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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.

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[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

OK this is low-hanging fruit but ChatGPT-4o (4o? what even is branding?) was demoed with a feminine voice, So HN discussed it. And a couple extremely horny users can't stop talking about robot girlfriend sex and the end of relationships

the western world is already experiencing a huge decline in womens sexual appetites -- AI will effectively make women completely uninterested in men

An AI girlfriend that isn't going to bring up the last three time you fought because you forget her birthday/called her fat/hit on her friends? are you sure you understand the target market?

I guess I can never understand the perspective of someone that just needs a girl voice to speak to them. Without a body there is nothing to fulfill me.

And after that you have a robot that listens to you, do your chores and have sex with you, at that point she is "real".

If you want to solve procreation them you can do that without humans having sex with humans.

[-] slopjockey@awful.systems 17 points 6 months ago
[-] yellowcake@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago

countries with GPUs

GPU is the new WMD

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[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago

countries with GPUs

Did this person forget how the internet works? Or is he imaging that people just buy a desktop to fuck (and that any desktopsexuals have not done so already. (keep that blacklight away from my dvd player please).

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago

It’s the same fantasy zero-depth comprehension as the chuds who thought they could transact in only bitcoin come the fall of civilisation, in the same delivery format: thonkwits trying to cloutfarm in hypewave

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[-] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It never ceases to amaze me watching these tech bros breathlessly hyping the next revolutionary product for it to be a huge nothing burger. Like that's it? You gave gpt an image to text input + and a text to speech app? Dawg, I've been watching Joe Biden & Trump play Fortnite for 5 years at this point, text to speech just doesn't hit the same anymore.

I mean my god, at least some hardcore engineering went in to making the migraine inducing apple vision pro. If this is the best card in oai's deck, I would be panicking as an investor.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Well, I suppose dating a chatbot taped to a fleshlight is exactly the sort of relationship these people deserve. Self-solving problem.

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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

It got submitted to lobste.rs too and there are some insane takes there too

https://lobste.rs/s/ph5o0a/openai_gpt_4o

this model has lower latency, and they’ve priced it at half of the previous model’s price, despite it having comparable or better performance. If this is not a dumping price,[...]

Yeah it's totes more efficient, it's not like Altman/MSFT are desperate to goose subscriber numbers

I’ve seen first-hand how it helps non-programmers write programs to solve their problems (with “bad” code, but bad code is still empowering people), and I think that’s important given that software has been eating the world.

Couldn’t the thousands of people now free from mundane work, work together now on solving climate issues or issues that require physical human labor?

if LLMs/AI can run byrocracies (and whole countries) more efficiently, there are potential energy savings there too.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

fml i thought these were the smarter techies

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago
[-] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

this is an absolutely accursed post, well done

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Talking about the demo and not those HN reactions (they suck): So we all in tech have collectively forgotten the whole 'apple iphones didn't actually work when they were being presented and it was all just theatre' thing? Because I wouldn't trust a slick tech demo like that at all. (I also want to know about all the edge cases where it fails and well, there is also the whole 'what is this even for?' thing). (And yes some HN people did voice these concerns).

E: also don't these GPT things have a sort of token limit? After a while they just get stuck in 'cannot accept more new data' mode basically (which I assume is a limit so people don't use up too much compute (I hate how we are making that a word now)), how would that work? (This is more about the robofuckers, who have also not learned anything from the previous gen of this shit when somebody turned the naughty cybersex function off).

[-] mii@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Don't forget about how the presentations for Google Gemini and OpenAI Sora and Devin were all ~~faked~~ embellished too, but no one talks about that anymore either.

I'm still waiting for even one actual use-case for sexy Clippy that isn't generating SEO spam while speedrunning climate change.

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[-] self@awful.systems 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

this one doesn’t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post that’s best summarized as:

I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and it’s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big “L”.

It’s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.

[…]

But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.

[…]

From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didn't seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.

you’ve read all of this shit before. it’s another “centrist democrat” who thinks the republicans have really good points now that they’re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what I’ve quoted here. there’s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.

this post wouldn’t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:

Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.

In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.

I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.

and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tear’s name was George Washington

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (...)

Ofc it's not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of "let's move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucks" then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!

You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

lol this mcdonough guy's great

@nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who aren't interested in that.

yes it's a cynical power grab by the woke mob

and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each other's company

[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

the woke mob that is, at various points in his post, either a large group that’s taken over the Nix community, or a tiny and unimportant but loud group of marginalized folks, depending on what makes his point more efficiently at the time

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[-] mii@awful.systems 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Creativity is a lie. You heard it here first.

[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

I keep hearing this shit from creatively bankrupt folks and fash billionaires, because it’s very important to them that art and creativity isn’t for us — it’s an expensive relic of the past and a commodity that only they can afford. it’s fucking ghoulish, but that goes without saying with Sammy

what none of them seem to have an answer for is the obvious chicken and egg problem that their weird fucking conjecture leads to. if creativity isn’t possible, where in fuck did all the art come from? these assholes assert that modern artists just remix their inputs like a fucking generative AI, which is plainly false to anyone who knows artists or has even objectively evaluated generative AI outputs, but where in fuck did historical artists get their inputs from if we’re supposing that’s true? generative AI copies, but there’s nothing to copy from when there’s no original.

and that’s not meant to give a single inch to these shitheads and allow the fash idea that true art comes from some fantasy version of history either. modern artists do fucking fantastic creative work — when they’re not shackled by the capitalist systems that keep shitheads like Sammy boy buying expensive, unchallenging art pieces purely as a tax dodge

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[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 16 points 6 months ago

Did the Aella moratorium from r/sneerclub carry over here?

Because if not

for the record, im currently at ~70% that we're all dead in 10-15 years from AI. i've stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending and the amount of long-term health risks im taking

[-] mii@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago

Is increasing the amount of long-term health risks code for showering even less?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

Same Aella Same, but moon.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

For the record, I'm currently at ~70% that we're all dead in 10-15 years from the moon getting mad at us. I've stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending towards a future moon mission to give it lots of pats and treats and tell it it's a good boy and we love it, please don't get mad.

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[-] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

it's clear that the moon was right and we have it coming

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[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 6 months ago

MS carbon emissions up 30% due to spicy autocomplete

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/microsoft_co2_emissions/

[-] self@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago

a crossover sneer from the Nix Zulip:

This is an easy place to add a hook that goes through each message and asks a language model if the message violates any rules. Computers are about as good as humans at interpreting rules about tone and so on, and the biases come from the training data, so for any specific instance the decision is relatively impartial.

please for the love of fuck kick the fascists out of your community because they’ll never stop with this shit

[-] pyrex@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

This is another one for the "throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance" category.

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[-] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago

good to see that LessWrong is about improving human rationality to decrease the existential risk of superintelligent AI, and not long screeds on current political issues from a reactionary perspective

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 18 points 6 months ago

If what you really care about is stemming the ill-effects of large and growing student debt, debt cancellation is a terrible policy. If you want people to consume less of something, the last thing you should do is subsidize people who consume that thing.

Yes, I agree, once debt is cancelled we shouldn't let people go into debt and attending university should be free.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago

Also that is a weird sort of argument, how would people consume less schooling? 'Yeah I'm going for my 4th degree now, after Biden canceled the debt of the first one, I hope he will cancel the other 3 as well'

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[-] mii@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago

I know this is like super low-hanging fruit, but Reddit’s singularity forum (AGI hype-optimists on crack) discuss the current chapter in the OpenAI telenovela and can’t decide whether Ilya and Jan Leike leaving is good, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk, or bad, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk.

Yep, there’s no scenario here where OpenAI is doing the right thing, if they thought they were the only ones who could save us they wouldn’t dismantle their alignment team, if AI is dangerous, they’re killing us all, if it’s not, they’re just greedy and/or trying to conquer the earth.

vs.

to be honest the whole concept of alignment sounds so fucked up. basically playing god but to create a being that is your lobotomized slave…. I just dont see how it can end well

Of course, we also have the Kurzweil fanboys chiming in:

Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves. Use the tech to upgrade ourselves.

But don’t worry, there are silent voices of reasons in the comments, too:

Honestly feel like these clowns fabricate the drama in order to over hype themselves

Gee, maybe …

no ,,, they’re understating the drama in order to seem rational & worthy of investment ,, they’re serious that the world is ending ,, unfortunately they think they have more time than they do so they’re not helping very much really

Yeah, never mind. I think I might need to lobotomize myself now after reading that thread.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves.

But..... wait...

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago
[-] slopjockey@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago
[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

introducing the human brain to utilitarianism is a lot like introducing a proof system to Falso

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[-] carlitoscohones@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

I have a business idea for him. Small batch alcohol produced by harvesting ethanol produced by this bacteria found in Aella’s teeth scrapings. Call it Mutella 1140, the official alcohol shot of rationalist orgies.

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this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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