this post was submitted on 29 Jul 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.

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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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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.

BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace "robot overlords" in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, "The Authoritarian Peril":

https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg

with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:

A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur's Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

isn't that the Palantir business plan

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago

ha ha, wow.

Yeah, simple as, innit?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

with advanced near-perfect lie detection

how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become "near-perfect" with GPUs.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Ya know, it's funny that you point this out, it's a thing about their style of argument that's been nagging at me for a while.

There's a pattern in the promptfondlers' propaganda where they claim that they they've identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a "truth oracle" in the compsci sense of the word "oracle." If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

I guess that's true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.

Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just can't get there from here, but try telling them that.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

Damn bro, they're gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER ~~SEVEN~~ EIGHT DECADES AGO

EDIT: someone pointed out I suck at arithmetic