TechTakes
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
Days since last dangerous humanity ending infohazard discovered by some guy on twitter: 0
If this wasn't Scott Adams I'd have assumed this was fetish content. Now I don't know what to think.
how the fuck would you explain that to humans who don't have years of psychic damage
explaining these things to normal humans is how you turn them into humans with years of psychic damage, and I support that mission wholeheartedly
an attempt at a summary:
the dilbert guy, who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him, now also believes he knows a magic incantation to teach hypnosis to a chatbot, and heavily implies the chatbot was able to hypnotize him in turn (presumably into having sex with it)
who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him
Wait I missed this, he believes what?
Now this is doubly funny.
I saw people making fun of this on (the normally absurdly overly credulous) /r/singularity of all places. I guess even hopeful techno-rapture believers have limits to their suspension of disbelief.
imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it
all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago..)
and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them
what the fuck.
In his twitter thread he's attempting to troll people in the replies. And not even doing a particularly good job at it. A bold business strategy.
Apparently they also once chained a design into 'liberal moron' from what was some political message once in the past, so it isn't coming from nowhere. Guess it wasn't an innocent mistake.
yeah stickermule is where I got the bitcoin "it can't be that stupid" stickers
how annoying
Ah yes, Alexander's unnumbered hordes, that endless torrent of humanity that is all but certain to have made a lasting impact on the sparsely populated subcontinent's collective DNA.
edit: Also, the absolute brain on someone who would think that before entertaining a random recent western ancestor like a grandfather or whateverthefuckjesus.
No, it wasn't a massive impact by numbers but that superior euro genetics has been floating around waiting to be born like the Kwasitz Haderach.
In the spirit of the fondly-remembered "Cloud-to-Butt" plugin, I propose a new tool that transforms mentions of AI and LLMs to something else. But what shape should our word transformer take? While scatology is good shit, I bet we can come up with something more clever than "ChatGPT-to-Poop"
BTW, take 1d6 psychic damage when you realize that Cloud-to-Butt was released more than ten years ago
Edit: Favorite suggestions so far:
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AI-to-Bob @sc_griffith
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AI-to-DFE (Dumpster Fire Elemental) @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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AI-to-Statistics (HN user bitwize - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40024452)
@o7___o7 @dgerard cloud-to-butt, you say? https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/111007434026223446
a guy named Bob
Hey, this could work...Bob is short and punchy, very butt-like!
AI->Bob
LLM->Robert
Specific Products->Random selection from (Bobby, Bobert, Robby, Boberino, Roberto, Bert, etc)
AI Maxers Thrilled with Trump’s Vice President Pick JD Vance
This isn't really too interesting yet; but something to keep an eye on. As things like blockchain and AI alignment becomes weirdly political it's likely that sneering will get unpleasantly close to politics at times. And yet sneer we must.
Other self-titled techno-optimists highlighted Vance’s ties to venture capital, Thiel, and Andreessen, saying the “Gray Tribe [is] in control.” Gray Tribe is a reference to a term originating from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, which points to a group that is neither red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but a libertarian, tech savvy alternative.
I really should write more about technofascism while I still have electricity, clean water, a relatively unfractured global information network, and there aren’t too many gunshots outside
But but, tracingwood told us that claiming NRx is close to Rationalism is a lie made up by the evil David G.
maybe we should have a social/off topic thread too
Possibly the worst misunderstanding of quantum mechanics I've ever seen. I have no idea how anyone managed to convince themselves that the laws of physics are somehow different for conscious observers.
Can an observer be a single photon, or does it have to be a conscious human being?
The former. I'm glad we can stop the article right there and go home.
What the fuck is this question even? What the fuck is "conscious"? Do you think in the double-slit experiment we closed a guy inside the box to watch?
Under this, let's charitably call it, "interpretation", the Schrödinger cat analogy makes no sense, surely THE CAT is bloody conscious about ITSELF BEING ALIVE??
there’s so much quantum woo in that article I want to sneer at, but I don’t know anywhere close to enough about quantum physics to do so without showing my entire ass
To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.
Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einstein's thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.
Well a good thing to remember re quantum mechanics, Schrödinger Cat is intended as a thought experiment showing how dumb the view on QM was. So it is always a bit funny to see people extrapolate from that thought experiment without acknowledging the history and issues with it. (But I think that also depends on the various interpretations, and this means I'm showing a cheekily high amount of ass here myself).
Pretty much any mention of a thought experiment in the wild gets my hackles up. “Isn’t it cool that the cat is alive and dead at the same time?” Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!!! Tho to be honest it might just be schrodinger’s cat that comes up. I wish they’d leave the poor cat alone, and stop trying to poison it.
I have a whole series of rants about that cat, starting with how it doesn't illuminate anything about quantum theory specifically — as opposed to probabilistic or stochastic theories in general — and culminating in "Hey, maybe we should stop naming things after pedo creeps."
According to one story at least, Wigner eventually concluded that if you take some ideas that physicists widely hold about quantum mechanics as postulates and follow them through to their logical conclusion, then you must conclude that there is a special role for conscious observers. But he took that as a reason to question those assumptions.
(That story comes from Leslie Ballentine reporting a conversation with Wigner in the course of promoting an ensemble interpretation of QM.)
HN: I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.
Their goal: robo-feynman:
For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world's languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.
NGL though mostly just sharing this link for the ~~concept art~~ concept fart which features a three-armed many fingered woman smiling at an invisible camera.
But just focus on the vibes. This diverse group of young mutants getting an education in the overgrown ruins of this university.
Not sure how it ties into robo-feyman at all but the vibes
speaking of technofascism, we’re at the stage where supposed Democrat billionaires like the Andreesen Horowitz fuckers suddenly come out in support of Trump:
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, says he’s been a Democrat most of his life. He says he has endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
However, he says he’s no longer loyal to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential race, he is supporting and voting for former President Donald Trump. The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech, specifically for the startup ecosystem.
none of this should be surprising, but it should be called out every time it happens, and we’re gonna see it happen a lot in the days ahead. these fuckers finally feel secure in taking their masks off, and that’s not good.
Apparently the "startup ecosystem" matters more than the ecosystem of, you know, actual living things.
These people are just amazingly fucking evil.
Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Proton’s main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted
(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Proton’s servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)
Who is the target audience for this?
People who use Proton are privacy-conscious and mostly (I would argue) tech literate, and yet they shove spicy autocomplete that no one ever needed until two years ago and most people don’t want now because it produces complete horseshit, and spellchecking that every browser under then sun has built in by now.
And then they quietly say you need to use Chromium, so the people who use anything but (like, I don’t know, the majority of privacy-conscious folks who should be their main user base, lol) have their e2e broken?
I really hope they catch a raging firestorm for this.
(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)
Not a sneer, but an observation on the tech industry from Baldur Bjarnason, plus some of my own thoughts:
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.
Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.
Baldur has pointed that part out before, and noted how its kneecapping the consumer side of the entire bubble, but I suspect the phrase "AI" will retain that meaning well past the bubble's bursting. "AI slop", or just "slop", will likely also stick around, for those who wish to differentiate gen-AI garbage from more genuine uses of machine learning.
To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.
For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)
I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.
Part of me suspects that the AI bubble's spread that "tech asshole" stench to the rest of the industry, with some help from the widely-mocked NFT craze and Elon Musk becoming a punching bag par excellence for his public breaking-down of Twitter.
(Fuck, now I'm tempted to try and cook up something for MoreWrite discussing how I expect the bubble to play out...)
We should neoligise "NASB" for our community as shorthand for "Not a sneer, but"
Does anyone here know what Justine Tunney’s deal is? I’d been following her redbean project for a time but came across an article that left me rather startled
she is, regrettably, a fascist who reputedly still hides right-wing conspiracy shit in her projects
I unfortunately know that startled feeling well; I used to be a fan of the work she did with sectorlambda and similar projects
yeah, straight up alt-right techfash and long has been