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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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)

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"...according to my machine learning model we actually have a strong fit in favor of shooting at CEOs. There's a 66% chance that each shot will either jam or fail to hit anything fatal, which creates a strong Bayesian prior in favor, or at least merits collecting further data to scale our models"

"What do you mean I've defined the problem in order to get the desired result? Machine learning process said we're good. Why do you hate the future?"

[-] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago

Fellas, I was promised the first catastrophic AI event in 2024 by the chief doomers. There's only a few hours left to go, I'm thinking skynet is hiding inside the times square orb. Stay vigilant!

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

I'm sad to report that the catastrophic AI event already happened and it was this picture

mind horrors beyond your comprehension

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

Ow god it is 2025 in .nl, it is coming! Everything is exploding, ai is turning us into fireworks! Yud was right!!1!!one!!

[-] ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 1 week ago

Comment sections on awful.systems are similar to this Drew Gooden sketch sometimes:

It's just hard for me to give MY input when I don't even know what's going on

[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

I’m making a mental note to keep that link around for the next time someone barges into one of our threads and does the “I don’t know what this is, here’s my reaction to what I thought the topic was, no I didn’t read the article or lurk” routine

as a bonus they might accidentally watch the rest of the video and finally figure out how much AI sucks

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

You know guys, it's really hard for me to give MY input when you are so negative about all the terrible things I like. Next time you guys come CRAWLING to me for advice, try not hating me as a human being for everything my twisted value system represents.

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

“I don’t know what this is, here’s my reaction to what I thought the topic was, no I didn’t read the article or lurk”

bizarre that they actually just say this

Oh no I'm in this sketch and I don't like it. Or at least, I would be. The secret is to acknowledge your lack of background knowledge or basic grounding in what you're talking about and then blunder forward based on vibes and values, trusting that if you're too far off base on the details you'll piss off someone (sorry skillissuer) enough to correct you.

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[-] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago

I find it impressive how gen-AI developed a technology that is fine-tuned to generate content that looks precisely passably plausible, but never good enough to be correct or interesting or beautiful or worthwhile in any way.

Like if I was trying to fill the Internet with noise to ruin it, on purpose, I couldn't do better than this. (mostly on accounr of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still). It's like the ideal infohazard weapon if your goal is to worsen as many lives as you can

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[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago
[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

A "high-tech" grifter car that only endangers its own inhabitants, a Trump and Musk fan showing his devotion by blowing himself up alongside symbols of both, the failure of this trained and experienced murderer to think through the actual material function of his weaponry, welcome to the Years of Lead Paint.

from I Was Promised a More Aesthetically Pleasing Cyberpunk Dystopia by Vicky Osterweil

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[-] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

LLMs continue to be so good and wagmi that they've progressed to the serving ads part of the extractivist SaaS lifecycle

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 week ago

ellison wants to compete with thiel for title of chief boot-wielder https://archive.is/cOnPx

[-] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

I can't help but feel like for Ellison in particular, he must have given himself no choice but to believe this stuff is more capable than it is. He's 80 years old now, and if building towards honest-to-god "real AI" wasn't what his whole career was about, then what was the point? The twilight of the older generations of tech executives is going to be its own special kind of pathology.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

and if building towards honest-to-god “real AI” wasn’t what his whole career was about, then what was the point?

For Larry? Building a corporation that will last a thousand years fueled by greed and contempt to developer and consumer alike, and which would make nazis blush for its industrial disregrad for ethics in pursuit of profit. He did build a legacy for himself. I'll go to my grave cursing his name and he'll hear it from the depths of hell and smile.

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[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

this isn’t surprising at all, but some of the details are interesting: Server found in apartment funded by Russian government used AI to interfere with 2024 US elections

LLMs really are designed for this kind of thing, aren’t they?

[-] khalid_salad@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

I have landed on a "you can get fucked if you make this annoying for me, I don't need your product anyway" response to everything. The silver lining is that I will be dealing with way more bullshit while being just as angry all the time at everything.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

as an amuse bouche for the horrors that will follow this year, please enjoy this lobste.rs reaching the melting down end stage after going full Karen at someone who agrees with a submitted post saying LLMs are a dead end when it comes to AI.

https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_tefto4

Thankfully, accusing someone of being a crapto promoter is seen as an attack that is beyond the pale.

Highlights from the rest of the thread include bemoaning the lack of a downvote button for registering disapproval:

https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_ft9mpj

unilaterally deciding to reply multiple times to one comment, neccesitating them to add a meta comment with hyperlinks

https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_jjk5ei

And of course is a MoreWronger (moroner?)

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

If you go over to LessWrong, you can get some ideas of what is possible

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[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Lol of course they think they are civil and other people as pushing nasty rethoric. Quite the sealion feeling.

Wonder if they even notice how much communication weirdness they themself used. With the emphasis of emotional laden language. (They didnt use bold so i cant call it crank capitalization, but more crank cursive. A big deal for me! ;) )

Anyway the questioning of "how do you know this is why there is no downvoting" shows the type of person they are. (And is quite the Rationalist annoying behavior, suddenly they demand excessive sourcing for small remarks of people they disagree with).

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[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Nobody outside the company has been able to confirm whether the impressive benchmark performance of OpenAI's o3 model represents a significant leap in actual utility or just a significant gap in the value of those benchmarks. However, they have released information showing that the most ostensibly-powerful model costs orders of magnitude more. The lede is in that first graph, which shows that for whatever performance gain o3 costs over ~$10 per request with the headline-grabbing version costing ~$1500 per request.

I hope they've been able to identify a market willing to pay out the ass for performance that, even if it somehow isn't over hyped, is roughly equivalent to an average college graduate.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

if all of that $1500 cost is electricity, and at arbitrarily chosen but probably high electricity price of $0.2/kWh, that's 7.5MWh per request. could be easily twice that. this is approx how much electricity four 4-person households consume in a year in poland. or about half of american one. six tons of TNT equivalent, or almost 2/3 ton of oil equivalent if you prefer

Actually wait I'm pretty sure it's even worse because I'm terrible at reading logarithmic scales. It's roughly halfway between $1,000 and $10,000 on their log scale, which if I do the math while actually awake works out closer to $3,000.

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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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