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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
We live in a world where the US vice president admits to reading siskind AI fan fiction, so that ship has probably sailed.
It has but we dont have to make it worse, we can create a small village that resists. Like the one small village in Gaul that resisted the Roman occupation.
Yeah, that metaphor fits my feeling. And to extend the metaphor, I thought Gary Marcus was, if not a member of the village, at least an ally, but he doesn't seem to actually realize the battle lines. Like maybe to him hating on LLMs is just another way of pushing symbolic AI?
Could also just be environment, pretty hard to stay on one site staunchly if half the people around you are then people your radically oppose.
Also wonder about the only game in town factor
He knows the connectionist have basically won (insofar as you can construe competing scientific theories and engineering paradigms as winning or losing... which is kind of a bad framing), so that is why he pushing the "neurosymbolic" angle so hard.
(And I do think Gary Marcus is right that the neurosymbolic approaches has been neglected by the big LLM companies because they are narrower and you can't "guarantee" success just by dumping a lot of compute on them, you need actual domain expertise to do the symbolic half.)
I appreciate the reference having read half a dozen Astérix albums in the last few days. I just hope our Alesia has yet to come.