this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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.

Last week's thread

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

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Our anti-AI milita will be called "The Artists' Rifles"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I vaguely remember mentioning this AI doomer before, but I ended up seeing him openly stating his support for SB 1047 whilst quote-tweeting a guy talking about OpenAI's current shitshow:

pro-1047 doomer

I've had this take multiple times before, but now I feel pretty convinced the "AI doom/AI safety" criti-hype is going to end up being a major double-edged sword for the AI industry.

The industry's publicly and repeatedly hyped up this idea that they're developing something so advanced/so intelligent that it could potentially cause humanity to get turned into paperclips if something went wrong. Whilst they've succeeded in getting a lot of people to buy this idea, they're now facing the problem that people don't trust them to use their supposedly world-ending tech responsibly.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Isn't the primary reason why people are so powerful persuaded by this technology, because they're constantly sworn to that if they don't use its answers they will have their life's work and dignity removed from them? Like how many are in the control group where they persuade people with a gun to their head?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

it’s easy to imagine a world where the people working on AI that are also convinced about AI safety decide to shun OpenAI for actions like this. It’s also easy to imagine that OpenAI finds some way to convince their feeble, gullible minds to stay and in fact work twice as hard. My pitch: just tell them GPT X is showing signs of basilisk nature and it’s too late to leave the data mines

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Saw an unexpected Animatrix reference on Twitter today - and from an unrepentant promptfondler, no less:

animatrix promptfondler

This ended up starting a lengthy argument with an "AI researcher" (read: promptfondler with delusions of intelligence), which you can read if you wanna torture yourself.

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

yes. that's all true, but academics and artists and leftists are actually calling for Buttlerian jihad all the time. when push comes to shove they will ally with fascists on AI

This guy severely underestimates my capacity for being against multiple things at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

The type of guy who was totally convinced by the 'but what if the AI needs to generate slurs to stop the nukes?' argument.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Guy invented a new way to misinterpret the matrix, nice. Was getting tired of all the pilltalk

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

People are "blatantly stealing my work," AI artist complains

When Jason Allen submitted his bombastically named Théâtre D’opéra Spatial to the US Copyright Office, they weren't so easily fooled as the judges back in Colorado. It was decided that the image could not be copyrighted in its entirety because, as an AI-generated image, it lacked the essential element of “human authorship". The office decided that, at best, Allen could copyright specific parts of the piece that he worked on himself in Photoshop.

“The Copyright Office’s refusal to register Theatre D’Opera Spatial has put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work without compensation or credit.” If something about that argument rings strangely familiar, it might be due to the various groups of artists suing the developers of AI image generators for using their work as training data without permission.

via @[email protected]

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

Appropriately for this sort of meaningless bilge, the name is also bullshit. The way to say "space opera" in French is "space opera".

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

"Space opera's the same, but they call it le space opera."

It's been a long time since I lived in France, so my sense of what is idiomatic has no doubt grown rusty, but "Théâtre D'opéra" doesn't sound right. The word "Théâtre" doesn't belong in a reference to the place where operas are performed. It's "L'opéra Garnier" and "L'opéra Bastille" in Paris and "L'opéra Nouvel" in Lyon, for example. I'd read "théâtre d'opéra" as more like "operatic theatre" in the sense of a genre (contrasted with, e.g., spoken-word theatre). I could be completely wrong here, but the title feels like a naive machine translation.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

That's absolutely right.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Inventor sez "I locked myself in my apartment for 4 years to build this humanoid". Surprisingly, not a sexbot!

https://xcancel.com/lethic1/status/1839909404973642137

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Surprisingly, not a sexbot!

Well, not with that attitude

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

Surprisingly, not a sexbot!

would be a good album name

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

also series potential in there

Surprisingly (not), a sexbot!

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

not a sexbot!

Skill issue.

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

You know that's for Gen 2.0

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

This tech curve is about to go exponential, if you know what I'm sayin'

--venture capitalists, probably

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

all hail the hockey stick may we forever outspend all competition and reap the rewards of a ravaged market we solely control

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

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.

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

Fun fact: All of these incidents happened at the same jacuzzi party.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I heard it was the same 50 parties, over and over

(or, well, the same party, x50...)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

love a good second paragraph jumpscare

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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

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

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."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

right with you on team passive aggressive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month 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).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month 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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Job interviews by AI avatars are real and happening, apparently https://www.404media.co/ai-avatars-are-doing-job-interviews-now/

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

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.

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

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

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

Thank you for getting in touch! I was absolutely baffled by this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

their answer dodged answering the questions in a way that completely answered them

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

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