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.

26 points

Anyways, first actual post of the week (albeit not the first sneer):

(Source)

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13 points
*

Jesus, take the wheel!

–intel, probably

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10 points

you know

I actually meant to post that (a friend sent it to me earlier, and it was why I even got around to starting the new stubsack)

adhdbrain is a fuck

(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

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11 points

(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

Anything that takes the edge off a possible Great Recession sequel’s fine in my book

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22 points

Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we’re trying to force everyone to use one instead of using hunter2 everywhere.

Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that “Usually there’s no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT.”

Usually.

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14 points

what

whattttttttt

whatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

and it’s not like crowdstrike didn’t just happen. I guess maybe it was too recent, and the lesson-of-pain hasn’t percolated through to dipshit"integration advisor" technical sales fuckwits yet

bonus round, whatever the hell lemmy did here:

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24 points

It only shows it like that to you because it’s your password.

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9 points

ah yeah, the well-known nter2 Rust function that lets you… enter the number 2, you know?

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6 points

would’ve thought that’s a js/ts package

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17 points

Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0

These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/

Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.

Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.

I’m sure!

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13 points

They’ve given me a strange vibe for a while. I suspected they might be in the TREACLES sphere, so I guess at least I finally have confirmation.

Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

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9 points

Also, the amount of “ChatGPT is basically AGI already” people in the comments is alarming.

They prob should do a video on this effect as shown by the early ELIZA experiments. That even the smartest people could get fooled by a dumb program. Doubt they will though if they are into EA stuff.

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8 points
*

I still maintain that ChatGPT’s main draw is as a Ouija board for weird nerds.

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@hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they’ve previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.

This is extra crap because I’d already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn’t have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.

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10 points
*

Some ‘scientists’ cough Yud/Rob/Kokotajlo cough believe in FOOM. Anyways, let’s not question this fundamental assumption so we can engage in fear baiting and mental masturbation for the remainder of our show. It’s bonkers that people keep citing Kokotajlo as an AI researcher, like, I have serious doubts this man knows what a computer is. Pretty good at grifting though. Also why is Rob Miles still listed as a PhD student. Like cant he hurry up and fuckin graduate already? Christ.

As an aside, I remember watching a PBS space time and seeing sponsored by Open Philanthropy (or some other EA organization) and I was like no not my beloved PBS!! I know it feels :(

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1 point

Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it’s important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.

The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It’s fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman’s “last invention” is wrong because most, unfortunately, most “smart people’s” view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.

In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.

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10 points

Kurzgesagt

Yeah I’m not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as “all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s”.

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9 points

Idea: a Pivot to AI video series hosted by an avatar that’s, like, a talking polyhedron in the style of Mind’s Eye/Body Wars era CGI.

This would require effort and thus is a terrible idea, but I find the mental image amusing.

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13 points

using Hatsune Miku but with my voice would save on having to maintain a video setup

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4 points

Hatsune Miku but with my voice

Thanks, this will be my dreams now for the rest of the month

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7 points

we need to bring back machinima

I call dibs on being represented by the left pong paddle, lovingly recorded from the analog output of an Atari Pong TTL standup (or FPGA equivalent)

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5 points

I’ve never heard of this outfit. Is it a sort of skepticsphere darling?

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9 points

more a sort of ‘I love science’ youtuber I think.

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16 points

babe wake up, antitrust law was confirmed not dead

(I will say this one surprised me)

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7 points

The government has asked for “structural relief” - which could, in theory at least, mean the break-up of the company.

How likely would this be?

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6 points

I heard that one of Bidens good things is to put actually effect people on antitrust laws. Sadly I also heard that Harris is planning on putting somebody else on there.

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9 points

A lot of what Biden did was based on the wide margins the executive had. But now with Chevron deference dead people can sue those efforts and will win via the 5th Circuit or SCOTUS, because they’re institutions bought by people who most vehemently hate antitrust laws. Similar reasoning applies to right-to-repair efforts.

In other words, USA will never have nice things unless Harris pulls off a major court reform.

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6 points

Thanks! Indeed, I keep forgetting Chevron. Not sure how far this replacement is related however, but there should be a different priority indeed. Hope she pulls it off, people seem happy with Waltz at least. He also seems like a mostly decent person. Worst I saw people go was compare him to Boss Hogg, which is quite the dated reference.

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15 points

Regarding the paper “Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning”, a comment by e. e. arroyo:

“Yes! we can make explainable predictions of compounds with AI now!”

  • They could only explain 15% of predictions
  • They could only understand 9% of those explanations
  • 60% of those were wrong
  • The 4 active compounds left are probably, arguably, not even a novel class
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11 points

i’m not reading all that, at least now, but i’d just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development

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10 points

I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it’s not like there’s no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the “spare” cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

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6 points

“for SBV values of explaining”

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