8ni/russian_bot_falls_prey_to_a_prompt_iniection/l9pbmrw/ It reads like something straight off /r/programming or the orange siteThen it comes full circle with people making joke responses on Twitter imitating the first post, and then other people taking those joke responses as proof that the first one must be real: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dimlyl/twitter_is_already_a_gpt_hellscape/l9691c8/
This account kind of kicked up some drama too, basically for the same reason (answering an LLM prompt), but itās about mushroom ID instead: https://www.reddit.com/user/SeriousPerson9 Iāve seen people like this who use voice-to-text and run their train of thought through ChatGPT or something, like one person notorious on /r/gamedev. But people always assume itās some advanced autonomous bot with stochastic post delays that mimic a humanās active hours when like, itās usually just somebody copy/pasting prompts and responses.
Sorry if you contract any diseases from those links or comment chains
Yeah I thought this one looked very very made up and far too on the nose. I think itās fine to label human-run spam/troll accounts as bots though.
Somewhat related I stumbled upon robots flirting with eachother the other day.
letās just log off and leave internet to robots. itās what what Zizek would have wanted (nsfw)
Itās like young-earth creationists who believe that dinosaur bones were installed as-is at the beginning of time time in order to test us, so their existence proves nothing about geology or evolution.
the first post (and some bits) was featured earlier in the stubsack, if you want to check some other parts
but holy hell that reddit thread
well count me as bamboozled then. stupider, pre-gpt version of this consists of robocalls that are really operated by people, but they donāt speak, they just choose one of several canned responses. why donāt they speak? because most of them are illegal immigrants and it would be obvious by accent
Perplexity pulling a semi ouroboros. For effect, yāsee? Itās not a completely consistent feature of the design or anything. Thatās just crazy talk.
also in techtakes
Not sure where I got the link to this video from, could very well be from this place, but look āGamersā made an NFT game without blockchain and cryptocurrencies! And it will potentially lead to other Gamers being scammed! Innovation!
akshually, the tokens are perfectly fungible, my stickernana is totally indistinguishable from the million other stickernanas out there. Not that it matters for the purpose of useless speculative trades.
Shit you are right, I should have said an NFT game without the NFTs. I stand corrected! Also would have been funnier.
AHAHAHAHAAH they had fucking piddly little fans blowing. I hope that made the fire worse.
I realize that these are going to have been utter fucking idiots to start with, but
no air channeling, no structures heatsinks, wide-open roof that could cause further air movement, mismatched fan sizes, extremely insufficient extractors
-15/10, would watch it burn again
just remembering this perfect video about ironic-not-ironic fascism
Tom Murphy VIIās new LLM typesetting system, as submitted to SIGBOVIK. I watched this 20 minute video all through, and given my usual time to kill for video is 30 seconds you should take that as the recommendation it is.
i love you tom seven
The scales have fallen from my eyes How could've blindness struck me so LLM's for sure bring more than lies They can conjure more than mere woe All of us now, may we heed the sign Of all text that will come to alignWatched this without sound, as I had opened the tab and wasnāt paying attention, but did you really just suggest a video where they are drinking out of a clearly empty cup? I closed it in disgust.
Thereās a bit in the beginning where he talks about how actors handling and drinking from obviously weightless empty cups ruins suspension of disbelief, so Iām assuming itās a callback.
Yes, I was making a joke, as somebody who also gets unreasonably annoyed by those things. I felt seen.
Iām not sure if theyāre a decent person or not, but I liked this sneer on the orange site, in the context of this recent rant (previously, on Awful), describing a hypothetical executive-humbling mechanism. I agree with them; Iād read that fanfiction too.
oww god owwww official MS experimental LLM feature for Excel ow ow owwwwwwwww
Iām glad they finally got around to productizing the month name inference engine
From the creators of āwe turned your date formatting into a math equation, and now many of your research papers have substantially faulty dataā, we bring youā¦
Not a big sneer, but I was checking my spam box for badly filtered spam and saw a guy basically emailing me 'hey you made some contributions to open source, these are now worth money (in cryptocoins, so no real money), you should claim them, and if you are nice you could give me a finders fee. And eurgh im so tired of these people. (thankfully he provided enough personal info so I could block him on various social medias).
I got the same thing.
From a guy called Nā¦ Viā¦? (Iām not going to further call the guy out, that is just a bit weird to hate on a single weird person).
Yup.
https://xcancel.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1802894899022533034#m
The same pundits have been saying ādeep learning is hitting a wallā for a DECADE. Why do they have ANY credibility left? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Year after year after year. Like all professional pundits, they pound their fist on the table and confidently declare AGI IS DEFINITELY FAR OFF and people breathe a sigh of relief. Because to admit that AGI might be soon is SCARY. Or it should be, because it represents MASSIVE uncertainty. AGI is our final invention. You have to acknowledge the world as we know it will end, for better or worse. Your 20 year plans up in smoke. Learning a language for no reason. Preparing for a career that wonāt exist. Raising kids who might justā¦ suddenly die. Because we invited aliens with superior technology we couldnāt control. Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banksā Culture series as a good outcomeā¦ where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME. Whatās funny, too, is that noted skeptics like Gary Marcus still think thereās a 35% chance of AGI in the next 12 years - that is still HIGH! (Side note: many skeptics are butthurt they wasted their career on the wrong ML paradigm.) Nobody wants to stare in the face the fact that 1) the average AI scientist thinks there is a 1 in 6 chance weāre all about to die, or that 2) most AGI company insiders now think AGI is 2-5 years away. It is insane that this isnāt the only thing on the news right now. Soā¦ we stay in our hopium dens, nitpicking The Latest Thing AI Still Canāt Do, missing forests from trees, underreacting to the clear-as-day exponential. Most insiders agree: the alien ships are now visible in the sky, and we donāt know if theyāre going to cure cancer or exterminate us. Be brave. Stare AGI in the face.
This post almost made me crash my self-driving car.
humans are pets
Actually not what is happening in the books. I get where they are coming form but this requires redefining the word pet in such a way it is a useless word.
The Culture series really breaks the brains of people who can only think in hierarchies.
not a cult btw
Itās mad that we have an actual existential crisis in climate change (temperature records broken across the world this year) but these cunts are driving themselves into a frenzy over something that is nowhere near as pressing or dangerous. Oh, people dying of heatstroke isnāt as glamorous? Fuck off
Ah yes, AGI companies, the things that definitely exist
Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banksā Culture series as a good outcomeā¦ where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME.
I am once again begging these e/acc fucking idiots to actually read and engage with the sci-fi books they keep citing
but who am I kidding? the only way you come up with a take as stupid as āhumans are pets in the Cultureā is if your only exposure to the books is having GPT summarize them
If youāve been around the block like I have, youāve seen reports about people joining cults to await spaceships, people preaching that the world is about to end &c. Itās a staple trope in old New Yorker cartoons, where a bearded dude walks around with a billboard saying āThe End is nighā.
The tech world is growing up, and a new internet-native generation has taken over. But everyone is still human, and the same pattern-matching that leads a 19th century Christian to discern when the world is going to end by reading Revelation will lead a 25 year old tech bro steeped in ārationalismā to decide that spicy autocomplete is the first stage of The End of the Human Race. The only difference is the inputs.
Sufficiently advanced prompts are indistinguishable from prayer
if i only could, iād prompt-engineer God,
NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But Whatās the Alternative? (archive.org)
lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? ohā¦
(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesnāt exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).
You donāt hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.
Lucky souls havenāt found sneerclub yet.
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who canāt help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of usā¦
rational_economist.webp
There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesnāt actually engage with them at all):
The problem is that āE.A. grew up in an environment that doesnāt have much feedback from reality,ā Wenar told me.
Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as āneo-colonialā in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors donāt reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.
Effective Altruism Is Flawed. Hereās Why Itās Bad News for Joe Biden.
the economist in each of us
get it out get it out get it out
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who canāt help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of usā¦
Funny how the wannabe LW Rationalists donāt seem read that much Rationalism, as Scott has already mentioned that our views on economists (that they are all looking for the Rational Economic Human Unit) is not up to date and not how economists think anymore. (So in a way it is a false stereotype of economists, wasnāt there something about how Rationalists shouldnāt fall for these things? ;) ).
didnāt the comments say ātax the hell out of themā before they were closed
Oh my god there is literally nothing the effective altruists do that canāt be done better by people who arenāt in a cult
Eating live fire ants is flawed. But whatās the alternative?
welcome post is pinned on some remote instances without obvious reason https://awful.systems/post/61
yeah thatās cos itās still pinned ;-) a year is probably enough Iāll unpin it now
i mean it didnāt show up as pinned ever before, at least for me
maybe awful.systems talking better to discuss.tchncs.de for obscure reasons? WELCOME TO FEDI WHO KNOWS HOW THE HELL ANY OF THIS WORKS
I just want to highlight that lemmy decided that .de domains were obviously legit, and the instanceās own domain does not get the autolink treatment (probably because the inner crate hasnāt been updated against IANA roots? who knows)
bless this jank
and here is a rare instance where Iāll be, like, 30% gracious. modern zoneroots are a fucking trip.
for instance, you may think you have an idea of how many there are. maybe even a guess? go on, have a guess. write it down. then open this link and post your delta
(side thought: this could be a drinking game)
I guessed 500. Thatāsā¦thatās not how many.
mastodon and bluesky are conspiracies by Big Janky Offbrand Domain Name
Wild, isnāt it? And thatās just the raw TLD config, ignoring all the weird ccTLD etc things going on
And not even mentioning the once-again-grift-rich world of altrootsā¦
thatās only desktop, jerboa autolinks both
Well fuck, now Iām going to have to dig into that, because that sounds like a wonderfully cursed divergent behaviour
maybe it was triggered by somebody responding to that post idk. nothing works, but it works reliably enough
iāve noticed that federation to kbin got significantly worse
WELCOME TO FEDI WHO KNOWS HOW THE HELL ANY OF THIS WORKS
Iām gonna get this tattooed on my knuckles. yes, all of it
I suspect whatās going on is discuss.tchncs.de probably updated lemmy to the new stable version? Iāve seen a couple of things federate that didnāt before, now that the new version is out
the confusing thing is, weāre not on the new stable version yet
Iām gonna get this tattooed on my knuckles. yes, all of it
how many fingers do you have
an accident with a teleporter and Midjourney
there was a perfectly good abyss/cthulhu joke here and you just DIDNāT
david.
THIS IS NOT A DRILL. I HAVE EVIDENCE YANN IS ENGAGING IN ACASUAL TRADE WITH THE ROBO GOD.
