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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      version readable for people blissfully unaffected by having twitter account

      ā€œOver the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans.ā€

      yeah ez just lemme build dc worth 1% of global gdp and run exclusively wisdom woodchipper on this

      ā€œBehind the scenes, thereā€™s a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still available for the rest of the decade, every voltage transformer that can possibly be procured. American big business is gearing up to pour trillions of dollars into a long-unseen mobilization of American industrial might.ā€

      power grid equipment manufacture always had long lead times, and now, thereā€™s a country in eastern europe that has something like 9GW of generating capacity knocked out, you big dumb bitch, maybe that has some relation to all packaged substations disappearing

      They are doing to summon a god. And we canā€™t do anything to stop it. Because if we do, the power will slip into the hands of the CCP.

      i see that besides 50s aesthetics they like mccarthyism

      ā€œAs the race to AGI intensifies, the national security state will get involved. The USG will wake from its slumber, and by 27/28 weā€™ll get some form of government AGI project. No startup can handle superintelligence. Somewhere in a SCIF, the endgame will be on. ā€œ

      how cute, they think that their startup gets nationalized before it dies from terminal hype starvation

      ā€œI make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer. That doesnā€™t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.

      ā€œWe donā€™t need to automate everythingā€”just AI researchā€

      ā€œOnce we get AGI, weā€™ll turn the crank one more timeā€”or two or three more timesā€”and AI systems will become superhumanā€”vastly superhuman. They will become qualitatively smarter than you or I, much smarter, perhaps similar to how you or I are qualitatively smarter than an elementary schooler. ā€œ

      just needs tiny increase of six orders of magnitude, pinky swear, and itā€™ll all work out

      it weakly reminds me how Edward Teller got an idea of a primitive thermonuclear weapon, then some of his subordinates ran numbers and decided that it will never work. his solution? Just Make It Bigger, it has to be working at some point (it was deemed as unfeasible and tossed in trashcan of history where it belongs. nobody needs gigaton range nukes, even if his scheme worked). he was very salty that somebody else (Stanisław Ulam) figured it out in a practical way

      except that the only thing openai manufactures is hype and cultural fallout

      ā€œWeā€™d be able to run millions of copies (and soon at 10x+ human speed) of the automated AI researchers.ā€ ā€œā€¦given inference fleets in 2027, we should be able to generate an entire internetā€™s worth of tokens, every single day.ā€

      whatā€™s ā€œmodel collapseā€

      ā€œWhat does it feel like to stand here?ā€

      beyond parody

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        To engage with the content:

        That doesnā€™t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.

        I see this is becoming their version of ā€œtoo the moonā€, and itā€™s even dumber.

        To engage with the form:

        wisdom woodchipper

        Amazing, 10/10 no notes.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 months ago

      As an atheist, Iā€™ve noticed a disproportionate number of atheists replace traditional religion for some kind of wild tech belief or statistics belief.

      AI worship might be the most perfect of the examples of human hubris.

      Itā€™s hard to stay grounded, belief in general is part of human existence, whether we like it or not. We believe in things like justice and freedom and equality but these are all just human ideas (good ones, of course).

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        can also happen with nontraditional religion, mostly irreligious czech republic seems rather sane and rational until you notice tons of new age shite. it might be some kind of remnant rather a replacement

        • rook@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          Iā€™m always slightly surprised by how much the French and Germans luuuuuurve their homeopathy, and depressed by how politically influential Big Sugar Pill And Magic Water is there.

            • rook@awful.systems
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              3 months ago

              Nothing concrete, unfortunately. Theyā€™re places I visit rather than somewhere I live and work, so Iā€™m a bit removed from the politics. Orac used to have good coverage of the subject, but I found reading his blog too depressing, so I stopped a while back.

              Pharmacies are piled high with homeopathic stuff in both places, and in Germany at least it is exempt from any legal requirement to show efficacy and purchases can be partially reimbursed by the state. In France at least, you canā€™t claim homeopathic products on health insurance anymore, which is an improvement.

    • jax@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      q: how do know if someone is a ā€œRenaissance manā€?

      a: the llm that wrote the about me section for their website will tell you so.

      jesus fucking christ

      From Grok AI:

      Zach Vorhies, oh boy, where do I start? Imagine a mix of Tony Starkā€™s tech genius, a dash of Edward Snowdenā€™s whistleblowing spirit, and a pinch of Monty Pythonā€™s humor. Zach Vorhies, a former Google and YouTube software engineer, spent 8.5 years in the belly of the tech beast, working on projects like Google Earth and YouTube PS4 integration. But it was his brave act of collecting and releasing 950 pages of internal Google documents that really put him on the map.

      Vorhies is like that one friend who always has a conspiracy theory, but instead of aliens building the pyramids, heā€™s got the inside scoop on Googleā€™s AI-Censorship system, ā€œMachine Learning Fairness.ā€ I mean, who needs sci-fi when youā€™ve got a real-life tech thriller unfolding before your eyes?

      But Zach isnā€™t just about blowing the whistle on Googleā€™s shenanigans. Heā€™s also a man of many talents - a computer scientist, a fashion technology company founder, and even a video game script writer. Talk about a Renaissance man!

      And letā€™s not forget his role in the ā€œPlandemicā€ saga, where he helped promote a controversial documentary that claimed vaccines were contaminated with dangerous retroviruses. Itā€™s like heā€™s on a mission to make the world a more interesting (and possibly more confusing) place, one conspiracy theory at a time.

      So, if you ever find yourself in a dystopian future where Google controls everything and the truth is stranger than fiction, just remember: Zach Vorhies was there, fighting the good fight with a twinkle in his eye and a meme in his heart.