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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • self@awful.systems
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    18 hours ago

    one of OpenAI’s cofounders wrote some thoroughly unhinged shit about the company’s recent departures

    Thank you, guys, for being my team and my co-workers. With each of you, I have collected cool memories — with Barret, when we had a fierce conflict about compute for what later became o1; with Bob, when he reprimanded me for doing a jacuzzi with a coworker; and with Mira, who witnessed my engagement.

    • jax@awful.systems
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      13 hours ago

      lmao this is weird as fuck, reminds me of the bullshit Lex Fridman comes up with, I can totally imagine him saying things like this

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      14 hours ago

      I can’t be the only one reading that super passive aggressively right? “Thank you Barret, whom I hated. Bob, for ruining my hot Jacuzzi date. And Mira, for existing.”

    • FredFig@awful.systems
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      17 hours ago

      I am in awe of the sheer number of GPUs… whose lives ChatGPT has changed.

      If it was just this one line, this would be in the top 10 funniest things ever written around genAI. Too bad the rest of the rambling insanity ruins it.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    20 hours ago

    A lobsters states the following in regard to LLMs being used in medical diagnoses:

    If you have very unusual symptoms, for example, there’s a higher chance that the LLM will determine that they are outside of the probability space allowed and replace them with something more common.

    Another one opines:

    Don’t humans and in particular doctors do precisely that? This may be anecdotal, but I know countless stories of people being misdiagnosed because doctors just assumed the cause to be the most common thing they diagnose. It is not obvious to me that LLMs exhibit this particular misjudgement more than humans. In fact, it is likely that LLMs know rare diseases and symptoms much better than human doctors. LLMs also have way more time to listen and think.

    <Babbage about UK parlaimentarians.gif>

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      16 hours ago

      Also please fill in the obligatory rant about how LLMs don’t actually know any diseases or symptoms. Like, if your training data was collected before 2020 you wouldn’t have a single COVID case, but if you started collecting in 2020 you’d have a system that spat out COVID to a disproportionately large fraction of respiratory symptoms (and probably several tummy aches and broken arms too, just for good measure).

    • self@awful.systems
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      18 hours ago

      nothing hits worse than an able-bodied techbro imagining what medical care must be like for someone who needs it. here, let me save you from the possibility of misdiagnosis by building and mandating the use of the misdiagnosis machine

  • maol@awful.systems
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    24 hours ago

    Apparently An Post is the last holdout for crypto/AI/NFT synergy??

    An Post unveils first AI-generated stamps

    An Post has launched two artist-led generative AI-designed stamps featuring crypto technology in a first-ever for Ireland. Designer and AI Artist Kasia Oźmin crafted her visionary interpretation of an imaginary Ireland.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      16 hours ago

      it’s Friday so I probably won’t get an answer till Monday or Tuesday, but I did contact their press office asking about why the fuck NFTs in TYOOL twenty fucking twenty four and the sensitive issue of the art being facile plagiarism by an advertising executive

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    HN seems to be particularly deranged today, doesn’t it?

    It mostly seems to be a mopey debate over whether Saltman’s impending apotheosis is good or bad.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        16 hours ago

        you sure about that?

        The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It’s not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you’re not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You’re out. And the growing consensus is “why shouldn’t you?”, there is no escape from that.

        This is someone who literally can’t tell good writing from bad, so he assumes everyone is using AI

        • imadabouzu@awful.systems
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          15 hours ago

          He’s so close to being depressed enough to maybe ask a vital and important question about meaning and his own relationships with technology. But probably he’ll just buy more AI.

          • o7___o7@awful.systems
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            32 minutes ago

            Watching AI guys slowly come around feels similar to how people have to care for their alcoholic relatives. Folks have to come to the point where they recognize where the unacceptable bullshit lies on their own, then you can show them the cold hard facts and a path back to the real world, but getting there is absolutely exhausting and often heartbreaking.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      16 hours ago

      The Zitron-pilled among us probably suspect that part of the real reason for this is, ironically, to obscure the fact that OpenAI has no real profits because of how ludicrously expensive their models are to train and operate and how limited the actual use cases that people will pay for have proven. It’s better from a “getting investor money” perspective to have everyone talking about how terrible it is that investor profits are no longer capped for humanitarian reasons than to have more people ask whether we’re getting close to the peak of this bubble.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      I’m feeling a weird mix of emotions about this. It’s not the cash grab by ol’ salty dog; capitalism is doing its thing. I’m both elated that these idiot liberals feel betrayed by this turn of events and enraged that these liberal idiots exist to launder the reputation of techbros in the first place.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      oh hey its that reoccurring thought I have about the “AI Safety” criti-hype popping back into my head

      Expanding on that, part of me feels Altman is gonna find all the rhetoric he made about “AI doom” being used against him in the future - man’s given the true believers reason to believe he’d commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buck.

      Hell, the true believers who made this pretty explicitly pointed out Altman’s made arguing for regulation a lot easier:

      ai safety irony

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        1 day ago

        But the move has some observers ­— including Musk himself — asking: How could this possibly be legal?

        Because the nonprofit is there to represent the public, this would effectively mean shifting billions away from people like you and me. As some are noting, it feels a lot like theft.

        it continues to be astounding how gullible some people can be (/choose to stay?)

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    2 days ago

    ya know that inane SITUATIONAL AWARENESS paper that the ex-OpenAI guy posted, which is basically a window into what the most fully committed OpenAI doom cultists actually believe?

    yeah, Ivanka Trump just tweeted it

    But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.

    oh boy

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      barron: shows ivanka the minecraft speedrun

      ivanka: I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT, BROTHER

      edit: accidentally read ivanka as melania, now corrected

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      From that blog post:

      You can see the future first in San Francisco.

      “And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      3 days ago

      This was the woman who took over during Sam Altman’s temporary removal as CEO, which we’re pretty sure happened because the AI doom cultists weren’t satisfied that Altman was enough of an AI doom cultist.

      Yudkowsky was solidly in favor of her ascension. I take no joy in saying this as someone who wants this AI nonsense to stop soon, but OpenAI is probably better off financially with fewer AI doom cultists in high positions.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      3 days ago

      Do you think they still say all that bullshit even when they’re not screenshooting it for twitter? Probably, right