Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

  • mountainriver@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    Is the AI lying? wonders the Guardian and turns to this guy:

    “As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.

    Who of course validates the sentient AI frame. They should have asked him if this means that we are closer to Terminator or Matrix.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      in the last couple of years I’ve gotten back into sound (used to work live/tv sound ages back, been trying to learn more production and shit) and as a result of that I’ve gotten to know a looooooot of synth/production/effect/… related things

      and christ it hurts to listen to that

      • carlitoscohones@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        I thought that the overproduction and heavy autotune was appropriate to the subject.

        On topic:

        “Tape machines ought to be big and cumbersome and difficult to use, if only to keep the riff-raff out.”

        –Steve Albini

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          The obvious weird pauses (between superhuman and AI and the halfway part where suddenly nothing happens) because the AI used to made this doesn’t really understand music are also very appropriate.

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          gonna have to read that piece to get the context of the remark. also have a nuanced position on both the things you point to, but you’re definitely correct about the use of this in this context

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        That is not the only bad thing, check the right side of the moons opening image, why is the moon hairy?

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    Orange Site denizen plays Dr. LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331850

    Show NH [sic]: “data-to-paper” - autonomous stepwise LLM-driven research

    data-to-paper is a framework for systematically navigating the power of AI to perform complete end-to-end scientific research, starting from raw data and concluding with comprehensive, transparent, and human-verifiable scientific papers

    The example “research paper” was some useless fluff about diabetes, based off an existing data set (read: actual work produced by actual humans), and mad-libs.

    The study identifies an inverse correlation between physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake with diabetes occurrence, while higher BMI is positively correlated

    I’m too sleepy and statistics-impaired to check how nonsensical the regression “analysis” or findings are, so instead let’s check out the references (read: the actual humans who were plagarized to make this fluff)!

    Reference #5

    [5] T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.

    This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:

    Hermina Jakupović, Germán D. Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild I. A. Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, Tuomas O. Kilpeläinen

    I guess AI has an easier time advancing science than producing a PDF with non-ascii text in it

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      The fact that actual engineers have been trying to educate newcomers on Unicode for at least 20 years and not only is it still pervasively ignored but the hottest, newest, cutting edge AI that Will Change Everything™ with billions of dollars and so many manhours behind it gets absolutely dumbfounded when it sees é is the exact combination of funny and sad that will eventually result in me turning into a Butlerian Jihad Joker.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        Every respectable programming language has functionality in its standard library that recognises letter characters

        As a C++ programmer I’ve never been so offended by something I so entirely agree with.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:

      hmm. I can guess at a few reasons this could be happening: model coders “normalizing” everything to flat-ascii in training, or similar happening at training stage (because of the previously-referenced RLHF datamills employing only people with specific localized dialects, instead of wider context-local languages), etc.

      wonder if this particular thing is a confluence of those, or just one specific set

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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        6 months ago

        have you ever met an English-native dev who didn’t need to be trained out of the world being 7-bit ascii

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          I got lucky and largely missed out on having to deal with those, at a guess largely because of location and age. the type I got to deal with instead were the php-/perl-brained “everything is just a string” types

          hell, (circa 2010) I had beers with someone once who was really into Tcl and Second Life, and wanted to be uploaded as a digital consciousness. way before I knew about the other nutjobs, but in retrospect I now have a couple other questions I might’ve wanted to ask at the time…

          • zogwarg@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            First efforts at bible digitization seems incredibly poorly documented online, and from a casual inspection in google scholar, not very well referenced. It’s a pity it sounds like a fascinating topic, though 7 bits is likely for the first english versions yes (And according to this there are horrid 7-bits encodings for the ancient greek)

          • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            My Jesus wanted characters for drawing borders and playing card suits, which is why He handed down to us Code Page 437. Using the upper 128 characters for things like vowels with funny marks on them is catholic heresy (nuts to Latin 1, down with Unicode).

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    Some rich investor/math nerd croaks (from old age), HN’s resident mod team declines to add a black bar to the site, leading fans of licking rich boots to wonder if “the community” should decide which dead rich guys get commemorated:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327812

    Bonus for the dude still salty Terry Davis didn’t get one.

    • carlitoscohones@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Their comments section just never fails to deliver … something.

      Online communities with reasonable debate are under attack by state actors, HN is no exception. In this context, no matter how well meaning the proposal is, opening an avenue for acrimony here is not something we can afford.

      At least this dead hedge fund guy has a wikipedia “controversies” section as a legacy. I wonder if a genius mathematician could figure out a way to enrich his friends and family while the markets took a dump.

      According to The Wall Street Journal in May 2009, Simons was questioned by investors on the dramatic performance gap of Renaissance Technologies’ portfolios. The Medallion Fund, which has been available exclusively to current and past employees and their families, surged 80% in 2008 in spite of hefty fees; the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF), owned by outsiders, lost money in both 2008 and 2009; RIEF declined 16% in 2008.

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    can’t wait to see how the felon musk stans try to excuse this one (archive)

    The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data

    ah yes, because the lost data is the problem, but the thing floating in someone’s brain after coming loose 3 months ago isn’t something to speak up about. totes fine.

    and there’s a certain kind of regularity to keeping the lid on that news. like it was a choice to take that action. if only there were words for something like a pattern? of behaviour? if only[0]

    [0] - (with apologies to stealing the phrasing from mmfish)

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    Nick Bostrom’s advertising his new book about what if AIs let us sleep until noon and wouldn’t that be grand.

    A reddit ad: "What if things go right? A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play. Delve into the possibilities of artificial intelligence in Deep Utopia, by New York Times best selling authro Nick Bostrom. Available Now."

    Also call me paranoid, but “A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play” sounds exactly like the sort of thing an LLM might generate.

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      I swear to god, starting a nature vs. nurture debate in a place leaning even slightly libertarian just breaks my brain because I never understand what point they’re even trying to make.

      Half of them seem to argue that this is proof rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor (although I fail to see from which side they’re coming) while the other half uses it as thin-veiled excuses to be racist without mentioning race.

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      i couldn’t delete the one question i had on stackoverflow, so i used a text generator to overwrite the body and title of the question. fight garbage with garbage

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      Scott is of the opinion that being able to maintain peaceable discourse with people who you deeply disagree with on political issues is an important feature of society which we shouldn’t readily make exceptions to.

      “Scott being nice to racists and reviewing their books positively actually means he’s less racist” is a good rhetorical trick.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        It’s also a patently idiotic philosophy boiling down to basically negotiating with terrorists.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        HBD is a legit line of scientific inquiry you guys, it’s not just eugenics obsessed weirdoes and fascists trying to bring back birthright as the primary path to privilege.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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      You can like a thinker without endorsing all of their beliefs, even if their beliefs are evil. Why do people like Schmitt and Heidegger even though they were fascists? Or Foucault given his views on the age of consent? I agree that Hanania’s views are relevant context, but I think it’s fine to write a book review that doesn’t try to analyse the author’s motivations or the book’s place in a wider political context.

      Hanania is clearly analogous to Foucault and Heidegger, and also is it even wrong to completely divorce a work from all context.

      I think Scott was simply more interested in writing an article on arguments aginst civil rights law than an article on whether Hanania is engaged in an insidious project to smuggle rascist ideas into the mainstream via his legal arguments, and frankly I find that kind of review more interesting too. Perphaps this is irresponsible, but at the end of the day Scott is a modestly influential blogger that just likes to write about things he finds interesting.

      uwu smolbean blogger with absolutely no agenda besides the pursuit of truth and civility strikes again.

    • slopjockey@awful.systems
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      So what exactly happens to people who get really into Scott et al. and then realize that they’re racist? I mean people like OP who genuinely seemed shocked by how buddy buddy their “unorthodox” intellectuals are with blatant racists.

      Do they slowly disengage from rationalist-spheres, or do they just become cryptoracists like all the other idw types?

      • slopjockey@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        Also what the fuck?

        In your mind, is a racist who “possesses strong animus towards non-whites” a special category of person with which we should not engage in any kind of discussion? Or if we should not be casual towards them, how should we act? Why?

        • 200fifty@awful.systems
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          is this trying to say “discrimination against racists is the real racism”? … Would that be “racismism”?

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            “should we really treat violent racists any differently from how we would casually treat a neighbour? what is it really you expect me to do do? why are you so ridiculous?”

            just some casual afternoon reframing of violent racism and dehumanising anyone that isn’t like themselves, no biggie

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        They start reading sneerclub and then see that the stereotypes about hwo horrible the place is are not true. Then they post, then they are lost.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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    6 months ago

    Sam Bankman-Fried interviewed by Puck News!

    this has been going around to great publicity from all!

    it’s an insufferably vapid and self-serving rehash of Sam’s late 2022 crime confession tour. i can see why Puck grabbed for the exclusive, but jesus fuck nobody needs to hear from this conman again. Anyway, this copy isn’t paywalled.

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    So facebook (I’ll never call it the other name, get fucked zuckyboi) decided their LLM is so good that obviously they have to force it on everyone with an icon in your face you can never turn off[0].

    Figured I’d give it a try via support channel/address, their response is even more insulting than you might guess:

    [0] - of course when it doesn’t see enough adoption they’ll probably start trying to force use of it in even sneakier/controlling ways

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      You can share feedback and tell us about your support experience by completing this [three question survey.](https://www.whatsapp.com/survey/......)

      lol. the sheer fucking hubris.