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 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.

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.

    BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace ā€œrobot overlordsā€ in TESCREAL with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, ā€œThe Authoritarian Perilā€:

    https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg

    with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:

    A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any weā€™ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedientā€”no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildurā€™s Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictatorā€™s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Partyā€™s conception of ā€œtruthā€ totally and completely.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      with advanced near-perfect lie detection

      how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become ā€œnear-perfectā€ with GPUs.

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Ya know, itā€™s funny that you point this out, itā€™s a thing about their style of argument thatā€™s been nagging at me for a while.

        Thereā€™s a pattern in the promptfondlersā€™ propaganda where they claim that they theyā€™ve identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a ā€œtruth oracleā€ in the compsci sense of the word ā€œoracle.ā€ If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

        I guess thatā€™s true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.

        Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just canā€™t get there from here, but try telling them that.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          3 months ago

          If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.

          Damn bro, theyā€™re gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER SEVEN EIGHT DECADES AGO

          EDIT: someone pointed out I suck at arithmetic