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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
Does anyone actually believe this? What the heck does bullshit-text engines or fake-image-generators contribute towards discovering ANYTHING, delivering ANYTHING, producing ANYTHING? The only thing there is any argument for at all is delivering quick-and-dirty code, which is hardly connected to any of those tired promises.
Current copium is that if it can solve Erdos problems after a fashion then the cancer annihilating molecular biology breakthroughs canāt be that far behind.
Also since just shovelling GPUs and reddit posts into a data center forever probably wonāt do the trick theyāve settled on the questionmarks on the list before Profit! being Recursive Self Improvement, meaning that since automatic code generation is somewhat improving it follows that pretty soon LLMs will just code themselves out of their current predicament of being unsustainably resource intensive hallucination machines and build AGI on their own.
I really like how in the past couple of years theyāve decided model collapse just isnāt a thing anymore.
They just donāt call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem. (Somebody on bsky said āhey that isnāt actually model collapse, read this article on it written by the AI companyā. And then the article described model collapse, but didnāt call it model collapse, it was amusing. (And I went into it, thinking I could be wrong, going āah so it is only related to a specific set of instructionsā, but then the article also showed that models without those instructions had the the problem (in a much smaller way, but the bad instructions were spreading due to synthetic data))).
Reminds me of OpenAIās blog post explaining the goblins. It described textbook model collapse, but somehow avoided saying the actual words āmodel collapseā even once.
I was talking about that one, shit didnāt I even mention the goblins? Lol, sorry about that.
every week of work with biologists brings another āguess we doin circles nowā moment. thereās simply so many things that were never measured, measuring them requires knowing what are you doing, proper experimental design and interpretation of results, that are affected by myriad factors and dozens of feedback loops. none of that is in training data of course, and even if it was it would help very little because humans measuring that would make better use of these results first. but donāt worry about that, machine god will learn relativity from three video frames and will make peter thiel immortal right away
The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they havenāt considered that if no-one has any income they wonāt have any customers. However, they do value geese).