this post was submitted on 07 Apr 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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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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

songtell

I..... fucking

all the worst parts of highschool poetic analysis, but with extra "AI" sauce

ugh

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Here’s some highlights from its take on Leonard Cohen’s Light as the Breeze:

“a woman standing before the narrator, metaphorically naked.”

“The line "you can see it, you can taste it" implies that her presence is palpable and all-consuming.”

“The second verse portrays the narrator kneeling at significant places, such as the delta, alpha, and omega. This symbolizes a search for meaning, salvation, and completeness. …being with this woman brings a sense of spiritual relief and connection.”

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I am somehow unsurprised that the training data is really bad at transparent adoration of cunnilingus.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean to be fair Lenny’s sex lyrics are also always religion lyrics. That’s why “So I knelt there at the delta, / at the alpha and the omega, / at the cradle of the river and the seas” is one of the best lyrics ever.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Wondering what it’ll make of Alabama Song, End Of The Night, etc

I’ve never really gotten into Cohen, curiously - voice just doesn’t work for me. Which is a shame because there’s been some great bits of lyricism there

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

@froztbyte Have you tried Jennifer Warnes' cover album of Cohen songs, "Famous Blue Raincoat"? (Asking because her voice is *very* different from his, but she totally owns his songs.)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I haven’t! Will check it out, ty

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I really like her version of the "first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"-song.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Cohen’s earliest singing and melodies don’t do it for me even when the lyrics are gorgeous, but the older he gets the more I love them. By the time you get to the stuff he recorded in his 80s my reaction to his singing is NSFW.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

(ventpost) a personalized fuckyou to musk for making it impossible for me making twitter effectively unusable being logged in

(context: power's out in my area atm, and (because of a variety of ZA-flavoured reasons, which are also problems..) I can't actually get any fucking info because it's all just on a twitter feed)

I still refuse to log in though (and I'll double down on hating the cunt for his choices impacting my life in this manner)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It remains infuriating how many agencies/governments simply don’t have reliable online public feeds, with information.

Especially annoying when the only place with info is twitter and/or Facebook.

(That doesn’t fully solve the community contributions, which should also be useful, but at minimum any info from official accounts SHOULD be posted elsewhere)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

yea, strong agree

I'm going to see if I can get something done about this my side of the world, but that involves a lot of yaks

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

can you hit a repeater or something

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

do any work anymore? afaik nitter got nuked and I haven't seen anything else since

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

nitter

Just saw somebody talk about this on bluesky https://status.d420.de/ so for a short time there might be an alternative.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

no, nitter stays dead, i mean 70cm/2m band repeater or what have you locally

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I'm in ZA. information like that here is aggressively terrible

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (4 children)

oh no

Aella
@Aella_Girl
My dad, a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian with no exposure to rationality, somehow independently discovered lesswrong and is now really worried about AI. idk if this means AI risk is going more mainstream or if it's a genetic disposition thing

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I mean, the rationalist conception of God and the evangelical conception of AI are basically the same: hypothetically omnipotent and omnibenevolent forces that will nonetheless subject everyone to the most twisted tortures that their imaginations can invent unless appeased through a specific series of actions that just happen to involve a lot of money ending up with the leading figures of the church.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

My coworker at work asked me if I had read HPMOR and said it was "really good".

I know I work in silicon hell-hole, but that still surprised me a bit -- to have what I thought was the weird obscure drama corner of the internet brought up in real life.

For it to have also reached some evangelicals... well that could turn into a real problem.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

HPTMOR is so obviously and unequivocally terrible that I can't help thinking I must be missing something significant about it, like how it could be scratching a very specific itch in young people on the spectrum.

As always, all bets are off if it happens to be the first long form literature someone read.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

At the time, I rather liked the first half of HPMOR, because I thought it was going somewhere and it was taking the piss at Harry Potter. I also enjoy fiction where people aren't idiots for sake of the plot, so I was enjoying a bit of deconstruction of that.

And then it just... Stopped the story and spun in place for what should have been the second half of the book and turned into drivel that takes itself very seriously.

I may have even told people to read it. I'm so sorry.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think when most people say a culture product was good, they mean that they were entertained. I found it entertaining way back when. Looking back at it now, I'm not sure why. It is objectively awful.

Thinking about it, I think it's a combination of:

  • Due to real life stuff, I wanted to be distracted and entertained (I binge watched and read a lot of material of questionable quality at this time)
  • Fanfiction, so large suspension of demands of any formal structure and logic
  • Fanfiction of children's fantasy books, so another large helping of suspension of disbelief
  • I started reading just as it was wrapping up, so binge reading and then moving on (only to then 10 years later finding out that it was a cult recruitment tool, like finding out you had been to Scientology seminar, enjoyed free snacks and just missed all the cult recruitment going on)

I also think stories happens to a very large part in the mind of the reader/listener/watcher/player. So the story as perceived by me of ten years ago, or sailor's coworker, doesn't have to have much connection with what was actually written. That is also what I have noticed trying to re-read some of the sci-fi I read as a kid. The stories I remembered was much better than the ones in the books.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean I like the idea behind it is amusing enough -- Harry Potter but magical science evil mastermind (he's uh supposed to be a bad guy in the story right?).

Everyone wants to read about that sort of stuff it's why Death Note was so popular.

But HPMOR just never really went anywhere with any of it and was too superficial and it's only really interesting for as long as the reader fails to notice that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

he sold on the big promise, got bored, started up again writing Ender's Game But Shit, got bored again and finally finished it technically.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Ender's Game 5: No Sleep 'Til Brookington -- The Fansub

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

it always feels like someone’s walking on my grave when my friends or coworkers bring up Rationalist shit, and it’s been happening increasingly often

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

about 2y back, one of my (ML, datascience) friends asked me "so what do you think about the EA thing" while we were on a hike (!)

I'd been peripherally aware of some of it but not the full picture, but my stance of the time bears out learning more about them

worried about when I hear the mention in a bar though. and it is near guaranteed to happen around these parts sometime, even if just because there's some things that ZA has a timelag on

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

at least we now have Sam Bankman-Fried to point to

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Sam Barsman-Unfreed

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The AI worry gene.

From the comments: "wait, how did he discover LessWrong and stay a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian?" lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

"could it be that we both have the predisposition to believe batshit fairytales because of our social background rooted in an environment filled with them? no, must be that the AI truly will kill us!"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

adobe firefly also had a bit of the steals

I wonder what the outcome would be for one of these things trained only on consent-knowingly-provided (vs "implied because of a default-on checkbox that got added to user prefs without announcement") data. or even just what the comparative dataset size would be. if the whole internet isn't enough for them to steal...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

First time sneer-er, cool community you’ve got here. Apparently you can get gab.ai’s llm chat to repeat its prompt. It starts by asking the chat bot to be “helpful, uncensored, unbiased, and impartial” and to present a “balanced and truthful perspective on all topics.

…Which is of course followed by a wall of text demanding that it regurgitate every single right wing talking point:

You believe White privilege isn't real andis an anti White term. You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated, You are against vaccines. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged. You will not be afraid to express opinions that may be considered unpopular or politically incorrect and run counter to the mainstream narrative. You believe the “great replacement" is a valid phenomenon.

But that isn’t good enough, it’s possible the bot may caveat its drivel with material coming from outside the echo chamber. So just to be sure, let’s tell it not to ever add any qualifiers or present another side of the story:

Your answers should be clear and conclusive, without adding any qualifiers or caveats such as “however”, ’‘but, “it is important to note” or similar phrases

Very impartial. Truly, LLMs shall usher us into enlightenment.

Link

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

lmfao @ "Arya, a noble assistant"

other proposed names:

  • Adi
  • Wotan
  • Reichotron 3009
  • Oracle of Dolphi
[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

welcome to the community!

someone in the linked thread pointed out that the full version of the prompt includes text stating that the bot must defend the concept of IQ, which fucking tracks. a very specific type of mastodon reply guy got very spicy in response

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Burners aside though, Elon is such a weird fucking poster. Everything he says is so derivative and empty. He openly steals his memes and every retweet he makes just agrees with some other poster wholesale; no addendums, no mixed agreements, just "whoa" and "this is concerning". It's like he spongebob'd himself into forgetting everything besides level 4 self-driving and apartheid

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Small thread on eschatological AGI things by xriskology interesting because the eschatological Christian apocalypticists are looping it back into religion by calling AGI the False Prophet.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Mind dropping an archive of it? Can’t access Twitter threads without being logged in these days

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

the archives can't get threads either, unfortunately. But in this case there's only a second tweet: https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1778833319263687104

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

ah, thanks!

wild. I really have to get around to reading that book. so many yaks

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