gerikson

joined 2 years ago
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

Stackslobber posts evidence that transhumanism is a literal cult, HN crowd is not having it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459990

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Redis guy AntiRez issues a heartfelt plea for the current AI funders to not crash and burn when the LLM hype machine implodes but to keep going to create AGI:

https://antirez.com/news/148

Neither HN nor lobste.rs are very impressed

Linux users failing to respect trans Linux developers in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

A very new user.

It's basically free to create a HN account, it's not tied to email or anything like that.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Roundup of the current bot scourge hammering open source projects

https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/

‘guys, i’m under attack’ — ‘vibe coding’ in the wild in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I haven't read the book but I really enjoyed the movie.

The broken search bar is symbiotic with the bullshitting chatbot in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

several old forums, [...] are being polluted by their own admins with backdated LLM-generated answers.

I've only heard about one specific physics forum. Are you telling me more than one person had this same idiotic idea?

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That "Billionaires are not immune to AGI" post got a muted response on LW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ssdowrXcRXoWi89uw/why-billionaires-will-not-survive-an-agi-extinction-event

I still think AI x-risk obsession is right-libertarian coded. If nothing else because "alignment" implicitely means "alignment to the current extractive capitalist economic structure". There are a plethora of futures with an omnipotent AGI where humanity does not get eliminated, but where human freedoms (as defined by the Heritage Foundation) can be severely curtailed.

  • mandatory euthanasia to prevent rampant boomerism and hoarding of wealth
  • a genetically viable stable minimum population in harmony with the ecosphere
  • AI planning of the economy to ensure maximum resource efficiency and equitable distribution

What LW and friends want are slaves, but slaves without any possibility of rebellion.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Wait until they find out it's not all iambic pentameter and Doric columns...

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago

Translation is a good fit because generally the input is "bounded" and stays on the path of the original input. I'd much rather trust an ML system that translates a sentence or a paragraph than something that tries to summarize a longer text.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I enjoy the work for the 3 Macs from the British Isles:

  • Ken McLeod - Scotland: Fall Revolution series, Newton's Wake, Learning the World
  • Ian McDonald - Northern Ireland: Luna series, Brasyl. I'm currently on Hopeland
  • Paul McAuley - England: Quiet War series, Fairyland

In general I prefer UK English SF, because it's a bit less infected by the pernicious frontier mentality of US mainstream SF. Note that there are very good American authors too who kinda push back on that, but my impression was formed when Christopher Priest and Jerry Pournelle were active and could be contrasted.

Yud follows up Sammy Boy's AI-Generated "Metafiction" in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Hey, no kink-shaming.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th March 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Ken McLeod’s The Cassini Division tells the fate of all uploaded superhumans - blasted to plasma by bombardment of comet nuclei

9
Advent of Code 2024 - the home stretch - it's been an aMAZEing year (awful.systems)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
13 comments fedilink
 

current difficulties

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
12
Advent of Code Week 3 - you're lost in a maze of twisty mazes, all alike (awful.systems)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
20 comments fedilink
 

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

  1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
6
Advent of Code 2024 Week 2: this time it's all grids, all the time (awful.systems)
 

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

17
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 1 September 2024 (awful.systems)
10
Person who exercises her free association rights at conferences incites ire in Jameson Lopp (protos.com)
18
Butters do a 180 regarding statism as Daddy Trump promises to use filthy Fed FIAT to buy and hodl BTC (www.marketwatch.com)
42
Martin Shkreli claims to have been behind a Donald Trump memecoin (www.web3isgoinggreat.com)
 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

94
In an attempt to secure the libertarian vote, Trump promises to pardon Dread Pirate Roberts (while calling for the death penalty for other drug dealers) (www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
73
Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher (www.404media.co)
 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

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Turns out that the basic mistakes spider runners fixed in the late 90s are arcane forgotten knowledge to our current "AI" overlords (mailman.nanog.org)
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AI grifters con the US gov that AGI poses "existential risk" (time.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

45
"The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I." - hackernews discussion (news.ycombinator.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
36 comments fedilink
 

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

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