Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
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absolutely not a thing to be āat risk ofā, and a little bit worrying to see someone even worrying about
Zitron was a major dick to a friend of mine who was having technical troubles with reading his newsletter.
And he needs an editor.
absolutely not the first time I hear something like that, and part of why I donāt really like the guy
Zit crit!
Agree: I donāt have much of an opinion on him either way. If this community is gonna hold him up as a voice of note then it should be able to critically engage with his work.
exactly so
TBF itās probably just a āmeā thing. I donāt know how much stock you want to put in that.
I never got the impression that Zitronās reception here has ever been more than lukewarm, which I think (personal grievances like him being a dick in person aside) is partially because his Mahabharata length blog posts were posted here even before he emerged as a significant voice in the AI discourse, i.e. when the tiresome to interesting ratio wasnāt all there yet.
That said, you post is both the nittiest of nitpicks and also wrong. āBut achktually LLMs arenāt the same as diffusion models and also they can run on low end hardware, after a fashion, not reading any further, zero starsāāare you serious?
The wrong part is that addressing the latter part of your post (i.e. the broader economics issues) is like Ed Zitronās whole entire shtick that you somehow managed to miss on your way to remind people that once upon a time someone somewhere managed to complete an inference run on a Raspberry Pie as a proof of concept, when the scale of the issue at hand is more like that load bearing chunks of the US economy are being propped up solely by imaginary hundred-billion-dollar data center construction and nvidia moving GPUs from one trouser pocket to the other.
Fair enough. I acknowledge that I made a mistake, here.
Donāt worry about it, managing to run inference on a raspberry is really cool actually.
Also itās true that Zitron is winging it a lot of the time when it comes to technical details, but not in a way that matters for what he has to say, so dismissing him on those grounds seemed deliberately adversarial, sorry if i got carried away.
TBF I basically had the same concerns about how useful my comment was, so itās not like I think calling me out on it was a bad thing.