this post was submitted on 21 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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (10 children)

Whatever shambling corpse of Toys "R" Us still exists has released "the first OpenAI SORA generated brand commercial."

still frame from the commercial of a child who looks slightly melted

It looks absolutely dire, particularly in motion, but posters are still falling over themselves to call it "cool" and "exciting" or claim that people "might not notice" that it's complete and utter arse. Twitter screenshot of a user admitting that it's a bad ad but claiming that people might not notice it's computer generated

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I see Sora still hasn't cracked the nut of having longer output windows. or at producing things that aren't deathly boring.

and what the fuck is up with that music? it sounds like a medical commercial selling hope

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

AI or not this is an incredibly depressing advert, what the fuck. They went for whimsy and produced an elegy.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

the thing is, people are again taking this as direct output of the regurgitating machine. i wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a ton of editing going on to fix all of the most glaring issues, just like when sora was first announced.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

OpenAI said in its announcement that search responses will include in-line citations and that users can open a sidebar to view links to external sources. The long-term goal is to then incorporate search features into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI product.

"The long-term goal is to reinvent the Internet of 25 years ago, but worse."

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Just found out from a screenshot in a tweet that Marc Aandreesen considers Nick Land to be some kind of patron saint of "techno-optimism". Setting aside Land's ugly views about everything... I didn't think optimism was what he was known for. More like grasping, desperate, disgusted embrace of the onward march of capital.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

Nick Land (...) “techno-optimism”

His thing is literally called DARK ENLIGHTENMENT, fucking Final Fantasy villain level of grandiose menacing naming, how on earth would that be "optimism".

Marcee do you even like know who your idols are?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"Nothing human makes it out of the near-future." - Nick Land.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

Not a sneer, but a mildly interesting open letter:

A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.

The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.

Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.

Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people's work, and the fact a lot of people's work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say "no", the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Regarding that claimed breakthrough about AI winning the International Mathematical Olympiad: a reminder that a proof which hangs together logically is not necessarily a proof that makes sense.

Those formalized proofs are so incredibly ugly, it's amazing. Of course it doesn't much of a sensible indentation, but then there are single proof steps where I have no idea what it's even doing. [...] And then there are nonsense mathematical steps. The solution of problem 2 starts with induction, before introducing any variables. It applies induction to the number 12. And it write 12 as (10)+2. Then it proceeds to do the whole proof in the base case of the induction, and notices that the induction step is trivial, since the goal is the same as the induction hypothesis (but instead of the assumption tactic it uses congr 26).

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

Also, choice sneer in the comments:

AlphaProof is more "AlphaZero doing self play against Lean" and less "Gemeni reading human proofs"

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (8 children)

after all this time, TIL that Roko pronounces his name "Rocko" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIwJDnej7pg

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

I'm not a native english speaker, how else was he supposed to pronounce it?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Quick, someone file the copyright for "Roko's Postmodern Life"

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

AP takes down CF Vance apologia, not asserting things that they cannot evidence (that Vance did not have sexual relations with that couch)

before: https://archive.is/fXiMc after: https://archive.is/j3aot

This is the journalistic integrity we expect of AP News

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