this post was submitted on 18 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.

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(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

My professor is typing questions into chat gpt in class rn be so fucking for real

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

gentlemen, this means war

-me imagining myself paying to sit through that

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

He's using it to give examples of exam question answers. The embarrassment

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

I mean, that kind of suggests that you could use chatGPT to confabulate work for his class and he wouldn't have room to complain? Not that I'd recommend testing that, because using ChatGPT in this way is not indicative of an internally consistent worldview informing those judgements.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago

I'd pipe up and go "uhhh hey prof, aren't you being paid to, like, impart knowledge?"

(I should note that I have an extremely deficient fucks pool, and do not mind pissing off fuckwits. but I understand it's not always viable to do)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (7 children)

HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion

Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is "The Best Charity Isn't What You Think".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago

This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesn't crumble.

Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.

Dog, you've lost the plot.

FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isn't indefensible, but the way it's framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious you'd be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.

wat

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

rat endgame being eugenics again?? no waaay

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

Did the human pet guy write this

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

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.

wat

This entire fucking shrimp paragraph is what failing philosophy does to a mf

[–] [email protected] 13 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Trolley Problem Meme - 34 shrimp vs 1 human

Not that I'm a super fan of the fact that shrimp have to die for my pasta, but it feels weird that they just pulled a 3% number out of a hat, as if morals could be wrapped up in a box with a bow tied around it so you don't have to do any thinking beyond 1500×0.03×1 dollars means I should donate to this guys shrimp startup instead of the food bank!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 21 hours ago

Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Ah you see, the moment you entered the realm of numbers and estimates, you’ve lost! I activate my trap card: 「Bayesian Reasoning」 to Explain Away those numbers. This lets me draw the「Domain Expert」 card from my deck, which I place in the epistemic status position, which boosts my confidence by 2000 IQ points!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

Obviously mathematically comparing suffering is the wrong framework to apply here. I propose a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The best shrimp is a tasty one, the best man is a philosopher-king who agrees with everything I say, and the best EA never gets past drunkenly ranting at their fellow undergrads.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago

Effective Altruism Declares War on the Entire State of Louisiana

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like it's crucial to the overall argument:

... if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ...

Does this proposition make sense? It's not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.

It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe I'm too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.

lol hahah.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say They're Underage

Three billion dollars and its going into Character AI AutoGroomer 4000s. Fuck this timeline.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

automated grooming is just what progress is and you have to accept it. like the printing press

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