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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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 2 hours ago

Like Vitalik Buterin creating eht because he was mad his op WoW char got nerfed, we now have more gamers lore. J D Vance played a Yawgmoth's Bargain deck.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

As Nina Power was mentioned before, here is an article on a Welsh 'druid'/forger which touches that subject (and Marx) a bit. People might find it an interesting read.

Anti-Woke Druids and Radical Bards - 'What links Welsh 18th century romantic Druid-Bards, gathering around a circle of pebbles in North London, and the contemporary online right?'

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago

It was an interesting read, thanks for posting it.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

NYT: "Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying" (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html)

Archive: https://archive.ph/Bas23

HN link from whence I got this, have not mined this for sneers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41878281

edit oh wait found one

OpenAI's revenue isn't from advertising, it should be slightly easier for them to resist the call of enshittification this early in the company history.

Can't enshittify that which is already shit

Twice in the last week I've had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership) and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates. Both times I turned to ChatGPT and it gave me an answer immediately

Just a normal hackernews, testing if the models they use are racist

Well, at this point most new data being created is conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation logs are their moat.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 6 hours ago

Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)

The unspecificity is damning. "Facts about their membership" might range from "what racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member of" to "am I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculate".

and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.

That's an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

tl;dr of the article: ever since the ousting of altman, microsoft, which virtually owns openai, has been suspicious of openai's actual worth. therefore MS has cut down on the infinite resource flow. openai employees are whining about this.

there is one additional point in three of the near final paragraphs, which I'll quote in full because they are so amusing to me

Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of A.I. that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

The first paragraph surprised me. I didn't know there were still some true believers left.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I think I see a possible future here. Just as the promptfondlers are now trying to talk down human accomplishments to make the LLMs sound more impressive ('it learns just like a child!' (no, it doesn't)). As when you are trying to reach a deal on a car, you either need the buyer to raise the price, or the seller to lower theirs. This will lead to a lawsuit where they are going to drop down the theoretical capabilities of an AGI just to trigger this clause.

And as the judge thinks that emoji's are a form of novelty pasta, any potential jury can't spell stattistical, there is a 50% chance that they will be convinced it is AGI because humans like the AGI also make mistakes.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Still unclear how OpenAI declaring they've created an AGI (and getting this adjudicated as "true") and thus being released from their MSFT partnership helps OpenAI. They're just lost all their compute, and will have a worse negotiating position from which to get more compute. What's the upside?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 37 minutes ago
[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

pivot to ai now has working dark mode! all praise to the illustrious @fasterandworse@awful.systems

i still hate dark mode, but others fucking love it so

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Thank for letting me know there are other people indifferent to dark mode. Sometimes I feel I am the only one.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

i have already had whiny shits demand that I (a) set dark mode default (b) remove the switch

default is currently set to whatever your browser thinks is the default and you can switch it otherwise

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 8 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Awful.systems defaults to dark mode.

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

like a good developer, I made my personal preference the default (and I think when we started there were major issues with switching themes?)

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago

This is what the BDFL model is all about.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

booooo should be my personal preference (light)

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

brb banning David from the awful.systems plugin repo, modifying the login page so everyone has to swear they don’t know him, and launching a lawsuit for (throws a dart at a dartboard) uhh shoplifting, he shoplifted my website

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

YOU ~wouldn’t~

shoplift a ~WEBSITE~

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Common mistake, but David is from the UK. He was actually just looking online for ways to improve wheelchair accessibility in a multistory house. On a lift-shopping website.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Isnt he a goth? Dont think he needs more lifts.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago

Wouldn't a goth prefer heavy mode?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 15 hours ago

and now that damn jingle is playing in my head at early o’ clock

awful.systems: where the abyss delivers, always

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 20 hours ago

imma fuckin do it again

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 6 points 20 hours ago

The only reason I use dark mode is because my phone is OLED so it uses less power. Otherwise I go for light.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

our good buddy Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux aka TP0 gives a talk to Stanford libertarians

i haven't watched this but i am confident it is the most cursed fuckin thing

one hour thirty frickin eight

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 20 hours ago (1 children)
[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

yep, i'm in touch with college hill, she's aware of our esteemed site too

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 9 hours ago
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Over on /r/politics, there are several users clamoring for someone to feed the 1900 page independent counsel report into an LLM, which is an interesting instance of second-order laziness.

They also seem convinced that NotebookLLM is incapable of confabulation which is hilarious and sad. Could it be sneaky advertising?

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