Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    Microsoft’s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

    With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding, there’s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.’ That’s a gray area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.

    Watch the entire interview if you’re bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

  • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    No, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:

    • Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
    • [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
    • You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so I’m right, Q.E.D.!
    • Lawyers couldn’t possibly read everything in discovery, right?
    • Lawyers couldn’t possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
    • Even when it’s mandated by the court?
    • Really?
    • and many, many more
    • FRACTRANS@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      10 days ago

      I wish I was surprised at what the main account was posting about when I looked into it 😵‍💫

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      This thread is an unending source of amusement.

      Someone there found his ORCID and… It’s not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521

      He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different “preprints”, read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.

      I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology1. [emph. mine]

      🤡

      1 No he doesn’t? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease

        also it’s not “almost all” preprints, it’s all preprints, just one repository calls these papers

        he didn’t discover yet predatory journals, it all could have been published for a small fee like with this one (contains mind numbing level of conspiracy-theoretic rambling and related brainworms) hxxps://uraniumisagenocidegiant[.]com/ (you have been warned)

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          There’s one classified as “SSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal article”, I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the “almost”, but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an “electronic journal”? No fucking idea.

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science

        wait, wait. that’s basically the bootcamp level of education, no?

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          6 days ago

          I know essentally nothing about the US education system but…

          If you’re gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldn’t be pulling your degrees up if you didn’t first talk about how formally educated you are…

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          (nothing wrong with that per se, i don’t have any c. s. degree anyways and yet i work in the field for years. but the gall of a dude who has finished a few two-year courses to tell fucking law professionals that they don’t know enough… this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)

          • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            8 days ago

            the sheer hubris of that individual putting out preprints, as if making this available before peer review would hasten chatgpt rapture (none of that shite will be ever published)

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        Those “papers” are gold, they’re mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:

        • How to calculate a mean of numbers?
        • What is a number?
        • Atheism is actually a religion.
        • Ethereum is a store of energy.

        I’ve never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isn’t healthy.

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            7 days ago

            Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??

            This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.

            • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              0·
              8 days ago

              he also has a personal site, it’s linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass

              • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
                0·
                8 days ago

                oh goddess, he’s already a bleeding muppet, and going to be a major crank. from the researchgate profile:

                I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar. I also tend to look at questions, rather than fields of study, as a research question often does incorporate many disparate topics. Research interests include the psychological and anthropological nature of religion, vaccine efficacy and impact on asymptomatic carriage, and the application of paraconsistent logic to scientific research.

                rōnin! fucking! scholar!

                • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
                  3·
                  6 days ago

                  Hey, he didn’t update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long he’s been a samurai of that

    • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      I hate that I saw that same post earlier today

      Here’s a quote from the book:

      AI already transcends human perception — in a sense, through chronological compression or “time travel”: enabled by algorithms and computing power, it analyzes and learns through processes that would take human minds decades or even centuries to complete.

      Glad to know the calculators I had in school were capable of time travel

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        Isn’t it absolutely deranged? These people have (well had lol) real power over us.

        There is a great March 2023 episode of Trashfuture I’m listening to atm called “The Diet of Brainworms” about this book. They basically want to install feudalism and tech-priests because AI is sO pOwErFuLl.

        One of the hosts (Riley iirc) made a great point that it’s as if someone showed Kissenger that trick where you write “boobs” using a calculator, and he became deeply unsettled by the computer’s power of speech. Also appreciated the one about Kissenger being the guy who used an etch-a-sketch to draw a gun and was scared of it.

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    I tried using Claude 3.5 sonnet and … it’s actually not bad. Can someone please come up with a simple logic puzzle that it abysmally fails on so I can feel better? It passed the “nonsense river challenge” and the “how many sisters does the brother have” tests, both of which fooled gpt4.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I don’t have any proof for this statement but I believe the LLM-minders keep track of whatever stupid shit bubbles up on the internets making fun of their babies and hardcode “solutions” to them in a game of whack-a-mole.