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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). Itās a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called āLLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQLā
I didnāt have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy
We systematically develop benchmarks to study [the problem] and find that standard methods answer no more than 20% of queries correctly, confirming the need for further research in this area.
(Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)
Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.
Iād also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate āDATABASES AND MLā session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.
Polish commentary on HitlergruĆ: https://bsky.app/profile/smutnehistorie.bsky.social/post/3lgaoyezhgc2c
Translation:
- itās just a Hindu symbol of prosperity
- a normal Roman salute
- regular rail car
- wait a second
From the āflipping through LessWrong for entertainmentā department:
What effect does LLM use have on the quality of peopleās thinking / knowledge?
- Iād expect a large positive effect from just making people more informed / enabling them to interpret things correctly / pointing out fallacies etc.
Youād think the AI safety chuds would have more reservations about using GPT, which they believe has sapience, to learn things. They have the concept of an AI being a good convincer, which, hey, idiots, how have none of you thought the great convincing has started? Also, how have none of you realised that maybe you should be a little harder to convince in general???
It is a long-established truth that itās significantly easier to con someone who thinks theyāre smarter than you. Also as I think about it a little bit there seems to be a reasonable corollary of their approach towards Bayesian thinking that you not question anything that matches your expectations, which is exactly how you get taken advantage of by the kind of grifter theyāre attached to. Like, theyāve been thinking about the singularity for long enough that the Sams (bankman-fried, Altman, etc) have a well-developed script for what they expect the first stages to look like and it is, as demonstrated, very easy to fake that.
The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading
i think it was posted somewhere in techtakes https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
yeah, I posted in previous stubsack I think
This is a thought Iāve been entertaining for some time, but this weekās discussion about Ars Technicaās article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.
A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly havenāt cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network wonāt dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? Itās gassed. The idea that āit might be ME up there one day!ā persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining donāt have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.
For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what Iāve seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systemsā¦ which, if itās not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.
Everybodyās looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?
This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.
Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.
Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I donāt fucking think so.
Weāre unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldnāt you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after youāre gone? If you canāt spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then thatās a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.
And I donāt think thereās a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.
Its really about the ultimate white flight.
Agree with space travel being retro-futurist fluff. Itās very rich men badly remembering mediocre science fiction.
The US could lead the world in innovation in green technology but thatās now tainted by wokeness.
Hmm, any sort of vision for generating public support for development of a technology has to have either ideological backing or a profit incentive. I donāt say this to mean that the future must be profitable, rather, I say this to mean that you donāt get the space race if western powers arenāt afraid of communism appearing as a viable alternative to capitalism, on both ideological and commercial fronts.
Unfortunately, a vision of that kind is necessarily technofascist. Rather than look for a tech-forward vision of the future, we need deprogram ourselves and unlearn the unspoken narratives that prop up capitalism and liberal democracy as the only viable forms of society. We need to dismantle the systems and structures that require the complex political buy-in for projects that are clearly good for society at large.
Uh, I guess Iāve kind of gone completely orthogonal to your point of discussion. Iām kind of saying the collapse of the US is inevitable.
On another somewhat orthogonal point, I suspect AI has likely soured the public on any kinda tech-forward vision for the foreseeable future.
Both directly and indirectly, the AI slop-nami has caused a lot of bad shit for the general public - from plagiarism to misinformation, from shit-tier AI art to screwing human artists, the public has come to view AI as an active blight on society, and use of AI as a virtual āKick Meā sign.
Iāve been struggling with what the appropriate level of engagement for all the tech shit is.
I can stick to making fun of the AI crap and whatever else the tech people shit out because itās tangible for me, and I can more or less be an effective gatekeeper for my community, but the problems go beyond just a bunch of rich tech weirdos floating bad ideas, itās what theyāre trying to paper over. The fact that theyāre incompetent at it is very funny, but Iāve been laughing with gritted teeth for too long.
I just want it all to stop.
For the US to avoid collapse, the Democrats would have to sweep the board in multiple successive elections and be more unified and committed to deep reform than they ever have been.
I will pause for the laughter to fade.
Snark answer: for the US to avoid collapse, the democrats will have to do literally anything, so yeah collapse is inevitable.
Optimistic answer: a third, actually leftist, anti-liberal party suddenly gains popularity and power and reforms the US entirely.
Realistic answer: trump and the republicans will fully construct a fascist chokehold over the US probably by the end of this year at the earliest. Anyone who has any hope in non-violent action is deluding themselves.
A necessary precondition for the Democrats to do anything is Democrats regaining the Senate, which pretty much requires winning a Senate seat in North Carolina, where the state supreme court is taking the attitude that no Democratic win is legitimate. So, yeah: Thereās basically no institutional way for this country to come back from where it has gone.
In completely related news Iām strongly considering getting my affairs in order and moving
anywhere in the entire world besides the united statessomewhere in Europe; as itās apparently no longer safe for trans peopleor C++ developers*in the US. So if anyone has any advice (or job leads) please do share.* This is a memory safety joke
from what Iāve been told, a digital nomad visa and EU citizenship by descent are a couple of routes worth looking into. I have frustratingly little detail on the expectations around the visa though, and citizenship by descent laws vary by country.
Estonia has an immigration thing for tech workers I believe!
as itās apparently no longer safe for trans people or C++ developers
Sorry but Rust knowledge is now a hard requirement for visas so you better hit the book
might be relevant https://lemmy.world/post/21995141
what? space race was thinly disguised ICBM development program
ah, am conflating the cold war and the space race. Though, why the nations wanted to develop ICBMs is entirely relevant.
No actually, I think what you have to say is in line with my broader point. As the top source of global consumer demand, America is primarily held together by its supply chains at this point. To be crude about it, the best reasons to be an American in the 21st century are the swag and the cheap gas. When the MAGA and Fox News crowd are pointing fingers and ranting about Marxism, theyāre actively trying to obscure materialism and keep people from thinking about material conditions. Having a material program, that at least has elements that can be built from the bottom up, is at least as crucial as having an electoral program. I know the Four Thieves people got rightfully shredded here a few weeks back, and that kind of technical pushback on amateur dreams is necessary, so itās a tough needle to thread. But for instance, consider Gavin Newsomās plan to have California operate its own insulin production, within existing systems and regulations: https://calmatters.org/health/2025/01/insulin-production-gavin-newsom/ This is a Newsom policy I actually think is a fantastic idea, and a big credit to him if it happens! But itās bogged down in the production-line validation stage, because we already know how to synthesize insulin and that itās effective. And the production may not even be in California when it happens! Thereās plenty of room for improvement here.
Space and centralized, rent-seeking āAIā are not material programs that improve conditions for the broader population. The original space program was successful because a more tightly controlled media environment gave the opportunity to use it to cover for the missile development that was the enduring practical outcome. Positive consumer outcomes from all that have always felt, to me, like something that was bolted onto the history later. We wouldnāt have Tang and transistors if not for Apollo! Well, one is kind of shitty and useless, the other is so overwhelmingly advantageous that it surely would have happened anyway.
And to your last point, I somewhat sadly feel like a lot of doomer shit I was reading ~15 years ago actually prepared me to at least be unsurprised about the situation weāre in. A lot of those writers (James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer for instance) have either softly capitulated, or else happily slotted themselves into the middle of the red-brown alliance. I think thatās a big part of why weāre at where weāre at: a lot of people who were actually willing to consider the idea of American collapse were perfectly fine with letting it happen.
AGI is coming, weāre already at the ādumb guy who doesnāt understand math but thinks heās smartā level
I asked ChatGPT, the modern apotheosis of unjustified self-confidence, to prove that .999ā¦ is less than 1. Its reply began āHere is a proof that .999ā¦ is less than 1.ā It then proceeded to show (using familiar arguments) that .999ā¦ is equal to 1, before majestically concluding āBut our goal was to show that .999ā¦ is less than 1. Hence the proof is complete.ā This reply, as an example of brazen mathematical non sequitur, can scarcely be improved upon.
Iāve said it before a few times: this shit is a tunguska-level event on society today
that thereās now even retroactive contamination fallout is sickening :|
tunguska incident only wiped out local squirrel population and its fallout was inert. this is more like leaded gasoline: introduced for profit, polluting for decades, makes people dumber during entire duration of it, entrenches techbros and makes them responsible for development of infrastructure going forward
Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.
brb, saving copies of physics and math books before they go offline
I donāt even have an optical drive anymore jesus.
Encarta 96 btw
As a fan of physical media, I recently bought another drive as a spare, currently is IMO a good time for that. They still make really good drives in large enough quantities so theyāre cheap, but that could end any time. Once production stops, they will vanish silently. Learned that lesson back then when floppy drives were suddendly goneā¦ kinda wish I had stocked up a few new ones (for retro computing purposes) when they were still available.
Yeah production of consumer writeable CDs / DVDs / BDs has basically stopped already. The end is in sight.
Also Iām not sure how much of a problem this is for newer CD drives, but older ones tend to give out sooner or later.
My Sega Saturn*'s drive still works, but I also installed a Satiator** drive emulator in case that changes.
* My username is serious business after all
** Had to go with this option since itās the only non-destructive one
expensive archival write-once BDs
Thereās always overpriced audiophile gearā¦
Whats your fav saturn game?
Nights into Dreams. Iād have dreams about that game as a kid.
This seems like an apt point to share Maxwell Neely-Cohenās āCentury-Scale Storageā.
I knew there was a reason I couldnt part with my CD tower.
Iām the weirdo who installs blu-ray drives in all my computers. Iām also the weirdo who has multiple computers. There are currently three or four (Iāve lost count) blu-ray drives in my house.
Itās great being able to buy and own movies without dealing with the horrors of streaming. Unfortunately discs are becoming less and less popular commercially, so a lot of stuff nowadays is streaming only.
Also my car can play MP3 CDs so of course I need to be able to create those from a computer disregard the fact that my car also supports USB which I neglect since itās less retro.
My father-in-law is a hoarder of both physical and digital things. His house is filled with hard drives where he has like stored copies of every movie ever made as mp4s and then he sends the drives to us because he has no physical space for them since he has junk from like 30 years ago piling up in the living room. So now my house is filled with random ass hard drives of (definitely not pirated) movies.
Yeah, wanted to get the new seasons of Futurama on bluray as a gift, turns out that they only are on streaming. Of course.
That one hurts :(
You may have heard that Catturd doesnāt have any fiber in his diet and was hospitalized for bowel blockage. (Best sneer Iāve seen so far: ācanāt turd.ā) Along similar lines, Srid isnāt taking his statins for high cholesterol caused by a carnivore diet.
Meta: Iām kind of pissed that Catturd is WP notable but laughing my ass off at the page for carnivore diets. Life takes and gives.
My favorite part of the carnivore diet is that apparently scurvy can become enough of a problem that youāll see references to ānot wanting to start the vitamin C debateā in forums.
Iām pretty sure itās not just a me thing, but I thought we all knew that sailors kept citrus on board specifically to prevent scurvy by providing vitamin C and that we all learned about this as kids when either a teacher tried to make the colonial era interesting or we got vaguely curious about pirates at some point.
scurvy? what year do we have? maybe they need to include mice in their diet since rodents can make their own vitamin C (iirc)
if they start eating rat, does that technically define them as cannibals? given how much of their ilk become diet targetā¦
I learnt about it because I was so damn interested in sauerkraut.
deleted by creator
@o7___o7 @Amoeba_Girl also delicious
So thatās how to translate āYo, this diet is for chumpsā into Wikipedian.
you could say that being full of shit finally caught up to him *rimshot*
Hereās a bonus high fiber diet pro-tip: Metamucil tastes like old socks and individual capsules have hardly any fiber anyway, I eat triscuits and Oroweat Double-Fiber bread instead because theyāre both much much better tasting. Also chili is the food of the gods.
what, are statins woke now?
edit wtf 'sneak did this too? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42800452
Refusal of statins was one of the most prominent anti-medical trends I remember observing among right-wing acquaintences, even well before such people got on the anti-vax bandwagon. To be sure, some people experience bad side-effects (including my mom, at least for a while), but it definitely seemed like a few bits of anecdata in the early 2010s built into a broad narrative of ādoctorās tryinā ta kill yaā
I love how srid deflects by claiming no one has reported bad outcomes from the āmeat and butterā dietā¦ I found an endless stream of anecdotes from Google, like this.
can you imagine sneak, of all people, telling you youāre crazy and probably being right?
Is this why they want to cancel Wikipedia? Because they hate their bowel blockage being reported on?
Rationalist death count keeps climbing https://xcancel.com/jessi_cata/status/1882182975804363141#m
What the fuck?
The agents were conducting a routine roving patrol when they stopped Bauckholt and a female in the town close to the border. During a records check, the unidentified female occupant was removed from the vehicle for further questioning, broke free, and began shooting at the agents, the incident report shows.
After the female suspect was hit by return fire, Bauckholt emerged from the vehicle and also began firing on the agents. He sustained gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead.
ā¦ What the fuck?
Jesus wept, itās so frustratingly obvious that anytime some flavor of cop kills someone, the news media reporting (if any) will be this weird Yoda grammar pidgin.
The femoidically gendered female shot with its gun by very personally pulling the trigger, with this viscerally physical action performed by the said femalian in most pointedly concrete terms amounting to it (the femaloidistical entity, a specimen of the species known as females) firing lethal gunshots at the border patrol with the femaleās own two hands.
Subsequently return fire manifested itself from somewhere and came into contact with the female suspect female. The Justice Enforcement Officers involved in the situation were made a part of a bilateral exchange of gunfire between the shooting female and the officers situated in the scenario in which shooting was, to some extent, quite possibly performed from their side as well.
The zizian angle makes this so weird. Like, on top of probably being stopped for driving while trans, they might have instigated the shootout to prove to the basilisk that their parallel universe selves/simulated iterations/eternal souls canāt be acausally blackmailed.
Ziz is a boogeyman figure to them at this point. I think its deliberate to deflect from the sex abuse stuff (ziz was a part of that whole controversy).
Yeah there is so much untold in the reporting and Iām not going to trust either tpots or border cops. I have no idea whatsoever what to make of this.
Maybe someone will finally write that articleā¦
Does anyone know who or what is Ziz in this context? Google says jewish mythological beast.
edit: found this:
The Zizians were a cult that focused on relatively extreme animal welfare, even by EA standards, and used a Timeless/Updateless decision theory, where being aggressive and escalatory was helpful as long as it helped other world branches/acausally traded with other worlds to solve the animal welfare crisis.
They apparently made a new personality called Maia in Pasek, and this resulted in Pasekās suicide.
They also used violence or the threat of violence a lot to achieve their goal.
This caused many problems for Ziz, and she now is in police custody.
itās like looking from outside at minor splinter groups within scientology, and the purported voice of reason says that the right way to deal with these transgressors is to return to scientologist orthodoxy. it even includes seasteading
Itās another one of those things that the further you read the worse it gets, isnāt it?
yep.
I was reading something David wrote about it at one point, but it seemed like lore too cursed even for the rationalist milieu
Rationalism is a cult, but itās also a cult franchise that generates smaller cults. Also a lot of the people were not entirely balanced to start with and rationalism made them worse. Anyway, Ziz.
that blog in question comes with its own private glossary and is just as dense and long as you can expect. i spent half an hour trying to figure it out and noped when noticed scroll bar position
tfw when you recognize itās Quality Rationalist Content
itās workday, iām too sober for this
I hope everyone is ready for the constant overlap between politics and AI / Silicon Valley; because Iām not.
Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders (Source Bluesky Thread).
Iām not 100% sure I buy that the EOs were written by AI rather than people who simply donāt care about or donāt know the details; but it certainly looks possible. Especially that example about the Gulf of Mexico. Either way I am heartened that this is the conclusion people jump to.
Aside: I also like how much media is starting to cite bluesky (and activitypub to a lesser extent). I assume a bunch of journalists moved off of twitter or went multi-platform.
Isnāt this one of the things that LW was spooked by? Giving the reins to an AI? Wonāt someone think of the wrongers???
yeah bsky is where journalists post now so itās where they scrape stories from
Thanks, I hate it.
Especially because Trumpās legal teams have historically been more than incompetent enough to produce this kind of work on their own.
In a way that they have been historically awful and thwarted by the courts is a thing that worries me. Iād expect that somebody the past 8 years went āthis time we will not be bogged down in thatā. But considering they went 100% in on repression from day 1 Iām slightly less worried about that.
For context, going all in on day 1 is actually bad for them, when the nazis took over The Netherlands/Belgium they methods there differed. In .nl they worked slowly and with gov already there, in .be they went full pogroms a lot faster. This meant that in .be a lot of people saw the threat sooner (WW1 and Belgium prob also didnāt help) and acted and took better care of the vulnerable. The amount of Dutch Jewish people who survived ww2 vs Belgian Jewish people is very tragic. (and a very dark part of our history which we donāt really talk about like this as mentioning that parts of your own country also are to blame for the holocaust is not a thing a lot of people want to talk about). At least I hope that stuff like going all crazy on the bishop will turn out to be big wakeup for random Americans and a strategic mistake on their part, they certainly didnāt seem to have learned from the nazis (at least not this lesson, which fits with how fascism is blind for their own mistakes).
I donāt know if this is good news for the underlying risk of how willing the nuts and bolts of society are to resist unlawful or monstrous policies. IDK, on the subject of complicity I think the fact that we eventually joined the war has caused a deep cultural amnesia about how much influence the Reich had on the states and vice versa. Charles Lindbergh, Madison Square Garden, etc. We didnāt really acknowledge how much our cultural and political structures are open to authoritarianism, much less addressing those issues.
so I ran into this fucking garbage earlier, which goes so hard on the constituent parts of āthe spam is the pointā, an ouroborosian self-reinforcing loop of Just More Media Bro Just One More Video Bro Youāll See Bro Itāll Be The Best Listicle Bro Just Watch Bro, and the insufferably cancerous āthe medium is the messageā videos-made-for-youtube-because-youtube that if it were a voltron itād probably have its own unique Special Moment sequence instead of being one of the canned assembly shots
various topics (e.g., AI news, crypto, fitness, personal finance)
That sure is a specifc selection of topics.
The only one missing is dating, but that prob is extremely toxic if trained on online data.
we already know how would it end
huh i had no idea, but considering how that crowd looked like, it would happen if it were real
I was thinking more about Grok explain people how to ānegā. But that is also a horrible horror.
I wish YouTube would ban this shit wholesale, but itās Google and of course they wonāt.
Aside: Iāve been hammering āDonāt recommend this channelā on every video that remotely smells like AI slop for a while and so far that seems to keep the feed fairly clean.
if/when I use youtube, I use it entirely statelessly (and thus also without account)
itās a remarkably good way to see some utter lunacy, but it also precludes that option of dealing with shit
Yeah. I ran without an account for the longest time (and used alternative frontends like Freetube, Invidious, yt-dlp, etc.) but I caved and made one just so I could curate my feed.
re the youtube phenomenon, ran into this as an interesting post recently, although fuck if I can remember where I saw it
itās this bullshit again isnt it https://www.404media.co/inside-the-world-of-tiktok-spammers-and-the-ai-tools-that-enable-them/
Among other things, probably
also cc @dgerard (for pivot maybe)
Buckle up humans; because humanityās last exam just dropped: https://lastexam.ai/ (Hacker News discussion). May the odds be ever in your favor.
Edit: Per NyTimes, whom I hate, they were apparently trying to avoid an over-dramatic name. Amazing:
The testās original name, āHumanityās Last Stand,ā was discarded for being overly dramatic.
i only want to notice that the example chemistry question has two steps out of three that are very similar to last image in wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocyclic_reaction (question explicitly mentions that it is electrocyclic reaction and mentions the same class of natural product)
e: the exact reaction scheme that is answer to that question is in article linked just above that image. taking last image from wiki article and one of schemes from cited article gives the exact same compound as in question, and provides answer. considering how these spicy autocomplete rainforest incinerators work, this sounds like some serious ratfucking, right? you donāt even have to know how this all works to get that and itās an isolated and a bit obscure subsubfield
You think people would secretly submit easy questions just for the reward money, and that since the question database is so big and inscrutable no one bothered to verify one way or another? No, that could never happen.
well, itās not the most obvious thing but not because itās easy, itās because itās almost a trivia, a sort of thing you can see once in textbook and then never use it ever for anything and that doesnāt really connects readily to anything else, most of the time. i havenāt done electrocyclic reaction once in my entire phd programme, and last time iāve seen them was in second year ochem course. these kinds of reactions are not very controllable or clean, synthesis of precursors looks like a major PITA, precursors would probably have to be kept in freezer under argon for maybe days before they decompose, and introduction of any modifications requires you to redo multistep synthesis, and then it might fail to work. i also suspect that this exact example might be in some undergrad textbook verbatim, and it will be in scihub pdfs at any rate. itās also kinda old stuff with research starting in 60s
Oh yeah I meant āeasyā in the sense of āmaybe it can get it right from sheer chance by pattern matching training data from the interwebsā
iād say it was made easy for machines in that wisdom woodchipper would ārandomlyā stumble upon correct answer while scraping everything related to more general topic, while itās made harder for humans because itās rather obscure
that question was sorta related to research done previously by that uploader (not anonymous; how many noahs b. are professors at stanford?) and thereās 15 of them, which makes me suspect that he might have just loaded some exam questions for undergrads there
oh cool, the logoās just a barely modified sparkle emoji so you know itās horseshit, and itās directly funded by Scale AI and a Rationalist thinktank so the chances the models werenāt directly trained on the problem set are vanishingly thin. this is just the FrontierMath grift with new, more dramatic, paint.
e: also, slightly different targeting ā FrontierMath was looking to grift institutional dollars, I feel. this oneās designed to look good in a breathless thinkpiece about how, I dunnoā¦
When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out
yeah, whatever the fuck they think this means. this oneās designed to be talked about, to be brought up behind closed doors as a reason why your payās being cut. this is vile shit.
We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting.
ā¦ Oh so itās a training dataset, got you.
just mark C for every answer if you donāt get it, thatās what the State of California taught me in elementary school
Humanityās last exam or AI grifters first bankrupcy.
You gotta love how in the announcement the guy is so blatantly āhey they said and did such nice things for me that I just got a throw them a bone, and if releasing the leader of a notorious drug bazaar who tried to put out a hit on one of his employees is what they want then they can have it!ā
Sidenote: AFAIK, even with this pardon, Ulbricht still ended up spending more time in prison than if he took a plea deal he was reportedly offered:
He was offered a plea deal, which would have likely given him a decade-long sentence, with the ability to get out early on good behavior. Worst-case scenario, he would have spent five years in a medium-security prison and been freed.
Gotta say, this whole situationās reminding me of SBF - both of them thought they could outsmart the Feds, and both received much harsher sentences than rich white collar criminals usually get as a result.
SBF
Wonder when his pardon clears.
Not really sure if he thought he was smart or got bad legal advice from coiners who figured he could get off scot-free because ācryptoā and āharm reductionā
Probably both tbh. It really is like SBF round 1, but because itās drugs instead of financial crimes they didnāt need to hire Margot Robbie to explain why itās illegal and destructive to everyone from her bath.
Ulbricht also had really bad lawyers. The FBI evidence on the server in Iceland was tainted in fairly obvious ways and he coulda got much of the case thrown out, then just ā¦ didnāt? I canāt find it, but Nicholas Weaver wrote some stuff on this.
Ah yes that will be good for international relations and the morale of law enforcement and anti cybercrime people. Lol it is all so stupid.
This and the releasing of the jan 6 people who assaulted cops (one cop who testified against them got a shitton of messages they got early release) is going to do wonders. Not that it will shake the belief of a lot of people that the repubs are the party of back the blue and law and order.
trump just dumped half trillion dollars into openai-softbank-oracle thing https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/trump-stargate-ai-openai-oracle-softbank/77861568007/
youād think itās a perfect bait for saudi sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps it is
for comparison, assuming current levels of spending, this will be something around 1/10 of defense spending in the same timeframe. which goes to, among other things, payrolls of millions of people and maintenance, procurement and development of rather pricey weapons like stealth planes (B-21 is $700M each) and nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines ($3.5B per Ohio-class, with $31M missiles, up to 24). this all to burn medium-sized country worth of energy to get more āimpressiveā c-suite fooling machine
The fact that the first thing a new fascist regime does is promise Larry Ellison a bunch of dollaridoos answers a lot of questions asked by my āORACLE = NAZISā tshirt
Elon Musk is already casting doubt on OpenAIās new, up to $500 billion investment deal with SoftBank (SFTBY+10.51%) and Oracle (ORCL+7.19%), despite backing from his allies ā including President Donald Trump. [ā¦] āThey donāt actually have the money,ā the Tesla (TSLA-1.13%) CEO and close Trump ally said shortly before midnight on Tuesday, in a post on his social media site X. āSoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority,ā Musk added just before 1 a.m. ET.
I was mad about this, but then it hit me: this is the kind of thing that happens at the top of a bubble. The nice round numbers, the stolen sci-fi name, the needless intertwining with politics, the lack of any clear purpose for it.
[mr plinkett voice] hey wait a minute wasnāt that meant to be a Microsoft project?
Hey wasnāt that project contingent on āmeaningfully improving the capabilities of OpenAIās AIā?
(Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)
I like how none of the reporting Iāve seen on this so far can be bothered to mention Softbankās multi-year, very obvious history of failures
I think I saw like one outlet mention it, and it was buried in the 18th paragraph
itās better than that, he didnāt dump a penny in
the deal is:
- they get unregulated
- they promise to spend money they were going to anyway, theyāre totally getting round to it bro
I know a lot of people are looking for alternatives for programs as stuff is ennshitfying, rot economying, slurping up your data, going all in on llms etc https://european-alternatives.eu/ might help. Have not looked into it myself btw.
Always down for the european alternative if you know what I mean.
dāya think this post on awful.systems, the lemmy instance (which is known as awful.systems), is the location of this awful.systems thread? let me hear your thoughts, awful.systems
you get even more awful.systems on remote instances
#branding
next thread needs to be Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems - awful.systems
Michael Keaton bursts out of a grave Itās sneer time!
Itās like Huntingtonās, but with style
gonna start referring to awful.systems like how a twitch streamer refers to chat
(what in the everloving fuck did lemmy do now)
Xcancel is giving me issues so gimme a sec. That said: another killing. https://x.com/st_rev/status/1882852779582239053
Is there any rundown on this backstory for people who missed it happening live over the last few years that doesnāt get sidetracked into theological disputes with the murder cult?
I would appreciate this too, frankly. The rabbit hole is deep, and full of wankers.
I donāt know if I could do it.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69573795/5/1/united-states-v-youngblut/
More details. The feds were watching them.
rat death squads are a thing now? this wasnāt on my 2025 bingo
Related to the other killing by the border patrol people, Chad Loder noticed the reports on the shooting have some strange wording which might imply the cop shot was hit by another cop. (Assuming this is the same shooting).
Had not considered the meth angle. Would explain a lot.
Wasnāt much ammo either.
Wasnāt much ammo either.
Iām just sitting here with a bit of European culture shock.
it seems like common commercial box size for this caliber is 50, and some were likely already used for practice. soviet pistol ammo for army used to come in cans (āspam cansā), 1200+ per
Sometimes I forget these things.
Same thing with trucks I imagine.
would be easy to figure out during autopsy as cops had 9mm and zizians had .380 and .40
aw man first he gets attacked during a perfectly polite threat of eviction, now this?
āA big part of this problem was this moratorium on rent, COVID. People took advantage of it,ā Carl Lind said.
rest in peace little angel.
Itās a pity there are no Journalists left in America because 50 years ago this would be a Hot Scoop and eventually thereād be a movie about it
god st rev youāre such a dumb bitch
