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 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.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.

    • mountainriver@awful.systems
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      4 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.

      Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 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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        4 months ago

        Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          4 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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            4 months ago

            “genetic algorithm” - something I hadn’t previously seen branded as “AI”, but I guess I’m not surprised

            • froztbyte@awful.systems
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              4 months ago

              GAs went out of the limelight before the rest of the beaus of current “AI” branding came to be, suspect that might be part of it

              (Another suspicion is that it’s because they’re…fairly observable, ito operation? So it’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)

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

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

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

        Ugh, so many people are working the “AI will solve X problem” mill. I don’t need nor want AI to be there increasing output.