this post was submitted on 14 Jul 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.

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For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (3 children)

comment from friend:

Slightly related: now I know when the AI crash is going to happen. Every bottomfeeder recruiter company on LinkedIn is suddenly pushing 2-month contract technical writer positions with AI companies with no product, no strategy, and no idea of how to proceed other than “CEO cashes out.” I suspect the idea is to get all of their documentation together so they can sell their bags of magic beans before the beginning of the holiday season.

sickos.jpg

I have asked if he can send me links to a few of these, I'll see what I can do with 'em

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (9 children)

That seems suspiciously soon, but my impression is based on nothing but vibes — a sense that companies are still buying in.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think there was a report saying that the most recent quarter still showed a massive infusion of VC cash into the space, but I'm not sure how much of that comes from the fact that a new money sink hasn't yet started trending in the valley. It wouldn't surprise me if the griftier founders were looking to cash out before the bubble properly bursts in order to avoid burning bridges with the investors they'll need to get the next thing rolling.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (11 children)

Current flavor AI is certainly getting demystified a lot among enterprise people. Let's dip our toes into using an LLM to make our hoard of internal documents more accessible, it's supposed to actually be good at that, right? is slowly giving way to "What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

“What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?”

Our BI team is trying to implement some RAG via Microsoft Fabrics and Azure AI search because we need that for whatever reason, and they've burned through almost 10k for the first half of the running month already, either because it's just super expensive or because it's so terribly documented that they can't get it to work and have to try again and again. Normal costs are somewhere around 2k for the whole month for traffic + servers + database and I haven't got the foggiest what's even going on there.

But someone from the C suite apparently wrote them a blank check because it's AI ...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu gather around a newly-opened barrel of vinegar.

Confucius tastes the vinegar and perceives bitterness.

The Buddha tastes the vinegar and perceives sourness.

Lao Tzu tastes the vinegar and perceives sweetness, and he says, "Fellas, I don't know what this is but it sure as fuck isn't vinegar. How much did you pay for it?"

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

LessWrong doesn't let you download if your user agent isn't a browser. Did y'all know about this?

$ curl https://www.lesswrong.com
<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>
$ curl https://www.lesswrong.com -A "Mozilla"
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

This isn't a sneer, just want to share this enjoyable presentation about tech and nihilism by Assoc Professor Nolen Gertz at the University of Twente here in the Netherlands https://iai.tv/video/nihilism-and-the-meaning-of-life-nolen-gertz

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

surprising absolutely nobody who’s been paying attention, Fedora has signaled its intent to use generative AI and an LLM in its packaging software

and I wouldn’t give a fuck what IBM’s pet distro does, but Red Hat’s developers have a high amount of control over what ends up in the userland… and bootloader… and pretty much every part of the system but the kernel cause they got told to fuck off, of every Linux distro but the obscure ones

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I'm not really in on distros and related drama (strong "just fucking use Debian stable" camp), why did Red Hat get told to fuck off from the kernel?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I started a job in the last year that really forced me to play around with different distros and sometimes building them. Pretty much my entire experience is “abandon ubuntu, just use debian” and wishing other people would do the same

(Pretty much my entire reasoning is that snap fucked up my dev environment so bad I rage installed debian)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

NSFW, as NSAB, I know that anti-environmentalists shout a lot about 'what about china china should go green first!' while not knowing china is in fact doing a lot to try and go green (at least on the co2 energy front, I'm not asking here to go point out all the bad things china does to fuck up the environment). I see 'we should develop AI before china does so' be a big pro AI argument, so here is my question. Is china even working on massive A(G)I like the people claim?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I am overall very uninformed about the chinese thechnological day-to-day, but here's two interesting facts:

They set some pretty draconian rules early on about where the buck stops if your LLM starts spewing false information or (god forbid) goes against party orthodoxy so I'm assuming if independent research is happening It doesn't appear much in the form of public endpoints that anyone might use.

A few weeks ago I saw a report about chinese medical researchers trying use AI agents(?) to set up a virtual hospital in order to maybe eventually have some sort of a virtual patient entity that a medical student could work with somehow, and look how many thousands of virtual patients our handful of virtual doctors are healing daily, isn't it awesome folks. Other than the rampant startupiness of it all, what struck me was that they said they had chatgpt-3.5 set up up the doctor/patient/nurse agents, i.e. they used the free version.

So, who knows? If they are all-in in AGI behind the scenes they don't seem to be making a big fuss about it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

"I'm sick of Google putting gratuitous LLMs everywhere"
(finger curls on monkey paw)

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