this post was submitted on 29 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.

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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[–] aninjury2all@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (9 children)
[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago

The proud tradition of "no really, Trump isn't that bad if you pretend he's a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth"

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.

BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace "robot overlords" in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, "The Authoritarian Peril":

https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg

with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:

A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur's Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

isn't that the Palantir business plan

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago

ha ha, wow.

Yeah, simple as, innit?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

with advanced near-perfect lie detection

how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become "near-perfect" with GPUs.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Ya know, it's funny that you point this out, it's a thing about their style of argument that's been nagging at me for a while.

There's a pattern in the promptfondlers' propaganda where they claim that they they've identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a "truth oracle" in the compsci sense of the word "oracle." If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

I guess that's true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.

Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just can't get there from here, but try telling them that.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

Damn bro, they're gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER ~~SEVEN~~ EIGHT DECADES AGO

EDIT: someone pointed out I suck at arithmetic

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it's on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.

[–] aninjury2all@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

After hate-reading the replies I spied Roko plus an an unironic Yarvinite what an absolute G E M

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago

Dude posted to the EA forum as suggested and it went over like a lead balloon:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A6W5qm9gWyr3mikmS/the-ea-case-for-trump-2024

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago

Kinda funny that they write thousand page essays with detailed reasons on why to vote for a person who can't read more than two sentences without getting distracted by a ketchup bottle.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”

Jesus.

Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice

Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?

Siri, how can I unread a post?


Also look at this dude in the replies advocating for mask-off right-wing sexist / racist / fascist EA: https://x.com/diegocaleiro/status/1729715617945788773 ... if you dare 😱

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn't realize you can still start threads there.

[–] earthquake@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

the number of people on /r/sneerclub who seem utterly unaware of the new digs is tragic.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

looks like completely-ineffable just decided to start it up again

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

i have no idea!

but still the founder and first mod

[–] earthquake@lemm.ee 5 points 3 months ago

Two Sneer Clubs, both alike in dignity...

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 3 points 3 months ago

ah looks like he restarted r/badphilosophy at the same time

[–] fnix@awful.systems 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:

If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.

Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.

What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:

What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago

do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths

Wh.. What? Does favouring seatbelts also induce millions of premature deaths, because of... because of what? What the actual fuck dude?

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I've found it impossible to share threads without.

[–] earthquake@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago

https://status.d420.de/ there's a few nitters post-rebirth, all of them probably using a fleet of real accounts and anti-bot protection instead of the guest accounts that first-age nitter used.

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago

Strange, they didn't count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald