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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    2 hours ago

    Huggingface cofounder pushes against LLM hype, really softly. Not especially worth reading except to wonder if high profile skepticism pieces indicate a vibe shift that can’t come soon enough. On the plus side it’s kind of short.

    The gist is that you can’t go from a text synthesizer to superintelligence, framed as how a straight-A student that’s really good at learning the curriculum at the teacher’s direction can’t really be extrapolated to an Einstein type think-outside-the-box genius.

    The world ‘hallucination’ never appears once in the text.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    2 hours ago

    A hackernews doesn’t think that LLMs will replace software engineers, but they will replace structural engineers:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43317725

    The irony is that most structural engineers are actually de jure professionals, and an easy way for them to both protect their jobs and ensure future buildings don’t crumble to dust or are constructed without sprinkler systems is to simply ban LLMs from being used. No such protection exists for software engineers.

    Edit the LW post under discussion makes a ton of good points, to the level of being worthy of posting to this forum, and then nails its colors to the mast with this idiocy

    At some unknown point – probably in 2030s, possibly tomorrow (but likely not tomorrow) – someone will figure out a different approach to AI. Maybe a slight tweak to the LLM architecture, maybe a completely novel neurosymbolic approach. Maybe it will happen in a major AGI lab, maybe in some new startup. By default, everyone will die in <1 year after that.

    Gotta reaffirm the dogma!

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      5 hours ago

      While not exactly celebration worthy and certainly not worth a tenth anniversary celebration, you could argue HPMoR finally coming to a fucking end by whatever means was a somewhat happy occasion.

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
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          4 hours ago

          It had an actual ending. Not a satisfying one, even by the standards of the rest of the fic, and I remember finding the treatment of Hermione kinda distasteful, but it wasn’t even close to the worst part of the entire story. 3/10.

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          4 hours ago

          the author decided to stop publishing texts but instead lecture tirade preach unto the thronging youths directly

          in person it’s easier to do sketchy shit that won’t immediately get caught by a wider audience, you see?

    • zogwarg@awful.systems
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      7 hours ago

      Also disturbing that OP’s chosen handle—Screwtape—is that of a fictional demon, Senior tempter. A bit à-propos.