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dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don't quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!

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 here 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.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

CW: Palestine-Israel.

Something I’ve observed is various members of the rats being zionist/pro-israel/anti-palestine. This doesn’t really surprise me, but that’s not what I’m commenting on.

One topic that occasionally gets discussed is Israel’s use of “AI” in warfare. I’m only going to link one source and I’m not going into it too deeply.

So what I’m wondering is: this seems to pattern match to one of the great AI doom narratives, ie. of AGI* being given control of military assets; where is the rationalist outrage? I searched Lesswrong for mentions of Israel and the IDF but turned up empty handed.

To be clear: this is a request for submissions. I am not rhetorically sneering at what I am perceiving as a hypocritical lack of outrage, to do so would require proof. That being said it’s probably clear from this comment that my mind is constructing that narrative.

*of course I am not saying that whatever the IDF is saying is AI is AGI, as AGI is not real.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

the old thing was use of ai in iron dome, because generally mistaking a civilian target for a rocket is pretty hard given differences in size and speed, and autonomous air defense is a thing that already exists for decades. the ai part comes from predicting if a given rocket will fall on populated area, and pointing radar-guided interceptors to those that do

the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you're doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it's working or not you'd need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage

people at palantir are probably making very detailed notes

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 8 months ago

the new thing, well nobody can tell you that you’re doing things wrong if nobody knows for sure what are you doing. to even tell whether it’s working or not you’d need to sit in heads of israeli military planners and know what are their exact objectives and acceptable collateral damage

Yeah, and I don’t think they are ever going to be explicit about how their “AI” works.