this post was submitted on 18 Nov 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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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Dude discovers that one LLM model is not entirely shit at chess, spends time and tokens proving that other models are actually also not shit at chess.

The irony? He's comparing it against Stockfish, a computer chess engine. Computers playing chess at a superhuman level is a solved problem. LLMs have now slightly approached that level.

For one, gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct rarely suggests illegal moves,

Writeup https://dynomight.net/more-chess/

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42206817

[–] misterbngo@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

Stack overflow now with the sponsored crypto blogspam Joining forces: How Web2 and Web3 developers can build together

I really love the byline here. "Kindest view of one another". Seething rage at the bullshittery these "web3" fuckheads keep producing certainly isn't kind for sure.

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

a better-thought-out announcement is coming later today, but our WriteFreely instance at gibberish.awful.systems has reached a roughly production-ready state (and you can hack on its frontend by modifying the templates, pages, static, and less directories in this repo and opening a PR)! awful.systems regulars can ask for an account and I'll DM an invite link!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

When the reporter entered the confessional, AI Jesus warned, “Do not disclose personal information under any circumstances. Use this service at your own risk.

Do not worry my child, for everything you say in this hallowed chamber is between you, AI Jesus, and the army of contractors OpenAI hires to evaluate the quality of their LLM output.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago (7 children)

The mask comes off at LWN, as two editors (jake and corbet) dive in to frantically defend the honour of Justine fucking Tunney against multiple people pointing out she's a Nazi who fills her projects with racist dogwhistles

https://lwn.net/Articles/998196/

[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

fuck me that is some awful fucking moderation. I can’t imagine being so fucking bad at this that I:

  • dole out a ban for being rude to a fascist
  • dole out a second ban because somebody in the community did some basic fucking due diligence and found out one of the accounts defending the above fascist has been just a gigantic racist piece of shit elsewhere, surprise
  • in the process of the above, I create a safe space for a fascist and her friends

but for so many of these people, somehow that’s what moderation is? fucking wild, how the fuck did we get here

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

See, you're assuming the goal of moderation is to maintain a healthy social space online. By definition this excludes fascists. It's that old story about how to make sure your punk bar doesn't turn into a nazi punk bar. But what if instead my goal is to keep the peace in my nazi punk bar so that the normies and casuals keep filtering in and out and making me enough money that I can stay in business? Then this strategy makes more sense.

[–] FRACTRANS@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Centrists Don't Fucking Be Like This challenge not achieved yet again

https://social.kernel.org/notice/AoGpED4fw3LSGhxTLU

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

fwiw this link didn't jump me to a specific reply (if you meant to highlight a particular one)

[–] FRACTRANS@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

It didn’t scroll for me either but there’s a reply by this corbet person with a highlighted background which I assume is the one intended to be linked to

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Post by Corbet the editor. "We get it: people wish that we had not highlighted work by this particular author. Had we known more about the person in question, we might have shied away from the topic. But the article is out now, it describes a bit of interesting technology, people have had their say, please let's leave it at that."

So you updated the article to reflect this right? padme.jpg

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago

so is corbet the same kind of fucker that'll complain "everything is so political nowadays"? it seems like they are

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[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 also, and I know this is way beside the point, update the design of your website, motherfuckers

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

I don't run any websites, what are you coming at me for

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[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

most of the dedicated Niantic (Pokemon Go, Ingress) game players I know figured the company was using their positioning data and phone sensors to help make better navigational algorithms. well surprise, it’s worse than that: they’re doing a generative AI model that looks to me like it’s tuned specifically for surveillance and warfare (though Niantic is of course just saying this kind of model can be used for robots… seagull meme, “what are the robots for, fucker? why are you being so vague about who’s asking for this type of model?”)

Quick, find the guys who were taping their phones to a ceiling fan and have them get to it!

Jokes aside I'm actually curious to see what happens when this one screws up. My money is on one of the Boston Dynamics dogs running in circles about 30 feet from the intended target without even establishing line of sight. They'll certainly have to test it somehow before it starts autonomously ordering drone strikes on innocent people's homes, right? Right?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Pokemon Go To The War Crimes

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 3 days ago

Pokemon Go To The Hague

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (9 children)

Peter Watts's Blindsight is a potent vector for brain worms.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Watts has always been a bit of a weird vector. While he doesn't seem a far righter himself, he accidentally uses a lot of weird far right dogwhistles. (prob some cross contamination as some of these things are just scientific concepts (esp the r/K selection thing stood out very much to me in the rifters series, of course he has a phd in zoology, and the books predate the online hardcore racists discovering the idea by more than a decade, but still odd to me)).

To be very clear, I don't blame Watts for this, he is just a science fiction writer, a particularly gloomy one. The guy himself seems to be pretty ok (not a fan of trump for example).

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

That's a good way to put it. Another thing that was really en vogue at one point and might have been considered hard-ish scifi when it made it into Rifters was all the deep water telepathy via quantum brain tubules stuff, which now would only be taken seriously by wellness influencers.

not a fan of trump for example

In one the Eriophora stories (I think it's officially the sunflower circle) I think there's a throwaway mention about the Kochs having been lynched along with other billionaires on the early days of a mass mobilization to save what's savable in the face of environmental disaster (and also rapidly push to the stars because a Kardashev-2 civilization may have emerged in the vicinity so an escape route could become necessary in the next few millenia and this scifi story needs a premise).

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