Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this, and happy 4th July in advance.)
Current copium is that if it can solve Erdos problems after a fashion then the cancer annihilating molecular biology breakthroughs can’t be that far behind.
Also since just shovelling GPUs and reddit posts into a data center forever probably won’t do the trick they’ve settled on the questionmarks on the list before Profit! being Recursive Self Improvement, meaning that since automatic code generation is somewhat improving it follows that pretty soon LLMs will just code themselves out of their current predicament of being unsustainably resource intensive hallucination machines and build AGI on their own.
I really like how in the past couple of years they’ve decided model collapse just isn’t a thing anymore.
They just don’t call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem. (Somebody on bsky said ‘hey that isn’t actually model collapse, read this article on it written by the AI company’. And then the article described model collapse, but didn’t call it model collapse, it was amusing. (And I went into it, thinking I could be wrong, going ‘ah so it is only related to a specific set of instructions’, but then the article also showed that models without those instructions had the the problem (in a much smaller way, but the bad instructions were spreading due to synthetic data))).
every week of work with biologists brings another “guess we doin circles now” moment. there’s simply so many things that were never measured, measuring them requires knowing what are you doing, proper experimental design and interpretation of results, that are affected by myriad factors and dozens of feedback loops. none of that is in training data of course, and even if it was it would help very little because humans measuring that would make better use of these results first. but don’t worry about that, machine god will learn relativity from three video frames and will make peter thiel immortal right away