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.
found this linked in ed zitron comment section for some reason: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/phil-vs-llms/
With a moment’s contemplation after reading it, I just realized how spectacularly bad this could go if, for example, you went to do a search for an chemical’s Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and a Large Language Model (LLM) gave you back some bullshit advice to take in the event of hazmat exposure or fire.
joke’s on you, MSDSs are already dogshit. these things only exist to cover ass of manufacturers and are filled with generic, useless advice https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-msds https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/un-safety-data-sheets there is MSDS for sand, MSDS for tear gas and ethanol lists the same dangers, toxicity is overemphasized (because it’s common) and some other dangers like explosiveness are underappreciated (because it’s not), we don’t even need LLMs for this, humans (lawyers mostly i guess) did the same on accident
also bonus points for first-principling what could have been instead of asking somebody that actually knows, like any proper rationalist would do. also, vinyl chloride is not reactive with water and spraying pressurized containers with water can be a sensible thing to do, because this cools them down, so it decreases pressure meaning it decreases risk of rupture, which would be a bad thing, if manageable for firefighters to do it safely. see: some fires involving propane tanks
An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;
Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (“appropriate respirator”), it’s your job to figure out what it is
MSDSs are already dogshit
one of those cases of “minimum legally required” type of things? maybe with a dash of “the specification and requirements were written ${time} ago and haven’t evolved a lick since then, despite much shift in industry and progress”?
there are no real enforced requirements of accuracy, most of typical known hazards are covered by generic useless advice and everything else is just filled by “no information”
An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (“appropriate respirator”), it’s your job to figure out what it is
Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh, still better than an LLM directly endangering you with bad advice
as if we needed LLMs for that. at least two of my profs have abstract tattoos left from experimenting with homemade explosives when they were in high school
as reminders? or are they just that metal?
(e: mostly unsure whether you mean ink or scartissue with “abstract tattoos”)