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)
Today in “Promptfondler fucks around and finds out.”
So I’m guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn’t end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing or when to stop, especially when it’s being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn’t remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.
Emphasis added.
So the ongoing discourse about AI energy requirements and their impact on the world reminded me about the situation in Texas. It set me thinking about what happens when the bubble pops. In the telecom bubble of the 90s or the British rail bubble of the 1840s, there was a lot of actual physical infrastructure created that outlived the unprofitable and unsustainable companies that had built them. After the bubble this surplus infrastructure helped make the associated goods and services cheaper and more accessible as the market corrected. Investors (and there were a lot of investors) lost their shirts, but ultimately there was some actual value created once we were out of the bezzle.
Obviously the crypto bubble will have no such benefits. It’s not like energy demand was particularly constrained outside of crypto, so any surplus electrical infrastructure will probably be shut back down (and good riddance to dirty energy). The mining hardware itself is all purpose-built ASICs that can’t actually do anything apart from mining, so it’s basically turning directly into scrap as far as I can tell.
But the high-performance GPUs that these AI operations rely on are more general-purpose even if they’re optimized for AI workloads. The bubble is still active enough that there doesn’t appear to be much talk about it, but what kind of use might we see some of these chips and datacenters put to as the bubble burns down?
Hopefully this doesn’t break the rules. But where can I find some educational podcasts that aren’t overly capitalist, reactionary, rationalist, or otherwise right-leaning or authoritarian in nature.
I want to specifically avoid content like Lex Friedman, Huberman, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. That sounds good on the surface but goes down a rabbit hole of affirming reactionary bias.
I’m not amazing with words, so I hope what I’m saying makes sense. Thanks.
Most everything from Cool Zone Media is going to be pretty decent. Haven’t listened to the whole catalogue, but Ed Zitron of Better Offline is an established nonmember (as far as I know) friend of the sneer and Behind the Bastards is truly excellent.
Maintenance Phase is an excellent examination of diet and health grifters, and Mike’s others (You’re Wrong About and If Books Could Kill) are also pretty excellent.
I also want to spotlight Wittenburg to Westphalia, a history podcast ostensibly about the wars of the reformation and the social and economic chamges of the early modern period. But in order to really give a sense of how dramatic those changes are, he has so far provided only an incredibly thorough examination of medieval European society from the politics to economics and social structures. He has an episode about unfree labor that I found particularly interesting.
Second on Maintenance Phase! I marathonned it on a road trip a couple of days ago, and not only is it a well-researched and a fun listen, you’ll discover that so much of the stuff Aubrey and Michael discuss is directly congruent to our typical subjects. Can’t recommend it enough.
They’ve inspired me to work on an effort post for MoreWrite, tentatively titled, “A Unified Theory of Bullshitter-Driven Social Diseases.”
Which isn’t going to be as pompous as it sounds, I promise!
Sounds great! Looking forward to reading it
it’s time for our weekly what in the fuck is wrong with you Proton
I’ve definitely seen this kind of meme format, to be fair. But generally speaking I think we should make a rule that in order to be considered satire or joking something should need to actually be funny.
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says in-depth Marxist economic analysis? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster breaks down historical context of Game of Thrones? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says the same VPN marketing schpiel as every other podcaster? Not. Funny.
The Aristocrats!
I’m thoroughly convinced Musk is an AI generated person and his life’s goal is simply to find the AI that generated him.
The world is a simulation and Musk has a green jewel above his head.
via friend:
Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052
@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.
For your delectation, here are the HN comments
I’m in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.
Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.
There’s not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.
Here’s the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk
oh i dunno, there was
Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.
This remark is actually part of a long fight between CS and CS people. And it is really frustrating in various ways, as CS always thinks they did better than CS while being blind of the actual accomplishments of CS they don’t know and just how complex the subject matter is. It is an annoying failure to communicate between both disciplines. (A lot of people don’t fall victim to this btw, but it can be really annoying to encounter a ‘Our CS is good, and theirs is bad because strawman’, who often don’t even realize that various words have different meanings in the different fields).
For the record, I think the Counter-Strike people are correct on this one, mainly because heuristically Confederate States advocates are wrong by default.
Exactly the problem im talking about. What about all the good things the confederate state … no wait.
