this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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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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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this...)

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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 13 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

“why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”

none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it's called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot

e: ok at least op is a machinist

Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn't correlate with real world usefulness.

benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!

My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.

with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

The fact this commenter doesn't mention the absolute fuckton of machining videos on Youtube tells me they're just talking out of their ass.

(not that forcing those into LLM slop would help but a hypothetical AGI would learn a lot)

Also

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone "in the same boat."

Dario is delusional. We don't even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF

I've got to acknowledge the sheer guts it takes to look at arguably the most predictable consequence of the cyberpunk dystopia you're building and say "nah that won't happen because reasons."

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

@gerikson I'd like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn't get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who's scared of robots.

[–] jonpsp@mstdn.social 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

@cstross @gerikson This doesn't sound promising: "A growing body of evidence is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers"

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/

In each case, existing social and communication-­oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.

That's legitimately chilling. I guess just like quality of art and writing is too hard to quantify against "efficiency" and "productivity" so is quality of care. The slow AIs are literally optimizing humans out of the economy before our eyes and the people who were most afraid of being turned into paperclips are the ones leading the goddamn charge.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 7 points 13 hours ago

amazement at chatbots comes from demographic that did not binge watch how it's made in middle school