this post was submitted on 13 Oct 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)

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

Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...

Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (12 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

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

Top level comment at time of posting:

“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”

???

No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.

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

As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.

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

[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684?s=46](Roko gets dunked on.)

He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.

Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?

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

he's a mathematician, is or was a lecturer somewhere i think

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

If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?

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

That launch happened Feb 2018. By that time, I was already solidified as a musk sceptic and didn’t pay attention to the hubbub. Thinking back on it:

  1. Why was this a thing?
  2. per wikipedia:

Musk explained he wanted to inspire the public about the "possibility of something new happening in space" as part of his larger vision for spreading humanity to other planets.’

What I like about the phrasing “possibility of something new” is that nothing new really happened with that launch. We’ve already sent all kinds of junk into space in configurations varying in impressiveness.

  1. Naming the mannequin Starman falls apart since the eponymous starman is an extra terrestrial. Just goes to show that Musk is not a Real Nerd^TM^ and just makes surface level references to look cool.
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I'll admit I did get a kick out of the "don't panic" dashboard.

But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):

I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.

It's backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can't afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!

Surely his reading comprehension isn't actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!

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

Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!

Ow boy do I have some stories for you about his takeaways from other media he consumed. For example, and a worse take.

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

fucking hell how are Musk’s Banks takes even worse than I remember? that was the point where I realized I hated the fucker so you’d think there’d be nothing left to feel rage over but no, Musk corpsefucking Iain’s memory once he was too dead to tell Musk to go fuck himself is absolutely doing it

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

"utopian anarchist" I assume means "it would be nice in theory".

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

Nah, his ego is big enough that he's probably some version of the an-cap, with a personal political based in "I could give everyone this utopian world if the government and the 'woke mob' and the labor organizers would just get out of my way."

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

~aaaaaaaaaaaa~aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

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

Why was this a thing?

Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.

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

🙄🙄🙄

Hope Musk’s existence and influence today was worth it, nerds from 2018!

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

Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.

Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))

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

Okay but "Elon is not smarter than me" is a universally true statement in the exact same way as "dumb as a rock" is a universally applicable idiom.

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

Indeed, it isn't that Roko is smart, it is the bar is so low.

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

Quick sidenote, you cocked up the formatting on the hyperlink - you're supposed to put [text in square brackets and](the link in circle brackets) like this

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

I suspect it's the frontend on awful that fucked this up, viewing their post in plain/preview shows the correct formatting

placing my bet on the trailing .

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

it may be helpful to know that, at least on the platforms I have tried, you can highlight text and paste a link, and the awful.systems will handle the bracketing for you.

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

I bear news from the other place!

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/

Post content reproduced here:

autoplag image of some electronics on a table

hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but that’s what it looked like

for a subject which tells u to “analyse the deeper meaning”, “analyse the composer’s intent”, “appreciate aesthetic and intellectual value” having an AI image in which you physically can’t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, it’s just extremely ironic 😭 idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since i’m an artist, what r ur thoughts?

*NB: original post contains the text: "as an artist using AI images" but this was corrected in a later comment:

also i didn’t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, “as an artist who DOESNT use AI”

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

In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.

I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.

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

As anyone who's been paying attention already knows, LLMs are merely mimics that provide the "illusion of understanding".

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