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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • mountainriver@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

    Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

    Donā€™t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Donā€™t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

      Ugh, so many people are working the ā€œAI will solve X problemā€ mill. I donā€™t need nor want AI to be there increasing output.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only

    • rook@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Eh, thereā€™s a chance that machine learning might help hereā€¦ thereā€™s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but Iā€™d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) ā€œaiā€ only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 months ago

        dunno about rockets, but antenna thingy works only because you can simulate performance of antenna very reliably, precisely and quickly. This data was fed back, random small changes were made, things that were an improvement passed to the next iteration. Not sure how this approach is called but none of it is LLM

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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          6 months ago

          ā€œgenetic algorithmā€ - something I hadnā€™t previously seen branded as ā€œAIā€, but I guess Iā€™m not surprised

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            GAs went out of the limelight before the rest of the beaus of current ā€œAIā€ branding came to be, suspect that might be part of it

            (Another suspicion is that itā€™s because theyā€™reā€¦fairly observable, ito operation? So itā€™s far less easily claimable that one of these has gained sentience, or all the other dumb bullshit that the cluster has spun in recent years)