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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.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 23 June 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!

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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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

This is quite minor, but it's very funny seeing the intern would-be sneerers still on rbuttcoin fall for the AI grift, to the point that its part of their modscript copypasta

Or in the pinned mod comment:

AI does have some utility and does certain things better than any other technology, such as:

The ability to summarize in human readable form, large amounts of information.

The ability to generate unique images in a very short period of time, given a verbose description

tfw you're anti-crypto, but only because its a bad investing opportunity.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't think that comment is unreasonable. LLMs can summarize large-ish amounts of information (as long as it fits in the context window) in a human-readable form, and while it's still prone to getting things wrong and I'd rather a human do it all day, it does do it "better than any other technology" that I know of. We can argue about "unique" but strictly speaking it will almost certainly generate an image that didn't exist before. I'd also rather a human make the image for quality's sake, but being fast, cheap, and copyright-free is a useful enough combo in certain situations.

It doesn't really bring up the main issues with AI, but I think that's acceptable in the context, which is "How is AI different from crypto in the context of r/Buttcoin", and in that context "crypto is completely useless" and "AI has minimal uses which may or may not be worthwhile depending on how you evaluate the benefits and negatives" are meaningfully different.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It's "reasonable" in context, I just thought it's funny that rbuttcoin would be headpatting AI at all, since its basically the exact same people pushing AI as the people pushing crypto with the exact same motives.

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