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.

Last week’s thread

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

10 points

I vaguely remember mentioning this AI doomer before, but I ended up seeing him openly stating his support for SB 1047 whilst quote-tweeting a guy talking about OpenAI’s current shitshow:

I’ve had this take multiple times before, but now I feel pretty convinced the “AI doom/AI safety” criti-hype is going to end up being a major double-edged sword for the AI industry.

The industry’s publicly and repeatedly hyped up this idea that they’re developing something so advanced/so intelligent that it could potentially cause humanity to get turned into paperclips if something went wrong. Whilst they’ve succeeded in getting a lot of people to buy this idea, they’re now facing the problem that people don’t trust them to use their supposedly world-ending tech responsibly.

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4 points

Isn’t the primary reason why people are so powerful persuaded by this technology, because they’re constantly sworn to that if they don’t use its answers they will have their life’s work and dignity removed from them? Like how many are in the control group where they persuade people with a gun to their head?

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7 points

it’s easy to imagine a world where the people working on AI that are also convinced about AI safety decide to shun OpenAI for actions like this. It’s also easy to imagine that OpenAI finds some way to convince their feeble, gullible minds to stay and in fact work twice as hard. My pitch: just tell them GPT X is showing signs of basilisk nature and it’s too late to leave the data mines

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15 points
*

Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Who’d have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.

Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35T crypto we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.

https://xcancel.com/mattyglesias/status/1838331688931266694

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6 points

I mean there are definitely some brain rotted crypto bros who would buy shares at face value because it’s totally gonna go to the moon guys

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9 points

The question (which doesn’t matter) now is, does he really understand crypto? Or did he get at the right conclusion because he thinks that everybody else, like him, is just scamming all the time?

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7 points

Given the kinds of crowds he hangs out with (i.e. mostly other rich people and political elite) is that not an understandable conclusion?

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8 points

anything that makes yglesias have a bad day is generally a good thing

but it sounds like the orange man understands the crypto market perfectly: the numbers are all made up and everyone’s lying

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4 points

(at least I think it’s that one? one of them’s quite the bootlicker. I’m bad at names tho)

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15 points

A lobsters states the following in regard to LLMs being used in medical diagnoses:

If you have very unusual symptoms, for example, there’s a higher chance that the LLM will determine that they are outside of the probability space allowed and replace them with something more common.

Another one opines:

Don’t humans and in particular doctors do precisely that? This may be anecdotal, but I know countless stories of people being misdiagnosed because doctors just assumed the cause to be the most common thing they diagnose. It is not obvious to me that LLMs exhibit this particular misjudgement more than humans. In fact, it is likely that LLMs know rare diseases and symptoms much better than human doctors. LLMs also have way more time to listen and think.

<Babbage about UK parlaimentarians.gif>

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13 points

Also please fill in the obligatory rant about how LLMs don’t actually know any diseases or symptoms. Like, if your training data was collected before 2020 you wouldn’t have a single COVID case, but if you started collecting in 2020 you’d have a system that spat out COVID to a disproportionately large fraction of respiratory symptoms (and probably several tummy aches and broken arms too, just for good measure).

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14 points

nothing hits worse than an able-bodied techbro imagining what medical care must be like for someone who needs it. here, let me save you from the possibility of misdiagnosis by building and mandating the use of the misdiagnosis machine

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8 points

Job interviews by AI avatars are real and happening, apparently https://www.404media.co/ai-avatars-are-doing-job-interviews-now/

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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.

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