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 “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.

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[–] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Anyways, first actual post of the week (albeit not the first sneer):

oh no

(Source)

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    [–] 22 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Quick personal sneer: I just had a call with a company trying to sell us their SaaS password/secrets manager solution because we're trying to force everyone to use one instead of using hunter2 everywhere.

    Anyway, after going on for 30 minutes about their amazing integrations with every platform on the planet and their super duper security and how their systems are rock solid and never fail, the marketing dude finished off by trying to sell ChatGPT integration as a feature. Not for actual passwords, thank fuck, but in order to quickly produce integrations between their APIs and other systems. He proudly proclaimed that "Usually there's no security issues with just copy-pasting the code from ChatGPT."

    Usually.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    what

    whattttttttt

    whatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

    and it's not like crowdstrike didn't just happen. I guess maybe it was too recent, and the lesson-of-pain hasn't percolated through to dipshit"integration advisor" technical sales fuckwits yet

    bonus round, whatever the hell lemmy did here:

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    Oh no. Kurzgesagt just published a full-on TREACLES piece.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0

    These are the sources they cited: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-superintelligence/

    Open Philanthropy is a sponsor of kurzgesagt. The foundation is supporting academic work across the field of Artificial Intelligence, and some of the sources used to create this script (from OpenAI, Future of Humanity Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute and Epoch AI) also receive financial support from Open Philanthropy.

    Open Philanthropy had no influence on the content and messages of this video.

    I'm sure!

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Kurzgesagt

    Yeah I'm not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as "all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s".

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    @hrrrngh @froztbyte I was preeved about this, but was already starting to get sus because they've previously touched on Effective Altrusim positively (without using the term) and seem uncomfortably longtermist, which really does concern me given the figures and philosophies involved.

    This is extra crap because I'd already introduce the channel to younger family members as a learning resource that I wouldn't have to fact-check to death, but apparently noooo.

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    [–] [S] 16 points 2 years ago (6 children)
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    [–] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)
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    [–] [S] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I didn't even know this was happening friend sent me the screenshot, but apparent grimusk are in the bureaucratic stages of their relationship ending. and of course it's going extremely normal:

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I sadly know more, it is horrible. Not only is there a custody battle, grimes grandma is dying and she has never seen grimes kids, and because Musk isn't reacting to anything Grimes mother put a plea online for him to please let her grandkids see her mother.

    Poor kids, just heartbreaking.

    E: source

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    heh

    that looks pretty fucking shitty. but we all already knew both of them were fucking ghouls. sucks for the kids, hopefully they can get out okay eventually. but that's about as much as I'm willing to say (largely: reasons private, w/ heavy state load implications. I don't mind telling/explaining, but not in public, and it's a lot of work/context)

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Regarding the paper "Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning", a comment by e. e. arroyo:

    "Yes! we can make explainable predictions of compounds with AI now!"

    • They could only explain 15% of predictions
    • They could only understand 9% of those explanations
    • 60% of those were wrong
    • The 4 active compounds left are probably, arguably, not even a novel class
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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    i'm not reading all that, at least now, but i'd just notice that carboxylic acids are notoriously terrible at crossing membranes unless some trickery is used, so there could be massive issues downstream. issues that, you know, can be effortlessly pruned at early stage of drug development

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  • I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it's not like there's no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the "spare" cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

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    [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)

    this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now

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    [–] [S] 13 points 2 years ago (19 children)

    lol holy shit, apparently a US chain is trying to do"AI-based" individualised pricing of goods in-store

    can't wait to hear of someone being charged $500 for a packet of gum

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    [–] 13 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:

    What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn't want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it'll be fine as long as there's a big cyber noggin down the track... just google TESCREAL. We didn't make this up.

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    [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    Oh look, an AI tool to make Wikipedia worse.

    (Apparently, the Wikimedia Foundation couldn't even be bothered to care about the standards that en.wp contributors deem necessary for sources on medical topics. Because it's more important to "sustain and grow Wikimedia projects in a changing online knowledge landscape". Dammit, where's the button that sends electrical shocks through the Internet to anyone who talks like that?)

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    at least Wikipedia has some rather strident rules suggestions on LLM use - tl;dr under no goddamn circumstance, don't be a fucking idiot. And this seems to be using it as a forest-burning search engine rather than anything that will generate wiki text.

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    person who can barely brain themselves finds they have to engage with US postal system, hilarity ensues

    (via friend who often sends me tweet-screenshots (one day I'll convince 'em to join here))

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    For those who are wondering, real tweet. I checked. Guy is defending himself by going 'physical mail is outdated and shouldn't exist'. This guy is going to get cybercrimed by somebody so hard.

    E: also interesting, and relevant to our interests, you can just buy prestamped envelopes, so thanks chatgpt.

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    [–] [S] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    it happened

    I popped out somewhere to have a drink, and got to have someone tell me about their “edutech” startup that “uses AI”

    they very definitely overpromise (not gonna rinse their bullshit), and topped it off with “and then we use a LLM for suggesting improvements”

    (I ejected from the conversation but I can still hear it; it’s progressed to “talking about property” in the terms of mediocre early-20s white kids talking leveraging daddy and uncle’s assets)

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

    went and peeked at the ezra klein podcast on the off chance he's gotten into anything interesting

    There's something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It's clear we're witnessing the advent of a wildly powerful technology, one that could transform the economy and the way we think about art and creativity and the value of human work itself. At the same time, can't for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job.
So wanted to understand what I'm missing and get some tips for how could incorporate A.Il. better into my life right now. And Ethan Mollick is the perfect guide: He's a professor at the Wharton School

    lol

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  • To be fair, it's hard to really internalize that all these rich and powerful techbros are actually morons after all these years of journalists like Ezra Klein breathlessly reporting their weird ideas and baseless claims about what they were going to be able to do in the next couple of years.

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (11 children)

    Inventor of the ideological turing test (Bryan Caplan, occasional intellectual sparring partner of SSC) doesn't understand how vaccines work.

    (E: And he is certainly not joking. More: My doctor, and all of you were wrong because I didn't explain myself well (this longer post, while coming closer to a point still sucks. High 'shooting the people who clean phones into space' feeling))

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I have seen three separate instances of start-ups with "AI" in their name that proudly display a tagline along the lines of "BUILDING THE NEXT UNICORN" and jesus fuck almighty I swear I will fucking piledrive the next recruiter that tries that on me

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    [–] 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)
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