this post was submitted on 04 Nov 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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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)

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

Bitcoin peaks as Trump is elected

(Article encrypted in Finnish, see spoiler for translation)

lightly fixed machine translationThe cryptocurrency Bitcoin climbed to a new high record on Wednesday as Republican Donald Trump seemed to be taking the lead in the US presidential election. Bitcoin went up by almost $6,000 and traded above $75,000. The previous record from March, when the rate settled slightly below $73,800?

Trump has previously branded cryptocurrencies a scam, but he changed his line and during his campaign has praised them and promised to make the United States the world's centers for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

“The price of Bitcoin has followed Trump’s position in opinion polls and the betting market. Investors estimate that the victory of the Republicans would increase the demand for digital currencies", says Russ Mold, an analyst at the financial company AJ Bell, to the AFP news agency.

In the United States, the stock exchanges in New York were on the plus side at the end of the trading day on Tuesday after the previous day's declines.

The technology-focused Nasdaq closed up by a percent 1.4, while the more general S&P 500 was up 1.2 percent. The Industrial-oriented Dow Jones, on the other hand, ended the day with a 1.0 percent increase.

The dollar is initially weakened against the euro, but began to rise in Asian markets against both the euro and the Japanese yen as Trump's lead. Stock exchange rates were also rising in various parts of Asia. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 index ended by a percent 2.4.

The presidential race is a struggle between Democrats Kamala Harris and Republican Trump.

Trump has proposed a combination of low corporate tax rates and looser regulation that would be boosted by corporate profits and tighten the stock market, experts told ABC News.

Dry heaving at the shameless public fellatio Trump performed on Musk in his speech.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I know this shouldn't be surprising, but I still cannot believe people really bounce questions off LLMs like they're talking to a real person. https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/47183/are-llms-unlikely-to-be-useful-to-generate-any-scientific-discovery

I have just read this paper: Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli, "Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models", submitted on 22 Jan 2024.

It says there is a ground truth ideal function that gives every possible true output/fact to any given input/question, and no matter how you train your model, there is always space for misapproximations coming from missing data to formulate, and the more complex the data, the larger the space for the model to hallucinate.

Then he immediately follows up with:

Then I started to discuss with o1. [ . . . ] It says yes.

Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which o1 says yes [ . . . ]. Then it says [ . . . ].

Then I asked o1 [ . . . ], to which it says yes too.

I'm not a teacher but I feel like my brain would explode if a student asked me to answer a question they arrived at after an LLM misled them on like 10 of their previous questions.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

the writer's room is [open]

that's dasha the laptop, she used to work in a corporation but is sick of that and retired to be a writer

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

Seeing a worrying trend of people wanting to cosplay as La Resistance, going dark, hiding from the cops. "Fun" fact, the Gestapo was extremely good at finding, torturing and killing people in the resistance. If people only know you via encrypted messaging, who is gonna raise a ruckus when you're sent to a camp?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

My hope is that either more progressive third party options become more viable OR the dems finally understand that being essentially republican is a bad strategy and actually become progressive. I know the reality is that the dems will learn nothing from this as they have clearly learned nothing from 2016.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

I swear to god post the map with lots of diagonal arrows one more time

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

"brb going to make an AI blockbuster called 'Zennos Parhadox' starring Dwynne Johnson and Rebeca Fernugson and then we'll see who's laughing." -- Dick Trauma, SA

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

hackernews having a normal one (EDIT: Then things got worse)

HN Title: The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800

In the top comments:

dash2 55 minutes ago | next [–]

Here's an interesting extract:

We find evidence of nepotism for 5–6.6% of scholars’ sons in Protestant and for 29.4% in Catholic universities and academies. Catholic institutions relied more heavily on intra-family human capital transfers. We show that these differences partly explain the divergent path of Catholic and Protestant universities after the Reformation.

This relates to an important paper providing evidence that indeed Protestantism was associated with scientific progress: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389708

red016 3 minutes ago | parent | next [–]

i’d be more interested in jewish numbers than protestant or catholic

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

Ah yes, the famous European Jewish run universities. You don't have to be an idiot to be anti-Semitic, but it certainly helps.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

what do anthropic, aws, and palantir all have in common? except for being the fucking worst, of course

the dollar signs in their eyes seem to share a bit of a glow..

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago
  1. Buy a defense ai system with a cool GUI but that absolutely doesn't fucking work

  2. PRESS RELEASES

  3. Leave the source code+model weights somewhere that your enemies will find it, preferably next to a big data pipe

  4. Watch them copy it and try to use it on the battlefield

  5. lol

Just have to avoid naming it something that would give the game away like WIM-PLOW or whatever

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

Questions To Which the Answer is No, an ongoing series:

Generative AI - Can it actually help with the day-to-day technical work of a practising engineer?

The upcoming Autumn Panel Discussion hosted by the UCD Engineering Graduates Association (EGA) will take place on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, at ESB's Headquarters. This event will explore several pressing topics at the intersection of engineering and artificial intelligence. Attendees will gain insights into current trends in AI, particularly the latest advancements in generative AI tools and platforms. The discussion will feature case studies that highlight the successful integration of AI into real-world engineering processes, offering practical examples of its applications. Additionally, the panel will address the essential skills that engineers need to effectively incorporate AI into their workflows, providing guidance on upskilling for the future. The event will conclude with a Q&A session, allowing participants to engage directly with the panelists and delve deeper into the ethical considerations surrounding AI in engineering.

No, not software engineers, engineer engineers. Yikes!

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