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 so 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Sorry this wasn’t up earlier, I couldn’t connect to awful.)

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      4 小时前

      His non-apology apology:

      I’m not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.

      Guys, he has a baby. Don’t be too mean to him.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        2 小时前

        I am not retreating from public writing

        That’s OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      15 小时前

      Even /r/singularity, which has a high percentage of boosters and often buys OpenAI/Anthropic talking points uncritically (or with only a few un-upvoted naysayers) eviscerated his comments as the shallow attempt to beg for regulations on China to protect OpenAI that they are. Also, China’s consistent open sourcing and lower relative cost per performance (well insofar as you believe the benchmarks and such indicate performance) has the /r/singularity audience questioning the “China bad” narrative US media tries to sell.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      23 小时前

      One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism

      full AI communism

      At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

      Listen I’m all for hating on the Chinese government, but it’s more enjoyable to hate on them for real reasons rather than whatever this is.

      Second mistake: I was relatively imprecise, writing, as I usually do, for a fairly high-context audience that was inclined to give me grace rather than pick apart every word

      Oh no the lesson he took away from his tweet is that he didn’t use enough words.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        13 分钟前

        I also don’t get it because they already hate pre-social-media institutions, so why are they still angry that American journalists were bad at transmitting public health science at the beginning of COVID? Even if you believe in a COVID lab leak, the United States broke the global public health response while countries in East Asia and the South Pacific showed what to do. There are lab-leakers who blame a partnership between traitorous American scientists and sinister Chinese labs to conduct research that was illegal in the USA.

        Edit / this guy just comes out and uses COVID lab leak theories as an analogy for AI-box fantasies, but these people don’t just cite it as a parallel, they are MAD about what they think happened and want you to be mad too.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      1 天前

      I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).

      The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.

      The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.

      The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!

      The rest of his “accelerationist”/“decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

      e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha

      “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.