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 ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    got sent this image

    wonder how many more of these things we’ll see before people start having a real bileful response to this (over and above the fact that a number of people have been warning about exactly this outcome for a while now)

    (transcript below)

    transcript

    title: I gave my mom’s company an Al automation and now she and her coworkers are unemployed

    body: So this is eating me alive and I don’t really know where else to put it. I run this little agency that builds these Al agents for staffing firms. Basically the agent pre-screens candidates, pulls the info into a neat report, and sends it back so recruiters don’t waste hours on screening calls. It’s supposed to be a tool, not a replacement.

    My mom works at this mid sized recruiting company. She’s always complained about how long it takes to qualify candidates, so I set them up with one of my agents just to test it. It crushed it. Way faster, way cheaper, and honestly more consistent than most of their team.

    Fast forward two months and they’ve quietly laid off almost her whole department. Including my mom. I feel sick. Like I built something that was supposed to help people, and instead it wiped out my mom’s job and her team. I keep replaying it in my head like I basically automated my own family out of work.

      • scruiser@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        It’s pretty screwed up that humble bragging about putting their own mother out of a job is a useful opening to selling a scam-service. At least the people that buy into it will get what they have coming?

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        I didn’t dig into the post/username at all so I can’t guesstimate likelihood of this! get where you’re coming from

        (…I really need to finish my blog relaunch (this thought brought to you by the explication I was about to embark on in this context))

        (((it’s soon.gif tho!)))

    • Alex@lemmy.vg
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      7 months ago

      Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile and they’re a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man ā€œagencyā€ has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.

      • fullsquare@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        dude has a post named ā€œfrom 0 to 1 clients in 48hā€ where someone calls him out for already claiming to have 17 customers, so it’s reasonable to assume that this guy is full of shit either way

        then again, there’s plenty of clueless, could be real, because welcome to current year, where everything is fake, satire is dead and reuters puts the onion out of the business

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      The phrase ā€œadorned with academic ornamentationā€ sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.

    • BigMuffN69@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      The implication that Soares / MIRI were doing serious research before is frankly journalist malpractice. Matteo Wong can go pound sand.

      • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        It immediately made me wonder about his background. He’s quite young and looks to be just out of college. If I had to guess, I’d say he was probably a member of the EA club at Harvard.

          • blakestacey@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            Just earlier this month, he was brushing off all the problems with GPT-5 and saying that ā€œOpenAI is learning from its greatest success.ā€ He wrapped up a whole story with the following:

            At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feels—and, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence—a model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the company’s narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all disease—it is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.

            Weaselly little promptfucker.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        My copy of ā€œthe singularity is nearā€ also does that btw.

        (E: Still looking to confirm that this isn’t just my copy, or it if is common, but when I’m in a library I never think to look for the book, and I don’t think I have ever seen the book anywhere anyway. It is the ā€˜our sole responsibility…’ quote, no idea which page, but it was early on in the book. ā€˜Yudnowsky’).

        Image and transcript

        Transcript: Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve…[T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from ā€œimpossibleā€ to ā€œobvious.ā€ Move a substantial degree upwards and all of them will become obvious.

        —ELIEZER S. YUDNOWSKY, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, 1996

        Transcript end.

        How little has changed, he has always believed intelligence is magic. Also lol on the ā€˜smallest bit’. Not totally fair to sneer at this as he wrote this when he was 17, but oof being quoted in a book like this will not have been good for Yudkowskys ego.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    Meanwhile on /r/programmingcirclejerk sneering hn:

    transcription

    OP: We keep talking about ā€œAI replacing coders,ā€ but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.

    Comment: The future of coding is jerking off while waiting for AI managers to do your project for you, then retrying the prompt when they get it wrong. If gooning becomes the de facto way to program, maybe expecting to cum will be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Promptfondlers are tragically close to the point. Like I was saying yesterday about translators the future of programming in AI hell is going to be senior developers using their knowledge and experience to fix the bullshit that the LLM outputs. What’s going to happen when they retire and there’s nobody with that knowledge and experience to take their place? I’ll have sold off my shares by then, I’m sure.

  • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    The usual suspects are mad about college hill’s expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, I’m in bed and can’t be bothered to link at the moment.

      • scruiser@awful.systems
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        Weird rp wouldn’t be sneer worthy on it’s own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), it’s contributing factors like…

        • the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)

        • the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (he’s literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)

        • the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)

        • the fact that Eliezer think it’s another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)

        • the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of character’s working for literal Hell… is certainly an authorial choice)

        • and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)

        …At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.

        And it shouldn’t be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.

        • swlabr@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          obligatory reminder that ā€œdath ilanā€ is misspelled ā€œthailandā€ and I still don’t know why. Working theory is Yud wants to recolonise thailand

        • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          That’s about what I was thinking, I’m completely ok with the weird rpg aspect.

          Regarding the second and third point though I’ll admit I thought the whole thing was just yud indulging, I missed that it’s also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.

            Always a bad sign when people can’t just let a thing be a thing just for enjoyment, but see everything as the ā€˜hustle’ (for lack of a better word). I’m reminded of that dating profile we looked at which showed that 99% what he did was related to AI and AI doomerism, even the parties.

            • scruiser@awful.systems
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              7 months ago

              I actually think ā€œProject Lawfulā€ started as Eliezer having fun with glowfic (he has a few other attempts at glowfics that aren’t nearly as wordy… one of them actually almost kind of pokes fun at himself and lesswrong), and then as it took off and the plot took the direction of ā€œhis author insert gives lectures to an audience of adoring slavesā€ he realized he could use it as an opportunity to squeeze out all the Sequence content he hadn’t bothered writing up in the past decade^ . And that’s why his next attempt at a HPMOR-level masterpiece is an awkward to read rp featuring tons of adult content in a DnD spinoff, and not more fanfiction suitable for optimal reception to the masses.

              ^(I think Eliezer’s writing output dropped a lot in the 2010s compared to when he was writing the sequences and the stuff he has written over the past decade is a lot worse. Like the sequences are all in bite-size chunks, and readable in chunks in sequence, and often rephrase legitimate science in a popular way, and have a transhumanist optimism to them. Whereas his recent writings are tiny little hot takes on twitter and long, winding, rants about why we are all doomed on lesswrong.)

          • scruiser@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            I missed that it’s also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.

            It turns in that direction about 20ish pages in… and spends hundreds of pages on it, greatly inflating the length from what could be a much more readable length. It then gets back to actual plot events after that.

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      I’m sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If it’s not the implicit racialization of everything, it’s the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.

      You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, we’re going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and that’s final.

      • scruiser@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        also: The int-maxxing and overinflated ego of it all reminds me of the red mage from 8-bit theater, a webcomic based on final fantasy about the LW (light warriors) that ran from 2001-2010

        E: thinking back on it, reading this webcomic and seeing this character probably in some part inoculated me against people like yud without me knowing

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          I never read 8bit. I read A Modest Destiny. Wonder how that guy is doing, he always was a bit weird and combative, but when he deleted his blog it was getting very early signs of right wing culture warrior bits (which was ironic considering he burned a us flag).

          • swlabr@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            Never read AMD (and shan’t). The author’s site appears to be live.

            8BF’s site has been taken over by bots, and I can’t be bothered to find an alternate source. Dead internet go brrrrr. Otherwise, the creator, Brian Clevinger, appears to have had a long career in comics, and has written many things for Marvel.

              • swlabr@awful.systems
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                7 months ago

                Ah thanks! On mobile the main page gets redirected to spam, but the site is navigable from the archive.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              7 months ago

              Yeah, but he used to have forums, and then a blog, and then no blog and then a blog again, and then a hidden blog etc. Think Howard has only a few minor credits on some games, he always came off as a bit of a weirdly combative nerd who thought he was right and the smartest in the room and didn’t get that people didn’t agree with his definitions/assumptions. He is a big idea guy for example. One of his comics was also called ā€˜the atheist, the agnostic and the asshole’ so yeah. The 00’s online comic world was something.

              • swlabr@awful.systems
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                7 months ago

                has only a few minor credits[…], he always came off as a bit of a weirdly combative nerd who thought he was right and the smartest in the room and didn’t get that people didn’t agree with his definitions/assumptions. He is a big idea guy for example.

                gosh i’m sure glad that these kinds of people disappeared from the internet /s

      • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
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        @istewart

        I would simply learn how to keep ā€œgamesā€ and ā€œrealityā€ separate. I actually already know. It helps a lot.

        Racists are gonna racist no matter what. They didn’t need TTRPGs around to give them the idea of breaking out the calipers.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          Yes but basic dnd does have a lot of racism build in, esp with Gygax not being great on that end (nits make lice he said about how it lawful for paladins to kill orc babies). They did drop the sexism pretty quickly, but no big suprise his daughters were not into it. It certainly helps with the whole hierarchical mindset. My int/level is higher than yours so im better than you stuff. And sadly a lot of people do have trouble keeping both seperate (and even that isn’t always ideal, esp in larps).

          But yes this, considering the context ks def a bit of a case of some of their ideologies, or ideological fantasies bleeding through. (Esp considering, Yud has been corrected on his faulty understanding of genetics before).

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      We’ve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          Not sure if anybody noticed the last time, but so they get isekayed into a DND world, which famously runs on some weird form of fantasy feudalism and they expect a random high int person to rule the country somehow? What in the primogenitor is this stuff, you can’t just think yourself into being a king, that is one of the issues with monarchies.

          E: ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.

          • swlabr@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.

            Hey, write what you know

        • o7___o7@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          An encounter of this sort is what drove Lord Vetinari to make a scorpion pit for mimes, probably.

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yud’s coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I don’t know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified ā€œlintamandeā€ as Kelsey Piper in 2013.

        I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:

        The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.

        And I got to about here:

        Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.

        … before the ā€œwhat the fuck is this fucking shit?ā€ intensified beyond my ability to care.

        • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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          7 months ago

          Yeah I couldn’t find the strength to even get to the naughty stuff, I gave up after one or two chapters. And I’ve read through all of HPMOR. 😐

          • blakestacey@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            I’m hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played ā€œexquisite corpseā€ parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didn’t pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    so it’s been observed by many that github’s been getting worse for a while as they keep shoving copilot into every corner

    with the upgrade diff review, I wanted to quickly fold closed the 485 files in the diff. I could’ve sworn github’s diff view used[0] to have a button for this, and I know bitbucket does[1], but nope. so of course I open browser inspector to dig at elements (then quickly iterate over them with .click() in the js console)

    which is when I noticed that even the elements are renamed for copilot:

    <copilot-diff-entry data-file-path=".cargo/config.toml">
    

    which both makes me wonder my memory is right and this did used to have a button that was just overlooked in the rush for terrible chatbot shit, and makes me boggle at how astoundingly far the org is deepthroating this nonsense

    [0] it’s been a few years of no longer actively using github

    [1] fairly recently for client work

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        And how it fused Buddhism with more Christian religions. Considering how often you heard of old hackers being interested in the former.

      • fullsquare@awful.systems
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        aum recruited a lot of people, and also failed at some things that would be presumably easier to do safely than what they did

        Meanwhile, Aum had also attempted to manufacture 1,000 assault rifles, but only completed one.[37]

        otoh they were also straight up delusional about what they could achieve, including toying with the idea of manufacturing nukes, military gas lasers, and getting and launching Proton rocket. (not exactly grounded for a group of people who couldn’t make AK-74s)

        they were also more media savvy in that they didn’t pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they had entire radio station rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)

        • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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          they were also more media savvy in that they didn’t pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they had entire radio station rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)

          Its pretty telling about Our Good Friends’ media savviness that it took an all-consuming AI bubble and plenty of help from friends in high places to break into the mainstream.

          • o7___o7@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            With all that money, It’s only a matter of time before they start cribbing from their neighbors and we get an anime adaptation of HPMoR.

          • fullsquare@awful.systems
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            radio transmissions in russia were money shot for aum, and idk if it was a fluke or deliberate strategy. people had for a long time expectation that radio and tv are authoritative, reliable sources (due to censorship that doubled as fact-checker, and about all of it was state-owned) and in 90s every bit of that broke down because of privatization, and now you could get on the air and say anything, with many taking that at face value, as long as you pay up. at the same time there was major economic crisis and cults prey on the desperate. result?

            Following the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, two Russian Duma committees began investigations of the Aum – the Committee on Religious Matters and the Committee on Security Matters. A report from the Security Committee states that the Aum’s followers numbered 35,000, with up to 55,000 laymen visiting the sect’s seminars sporadically. This contrasts sharply with the numbers in Japan which are 18,000 and 35,000 respectively. The Security Committee report also states that the Russian sect had 5,500 full-time monks who lived in Aum accommodations, usually housing donated by Aum followers. Russian Aum officials, themselves, claim that over 300 people a day attended services in Moscow. The official Russian Duma investigation into the Aum described the cult as a closed, centralized organization.

            https://irp.fas.org/congress/1995_rpt/aum/part06.htm

    • fullsquare@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      aum:

      Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the ā€œAum Salvation planā€, included claims of […] realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure.

      this is in common with both our very good friends and scientology, but i think happy science is much stupider and more in line with srinivasan’s network states, in that it has/is an explicitly far-right political organization built in from day one

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Well if the bubble pops he will have to pivot to people who pivot. (That is what is going to suck when to bubble pops, so many people are going to lose their jobs, and I fear a lot of people holding the bags are not the ones who really should be punished the mosts (really hope not a lot of pension funds bought in). The stock market was a mistake).

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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        7 months ago

        I imagine it’ll be a pretty lucrative pivot - the public’s ravenous to see AI bros and hypesters get humiliated, and Zitron can provide that in spades.

        Plus, he’ll have a major headstart on whatever bubble the hucksters attempt to inflate next.

          • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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            7 months ago

            Y’know, I was predicting at least a few years without a tech bubble, but I guess I was dead wrong on that. Part of me suspects the hucksters are gonna fail to inflate a quantum bubble this time around, though.

            • blakestacey@awful.systems
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              7 months ago

              Quantum computing is still too far out from having even a niche industrial application, let alone something you can sell to middle managers the world over. Anybody who day-traded could get into Bitcoin; millions of people can type questions at a chatbot. Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.

              • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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                7 months ago

                Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.

                By my guess, no. AI earned its investor/VC dollars by providing bosses and CEOs alike a cudgel to use against labour, either by deskilling workers, degrading their work conditions, or killing their jobs outright.

                Quantum doesn’t really have that - the only Big Claimā„¢ I know it has going for it is its supposed ability to break pre-existing encryption clean in half, but that’s near-certainly gonna be useless for hypebuilding.

                • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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                  7 months ago

                  I think they will just start to make up capabilities, also with the added capabilities of quantum of a computing paradigm, AGI is back on the menu. Now, due to quantum without all the expensive datacenters and problems. We are gonna put quantum in glasses! VR/Augmented reality quantum AI glasses!

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      The thing that kills me about this is that, speaking as a tragically monolingual person, the MTPE work doesn’t sound like it’s actually less skilled than directly translating from scratch. Like, the skill was never in being able to type fast enough or read faster or whatever, it was in the difficult process of considering the meaning of what was being said and adapting it to another language and culture. If you’re editing chatbot output you’re still doing all of that skilled work, but being asked to accept half as much money for it because a robot made a first attempt.

      In terms of that old joke about auto mechanics, AI is automating the part where you smack the engine in the right place, but you still need to know where to hit it in order to evaluate whether it did a good job.

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        It’s also a lot less pleasant of a task, it’s like wearing a straightjacket, and compared to CAT (eg: automatically using glossaries for technical terms) actually slows you down, if the translation is quite far from how you would naturally phrase things.

        Source: Parents are Professional translators. (They’ve certainly seen work dry up, they don’t do MTPE it’s still not really worth their time, they still get $$$ for critically important stuff, and live interpreting [Live interpreting is definetely a skill that takes time to learn compared to translation.])

        • Alex@lemmy.vg
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          7 months ago

          Could I ask you a question I’ve always wondered about the translation business? Why do people send in machine translation asking for cleanup and even expect it’ll cost them less?

          Maybe I’m ignorant, but the way I see it, great machine translation tools are widely and freely accessible to anyone. If I needed professional translation done, I wouldn’t think copy-pasting a document into Google Translate – something that takes literal minutes – would get me any type of discount. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

          • zogwarg@awful.systems
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            7 months ago

            Some of it is driven by translation agencies, which will refer work to freelance translators.

            I would say the biggest gap is that many customers aren’t even bothering to use translators at all, and the ones that do realize it needs fixing up don’t really understand the work involved, many people misunderstand translation as being a 1-1 process, and think that Machine translation got you most of the way there.

            It’s also the are we willing to pay that much more, when the shitty translation is ā€œgood enoughā€.

            One big issue is that translation as a low barrier of entry, and many people will accept stupid work at stupid rates, and to keep rates high you have to prove the added value.

            (Proving the added value as also gotten harder, as some clients even more often than before will ā€œcorrectā€ your work before publish it, as highlighted in the article)

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Oh, looks like gemini is a fan of the hacky anti-comedy bits from some of my favorite podcasts

  • BigMuffN69@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    Gary asks the doomers, are you ā€œfeeling the agiā€ now kids?

    To which Daniel K, our favorite guru lets us know that he has officially moved his goal posts updated his timeline so now the robogod doesnt wipe us out until the year of our lorde 2029.

    It takes a big brain superforecaster to have to admit your four month old rapture prophecy was already off by at least 2 years omegalul

    Also, love: updating towards my teammate (lmaou) who cowrote the manifesto but is now saying he never believed it. ā€œThe forecasts that don’t come true were just pranks bro, check my manifold score bro, im def capable of future sight, trustā€

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Clown world.

      How many times will he need to revise his silly timeline before media figures like Kevin Roose stop treating him like some kind of respectable authority? Actually, I know the answer to that question. They’ll keep swallowing his garbage until the bubble finally bursts.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        And once it does they’ll quietly stop talking about it for a while to ā€œfocus on the human stories of those affectedā€ or whatever until the nostalgic retrospectives can start along with the next thing.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      So, as I have been on a cult comparison kick lately, how did it work for those doomsday cults when the world didn’t end, and they picked a new date, did they become more radicalized or less? (I’m not sure myself, I’d assume it would be the people disappointed leave, and the rest get worse).

      • nfultz@awful.systems
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        7 months ago

        When Prophecy Fails is worth the read just for the narrative, he literally had his grad students join a UFO / Dianetics cult and take notes in the bathroom and kept it going for months. Really impressive amount of shoe leather compared to most modern psych research.

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    There is a problem where well-endowed men will go to public places, drop trou, and do the helicopter dance.

    This is called an indiscreet log-a-rhythm, and can be solved with quantum computers (or so I’m told).

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      The requisite refrigeration equipment causes ā€œshrinkage,ā€ just like George suffers in that one Seinfeld episode, bing bong so simple

      Now, getting the quantum hardware to the point of service, so to speak, is the obvious challenge, and that’s why I’m seeking funding for multiple container trucks so we can realize Uber for QC

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    7 months ago

    imagine how fucking terrible it must be to be in this room

    (and I won’t lie: there’s definitely a moment that Inglorious Basterds briefly flashed to mind)