Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting 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: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

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.

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesnā€™t it?

      At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

        I expect history to repeat itself quite soon - where previously using the term ā€œartificial intelligenceā€ got you looked at as a wild-eyed dreamer, now, using that termā€™s likely getting you looked at as an asshole techbro, and your research deemed a willing attempt to hurt others.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      This does suck for all the non-LLM ML stuff that has actual usage. (Even if a percentage of that was also snake oil, or had dubious success rates).

      • otherstew@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Ehh, if youā€™re calling your ML stuff AI then thatā€™s on you (and youā€™re probably not technically serious about what youā€™re doing anyway). Other people are pointing out that AI isnā€™t a term that many compsci/software people would use, and neither the article (or afaict the study) or my experience suggest that ML has the same negative association as AI.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          AI has been and always will be the term for making the computer play a game against you. A search tree with some prunning is not ML, but if you use it to implement a chess bot then it is AI in the game sense.

          If youā€™re not doing video games then the term is essentially meaningless