this post was submitted on 25 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 - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

My organic chemistry professor used ChatGPT to write a lab procedure. My other chemistry professor's daughter is VP of AI at Microsoft. AAAAA

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Two posts in two weeks about professors using ChatGPT has me questioning my desire to go back to school

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

do you have it? i'm in this field and i wonder how badly it fucked up

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Eugenics in action:

Danish parenting tests under fire after baby removed from Greenlandic mother

Psychometric tests are widely used in Denmark as part of child protection investigations into new parents, and have long been criticised by human rights bodies as culturally unsuitable for Greenlandic people and other minorities.

In a 2022 report, the institute said that because the tests were not adapted to take cultural differences into account, Greenlandic parents ran “the risk of obtaining low test scores, so that it is concluded, for example, that they have reduced cognitive abilities, without there being actual evidence for this."

Psychological assessments of her were made by a Danish-speaking psychologist. Kronvold, whose first language is Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), is not fluent in Danish.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh man that is so grim

Kronvold, 38, was given an FKU test in 2014 before the birth of her second child, a boy, and again recently while pregnant with her third child. Speaking through an intermediary, she told the Guardian that on this last occasion she was told it was to see if she was “civilised enough”.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

billy spears got it right. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

presented without comment.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago

1.2 thousand upvotes for the LLM equivalent of adding a little astrology to your holistic medicine. reddit ain’t ok

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

Promptfondlers too lazy to even fondle prompts anymore. I’m sure this is the prime target demographic for Elon’s brain chips.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

the richest boy in the world sued to stop The Onion from turning infowars into a parody of itself on the grounds that he thinks infowars’ twitter accounts shouldn’t be transferred as part of the bankruptcy even though that’s something that happens constantly and also wouldn’t impact the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings even if it were grounded in anything resembling fact

Musk has also tweeted occasionally that he believes The Onion is not funny.

it’s getting really hard to adequately describe how funny musk isn’t. it’s not just try-hard shit like the weird sink thing, the soul-sucking cameos, or the fact that he’s literally throwing his money into stopping a comedy site from existing — it’s everything taken as a whole. I’d call him anti-comedy, but he’s so much less interesting than that implies

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago

The Onion clowns on Ol' Musky constantly, despite his efforts to shut them down. Around the peak space X buzz, they wrote a headline that was like "Musk invents the first infinitely divorceable wife", which he managed to scrub from the internet (or at least, I can't find it within 5 seconds), but other than that, he can only cope and seethe. He knows the onion is funny and can do nothing to become funny himself.

I would label him as anti-humor or humorless. Dishumorous?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Police are openly admitting to using chatGPT to hallucinate reports. I'm sure they were before, but now they're comfortable enough to admit to it.

Nothing could possibly go wrong with this. Nothing at all.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

great news for lawyers hopefully

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

All

Coppers

Are

Bots

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Starting things off with a fresh post from Brian Merchant: Tech under Trump, part 1

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Sidenote: Love how the tech VCs all grew up in the media landscape of tech workers going 'the management of this company is a group of idiots' an then didn't think that would apply to themselves.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

after going closed-source, redis is now doing a matt and trying to use trademark to take control over community-run projects. stay tuned to the end of the linked github thread where somebody spots their endgame

this is becoming a real pattern, and it might deserve a longer analysis in the form of a blog post

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (3 children)

currently in vc delusion, the public just doesn’t understand how to move about efficiently

the levels of not-even-wrong from these dipshits continue to be astounding

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

If you asked people what they wanted, they would say a car that drives itself

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

Also, this plan has a very much a fuck disabled people and old people factor. And what a lonely world they live in.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If I mathed right that'd be one waymo every 350 feet of road on average. Is that a lot? It sounds like it might be a lot. Especially since self-driving cars greatest weakness appears to be driving in the vicinity of other self-driving cars.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I think the idea is to solve that by networking all the self-driving cars together. I'm sure the long history of trying to get vendors to agree on a standard when they all benefit individually from the lock-in of proprietary systems has nothing to teach us about this prospect.

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

other than interop, the big problem I have with this is security. car modding for performance is already a big thing, and a car mod that makes other cars slow down, stop, get out of your way, or otherwise malfunction would be incredibly popular with assholes of all varieties, and car modding has many. the current state of automotive is that security is a fucking shitshow, but I can’t figure out any kind of security model for this that isn’t vulnerable to a wide variety of obvious attacks. even a perfect inter-vendor attestation chain (good fucking luck) is vulnerable to hooking an ECU (or whatever the ruggedized monitoring microcontroller unit for a magic self-driving EV is) and radio up to a variety of fake sensors and crafting inputs such that the thing starts transmitting “wait no stop here” signals to all the surrounding cars

but then again, all of this is probably intentional because it creates a privileged class of people who can afford to fuck with self-driving car networking and not worry about any associated fines, and an unprivileged class who just have to put up with everything being so much worse. in a world where you can roll smoke into a Subway with relatively few consequences (not to mention all the other horseshit Truck Guys get away with), it’s not a hard outcome to imagine.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Complexity theoretical, security and latency wise this sounds like a great plan. Can wait for people being stuck in cars for days because the freeway offramps are causing livelocks. (Like the example of the waymo cars all honking at each other at the parking lots).

Wonder if they are going to use the routing solutions used in tcp and then discover that cars are heavier and slower than data and suddenly waste a lot of peoples time and money.

E: small little detail which I don't know if other countries also have it, but in the dutch traffic system, emergency services and busses (and perhaps a few hackers who really want to be in trouble with the law (but I always heard this described as a 'this exist, but we don't mess with it' system)) have a system where you can get priority at traffic lights, so they turn green faster. Wonder if other countries have this, and how much they realize this will not work for waymo systems.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

someone pointed out that (paraphrasing) "yeah, you and I are never gonna care for autoplag output but kids are gonna grow up on it and expect it for everything" and that makes me want to do bad things.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

ehh i don't know, as a child i'd occasionally get a vhs with weird cheap counterfeit cartoons on it and they just creeped me out. children can actually tell imo.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

NASB does anybody else think the sudden influx of articles (from kurzgesagt to recent wapo) pushing the idea that you can't lose weight by exercise have anything to do with Ozempic being aggressively marketed at the same time?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

The promptfans testing OpenAI Sora have gotten mad that it's happening to them and (temporarily) leaked access to the API.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/artists-appears-to-have-leaked-access-to-openais-sora/

“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the [Sora early access] program for a $150B valued [sic] company,” the group, which calls itself “Sora PR Puppets,” wrote in a post ...

"Well, they didn't compensate actual artists, but surely they will compensate us."

“This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.”

OK, I could give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they're new to the GenAI space, or general ML Space ... or IT.

But I'm not going to. Of course it's about PR hype.

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

I woke up and immediately read about something called "Defense Llama". The horrors are never ceasing: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/24/defense-llama-meta-military/

Scale AI advertised their chatbot as being able to:

apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities

However their marketing material, as is tradition, include an example of terrible advice. Which is not great given it's about blowing up a building "while minimizing collateral damage".

Scale AI's response to the news pointing this out -- complaining that everyone took their murderbot marketing material seriously:

The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (6 children)

On the one hand, that spectacular failure could potentially dissuade the military from buying in and prolonging this bubble. On the other hand, having an accountability sink for war crimes would be a tempting offer to your average army.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

The eventual war crimes trials will very likely reveal that "AI targeting" has already been used as an accountability sink for a premeditated ethnic cleansing policy in Gaza.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago

Nothing huge, but some wonderful examples of people trying to rules lawyer fucking dictionary definitions of plagiarism in this HackerNews thread about the parents that sued the school because their kid got in trouble for copy pasting from an LLM.

Thankfully the case was ruled in the school's favor. Just got a laugh out of some of the comments that are just unintentional satire of stereotypical HN comments.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

John "Animats" Nagle choosing the most racist angle possible to respond to problems in education. The topic is giftedness and yet Nagle needs to start with "Ashkenazi Jews".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago

Wow, that starts bad and gets worse.

It starts with this quote, which is absolutely fine:

But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program.

Now for the expert analysis:

Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory.

Yes! This is true, following from the quote, as long as the thing that is "inherently" discriminated for is socioeconomic background. Of course, Animats immediately makes it about race.

[insert common race science stats here] There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.

AKA I disagree with the analysis and consensus that all this IQ stuff is socioeconomic rather than genetic.

(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)

Jesus fucking christ.

Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]

Nobody tell this guy that Gladwell is black.

Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.

I guarantee that in the not happening future where AI is smarter than humans, chuds like this guy will still be racist.

We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.

🙄🙄🙄

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Software licensing is notoriously labyrinthine, so resources like the site Microsoft will close – Get Licensing Ready – can be very handy. Today, the site offers over 50 training modules plus documentation.

I'm sorry, mister MSFT, why did you cause there to be more educational content about your stupid licenses than there is for theoretical physics in an undergrad programme, have you ever considered that it's time to stop? Get some help?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

Some anti-AI propaganda via spellingmistakescostlives

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

So there's apparently a memecoin site with the not-at-all suspicious name pump.fun and Coffeezilla made a video about it on his second channel.

Also: Epilepsy warning for that site. It's full of flashing colors and moving elements like late 90s Geocities.

I have no idea what the fuck is even going on there, but apparently people threaten to kill themselves or their animals if you don't invest in their shitcoin there, or run actual cockfights where they murder the chickens live on stream if the line doesn't go up.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

The old place on reddit has a tweet up by aella where she goes on a small evo-psych tirade about how since there's been an enormous amount of raid related kidnapping and rape in prehistory it stands to reason that women who enjoyed that sort of thing had an evolutionary advantage and so that's why most women today... eugh.

I wonder where the superforecasters stand on aella being outed as a ghislain maxwell type fixer for the tescreal high priesthood.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (15 children)

This is completely off topic I think but I need you all to see this, it's important on a spiritual level

This map is infinitely sneerable, every region you look at is somehow worse than the previous one, regardless of the order in which you do that.

Tag yourself, I'm Cracked Coast, population 17.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (5 children)

someone needs to stop paradox gamers from interfacing with the real world

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Unifying belgium and the Netherlands makes me think really bad things about the map designers. People who want that are either fools who dont know much about the region or white nationalist fascists. (They often also want SA included)

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

Ah yes Africa, the small country on the northern coast of Africa.

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

I listen to a podcast about black/african american conspiracy theories, and I got a podcast ad from Ed Zitron, so there’s that.

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