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.
i really, really donāt get how so many people are making the leaps from āneural nets are effective at text predictionā to āthe machine learns like a human doesā to āweāre going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten yearsā.
like itās multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. iām no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of āintelligenceā, but itās also pretty obvious that all LLMās are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. iām just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike justā¦ completely fail at the first step of asking āso what exactly is the program doing?ā
The y-axis is absolute eye bleach. Also implying that an āAI researcherā has the effective compute of 10^6 smart high schoolers. What the fuck are these chodes smoking?
this article/dynamic comes to mind for me in this, along with a toot I saw the other day but donāt currently have the link for. the toot detailed a story of some teacher somewhere speaking about ai hype, making a pencil or something personable with googly eyes and making it āspeakā, then breaking it in half the moment people were even slightly āengagedā with the idea of a personād pencil - the point of it was that people are remarkably good at seeing personhood/consciousness/etc in things where it just outright isnāt there
(combined with a bit of en vogue hype wave fuckery, where genpop follows and uses this stuff, but theyāre not quite the drivers of the itsintelligent.gif crowd)
https://mander.xyz/post/13749821 thatās probably this not sure if it ever happened
Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.
how exactly did he get googly eyes on a pencil. big āthen an eagle flew around the classroomā energy
yeah, was that. not sure it happened either, but itās a good concise story for the point nonetheless :)
deleted by creator
Theyāre just one step away from āOuija board as a Serviceā
Ouija Board, Sexy Lady Voice Edition
Either sexy voice or the voice used in commercials for women and children. (I noticed a while back that they use the same tone of voice and that tone of voice now lowkey annoys me every time I hear it).
Same with when they added some features to the UI of gpt with the gpt40 chatbot thing. Donāt get me wrong, the tech to do real time audioprocessing etc is impressive (but has nothing to do with LLMs, it was a different technique) but it certainly is very much smoke and mirrors.
I recall when they taught developers to be careful with small UI changes without backend changes as for non-insiders that feels like a massive change while the backend still needs a lot of work (so the client thinks you are 90% done while only 10% is done), but now half the tech people get tricked by the same problem.
i suppose there is something more āmagicalā about having the computer respond in realtime, and maybe itās that āmagicalā feeling thatās getting so many people to just kinda shut off their brains when creators/fans start wildly speculating on what it can/will be able to do.
how that manages to override peopleās perceptions of their own experiences happening right in front of it still boggles my mind. theyāll watch a person point out that it gets basic facts wrong or speaks incoherently, and assume the fault lies with the person for not having the true vision or what have you.
(and if i were to channel my inner 2010ās reddit atheist for just a moment it feels distinctly like the ways people talk about Christian Rapture, where flaws and issues youāre pointing out in the system get spun as personal flaws. you arenāt observing basic facts about the system making errors, you are actively in ego-preserving denial about the āinevitability of aiā)