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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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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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)

(page 3) 50 comments

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

A quick update: @ai_shame is quitting Twitter, and Musk using posts for AI training is the reason why:

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago (6 children)

our good buddy Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux aka TP0 gives a talk to Stanford libertarians

i haven't watched this but i am confident it is the most cursed fuckin thing

one hour thirty frickin eight

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

i am hearing that ProQuest has been quietly contacting small publishers to see if it can ingest their published output for AI training.

ProQuest has an AI thing now, but it's denied it's training on hosted content ... yet.

if you are, or know, an author who's had a letter of this sort recently, mentioning ProQuest or no, i'd love to know and please tell your friends - email is dgerard@gmail.com

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (7 children)

[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684?s=46](Roko gets dunked on.)

He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.

Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.

Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))

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[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (10 children)

If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.

And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this one's thankfully unrelated to the article's main point):

The idea that "[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitable^tm^" (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.

That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valley's failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.

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