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 youāll 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 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Am I the only person not impressed by veo3? Yeah there are more details yada yada, but the details are still wrong.
The view of the garbage fractal isnāt improved by zooming deeper into the Bullshit-Mandlebrot Set.
Holy hell all the examples I found made me seasick. I am apparently physically incapable of watching veo3 videos.
currently reading https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570
this is PsiQuantum, who are hot prospects to build an actually-quantum computer
no, they have not yet factored 35
but they are seriously planning qubits on a wafer and they think they can make a chip with 1m noisy qubits
anyone know more about this? does that preprint (from last year) pass sniff tests?
(my interest is journalistic, and also the first of these companies to factor 35 gets all the VC money ever)
I unfortunately know jack shit about quantum computing, so I canāt really weigh in, but I am rooting for them to pull it off, because PsiQuantum getting all the VC money ever means AI stops getting all the VC money ever
Hey, if we boil the oceans via quantum research, at least we might get some new physics out of it.
New webbed brief from Heydon
New artcle from Brian Merchant: An āalways onā OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen
Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Devicetm, I think Merchantās correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Devicetm and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.
headlines of Devicetm wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brianās noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Devicetm as an open show of contempt for others, and between AIās public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valleyās reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Devicetm wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.
New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:
Whatās missing from the now ubiquitous āLLMs are good for codeā is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code thatās realistically possible
LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev
Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:
Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear heās a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feedās just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.
Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.
this one is a joke, i think. he is definitely on the fashy bullshit though
Itās not healthy for me to have my biases confirmed like this.
But it lets you adjust your priors so pleasantly!
It also means you can update your priors about your own
biasespredictive instincts being good, allowing you to be more confident in literally everything youāve ever believed or thought about for half a second. Superpredictors unite!
@BlueMonday1984 lol @ āI try not to let [performance] considerations get in the wayā
Also why do you even put a React Dev on that task š¤”āI try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way
You could show me this without any context whatsoever and my first thought wouldāve been ādid a React dev say thatā
:(
Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/
OT: just got a job interview and wanted to pass the good vibes on!
Noice!
time amplifying the nonsense around saltmanās orb grift
features a helluva lot of words while at multiple points remaining entirely incurious about the claims it amplifies
Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:
I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:
It doesnāt even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isnāt plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldnāt do.
In the collection of links of what Ive has done in recent years, thereās one to an article about a turntable redesign he worked on, and from that article:
The Sondek LP12 has always been entirely retrofittable and Linn has released 50 modular hardware upgrades to the machine, something that Ive said he appreciates. āI love the idea that after years of ownership you can enjoy a product thatās actually better than the one you bought years before,ā said Ive.
I donāt know, should I laugh, or should I scream, that itās Ive, of all people, saying that.
I donāt get it, how is every one of the most touted people in the AI space among the least credible people in the industry.
Like literally every time its a person whose name I recognize from something else theyāve done, that something else is something I hate.
ED ZITRON
FROM THE TOP ROPE
New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them
In a world that chases status, be prestigious
Iāll keep that in mindā¦
Reminds me something F.D. Signifier said on a music podcast.
Progressives are losing the cultural war in a lot of ways, but theyāll always need us because weāre the ones pushing the boundaries on art, and it turns out, no matter how ghoulish people want to act, everyone has genuine love of fucking awesome art. The true loss condition is being captured by the tools of the master.
this is ridiculously good
Rekindled a desire to maybe try my own blog ^^.
I think beyond āKeeping up appearancesā itās also the stereotype of fascistsāand by extension LLM loversāhaving trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.
Girls think the āeuā in āeugenicsā means EW. Donāt get the ick, girls! It literally means good.
So if youāre not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what
ā¦ how is this man still able to post from inside the locker he should be stuffed in 24/7
Seeing Yarvin mansplain eugenics really does make one wonder how he doesnāt just get suckerpunched whenever he says anything at someone in public.
Not beating the sexism allegations.
The eigenrobot thread heās responding to is characteristically bizarre and gross. Youād think eigenrobot being anti-eugenics is a good thing but he still finds a way to make it suspect. (He believes being unable to make babies is worse than death?)
I think he means āmass sterilisation of a populationā Vs āmass murder of the same populationā, which is genocide either way, and then he would opt for the faster method.
Or something. Feels extra creepy discussing which genocide is better with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Re: extra creepy: and also with people their people in power.
I mean I guess you can argue that straight up murder has a certain honesty to it? At the same time that is mainly good because it makes it harder to justify whatās happening compared to anti-miscegenation laws or restricting people to an open-air prison for a few generations. And we can see how thatās working out in the current political climate.
sounds like heās posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school
So, heās essentially Drake if he got into AI doom
A new LLM plays pokemon has started, with o3 this time. It plays moderately faster, and the twitch display UI is a little bit cleaner, so it is less tedious to watch. But in terms of actual ability, so far o3 has made many of the exact same errors as Claude and Gemini including: completely making things up/seeing things that arenāt on the screen (items in Virdian Forest), confused attempts at navigation (it went back and forth on whether the exit to Virdian Forest was in the NE or NW corner), repeating mistakes to itself (both the items and the navigation issues I mentioned), confusing details from other generations of Pokemon (Nidoran learns double kick at level 12 in Fire Red and Leaf Green, but not the original Blue/Yellow), and it has signs of being prone to going on completely batshit tangents (it briefly started getting derailed about sneaking through the tree in Virdian Forestā¦ i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).
I donāt know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the cornerā¦ well actually I do know: hopium, cope, cognitive bias, and deliberate deception. The whole LLM playing Pokemon thing is turning into less of a test of LLMs and more entertainment and advertising of the models, and the scaffold are extensive enough and different enough from each other that they really arenāt showing the modelsā raw capabilities (which are even worse than I complained about) or comparing them meaningfully.
I like how all of the currently running attempts have been equipped with automatic navigation assistance, i.e. a pathfinding algorithm from the 60s. And thatās the only part of the whole thing that actually works.
I wouldnāt say even that part works so well, given how Mt. Moon is such a major challenge even with all the features like that.
The actual pathfinding algorithm (which is surely just A* search or similar) works just fine; the problem is the LLM which uses it.
