this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Neo-Nazi nutcase having a normal one.

It's so great that this isn't falsifiable in the sense that doomers can keep saying, well "once the model is epsilon smarter, then you'll be sorry!", but back in the real world: the model has been downloaded 10 million times at this point. Somehow, the diamanoid bacteria has not killed us all yet. So yes, we have found out the Yud was wrong. The basilisk is haunting my enemies, and she never misses.

Bonus sneer: "we are going to find out if Yud was right" Hey fuckhead, he suggested nuking data centers to prevent models better than GPT4 from spreading. R1 is better than GPT4, and it doesn't require a data center to run so if we had acted on Yud's geopolitical plans for nuclear holocaust, billions would have been for incinerated for absolutely NO REASON. How do you not look at this shit and go, yeah maybe don't listen to this bozo? I've been wrong before, but god damn, dawg, I've never been starvingInRadioactiveCratersWrong.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's wild that Yudkowsky saw a binary choice of "nuclear holocaust" and "superintelligence" and chose "nuclear holocaust" in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Like, even if I believed in FOOM, I'll take my chances with the stupid sexy basilisk 🐍 over radiation burns and it's not even fucking close.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (6 children)

I don't want to say with absolute confidence that there's no scenario I can imagine to which a nuclear apocalypse would be preferable (the real kind, not the Fallout kind). But I have yet to hear one.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

The advanced sinophobia where the Chinese are so much better at everything than the west that even when they make better and cheaper bullshit machines than the Americans do and hand them out for free, it has apocalyptic consequences.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

you can get banned on facebook now for linking to distrowatch https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-linux-topics-as-cybersecurity-threats-posts-and-users-being-blocked and from distrowatch https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews

but it's not as bad as you think, it's slightly worse. it's not only distrowatch and linux groups got banned too

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

I’m not going to link Andy Ngo but random rationalist transwomen are being accused of terror sympathy…and Aella is doing this ‘leopards ate my face’ dance.

edit: it was @jessi_cata who tipped Ngo off of all people.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago

Goddammit why can't the murder cult story just stay morbidly fascinating? Now I've got to worry about implications and how the worst people are gonna use this as ammo.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

i don't think it's the first time i see jessicata acting like a total piece of shit in her completely emotionless way and it's incredibly creepy. she doesn't even seem to be aware of the harm she can cause.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

I was kinda picking up on that ugh.

Ngo is going on Newsmax tonight to do his thing in front of the masses.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Ok you brought aella up so now I can post this:

Heard this song for the first time the other day and it reminded me of aella.

side note: what’s a good way to post links to music that isn’t youtube?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

oh this is brilliant, I’ve been looking for something like this

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

And on a less downbeat and significantly more puerile note, Dan Fixes Coin Ops makes a nice analogy for companies integrating ai into their product.

https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/112847573063473767

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

that thread is a work of genius and answers what the next tech boom needs to be

~~dicks in mousetraps~~ I MEAN whatever wastes electricity most, preferably with Nvidia cards

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

I do actually have a mechanism for using the sharp edges of NVidia cards for ~~dick~~ mouse trapping purposes. And we could - hypothetically - use the extraneous power inputs to mine Bitcoin or something, maximizing efficiency!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Hey, did you know of you own an old forum full of interesting posts from back in the day when humans wrote stuff, you can just attach ai bots to dead accounts and have them post backdated slop for, uh, reasons?

https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

this was mentioned in last week's thread

what I don't get is why the admins chose to both backdate the entries and re-use poster's handles. If they'd just tried to "close" open questions using GenAI with the current date and a robot user it would still be shit but not quite as deceptive

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

The whole thing is just weirdly incompetent. Maybe they just had everything configured wrong and accidentally deployed sone throwaway tests to production? I could almost see it as a way to poison scrapers, given that there are some odd visibility settings on the slop posts, though the owner’s shiftiness and dubious explanations suggest it wasn’t anything so worthy.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

gives a hell of a kicker to the numbers I found

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Live: Chinese AI bot DeepSeek sparks US market turmoil, wiping $500bn off major tech firm

Shares for leading US chip-maker Nvidia dropped more than 15% after the emergence of DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese AI bot.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjr85l2e4l4t

lmao

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Folks around here told me AI wasn't dangerous 😰 ; fellas I just witnessed a rogue Chinese AI do 1 trillion dollars of damage to the US stock market 😭 /s

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

is that Link??

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is from 2023 but when debugging an xfce issue this week I came across this forum post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16835

The user is competent enough to use xfce with Debian, but too incompetent to understand debug symbols is not a violation of privacy.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I get being privacy conscious and that sharing crash dumps and logs you don't really understand yourself can be scary. Making demands of urgent free tech support from strangers is just rude, though.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I screenshot this the other day and forgot to post it. Well, enjoy.]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Pouring one out for the local-news reporters who have to figure out what the fuck "timeless decision theory" could possibly mean.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Taylor said the group believes in timeless decision theory, a Rationalist belief suggesting that human decisions and their effects are mathematically quantifiable.

Seems like they gave up early if they don't bring up how it was developed specifically for deals with the (acausal, robotic) devil, and also awfully nice of them to keep Yud's name out of it.

edit: Also in lieu of explanation they link to the wikipedia page on rationalism as a philosophical movement which of course has fuck all to do with the bay area bayes cargo cult, despite it having a small mention there, with most of the Talk: page being about how it really shouldn't.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

This is a good article, thanks for posting.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (4 children)

They're probably talking about Ziz's group. The double homicide in Pennsylvania is likely the murder of Jamie Zajko's parents referenced in this LW post, and the Vallejo county homicide is the landlord they had a fatal altercation with and who was killed recently.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

Me: Oh boy, I can't wait to see what my favorite thinkers of the EA movement will come up with this week :)

Text from Geoff: "Morally stigmatize AI developers so they considered as socially repulsive as Nazi pedophiles. A mass campaign of moral stigmatization would be more effective than any amount of regulation. "

Another rationalist W: don't gather empirical evidence that AI will soon usurp / exterminate humanity. Instead as the chief authorities of morality, engage in societal blackmail to anyone who's ever heard the words TensorFlow.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago

dude missed that Trump won and the people in power are Nazi pedophiles

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

engage in societal blackmail to anyone who’s ever heard the words TensorFlow.

no no wait this is geoff's stopped clock moment

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