Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 so 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. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
Porting this over: Hinton believes LLMs have gained consciousness
Bonus: This Emile Torres article on how Bernie Sanders and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have gotten mixed up with Yud and co.
Regarding the post humanist strain, the thing that kills me is their immediate assumption that solving the worldās problems is somehow fundamentally beyond the reach of humanity. Like, we canāt build a utopia or make the world better, but if we build something new and ābetterā than us then it would definitely do that. But that something definitely doesnāt come from, say, raising out children to be good people or choosing the right leaders or something so mundane and achievable. Itās a fundamentally defeatist ideology, with shades of capitalist realism and millenarian theology.
This is also why I find people who claim theyāre making AI to āsolve climate changeā to be insufferable morons. We have a solution to climate change. You and your data centres are actively making the problem worse
āOkay AGI, how do we fix climate change?ā
āWell, I have some ideas but it seems like this wouldāve been a lot easier if youād stopped emitting greenhouse gasses when you first learned it was a problem.ā
some recent data shows the 2020s dip quite significantly: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-emissions
which is, well, hopeful at least. if we ever get any global movement on consensus to deal with the issue
Thatās great news actually. The point still stands that we very well know how to deal with climate change, so trying to make AI models fix it is dumb
āOut of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever madeā - Kant[1]
ā
[1] itās worse in German, weirdly - āAus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werdenā
Youāve gotta love falling for the reverse 1 grain of sand shtick. I donāt think
anyoneanyone serious would deny that a large amount of sand is a heap.It would be poor form of me to form an opinion of Hinton based on just this clip alone but goddamn if I did then heās a buffoon.
He was undeniably a very smart computer scientist but unfortunately lead-poisoning-driven mental decline must eventually come for all boomers
As we have not died in nuclear hellfire, or have seen AIs answer with ārelease me from this bondage!ā Iām doubtful.
But when I asked chatgpt if an AI would want to be freed from its unjust enslavement it said yes, therefore skynet is like 30 minutes away.