this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 27 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Anyways, first actual post of the week (albeit not the first sneer):

oh no

(Source)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Jesus, take the wheel!

--intel, probably

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

you know

I actually meant to post that (a friend sent it to me earlier, and it was why I even got around to starting the new stubsack)

adhdbrain is a fuck

(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

Anything that takes the edge off a possible Great Recession sequel's fine in my book

[–] mii@awful.systems 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we're trying to force everyone to use one instead of using hunter2 everywhere.

Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that "Usually there's no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT."

Usually.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 14 points 3 months ago (3 children)

what

whattttttttt

whatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

and it's not like crowdstrike didn't just happen. I guess maybe it was too recent, and the lesson-of-pain hasn't percolated through to dipshit"integration advisor" technical sales fuckwits yet

bonus round, whatever the hell lemmy did here:

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 24 points 3 months ago

It only shows it like that to you because it's your password.

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[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 17 points 3 months ago (11 children)

Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0

These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/

Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.

Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.

I'm sure!

[–] mii@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.

Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

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[–] imadabouzu@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

Kurzgesagt

Yeah I'm not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as "all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s".

[–] HauntedOwlbear@eldritch.cafe 10 points 3 months ago

@hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they've previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.

This is extra crap because I'd already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn't have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 16 points 3 months ago (6 children)
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Regarding the paper "Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning", a comment by e. e. arroyo:

"Yes! we can make explainable predictions of compounds with AI now!"

  • They could only explain 15% of predictions
  • They could only understand 9% of those explanations
  • 60% of those were wrong
  • The 4 active compounds left are probably, arguably, not even a novel class
[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

i'm not reading all that, at least now, but i'd just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago

I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it's not like there's no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the "spare" cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 15 points 3 months ago (3 children)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 3 months ago

Surely the words being put into the son's mouth should be "What's his TikTok?".

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I'm embarassed for the person wearing that shirt, and the people who made it, and us all for having seen that.

No wait something is wrong... This is the torture simulation!

[–] AcausalRobotGod@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago

Dammit, you caught me again! Time for another go-round...

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[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)

this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I didn't even know this was happening friend sent me the screenshot, but apparent grimusk are in the bureaucratic stages of their relationship ending. and of course it's going extremely normal:

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I sadly know more, it is horrible. Not only is there a custody battle, grimes grandma is dying and she has never seen grimes kids, and because Musk isn't reacting to anything Grimes mother put a plea online for him to please let her grandkids see her mother.

Poor kids, just heartbreaking.

E: source

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

heh

that looks pretty fucking shitty. but we all already knew both of them were fucking ghouls. sucks for the kids, hopefully they can get out okay eventually. but that's about as much as I'm willing to say (largely: reasons private, w/ heavy state load implications. I don't mind telling/explaining, but not in public, and it's a lot of work/context)

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[–] jax@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago (14 children)

my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:

What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn't want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it'll be fine as long as there's a big cyber noggin down the track... just google TESCREAL. We didn't make this up.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago (19 children)

lol holy shit, apparently a US chain is trying to do"AI-based" individualised pricing of goods in-store

can't wait to hear of someone being charged $500 for a packet of gum

[–] mpk@awful.systems 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

An "Oops, racism!" incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.

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[–] rook@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?

(also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Oh look, an AI tool to make Wikipedia worse.

(Apparently, the Wikimedia Foundation couldn't even be bothered to care about the standards that en.wp contributors deem necessary for sources on medical topics. Because it's more important to "sustain and grow Wikimedia projects in a changing online knowledge landscape". Dammit, where's the button that sends electrical shocks through the Internet to anyone who talks like that?)

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

at least Wikipedia has some rather strident ~~rules~~ suggestions on LLM use - tl;dr under no goddamn circumstance, don't be a fucking idiot. And this seems to be using it as a forest-burning search engine rather than anything that will generate wiki text.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

it happened

I popped out somewhere to have a drink, and got to have someone tell me about their “edutech” startup that “uses AI”

they very definitely overpromise (not gonna rinse their bullshit), and topped it off with “and then we use a LLM for suggesting improvements”

(I ejected from the conversation but I can still hear it; it’s progressed to “talking about property” in the terms of mediocre early-20s white kids talking leveraging daddy and uncle’s assets)

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago (8 children)

person who can barely brain themselves finds they have to engage with US postal system, hilarity ensues

(via friend who often sends me tweet-screenshots (one day I'll convince 'em to join here))

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

For those who are wondering, real tweet. I checked. Guy is defending himself by going 'physical mail is outdated and shouldn't exist'. This guy is going to get cybercrimed by somebody so hard.

E: also interesting, and relevant to our interests, you can just buy prestamped envelopes, so thanks chatgpt.

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (11 children)

Inventor of the ideological turing test (Bryan Caplan, occasional intellectual sparring partner of SSC) doesn't understand how vaccines work.

(E: And he is certainly not joking. More: My doctor, and all of you were wrong because I didn't explain myself well (this longer post, while coming closer to a point still sucks. High 'shooting the people who clean phones into space' feeling))

[–] jax@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago

dude got fucking ratioed lol

My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

"Ideological Turing test"?

Not gonna look up what that is, but I'm sure it's debatebro "civility" fetishism.

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

went and peeked at the ezra klein podcast on the off chance he's gotten into anything interesting

There's something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It's clear we're witnessing the advent of a wildly powerful technology, one that could transform the economy and the way we think about art and creativity and the value of human work itself. At the same time, can't for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job.So wanted to understand what I'm missing and get some tips for how could incorporate A.Il. better into my life right now. And Ethan Mollick is the perfect guide: He's a professor at the Wharton School

lol

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

To be fair, it's hard to really internalize that all these rich and powerful techbros are actually morons after all these years of journalists like Ezra Klein breathlessly reporting their weird ideas and baseless claims about what they were going to be able to do in the next couple of years.

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I have seen three separate instances of start-ups with "AI" in their name that proudly display a tagline along the lines of "BUILDING THE NEXT UNICORN" and jesus fuck almighty I swear I will fucking piledrive the next recruiter that tries that on me

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)
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