Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 2 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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 you’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 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.

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[-] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

OAI announced their shiny new toy: DeepResearch (still waiting on DeeperSeek). A bot built off O3 which can crawl the web and synthesize information into expert level reports!

Noam is coming after you @dgerard, but don't worry he thinks it's fine. I'm sure his new bot is a reliable replacement for a decentralized repository of all human knowledge freely accessible to all. I'm sure this new system doesn't fail in any embarrassing wa-

After posting multiple examples of the model failing to understand which player is on which team (if only this information was on some sort of Internet Encyclopedia, alas), Professional AI bully Colin continues: "I assume that in order to cure all disease, it will be necessary to discover and keep track of previously unknown facts about the world. The discovery of these facts might be a little bit analogous to NBA players getting traded from team to team, or aging into new roles. OpenAI's "Deep Research" agent thinks that Harrison Barnes (who is no longer on the Sacramento Kings) is the Kings' best choice to guard LeBron James because he guarded LeBron in the finals ten years ago. It's not well-equipped to reason about a changing world... But if it can't even deal with these super well-behaved easy facts when they change over time, you want me to believe that it can keep track of the state of the system of facts which makes up our collective knowledge about how to cure all diseases?"

xcancel link if anyone wants to see some more glorious failure cases:

https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1886506507157585978#m

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 19 points 2 months ago

"Aligning people is hard too" a thing that only a literal sociopath would think and only a special kind of sociopath would utter publicly

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

Remember when Scott wrote the 'dont talk like robots ya nerds' article? Good times.

[-] self@awful.systems 18 points 2 months ago

it’s amazing how intensely these assholes want to end Wikipedia and pollute all other community information sources beyond repair. it feels like it’s all part of the same strategy:

without consent, scrape all the information from an online source as destructively as you can
if possible, render that source useless by polluting it with LLM crap
otherwise, shut it down through political means
now that you’ve pulled the ladder up behind you, replace that information source with your garbage LLM and start rentseeking harder than Netflix

this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025

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