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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 June 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 5 months ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

This gem from 25 year old Avital Balwit the Chief of Staff at Anthropic and researcher of "transformative AI at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute" discussing the end of labour as she knows it. She continues:

"The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial. They grasp at the ever diminishing number of places where such models still struggle, rather than noticing the ever-growing range of tasks where they have reached or passed human level. [wherein I define human level from my human level reasoning benchmark that I have overfitted my model to by feeding it the test set] Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things. "

Ah yes, even though the synthetic text machine has failed to achieve a basic understanding of the world generation after generation, it has been able to produce ever larger volumes of synthetic text! The people who point out that it still fails basic arithmetic tasks are the ones who are in denial, the god machine is nigh!

Bonus sneer:

Ironically, the first job to go the way of the dodo was researcher at FHI, so I understand why she's trying to get ahead of the fallout of losing her job as chief Dario Amodei wrangler at OpenAI2: electric boogaloo.

Idk, I'm still workshopping this one.

🐍

[–] mii@awful.systems 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, […]

Holy shit, these chucklefucks are so full of themselves. To them, art and expression and invention are really just menial tasks which ought to be automated away, aren’t they? They claim to be so smart but constantly demonstrate they’re too stupid to understand that literature is more than big words on a page, and that all their LLMs need to do to replace artists is to make their autocomplete soup pretentious enough that they can say: This is deep, bro.

I can’t wait for the first AI-brained litbro trying to sell some LLM’s hallucinations as the Finnegans Wake of our age.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 21 points 5 months ago

Many will point out that magic eight balls are not yet writing award-winning books, let alone patenting inventions. But most of us also don’t do these things.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I maintain that people not having to work is a worst-case scenario for silicon valley VCs who rely on us being too fucking distracted by all their shit products to have time to think about whether we need their shit products

[–] jonhendry@awful.systems 2 points 5 months ago

Facebook conspiracy theorist grannies suggest that employment isn't required.