this post was submitted on 09 Dec 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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

the grok AI is now available to free twitter users, evidently not enough paying users were interested

it's somewhat more tedious than Gemini and that's saying something

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

Really wise decision to open up the system that costs a lot of money per question to the world. Esp when it brings in none. Wonder if there are people working on the low orbital cannon equivalent of trying to mess with twitters finances

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

just delivered a commission on why bitcoin is very like hawk tuah

this season's word is: kleptokakistocracy

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (12 children)

Can we all take a moment to appreciate this absolutely wild take from Google's latest quantum press release (bolding mine) https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10^25^ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

The more I think about it the stupider it gets. I'd love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

"Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously" is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for "problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer", BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like they'd need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you'd never imagine the Gottesman–Knill theorem could be true.

To quote a paper by Andy Steane, one of the early contributors to quantum error correction:

The answer to the question ‘where does a quantum computer manage to perform its amazing computations?’ is, we conclude, ‘in the region of spacetime occupied by the quantum computer’.

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[–] self@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

your regular reminder that the guy with de facto ownership over the entire Rust ecosystem outside of the standard library and core is very proud about being in Peter Thiel’s pocket (and that post is in reference to this article)

e: on second thought I’m being unfair — he owns the conferences and the compiler spec process too

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago

reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it

miscounting "r"s in "strawberry"

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago (9 children)

So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some.... boutique... views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:

  • Lab-grown meat
  • Modern architecture is rotten
  • Population decline is an existential threat
  • Elon Musk and Peter Thiel

How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 1 week ago (2 children)

the absolute state of american politics: rentseeker ceo gets popped by a libertarian

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

We should expect more of this to come. The ascendant right wing is pushing policies that only deliver for people who are already stinking rich. Even if 99% of those who vote that way go along with the propaganda line in the face of their own disappointment, that's still a lot of unhappy people, who are not known for intellectual consistency or calm self-reflection, in a country overflowing with guns. All it takes is one ammosexual who decides that his local Congressman has been co-opted by the (((globalists))), you know?

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[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (28 children)

StRev was calling him TPOT adjacent and woodgrains was having a bit of a panic over it.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 20 points 1 week ago (4 children)

"Our righteous warriors are only supposed to kill brown people and women, not captains of industry!!"

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago

dust specks vs CEOs

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[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago

It's so embarrassing to watch upper-middle class (at best!) rationalists get their panties in a twist over Luigi. At least the right wing talking heads are getting paid, these guys are just mad he did things instead of tweeting about things.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago

"My heavens, our self-regarding supremacist ideology can't possibly imply violence... can it???"

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[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Lots of developments in the UHC shooter case

  • They (probably) caught him

  • He's even hotter without his three identical jackets

  • He's a Thielhead

Not very happy with how this day's going

https://xcancel.com/pepmangione

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

He was radicalized by Tim Urban, an into AGI

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That assassin in New York has turned out to be a EA hang around.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The whole internet loves CEO Murderer, a handsome murderer that targets CEOs! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the murderer is into AI

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

On the third day of OpenAI my true ~~love~~ enemy gave to me ~~three french hens~~ Sora.

The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.

"12 days of OpenAI" lol. Such marketing.

Big eye roll to this part too:

We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.

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[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I ended up on Know Your Meme because folks are throwing around TPOT like we're all terminally online and all understand Twitter lingo.

For anyone else confused: that part of Twitter. It's techbro "phillosophists" like Peter Thiel.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (10 children)

yeah, TPOT is specifically the uwu smol bean neoreactionary race scientists

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