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.

Last week’s thread

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

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    NYT: “Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html)

    Archive: https://archive.ph/Bas23

    HN link from whence I got this, have not mined this for sneers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41878281

    edit oh wait found one

    OpenAI’s revenue isn’t from advertising, it should be slightly easier for them to resist the call of enshittification this early in the company history.

    Can’t enshittify that which is already shit

    Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership) and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates. Both times I turned to ChatGPT and it gave me an answer immediately

    Just a normal hackernews, testing if the models they use are racist

    Well, at this point most new data being created is conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation logs are their moat.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      tl;dr of the article: ever since the ousting of altman, microsoft, which virtually owns openai, has been suspicious of openai’s actual worth. therefore MS has cut down on the infinite resource flow. openai employees are whining about this.

      there is one additional point in three of the near final paragraphs, which I’ll quote in full because they are so amusing to me

      Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of A.I. that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

      Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

      The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I think I see a possible future here. Just as the promptfondlers are now trying to talk down human accomplishments to make the LLMs sound more impressive (‘it learns just like a child!’ (no, it doesn’t)). As when you are trying to reach a deal on a car, you either need the buyer to raise the price, or the seller to lower theirs. This will lead to a lawsuit where they are going to drop down the theoretical capabilities of an AGI just to trigger this clause.

        And as the judge thinks that emoji’s are a form of novelty pasta, any potential jury can’t spell stattistical, there is a 50% chance that they will be convinced it is AGI because humans like the AGI also make mistakes.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Still unclear how OpenAI declaring they’ve created an AGI (and getting this adjudicated as “true”) and thus being released from their MSFT partnership helps OpenAI. They’re just lost all their compute, and will have a worse negotiating position from which to get more compute. What’s the upside?

          • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.

      • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        The first paragraph surprised me. I didn’t know there were still some true believers left.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)

      The unspecificity is damning. “Facts about their membership” might range from “what racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member of” to “am I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculate”.

      and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.

      That’s an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?