this post was submitted on 30 Sep 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.

Last week's thread

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

(page 6) 50 comments
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (11 children)

In the endless genAI shit that the bird site pushes on me, this caught my eye because it seems like a dream tool for a non-tech suit to generate blame examples for engineers https://xcancel.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1840941643223945561

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Elon musk voice: 'So euhmmm euuhhh ummm you are ummm euhh saying it has umm some value?'

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

This gonna end in a gofundme

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

snrk

https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676

I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

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

I might be wrong but this sounds like a quick way to make the web worse by putting a huge computational load on your machine for the purpose of privacy inside customer service chat bots that nobody wants. Please correct me if I’m wrongWebLLM is a high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine that brings language model inference directly onto web browsers with hardware acceleration. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and is accelerated with WebGPU.  WebLLM is fully compatible with OpenAI API. That is, you can use the same OpenAI API on any open source models locally, with functionalities including streaming, JSON-mode, function-calling (WIP), etc.  We can bring a lot of fun opportunities to build AI assistants for everyone and enable privacy while enjoying GPU acceleration.  You can use WebLLM as a base npm package and build your own web application on top of it by following the examples below. This project is a companion project of MLC LLM, which enables universal deployment of LLM across hardware environments.

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

I do believe that’s the chrome-only horseshit that Proton uses for their local LLM, and reputedly it’s very slow and fairly unreliable

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

chrome-only

The whole concept of responsive really died in the arse with the onset of the full stack web developer.

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

the web platform is great!

  • your apps run everywhere (that a modern version of chrome runs)
  • every API is pointlessly terrible because your app is simultaneously a document and an Angular monstrosity
  • progressive enhancement! (is dead and they’re Weekend at Bernie’s-ing the body around knowing most web developers won’t notice)
  • it’s an open platform! (controlled almost entirely by Google, with Apple’s only role being to slow down the terrible fucking ideas coming out of the standards process, and all other parties being effectively Google mouthpieces)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Did you ever see that A16z funded startup that was making a web browser that streamed the web for an intermediary server? It was fucken wild

Edit, I guess it was yc funded? https://jacobhrussell.com/blog/mighty

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

Mighty comes in at $30 with a 9% discount with a 12 month prepayment. I don’t think Mighty is for everyone. […] However, for people who use resource intensive applications regularly and either prefer or don’t mind using web apps it seems like a no-brainer. I think there is also a legitimate argument for corporations to provide Mighty for their employees purely based on the productivity boost, especially for tech employees.

It might be hard to get purists to buy into the “browser = OS” value proposition, but in the meantime I’ll be enjoying my 40 GB of RAM.

oh it’s the web operating system again! things that make a web browser an operating system:

  • it’s extremely expensive every month
  • it rehashes the awful cloud rendering browser shit Amazon tried and gave up on for their underpowered Kindle tablets
  • it bundles a bunch of basic shit you can do in ordinary browser plugins
  • 40GB of RAM and 8 virtual cores! (that’s all? my current work machine unfortunately has 64GB, and my desktop from 2020 is a 32+32GB split between native and a VM. 8 KVM cores is also not fantastic. none of this should be required for a fucking web browser though but here we are)
  • it’s using a data center’s fantastic internet connection which is probably why it’s quick, but it of course requires a perfectly stable connection on your end or it’s gonna suck
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

One other thing, also correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a giant key logger as well?

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

…huh, that is true! so another bullet point and this one’s shared by more than one “web operating system”:

  • it irrevocably breaks the browser’s security model implementing pointless functionality

in this case it’s pretty bad, cause it’s got the same issue as all hosted VMs in that if the host or hypervisor is compromised so are all the VMs, but also effectively anyone on Mighty’s side with access to the event stream would have enough data to compromise your entire existence

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

Haha no way! Turns out the founder pivoted to AI 5 months after that article was published https://xcancel.com/suhail/status/1591813110230568963

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052

@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.

For your delectation, here are the HN comments

I'm in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.

Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.

There's not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.

Here's the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk

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

I remember when

I don’t think AI will ever be able to get me to lick my own elbow (while my body is undamaged). Boom AGI will never happen. Logic’ed

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

Well that's quite the confused comment chain given that neither Go nor chess are solved. "Remember that thing everyone said wouldn't happen? Well it still hasn't happened! 🫨"

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

Confusing 'solved' with 'a computer can win playing vs high level human players a high % of the times' because they don't know that 'solved' actually has a specific meaning.

Tech reporting has massively fucked up this as well over the years btw, so I'm not that annoyed random HN people also don't get it. But there is a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game

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

The best thing about the lobste.rs thread is to identify prompt fondlers among the brethren.

Here's something I've never heard of before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

Moravec wrote in 1988: "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers[...]"

Apparently he had GPT back then!

Anyway is this anything anyone takes seriously? Steven Pinker makes an appearance in the wiki page, which is a bit of a red flag.

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

Moravec's Paradox is actually more interesting than it appears. You don't have take his reasoning or Pinker's seriously but the observation is salient. Also the paradox gets stated in other ways by other scientists, it's a common theme.

One way I often think about it: in order for your to survive, the intelligence of moving in unknown spaces and managing numerous fuzzy energy systems is way more important to prioritize and master than like, the abstract conceptual spaces that are both not full of calories and are also cheaper to externalize anyways.

It's part of why I don't think there is a globally coherent heirarchy of intelligence, or potentially even general intelligence at all. Just, the distances and spaces that a thing occupies, and the competencies that define being in that space.

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

So to throw my totally-amateur two cents in, it seems like it's definitely part of the discussion in actual AI circles based on the for-public-consumption reading and viewing I've done over the years, though I've never heard it mentioned by name. I think a bigger part of the explanation has less to do with human cognition (it's probably fallacious to assume that AI of any method effectively reproduces those processes) and more to do with the more abstract cognitive tests and games being much more formally defined. Our perception and model of a game of Chess or Go may not be complete enough to solve the game, but it is bounded by the explicitly-defined rules of the game. If your opponent tries to work outside of those bounds by, say, flipping the board over and storming off, the game itself can treat that as a simple forfeit-by-cheating. But our understanding of the real world is not similarly bounded. Things that were thought to be impossible happen with impressive frequency, and our brain is clearly able to handle this somehow. That lack of boundedness requires different capabilities than just being able to operate within expected parameters like existing English GenAI or image generators, I suspect relating to handling uncertainty or lacking information. The assumption that what AI is doing is a mirror to the living mind is wholly unproven.

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

oh i dunno, there was

Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.

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

This remark is actually part of a long fight between CS and CS people. And it is really frustrating in various ways, as CS always thinks they did better than CS while being blind of the actual accomplishments of CS they don't know and just how complex the subject matter is. It is an annoying failure to communicate between both disciplines. (A lot of people don't fall victim to this btw, but it can be really annoying to encounter a 'Our CS is good, and theirs is bad because strawman', who often don't even realize that various words have different meanings in the different fields).

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

The best way to unearth sneers is to state "there are no sneers here"

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

David took it as a personal challenge

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

given it was first comment when i looked, it was Find Dumb Bro Shit On HN mode

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

I think the one thing LLMs have shown us is that coherent English is less complicated than we previously believed. I don't think we learned anything about actual cognition.

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