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.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      4 months ago

      “It’s real! Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.

      […]

      “People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing,” Schiffmann said.

      there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once

      The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”

      presented without comment

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      the ad alone should be a thread it’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in years

      the yt comments are brutal btw definitely check them out

    • mlen@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can’t they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that’s JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat

      one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn’t wrote a thing about ai earlier

      then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i’d expect even from him

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          7·
          4 months ago

          anything newer than 2022? won’t be on scihub, because scihub got in a court case in india, that they hope they can win and secure reasonably stable place where they can operate from

          tho it seems to me that the entire article is that three screens of text

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it’s already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy

      also musk’s downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          4 months ago

          The upshot of this is that if acausalrobotgod ever gives us a time machine, you just need to plant one tree on your way to killing hitler, and you solve so many problems.

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            4 months ago

            Maybe there’s an easy way to prevent apartheid in South Africa entirely? That alone led to so many waste-of-oxygen white dudes, we could nip Musk in the bud and much more

    • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      4 months ago

      It’s been 3 days, my hope that this is real is fading :(

      Musk will always own that hilariously disturbing baby roleplay Twitter alt though

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      21·
      4 months ago

      Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:

      Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.

      “Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        4 months ago

        Leukemia patients are always over-represented in their data because it’s so much easier to use the calipers on people with no hair.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they’re lazier and lazier written each time.

      Second, what’s the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?

      Also

      1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses

      Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
        14·
        4 months ago

        Cremieux used to post to Reddit as user Tr***yPornO (with the slur instead of the asterisks). Nobody here wanted to call him that, so it was rapidly abbreviated TPO or TP0. He posted the same breathtaking racist shit with low quality cites that didn’t check out as he has since. He also told all manner of inconsistent lies about who he was.

        • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          4 months ago

          Speaking of breathtaking racism with low quality cites, does anyone remember ebola chan? He was my favorite because he was a reactionary with 4chan temperament, so he’d mald when pushed instead of spewing out word salad.

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          4 months ago

          At least he wears his kink proudly, not many rightwing weirdoes would just admit they’re really into that.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            9·
            4 months ago

            I wouldn’t be too quick to conclude it’s that - I’ve seen a number of these creeps wear/handle-pick slurs as a trying-to-be-funny pejorative

            • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              4 months ago

              Oh I’m sure he’s trying to be edgy, but in that case there’s nothing that would trigger him more than what I’ve said :>

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        TP0 is the OSI connection-mode transport layer protocol’s transport protocol class 0 duh.

        Transport Protocol Class 0 (TP0), the simplest OSI transport protocol, performs segmentation and reassembly functions. TP0 requires connection-oriented network service.

        (source)

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        I thought it meant “thread poster zero” because I never really understood the order in which one reads tweets and replies, so when I saw “TP0”, three frames later I already deduced an entire vocabulary of terms to designate each persona in a twitter screenshot

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          4 months ago

          from the top down with either dfs or bfs depending on how you found the thread to spread, or from the inside out (by clicking through QTs until you get to the root). because twitter totally made browsing this shit easy.

          what’s hard.

      • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        4 months ago

        I’d never heard of him. His latest tweet is complaining about the left wing slant on his thread and he says that you can’t “get away from the culture war I guess”. Yet every fifth post below is a rage post about libs and lefties.

        • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          4 months ago

          It’s like how all topics are either the cishet white standard quo or “political.” Raging about libs and lefties is standard quo and telling a dimwit they are a dimwit is “culture war.”

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      christ and it’s always the fucking bad-faith bullshit arguments. I bet if you pulled another dimension to the same fucking numbers there you’d instantly find some Rather Interesting correlations with income brackets, and if you pulled a dimension for care/spend class you’d find Another interesting correlation

      I wish these people just fucking wouldn’t, gah

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      that’s just “poors don’t deserve healthcare” what else

      otoh aren’t they going against their benefactors (old rich ghouls)?

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn’t it?

      At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        4 months ago

        At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

        I expect history to repeat itself quite soon - where previously using the term “artificial intelligence” got you looked at as a wild-eyed dreamer, now, using that term’s likely getting you looked at as an asshole techbro, and your research deemed a willing attempt to hurt others.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      This does suck for all the non-LLM ML stuff that has actual usage. (Even if a percentage of that was also snake oil, or had dubious success rates).

      • otherstew@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        4 months ago

        Ehh, if you’re calling your ML stuff AI then that’s on you (and you’re probably not technically serious about what you’re doing anyway). Other people are pointing out that AI isn’t a term that many compsci/software people would use, and neither the article (or afaict the study) or my experience suggest that ML has the same negative association as AI.

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          4 months ago

          AI has been and always will be the term for making the computer play a game against you. A search tree with some prunning is not ML, but if you use it to implement a chess bot then it is AI in the game sense.

          If you’re not doing video games then the term is essentially meaningless

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    13·
    4 months ago

    I had a simple question: how to rescue a Windows hard disk to a new SSD?

    The answer is ddrescue from a Linux USB stick, but the Windows user wasn’t comfortable at the command line.

    But if you Google it, you get:

    • insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
    • AI slop.

    Eventually I just did it myself with ddrescue. But I got a first-hand experience of how fucking unusable search is now.

    Oh, and Google is now showing AI slop answers at the top of searches in the UK.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      4 months ago

      For people from the future:

      I’m a fan of Clonezilla, which is a debian-derived live distro designed specifically to clone partitions as well as whole disks. If you’re comfortable with how Linux represents devices, it’s as close as you can get to training-wheels-included imaging for free.

      BIG WARNING: Be sure to write down the BitLocker key before you begin, or else it’ll be a bad time!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.

      I had a windows problem once, so was looking through all that looking for an answer and saw somebody go ‘I need to save my data, which is very important, so how do I fix this problem’ and then they got a reply with ‘follow these steps with step X making sure they would delete their data’. And this was before the whole era of AI slop so I fear how much worse it has gotten now.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      For as much as they like to talk about building things and solving problems the software industry doesn’t seem to put a lot of effort into building things well or solving their own problems.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    4 months ago

    Here’s a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, and alse separately highlights new posts, to make long running threads easier to follow. I’m posting it in the stubsack because it’s the thread I had in mind when writing it.

    Pasting it in the browser’s console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I’ve cross tested it any… Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won’t steal your crypto, or mine any new.

    In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.

    edit: Also if you prepend javascript: to the code and store it as a bookmark you can just invoke it by calling the bookmark, like a macro, see https://awful.systems/comment/4173451

    Note: longer threads don’t load all comments at once, so you’ll have to rerun the script if you scroll down far enough.

    edit: fixed for Edge, because why wouldn’t it show dates differently there.

    edit: updated it to check if there’s a (xx New) notice in the post count in the OP and use the number to highlight the latest xx posts, i.e. all post made since the last time you were here. Change the value of variable newPostColor if you don’t like the lovely shade of lavender I picked. Depending on if edited posts are counted as new or not the count might be off, and like, what if there’s a new post that’s also been edited? Solving that seems to mean moving away from the warmth and comfort of the quick and dirty territory, and also is there a public philthy repository somewhere?

    edit: here’s how it looks in the SAP thread:

    edit: NEW: added some legibility changes and also consecutive executions now toggle old post highlights.

    Code now in spoiler:

    spoiler 
    (() => {
    function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
        const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
        return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
    }

    const newPostCount = (() => {
        const text = document.querySelector("span.fst-italic").textContent;
        return text.includes("New") ? parseInt(text.match(/\d+/)[0]) : 0;
    })();
    const newPostColor = "#783AFF";

    const timestampNodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
        .map(x => {
            return {
                Node: x,
                PostBox: x.closest('.ms-2'),
                Date: Date.parse(
                    x.dataset.tippyContent
                        .split('\n').at(-1)
                        .replace(/Modified |at /g, "")
                        .replace(/(?<=\d+)(st|nd|rd|th)/g, ""))
            };
        })
        .filter(x => x.PostBox != null)
        .sort((x1, x2) => x2.Date - x1.Date);

    const minDate = timestampNodes.at(-1).Date;
    const maxDate = timestampNodes.at(0).Date;
    const hl = (dt) => getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, dt);

    timestampNodes
        .forEach((x, i) => {
            if (i < newPostCount) {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = newPostColor;
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.person-listing').style.textShadow = '1px 1px 0.75px #FFFFFF';
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            }
            else if (x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor == "") {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = hl(x.Date);
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            } else {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = "";
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = "";
            }
        });
})()
    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      In the spirit of “worse is better”, here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:

      ! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)

      EDIT: fix bug with 1 hour and 20 minutes ago. regex is even worse is better.

      ! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text(/(hour|minute)s? ago/):style(background-color:#7700AA)
    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      other handy thing you can do: make a bookmark that has the URL be javascript:(function() { function bits go here} )();, and stick it in your bookmark bar

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        4 months ago

        Yes, do this if your browser allows it, it’s way better. Just paste the code in the OP prepended by “javascript:” without quotes in place of the url and as far as i can tell it works.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          4 months ago

          I only now saw how badly the syntax on my post is fucked, that’s what I get for trying to snip things in a dodgy textentry rather than a real editor 😅

          leaving it up for posterity tho.

    • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      This is really cool!

      I was just thinking it would be cool to have something like RES’s ‘Previously Read’ feature that only shows the new comments, and everything else is darkened or collapsed. This does a similar thing though and it’s great for these weekly threads

    • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      It’s the same story as has ever been. “Smart People”'s position on anything is often informed by their current economic relationship wrt to the things they care about. And maybe even Yud isn’t super happy about his profession being co-opted. What scraps will he have if his own delusions became true about GPT zombies replacing “authentic voices”?

      No one is immune to seeing a better take when it’s their shit on the line, and no is immune from being in a bubble without stake.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        4 months ago

        I’ve read enough of the Yudster’s work to recognize that he is particularly vulnerable to being replaced by a small shell script that outputs a massive volume of text that says very little of substance, and what little there is is weirdly racist.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          4 months ago

          You are mistaken in my reasoning, I’m saying a person with a well paid university position (which gives him access to money and the university library, which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them) should understand that a lot of training material is indeed not free. This being in addition to the university paying him for his own research, and him prob being pretty annoyed if he was replaced with an iSandberg bot and now was homeless. (This is in addition to what Yud said).

          Turns out making papers about replacing the earth with fruit is something Anders-GPT can do perfectly well on its own.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            14·
            4 months ago

            which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them

            wrong assumption tbh. the open-access fight is happening because the publisher cartels are extortionate and access is extremely uneven. I (personally/directly) know more than a few people presently in academia who roll libgen on a daily basis because it is easier/quicker/the only option/the only actually working option for the things they need

            • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
              12·
              4 months ago

              it’s often easier to pirate the published version of your own paper than to access it by official means

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              4 months ago

              Fair enough, my bad. No idea it had gotten that bad. But still, I wasn’t intending to rag on libgen, just his idea that these things (which also includes education) are free already.

              • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                10·
                4 months ago

                if you want to get really mad, shibboleth “elsevier”. it’ll be a speedrun of learning some of the worst of what’s fucked atm

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    4 months ago

    This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn’t it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that “regular” Republican politicians wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there’s many an NPR-loving granny googling “what is a yarvin” and getting wound up about it in her group chats.

    We’ve all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” I therefore propose a new thing, the “Yarvin Window,” which we can define as “the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents.”

    This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      4 months ago

      What amazes me, as a sort of US politics watcher from the outside, just how badly the various republicans weirdos are reacting to this. Esp Vance, posting his dolphin fucker stuff in the middle of the jokestorm about him being into furniture. But not just him, the GOP going ‘don’t be racist about Harris’ and then all the racists doubling down on their racism, etc etc. The weird lashouts re weirdness. “how dare you call me weird! Grabs calipers I can see from your skull shape that you are …”

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    4 months ago

    https://nitter.poast.org/edzitron/status/1819591404873568715

    Zitron’s sample size may be limited to his Twitter following, but its a bad sign for AI if bashing it gets you praise from both sides of the political aisle:

    Zitron's Tweet

    Bonus Tweet from Chris Alvino:

    I was just thinking about this today. I had a thread go viral where I bashed AI, resulted in thousands of new followers, and I’ve had to block a bunch bc they turned out to be on the far right. Honestly amazing how bipartisan AI hate is. Never seen anything like it before 😂

    • cornflake@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      She’s listened to anecdotes “about kids who are like my kids” (👀👀👀), and that’s quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      73·
      4 months ago

      As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I don’t think she’s actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school won’t magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and there’s a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If we’re going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, I’m not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individual’s odds of losing, y’know?

      Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere I’m probably being incredibly charitable and she’s actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.

      • cornflake@awful.systemsEnglish
        14·
        4 months ago

        I don’t know about “magically immediately” (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you don’t have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          4 months ago

          Don’t get me wrong, I think ending the de facto segregation we’ve ended up with needs to be a primary policy goal and that dealing with people not like themselves is going to do good for any kid all on its own. And the numbers parents use to figure out which schools are “better” are cooked to all hell, making trying to accurately judge school quality incredibly difficult. But that doesn’t change the fact that some schools do have better outcomes or more problems than others, and while the broader systemic factors that create those problems need to be solved, expecting parents not to try and take care of their own kids first isn’t a viable way to make that happen.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      4 months ago

      The proud tradition of “no really, Trump isn’t that bad if you pretend he’s a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth”

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it’s on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.

      BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace “robot overlords” in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, “The Authoritarian Peril”:

      https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg

      with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:

      A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur’s Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        with advanced near-perfect lie detection

        how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become “near-perfect” with GPUs.

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          4 months ago

          Ya know, it’s funny that you point this out, it’s a thing about their style of argument that’s been nagging at me for a while.

          There’s a pattern in the promptfondlers’ propaganda where they claim that they they’ve identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a “truth oracle” in the compsci sense of the word “oracle.” If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

          I guess that’s true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.

          Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just can’t get there from here, but try telling them that.

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            9·
            4 months ago

            If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

            Damn bro, they’re gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER SEVEN EIGHT DECADES AGO

            EDIT: someone pointed out I suck at arithmetic

    • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:

      If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.

      Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.

      What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:

      What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        4 months ago

        do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths

        Wh… What? Does favouring seatbelts also induce millions of premature deaths, because of… because of what? What the actual fuck dude?

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn’t realize you can still start threads there.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”

      Jesus.

      Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice

      Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?

      Siri, how can I unread a post?

      Also look at this dude in the replies advocating for mask-off right-wing sexist / racist / fascist EA: https://x.com/diegocaleiro/status/1729715617945788773 … if you dare 😱

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      Strange, they didn’t count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald

    • cornflake@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I’ve found it impossible to share threads without.

      • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        4 months ago

        https://status.d420.de/ there’s a few nitters post-rebirth, all of them probably using a fleet of real accounts and anti-bot protection instead of the guest accounts that first-age nitter used.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    4 months ago

    Rumor, but lol if true “A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets” Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.