this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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TechTakes

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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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? 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 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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

OK this is low-hanging fruit but ChatGPT-4o (4o? what even is branding?) was demoed with a feminine voice, So HN discussed it. And a couple extremely horny users can't stop talking about robot girlfriend sex and the end of relationships

the western world is already experiencing a huge decline in womens sexual appetites -- AI will effectively make women completely uninterested in men

An AI girlfriend that isn't going to bring up the last three time you fought because you forget her birthday/called her fat/hit on her friends? are you sure you understand the target market?

I guess I can never understand the perspective of someone that just needs a girl voice to speak to them. Without a body there is nothing to fulfill me.

And after that you have a robot that listens to you, do your chores and have sex with you, at that point she is "real".

If you want to solve procreation them you can do that without humans having sex with humans.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

countries with GPUs

GPU is the new WMD

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

mr president, we cannot allow GPU gap!

wait fuck

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

"And with the proper breeding ratio of, say, 10 chatbots to each male..."

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

countries with GPUs

Did this person forget how the internet works? Or is he imaging that people just buy a desktop to fuck (and that any desktopsexuals have not done so already. (keep that blacklight away from my dvd player please).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

It’s the same fantasy zero-depth comprehension as the chuds who thought they could transact in only bitcoin come the fall of civilisation, in the same delivery format: thonkwits trying to cloutfarm in hypewave

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It never ceases to amaze me watching these tech bros breathlessly hyping the next revolutionary product for it to be a huge nothing burger. Like that's it? You gave gpt an image to text input + and a text to speech app? Dawg, I've been watching Joe Biden & Trump play Fortnite for 5 years at this point, text to speech just doesn't hit the same anymore.

I mean my god, at least some hardcore engineering went in to making the migraine inducing apple vision pro. If this is the best card in oai's deck, I would be panicking as an investor.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

Well, I suppose dating a chatbot taped to a fleshlight is exactly the sort of relationship these people deserve. Self-solving problem.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It got submitted to lobste.rs too and there are some insane takes there too

https://lobste.rs/s/ph5o0a/openai_gpt_4o

this model has lower latency, and they’ve priced it at half of the previous model’s price, despite it having comparable or better performance. If this is not a dumping price,[...]

Yeah it's totes more efficient, it's not like Altman/MSFT are desperate to goose subscriber numbers

I’ve seen first-hand how it helps non-programmers write programs to solve their problems (with “bad” code, but bad code is still empowering people), and I think that’s important given that software has been eating the world.

Couldn’t the thousands of people now free from mundane work, work together now on solving climate issues or issues that require physical human labor?

if LLMs/AI can run byrocracies (and whole countries) more efficiently, there are potential energy savings there too.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

fml i thought these were the smarter techies

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

this is an absolutely accursed post, well done

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Talking about the demo and not those HN reactions (they suck): So we all in tech have collectively forgotten the whole 'apple iphones didn't actually work when they were being presented and it was all just theatre' thing? Because I wouldn't trust a slick tech demo like that at all. (I also want to know about all the edge cases where it fails and well, there is also the whole 'what is this even for?' thing). (And yes some HN people did voice these concerns).

E: also don't these GPT things have a sort of token limit? After a while they just get stuck in 'cannot accept more new data' mode basically (which I assume is a limit so people don't use up too much compute (I hate how we are making that a word now)), how would that work? (This is more about the robofuckers, who have also not learned anything from the previous gen of this shit when somebody turned the naughty cybersex function off).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Don't forget about how the presentations for Google Gemini and OpenAI Sora and Devin were all ~~faked~~ embellished too, but no one talks about that anymore either.

I'm still waiting for even one actual use-case for sexy Clippy that isn't generating SEO spam while speedrunning climate change.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (17 children)

this one doesn’t deserve a freeasm thread, but the latest bad nix take just dropped, and a bunch of the folks I follow on mastodon just outed themselves by agreeing with a post that’s best summarized as:

I am an American living in the United States. I have in the recent past been a centrist Democrat. But my opinions have been trending rightward for some time now, and it’s not impossible that I will consider voting for Republican candidates locally in the future. I would call myself a libertarian these days, although not with a big “L”.

It’s unfortunate that I have to mention my politics here, but it will become relevant.

[…]

But there is no moral difference taking money from Anduril or from Microsoft. Microsoft has had multi-billion dollar Pentagon and other agency contracts for many years now, and the things they produce are used wherever the U.S. Government wants to use them, including as tools for war and border control.

[…]

From the interactions I had, and the ones I saw in Discourse and on Matrix, it also didn't seem there was an epidemic of bigots in the Nix community.

you’ve read all of this shit before. it’s another “centrist democrat” who thinks the republicans have really good points now that they’re open fascists. you can autocomplete the rest of the post from what I’ve quoted here. there’s a bunch of paragraphs defending Jon, whose bigotry and resulting pissbaby tantrum over a temporary ban from the Nix community is legendary. there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as a direct sponsorship and control over the project from a company whose only purpose is to enable the more efficient killing of people.

this post wouldn’t be notable except that a bunch of apparent fuckheads I accidentally followed on mastodon (probably cause they do nix shit) started salivating over this post like hungry dogs. seriously, check this shit out:

Beyond NixOS, I learned so much about trying to get involved in politics from this post.

In a man like you, these events cause reflection, worry, and certain feelings. But to a politician, it would all be just one more day at work.

I read it twice and I showed it to my wife.

and my wife was a bald eagle and she shed a single tear and that tear’s name was George Washington

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

there’s a bunch of bad faith shit pretending that a dependency on Microsoft (via GitHub) is just as bad as (...)

Ofc it's not, but also hey mate, if you want to take up the cause of "let's move off GitHub cause Microsoft sucks" then more power to you! Microsoft does suck! Those problems are not mutually exclusive!

You can be both against bad business practices and human rights violations at the same time while recognising the latter is a much more pressing issue. Is this a hot take? Have those people never had two separate ideas in their head at the same time?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

lol this mcdonough guy's great

@nebucatnetzer none of that is relevant. the wedge issues mentioned in that letter are being used to gain power by cynical people who aren't interested in that.

yes it's a cynical power grab by the woke mob

and in conclusion I expect these people can greatly enjoy each other's company

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

the woke mob that is, at various points in his post, either a large group that’s taken over the Nix community, or a tiny and unimportant but loud group of marginalized folks, depending on what makes his point more efficiently at the time

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (8 children)

Creativity is a lie. You heard it here first.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Did the Aella moratorium from r/sneerclub carry over here?

Because if not

for the record, im currently at ~70% that we're all dead in 10-15 years from AI. i've stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending and the amount of long-term health risks im taking

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

Is increasing the amount of long-term health risks code for showering even less?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Same Aella Same, but moon.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

For the record, I'm currently at ~70% that we're all dead in 10-15 years from the moon getting mad at us. I've stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending towards a future moon mission to give it lots of pats and treats and tell it it's a good boy and we love it, please don't get mad.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

it's clear that the moon was right and we have it coming

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

MS carbon emissions up 30% due to spicy autocomplete

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/microsoft_co2_emissions/

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

good to see that LessWrong is about improving human rationality to decrease the existential risk of superintelligent AI, and not long screeds on current political issues from a reactionary perspective

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If what you really care about is stemming the ill-effects of large and growing student debt, debt cancellation is a terrible policy. If you want people to consume less of something, the last thing you should do is subsidize people who consume that thing.

Yes, I agree, once debt is cancelled we shouldn't let people go into debt and attending university should be free.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Also that is a weird sort of argument, how would people consume less schooling? 'Yeah I'm going for my 4th degree now, after Biden canceled the debt of the first one, I hope he will cancel the other 3 as well'

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

a crossover sneer from the Nix Zulip:

This is an easy place to add a hook that goes through each message and asks a language model if the message violates any rules. Computers are about as good as humans at interpreting rules about tone and so on, and the biases come from the training data, so for any specific instance the decision is relatively impartial.

please for the love of fuck kick the fascists out of your community because they’ll never stop with this shit

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I know this is like super low-hanging fruit, but Reddit’s singularity forum (AGI hype-optimists on crack) discuss the current chapter in the OpenAI telenovela and can’t decide whether Ilya and Jan Leike leaving is good, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk, or bad, because no more lobotomizing the Basilisk.

Yep, there’s no scenario here where OpenAI is doing the right thing, if they thought they were the only ones who could save us they wouldn’t dismantle their alignment team, if AI is dangerous, they’re killing us all, if it’s not, they’re just greedy and/or trying to conquer the earth.

vs.

to be honest the whole concept of alignment sounds so fucked up. basically playing god but to create a being that is your lobotomized slave…. I just dont see how it can end well

Of course, we also have the Kurzweil fanboys chiming in:

Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves. Use the tech to upgrade ourselves.

But don’t worry, there are silent voices of reasons in the comments, too:

Honestly feel like these clowns fabricate the drama in order to over hype themselves

Gee, maybe …

no ,,, they’re understating the drama in order to seem rational & worthy of investment ,, they’re serious that the world is ending ,, unfortunately they think they have more time than they do so they’re not helping very much really

Yeah, never mind. I think I might need to lobotomize myself now after reading that thread.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Our only hope is that we become AGI ourselves.

But..... wait...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

introducing the human brain to utilitarianism is a lot like introducing a proof system to Falso

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I have a business idea for him. Small batch alcohol produced by harvesting ethanol produced by this bacteria found in Aella’s teeth scrapings. Call it Mutella 1140, the official alcohol shot of rationalist orgies.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

This article motivating and introducing the ThunderKittens language has, as its first illustration, a crying ancap wojak complaining about people using GPUs. I thought it was a bit silly; surely that's not an actual ancap position?

On Lobsters, one of the resident cryptofascists from the Suckless project decided to be indistinguishable from the meme. He doesn't seem to comprehend that I'm mocking his lack of gumption; unlike him, I actually got off my ass when I was younger and wrote a couple GPU drivers for ATI/AMD hardware. It's difficult but rewarding, a concept foreign to fascists.

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