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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    HN seems to be particularly deranged today, doesn’t it?

    It mostly seems to be a mopey debate over whether Saltman’s impending apotheosis is good or bad.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        you sure about that?

        The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It’s not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you’re not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You’re out. And the growing consensus is “why shouldn’t you?”, there is no escape from that.

        This is someone who literally can’t tell good writing from bad, so he assumes everyone is using AI

        • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          He’s so close to being depressed enough to maybe ask a vital and important question about meaning and his own relationships with technology. But probably he’ll just buy more AI.

          • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Watching AI guys slowly come around feels similar to how people have to care for their alcoholic relatives. Folks have to come to the point where they recognize where the unacceptable bullshit lies on their own, then you can show them the cold hard facts and a path back to the real world, but getting there is absolutely exhausting and often heartbreaking.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Was salivating all weekend waiting for this to drop, from Subbarao Kambhampati’s group:

    Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved block stacking abilities. It is a straight shot from here to cold fusion! … unfortunately, there is a minor caveat:

    Looks like performance drops like a rock as number of steps required increases…

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      correct me if I’m reading this wrong — the results are that LLMs are much, much worse than classical AI at planning block placement for SHRDLU? that seems pretty damning

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Yes, the classical algo achieves perfect accuracy and is way faster. There is also a table that shows the cost of running o1 is enormous. Like comically bad. Boil a small ocean bad. We’ll just 10x the size and it will achieve 15 steps inshallah.

        Imo, this is like the same behavior we see on math problems. More steps it takes, the higher the chance it just decoheres completely. I can’t see any reason why this type of thing would just “click” for the models if they are also unable to do multiplication.

        I mean this just reeks of pure hopium from OAI and co that things will magykly work out. (But the newer model is clearly better^{tm}! I still don’t see any indication that one day that chart is just going to be 100s across the board.)