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.)
So, the Wikipedia article about “prompt engineering” is pretty terrible. First source: OpenAI. Second: a blog. Third: OpenAI. Fourth: OpenAI’s blog. ArXiv, arXiv, arXiv… 43 times. Hop on over to the Talk page, and we find this gem:
It is sometimes necessary to make assumptions to write an article (see WP:MNA).
Spoiler alert: that link doesn’t justify anything. It basically advises against going off on tangents: There’s no need to rehash the fact that evolution is a fact on every damn biology page. It does not say that Wikipedia should have an article on some creationist fantasy, like baraminology or flood geology, based entirely on creationist screeds that all cite each other.
hells yeah it’s time for some action - Drew DeVault is organizing a sit-in protest of Jack Dorsey’s keynote at FOSDEM 2025.
eh? I don’t see Jackie D’s keynote in the schedule, did the threat of a sit-in make them delete it? https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/ edit: oh, it’s linked from Drew’s post.
there it is, sammy has gone and said people are just prompting the model wrong (I recall we’ve had that bit said here earlier)
but in true sammy grift: you just need to be asking the right questions to trump intelligence. “why do you want to suck, as a human?” sammy asks, not understanding a moment of humanity
What they promise: intelligence systems, revolutionary agent which can take over tasks!
What we get: https://youtu.be/izazdBpraC8
how do you even define “raw, intellectual horsepower” and how does it differ from knowing how to formulate questions mother fucker
“Raw, intellectual horsepower” means fucking an intellectual horse without a condom.
Oh, wait, that’s rawdogging intellectual horsepower, my mistake.
shot:
Von Neumann arguably had the highest processor-type “horsepower” we know of plus his breadth of intellectual achievements is unparalleled.
chaser:
But imo Grothendieck is a better comparison point for ASI as his intelligence, while being strangely similar to LLMs in some dimensions
the bit about it that I find subtly glorious (in how remarkably fuckwitted it is) is the baseline idea of “intellectual horsepower”
I’m not surprised that this is a view they (of the company that’s effectively going “just 12 more DCs bro it’ll be enough compute bro I promise bro just watch”) hold and consider in such a simple mechanism-rating scale
but it is funny as fuck
This is extremely tangential to the areas of sneer interest, but seeing as this is the only technology related community I am in, I’m putting it here.
This song has been making the rounds on the charts/social media and I refuse to believe that it isn’t about the package management tool apt
I hope Toni Basil and the Ting Tings get big royalty cheques.
the writers of hey mickey have a writing credit on it, but the ting tings got shafted.
of course it is one in a long tradition of tech-tangential songs, including this banger about the inevitable collapse of tech bubbles
