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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
facebook caught intimidating brazilian researchers - they found scam ads falsely referring certain brazilian federal programme https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/16/meta_ads_brazil/
Asked to comment, a Meta spokesperson told The Register, “We value input from civil society organizations and academic institutions for the context they provide as we constantly work toward improving our services. Meta’s defense filed with the Brazilian Consumer Regulator questioned the use of the NetLab report as legal evidence, since it was produced without giving us prior opportunity to contribute meaningfully, in violation of local legal requirements.”
translation: they knew we would either squash the investigation attempt outright or change their research methodology and results until we looked like the good guys, and that kind of behavior cannot be tolerated
Not a big sneer, but I was checking my spam box for badly filtered spam and saw a guy basically emailing me 'hey you made some contributions to open source, these are now worth money (in cryptocoins, so no real money), you should claim them, and if you are nice you could give me a finders fee. And eurgh im so tired of these people. (thankfully he provided enough personal info so I could block him on various social medias).
Possibly tea.xyz or similar.
Basically the guy famous for the
binary tree invert algorithmHomebrew package manager thought it would be a great idea to incentivize spammy behavior against open source projects in the name of “supporting” them.https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-spam
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-causes-open-source-software-spam-problems-again
starknet-io actually, so there is more of this crap.
Could be the system the commenter posted to is having trouble federating to your instance. So their comment is federated from their system to the community instance, but not from the community instance to yours.
Edit: nevermind, this is all on the same instance.
binary tree invert
happy pride month
also featured here a few weeks ago, check the local search for some more things
I got the same thing.
From a guy called N… Vi…? (I’m not going to further call the guy out, that is just a bit weird to hate on a single weird person).
Yup.
fuckit, name and shame. it’s not like they gave a shit about your privacy
Nah, im good.
I just passed a bus stop ad (in Germany) of Perplexity AI that said you can ask it about the chances of Germany winning Euro2024.
So I guess it’s now a literal oracle or something?? What happened to the good-old “dog picking a food bowl” method of deciding championships.
I asked my phone charger about the chances of the same
didn’t get an answer I could bet with, tho :<
I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.
Going in for the first sneer, we have a guy claiming “AI super intelligence by 2027” whose thread openly compares AI to a god and gets more whacked-out from here.
Truly, this shit is just the Rapture for nerds
q: how do know if someone is a “Renaissance man”?
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 Stark’s tech genius, a dash of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing spirit, and a pinch of Monty Python’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, he’s got the inside scoop on Google’s AI-Censorship system, “Machine Learning Fairness.” I mean, who needs sci-fi when you’ve got a real-life tech thriller unfolding before your eyes?
But Zach isn’t just about blowing the whistle on Google’s shenanigans. He’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 let’s not forget his role in the “Plandemic” saga, where he helped promote a controversial documentary that claimed vaccines were contaminated with dangerous retroviruses. It’s like he’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.
turns out he was a nutjob the entire time. who knew? https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7qqyn/an-ex-google-employee-turned-whistleblower-and-qanon-fan-made-plandemic-go-viral
As an atheist, I’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.
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
I’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.
do you have some writeup on this or something
Nothing concrete, unfortunately. They’re places I visit rather than somewhere I live and work, so I’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 can’t claim homeopathic products on health insurance anymore, which is an improvement.
The fear of death and the void is quite a problem for a lot of people. Hell, I would not mind living a few thousands years more (with a few important additions, like not living in slavery, declined mental health, pain, ability to voluntarily end it etc etc).
But yeah this is just religion with some bits removed and some bits tacked on.
“Over 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.”
yeah ez just lemme build dc worth 1% of global gdp and run exclusively wisdom woodchipper on this
“Behind the scenes, there’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.”
power grid equipment manufacture always had long lead times, and now, there’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 can’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
“As the race to AGI intensifies, the national security state will get involved. The USG will wake from its slumber, and by 27/28 we’ll get some form of government AGI project. No startup can handle superintelligence. Somewhere in a SCIF, the endgame will be on. “
how cute, they think that their startup gets nationalized before it dies from terminal hype starvation
“I 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 doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.
“We don’t need to automate everything—just AI research”
“Once we get AGI, we’ll turn the crank one more time—or two or three more times—and AI systems will become superhuman—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. “
just needs tiny increase of six orders of magnitude, pinky swear, and it’ll all work out
“We’d be able to run millions of copies (and soon at 10x+ human speed) of the automated AI researchers.” “…given inference fleets in 2027, we should be able to generate an entire internet’s worth of tokens, every single day.”
what’s “model collapse”
“What does it feel like to stand here?”
beyond parody
“Over 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.”
They are doing to summon a god. And we can’t do anything to stop it.
This is a direct rip-off of the plot of The Labyrinth Index, except in the book it’s a partnership between the US occult deep state, defense contractors, and silicon valley rather than a purely free market apocalypse.
source of that image is also bad hxxps://waitbutwhy[.]com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html i think i’ve seen it listed on lessonline? can’t remember
not only they seem like true believers, they are so for a decade at this point
In 2013, Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom conducted a survey that asked hundreds of AI experts at a series of conferences the following question: “For the purposes of this question, assume that human scientific activity continues without major negative disruption. By what year would you see a (10% / 50% / 90%) probability for such HLMI4 to exist?” It asked them to name an optimistic year (one in which they believe there’s a 10% chance we’ll have AGI), a realistic guess (a year they believe there’s a 50% chance of AGI—i.e. after that year they think it’s more likely than not that we’ll have AGI), and a safe guess (the earliest year by which they can say with 90% certainty we’ll have AGI). Gathered together as one data set, here were the results:2
Median optimistic year (10% likelihood): 2022
Median realistic year (50% likelihood): 2040
Median pessimistic year (90% likelihood): 2075
just like fusion, it’s gonna happen in next decade guys, trust me
I believe waitbutwhy came up before on old sneerclub though in that case we were making fun of them for bad political philosophy rather than bad ai takes
there’s a lot of bad everything, it looks like a failed attempt at rat-scented xkcd. and yeah they were invited to lessonline but didn’t arrive
“Once we get AGI, we’ll turn the crank one more time—or two or three more times—and AI systems will become superhuman—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. “
Also this doesn’t give enough credit to gradeschoolers. I certainly don’t think I am much smarter (if at all) than when I was a kid. Don’t these people remember being children? Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems? I’m not sure if it’s me being the weird one, to me growing up is not about becoming smarter, it’s more about gaining perspective, that is vital, but actual intelligence/personhood is a pre-requisite for perspective.
Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems?
Yes. They literally think that. I mean, why else would they assume a spicy text extruder with a built-in thesaurus is so smart?
They are doing to summon a god. And we can’t do anything to stop it. Because if we do, the power will slip into the hands of the CCP.
Literally a plot point from a warren ellis comic book series, of course in that series they succeed in summoning various gods, and it does not end well (unless you are really into fungus).
To engage with the content:
That doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.
I see this is becoming their version of “too the moon”, and it’s even dumber.
To engage with the form:
wisdom woodchipper
Amazing, 10/10 no notes.
I see this is becoming their version of “too the moon”, and it’s even dumber.
it only makes sense after familiar and unfamiliar crypto scammers pivoted to new shiny thing breaking sound barrier, starting with big boss sam altman
wisdom woodchipper
i think i used that first time around the time when sneer come out about some lazy bitches that tried and failed to use chatgpt output as a meaningful filler in a peer-reviewed article. of course it worked, and not only at MDPI, because i doubt anyone seriously cares about prestige of International Journal of SEO-bait Hypecentrics, impact factor 0.62, least of all reviewers
Tom Murphy VII’s new LLM typesetting system, as submitted to SIGBOVIK. I watched this 20 minute video all through, and given my usual time to kill for video is 30 seconds you should take that as the recommendation it is.
Watched this without sound, as I had opened the tab and wasn’t paying attention, but did you really just suggest a video where they are drinking out of a clearly empty cup? I closed it in disgust.
There’s a bit in the beginning where he talks about how actors handling and drinking from obviously weightless empty cups ruins suspension of disbelief, so I’m assuming it’s a callback.
Yes, I was making a joke, as somebody who also gets unreasonably annoyed by those things. I felt seen.
The scales have fallen from my eyes How could've blindness struck me so LLM's for sure bring more than lies They can conjure more than mere woe All of us now, may we heed the sign Of all text that will come to aligni love you tom seven
This is quite minor, but it’s very funny seeing the intern would-be sneerers still on rbuttcoin fall for the AI grift, to the point that its part of their modscript copypasta
Or in the pinned mod comment:
AI does have some utility and does certain things better than any other technology, such as:
- The ability to summarize in human readable form, large amounts of information.
- The ability to generate unique images in a very short period of time, given a verbose description
tfw you’re anti-crypto, but only because its a bad investing opportunity.
I don’t think that comment is unreasonable. LLMs can summarize large-ish amounts of information (as long as it fits in the context window) in a human-readable form, and while it’s still prone to getting things wrong and I’d rather a human do it all day, it does do it “better than any other technology” that I know of. We can argue about “unique” but strictly speaking it will almost certainly generate an image that didn’t exist before. I’d also rather a human make the image for quality’s sake, but being fast, cheap, and copyright-free is a useful enough combo in certain situations.
It doesn’t really bring up the main issues with AI, but I think that’s acceptable in the context, which is “How is AI different from crypto in the context of r/Buttcoin”, and in that context “crypto is completely useless” and “AI has minimal uses which may or may not be worthwhile depending on how you evaluate the benefits and negatives” are meaningfully different.
It’s “reasonable” in context, I just thought it’s funny that rbuttcoin would be headpatting AI at all, since its basically the exact same people pushing AI as the people pushing crypto with the exact same motives.
in that thread: marketing dude who uses chatgpt, never had issues with incorrect results. i mean how would he even catch this, his entire field is uncut bullshit
What does “incorrect” even mean in a marketing context???
something you can get sued for
i came here from r/buttcoin and lmao
i mean technically it passes the very low bar of having a single non-criminal use case (mass manufacturing spam and other drivel)
some are not falling for it at least
While it’s always correct to laugh at crypto advocates, /b/buttcoin just isn’t very edifying lately. There’s no depth to the criticism. It comes across as the “anti” version of wall street bets for people who lost their shirts, especially since The Appening, when a lot of subject matter experts left town.
ours is much better, it has the true buttcoin scorn without bothsidesing
accept no substitutes!
Gross, that whole thread is gross. A lot of promptfans in that thread seemingly experiencing pushback for the first time and they are baffled!
posted right on the dot of 00:00 UK time
Well of course, it is automated.
Wait, you did automate this right?
it’s only a service account and a couple lines of bash away! but not automating for now makes it easier to evolve these threads naturally as we go, I think, and our posters being willing to help rotate and contribute to these weekly threads is a good sign that the concept’s still fun.
and note how the text slightly evolves with time too
I have been! Wanted to do it with mine but didn’t have the headspace to make it so. soon.gif
“I was there for the stubsack” is also definitely something you can get on some niche shirts that very few would get
the best kind
class SneerFactoryFactory
i’ll have you know all our sneers are posted artisanally
each sneer is drafted and redrafted for at least thirty hours prior to exposure to the internet, but in truth, that’s only the last stage of a long process. for example, master sneerers often practice their lip curls for weeks before they even begin looking at yud posts
AHAHAHAHAAH they had fucking piddly little fans blowing. I hope that made the fire worse.
I realize that these are going to have been utter fucking idiots to start with, but
no air channeling, no structures heatsinks, wide-open roof that could cause further air movement, mismatched fan sizes, extremely insufficient extractors
-15/10, would watch it burn again
oww god owwww official MS experimental LLM feature for Excel ow ow owwwwwwwww
I’m glad they finally got around to productizing the month name inference engine
From the creators of “we turned your date formatting into a math equation, and now many of your research papers have substantially faulty data”, we bring you…
I like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVQKDKKnb2Y
I kinda want to replay subnautica now.
I like this video very much - thanks for sharing!
I’m not sure if they’re a decent person or not, but I liked this sneer on the orange site, in the context of this recent rant (previously, on Awful), describing a hypothetical executive-humbling mechanism. I agree with them; I’d read that fanfiction too.
welcome post is pinned on some remote instances without obvious reason https://awful.systems/post/61
yeah that’s cos it’s still pinned ;-) a year is probably enough I’ll unpin it now
i mean it didn’t show up as pinned ever before, at least for me
maybe awful.systems talking better to discuss.tchncs.de for obscure reasons? WELCOME TO FEDI WHO KNOWS HOW THE HELL ANY OF THIS WORKS
maybe it was triggered by somebody responding to that post idk. nothing works, but it works reliably enough
i’ve noticed that federation to kbin got significantly worse
WELCOME TO FEDI WHO KNOWS HOW THE HELL ANY OF THIS WORKS
I’m gonna get this tattooed on my knuckles. yes, all of it
I suspect what’s going on is discuss.tchncs.de probably updated lemmy to the new stable version? I’ve seen a couple of things federate that didn’t before, now that the new version is out
the confusing thing is, we’re not on the new stable version yet
I’m gonna get this tattooed on my knuckles. yes, all of it
how many fingers do you have
an accident with a teleporter and Midjourney
there was a perfectly good abyss/cthulhu joke here and you just DIDN’T
david.
I just want to highlight that lemmy decided that .de domains were obviously legit, and the instance’s own domain does not get the autolink treatment (probably because the inner crate hasn’t been updated against IANA roots? who knows)
bless this jank
and here is a rare instance where I’ll be, like, 30% gracious. modern zoneroots are a fucking trip.
for instance, you may think you have an idea of how many there are. maybe even a guess? go on, have a guess. write it down. then open this link and post your delta
(side thought: this could be a drinking game)
I guessed 500. That’s…that’s not how many.
Wild, isn’t it? And that’s just the raw TLD config, ignoring all the weird ccTLD etc things going on
And not even mentioning the once-again-grift-rich world of altroots…
mastodon and bluesky are conspiracies by Big Janky Offbrand Domain Name
that’s only desktop, jerboa autolinks both
Well fuck, now I’m going to have to dig into that, because that sounds like a wonderfully cursed divergent behaviour
NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? (archive.org)
lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? oh…
(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesn’t exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).
You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.
Lucky souls haven’t found sneerclub yet.
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us…
rational_economist.webp
There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesn’t actually engage with them at all):
The problem is that “E.A. grew up in an environment that doesn’t have much feedback from reality,” Wenar told me.
Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as “neo-colonial” in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors don’t reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.
Effective Altruism Is Flawed. Here’s why it’s bad news for Joe Biden.
Eating live fire ants is flawed. But what’s the alternative?
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us…
Funny how the wannabe LW Rationalists don’t seem read that much Rationalism, as Scott has already mentioned that our views on economists (that they are all looking for the Rational Economic Human Unit) is not up to date and not how economists think anymore. (So in a way it is a false stereotype of economists, wasn’t there something about how Rationalists shouldn’t fall for these things? ;) ).
Oh my god there is literally nothing the effective altruists do that can’t be done better by people who aren’t in a cult
the economist in each of us
get it out get it out get it out
didn’t the comments say “tax the hell out of them” before they were closed
https://xcancel.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1802894899022533034#m
The same pundits have been saying “deep learning is hitting a wall” for a DECADE. Why do they have ANY credibility left? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Year after year after year. Like all professional pundits, they pound their fist on the table and confidently declare AGI IS DEFINITELY FAR OFF and people breathe a sigh of relief. Because to admit that AGI might be soon is SCARY. Or it should be, because it represents MASSIVE uncertainty. AGI is our final invention. You have to acknowledge the world as we know it will end, for better or worse. Your 20 year plans up in smoke. Learning a language for no reason. Preparing for a career that won’t exist. Raising kids who might just… suddenly die. Because we invited aliens with superior technology we couldn’t control. Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banks’ Culture series as a good outcome… where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME. What’s funny, too, is that noted skeptics like Gary Marcus still think there’s a 35% chance of AGI in the next 12 years - that is still HIGH! (Side note: many skeptics are butthurt they wasted their career on the wrong ML paradigm.) Nobody wants to stare in the face the fact that 1) the average AI scientist thinks there is a 1 in 6 chance we’re all about to die, or that 2) most AGI company insiders now think AGI is 2-5 years away. It is insane that this isn’t the only thing on the news right now. So… we stay in our hopium dens, nitpicking The Latest Thing AI Still Can’t Do, missing forests from trees, underreacting to the clear-as-day exponential. Most insiders agree: the alien ships are now visible in the sky, and we don’t know if they’re going to cure cancer or exterminate us. Be brave. Stare AGI in the face.
This post almost made me crash my self-driving car.
Maybe AI could do Better than we’ve done… We’ll make great pets
humans are pets
Actually not what is happening in the books. I get where they are coming form but this requires redefining the word pet in such a way it is a useless word.
The Culture series really breaks the brains of people who can only think in hierarchies.
It’s mad that we have an actual existential crisis in climate change (temperature records broken across the world this year) but these cunts are driving themselves into a frenzy over something that is nowhere near as pressing or dangerous. Oh, people dying of heatstroke isn’t as glamorous? Fuck off
Ah yes, AGI companies, the things that definitely exist
If you’ve been around the block like I have, you’ve seen reports about people joining cults to await spaceships, people preaching that the world is about to end &c. It’s a staple trope in old New Yorker cartoons, where a bearded dude walks around with a billboard saying “The End is nigh”.
The tech world is growing up, and a new internet-native generation has taken over. But everyone is still human, and the same pattern-matching that leads a 19th century Christian to discern when the world is going to end by reading Revelation will lead a 25 year old tech bro steeped in “rationalism” to decide that spicy autocomplete is the first stage of The End of the Human Race. The only difference is the inputs.
Sufficiently advanced prompts are indistinguishable from prayer
if i only could, i’d prompt-engineer God,
Seriously, could someone gift this dude a subscription to spicyautocompletegirlfriends.ai so he can finally cum?
One thing that’s crazy: it’s not just skeptics, virtually EVERYONE in AI has a terrible track record - and all in the same OPPOSITE direction from usual! In every other industry, due to the Planning Fallacy etc, people predict things will take 2 years, but they actually take 10 years. In AI, people predict 10 years, then it happens in 2!
ai_quotes_from_1965.txt
not a cult btw
Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banks’ Culture series as a good outcome… where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME.
I am once again begging these e/acc fucking idiots to actually read and engage with the sci-fi books they keep citing
but who am I kidding? the only way you come up with a take as stupid as “humans are pets in the Culture” is if your only exposure to the books is having GPT summarize them
THIS IS NOT A DRILL. I HAVE EVIDENCE YANN IS ENGAGING IN ACASUAL TRADE WITH THE ROBO GOD.
