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.)
In an completely unprecedented turn of events, the word prediction machine has a hard time predicting numbers.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-says-its-still-2024/
Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.
Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.
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.
