Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I never got the impression that Zitron's reception here has ever been more than lukewarm, which I think (personal grievances like him being a dick in person aside) is partially because his Mahabharata length blog posts were posted here even before he emerged as a significant voice in the AI discourse, i.e. when the tiresome to interesting ratio wasn't all there yet.
That said, you post is both the nittiest of nitpicks and also wrong. "But achktually LLMs aren't the same as diffusion models and also they can run on low end hardware, after a fashion, not reading any further, zero stars"--are you serious?
The wrong part is that addressing the latter part of your post (i.e. the broader economics issues) is like Ed Zitron's whole entire shtick that you somehow managed to miss on your way to remind people that once upon a time someone somewhere managed to complete an inference run on a Raspberry Pie as a proof of concept, when the scale of the issue at hand is more like that load bearing chunks of the US economy are being propped up solely by imaginary hundred-billion-dollar data center construction and nvidia moving GPUs from one trouser pocket to the other.
Fair enough. I acknowledge that I made a mistake, here.
Don't worry about it, managing to run inference on a raspberry is really cool actually.
Also it's true that Zitron is winging it a lot of the time when it comes to technical details, but not in a way that matters for what he has to say, so dismissing him on those grounds seemed deliberately adversarial, sorry if i got carried away.
TBF I basically had the same concerns about how useful my comment was, so it's not like I think calling me out on it was a bad thing.