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Soyweiser

@ Soyweiser @awful.systems

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997
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3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • Ow yeah the way it used in this story also made sense but not in a computer science way. Just felt a bit how Gibson famously had never used a modem before he wrote his cyberpunk series.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • Thanks. I know some complexity theory, but not enough. (Enough to know it wasn't gonna be my thing).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • My im not a witch shirt ...

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • Yeah, I was also just wondering, as obv what I read is not really typical of the average public. Can't think of any place where this idea spread in non-written science fiction for example, with an exception being the predictions of C-3PO, who always seems to be wrong. But he is intended as a comedic sidekick. (him being wrong can also be seen as just the lack of value in calculating odds like that, esp in a universe with The Force).

    But yes, not likely to be a big thing indeed.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • what could possibly go wrong

    Unrelated to this specific topic but more cryptocurrency fails. This reminds me of hardware wallets which, on the wallet show information about the transaction. Which seems smart, so you can make sure the data from your perhaps compromised machine is correct. Only, the problem with these wallets was that they didn't understand smart contracts. So if you got a smart contract you could still get hacked this way, because the information on the hardware wallet didn't make sense (there were fixes for this, but think most people only really went in to fix this after the North Koreans made off with billions of fake coins).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • Was reading some science fiction from the 90's and the AI/AGI said 'im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.' And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.

    The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can't count nor run doom and go 'this is what they predicted!'.

    Not a sneer just a random thought.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • A hack can also just be a clever way to use a system in a way it wasnt designed.

    Say you put a Ring doorbell on a drone as a perimeter defense thing? A hack. See also the woman who makes bad robots.

    It also can be a certain playfulness with tech. Which is why hacker is dead. It cannot survive contact with capitalist forces.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • “Why didn’t Iain take my neuroses into account??”

    Yes, why didn't he take the neuroses of normal people into account. Normal people who spend 90% of their day worrying about the acausalrobotgod killing everybody.

    Strikes me as they simply have never talked to normal people about immortality like that, even in a post scarcity world, lot of people simply don't feel like it would be worth their time to live forever in that.

    Edit:

    But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.

    This isn't oppositional reading. This is an often discussed thing in the novels. So much so that the novels have counterarguments for a lot of the regular 'the culture is bad' arguments.

    Anyway the article is so bad I wonder how well this person can read.

    Edit part 2, can't let things go shouting electronic booo:

    Sociopaths

    They mention that sociopaths either get a 24/7 drone on them to guard them if they do crimes (more a general criminal thing) or if they are more megalomanic sociopaths they get to run out their desires in a virtual world (Which I assume runs a lot like the modern game Rust, where a subset of the playerbase seems to love to make 14 year old boys cry, going from the yt vids I saw). If this isn't enough, they will need to convince a Mind to help them. Because all large machines in The Culture are intelligent. Good luck with that. Also The Culture is not something like the glitter belt of Revelation Space, where somebody can sign a contract to give away their voting rights or something. So the power of a sociopath is already limited.

    not solved alignment

    They both have, and it doesn't matter. They have because any mind-equiv mind who goes mad gets destroyed (they literally need to take care of large group of humans or go mad, they have symbiotic relationship with humanity), or if they try to go foom they sublime, in the culture universe, sublimation is inevitable. (Therein also lies the real distopian part, considering sublimation is seen as so amazing that keeping a whole culture away from proven heaven seems like an angle to take, then the deathism also would be an argument, but more like that they let people die without going to heaven (but again, this is not subtext, culture not going poof is seen as very weird, only question is why a Yud-equiv mind doesn't come back to uplift the physical universe)).

    A manipulated population

    Not subtext, but simply text. Often criticized in various ways. But also a lot of behavior outside of the norm is tolerated, see the lava boat ride (where the only person not tolerated is the one having a 'this is a simulation' break). Or the guy just building a cable system.

    Not mentioned:

    consent

    (This is also why humans are not pets).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • It also comes from a mall cop (a very USA sort of concept) who was extremely afraid of getting shot at his job (more so than regular cops at the time) and who overreacted massively and wanted all kinds of weird gun attachments iirc. Sadly this paranoia is something that the US cops also suffer from now. Causing everybody to suffer.

    E: wow I had misremembered how crazy the story was.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

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  • Hackers is dead. (Apologies to punk)

    Id say that for one reason alone, when Musk claimed grok was from the guide nobody really turned on him.

    Unrelated to programmers or hackers, Elons father (CW: racism) went fully mask off and claims Elon agrees with him. Which considering his promotion of the UK racists does not feel off the mark. (And he is spreading the dumb '[Africans] have an [average] IQ of 63' shit, and claims it is all genetic. Sure man, the average African needs help understanding the business end of a hammer. As I said before, guess I met the smartest Africans in the world then, as my university had a few smart exchange students from an African country. If you look at his statements it is even dumber than normal, as he says population, so that means either non-Black Africans are not included, showing just how much he thinks of himself as the other, or they are, and the Black African average is even lower).

  • Medical research ethics is hard — but fake AI data is easy!

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  • Grok, is this ethical?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • That was in relation to nanotech right? Or am I confusing articles here.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • The normal max if an iq test is ~160 and from what I can tell nobody tests above it basically because it is not relevant. (And I assume testing problems and variance become to big statistical problems at this level). Not even sure how rare a 190 iq would be statistically, prob laughably rare.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • Reality has an anti-robot bias.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • Also notable that apparently Siskind thinks nuclear non-proliferation sorta worked because people talked it out and decided to be mature about it

    This is his claim about everything, including how we got gay rights. Real if all you have is a hammer stuff.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • Yeah and missing the point that a lot of people think 'some ideas are so shit they shouldn't be debated the right way' esp not ideas about others who are not you and stuff we have debated (and fought over) again and again already. It is like the IRA, Kirk needs to be lucky once, trans people/minorities/university professors(*) need to be lucky every time, again and again, forever. This is just the dumbest level of object level vs meta level thinking out there. When somebody enters the marketplace with sawdust they claim is flour every week you toss them out, don't let them in next time. And you should notice they only try to sell this 'flour' to the poor.

    *: my second point, Piper is also very full of shit here. You know what happened to uni professors who debated/corrected/were women/poc in his space? They got put on the TPUSA watchlist and got death and rape threats. He was part of the organisation who ran that database. So this imagined idealized platonic Kirk shaped object isn't even real. Hell you can see in debates the tricks he pulls so his side thinks he wins. That creepy smile he makes after a point that he knows is bullshit, that is to knock people off balance so people react oddly (as it is a really creepy smile) and don't react to the dumb shit he just said. See this clip for example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jrsy1aB6OSk (it cuts off before she talks about how creepy his smile is). Note he is lying about the fetus thing, and if this wasn't a high stress debate and people got time to think about things they would just reply with 'so a dolphin fetus is a dolphin little human being?'. But that is professional debaters vs college students for you. This is not a man who was interested in truth or having his mind changed. And this smile is not some incident, he does it in other places. But his audience is preprimed on thinking they are the logic and reason people, so they consider somebody going 'what the fuck did you just do with your face' as a way to dodge the argument, so in their eyes this is a win for him.

    I find that all these debatebro types have some of these tricks, in addition to often controlling the mic. Peterson refuses to explain, Shapiro demands you accept his premise from the start 'for the argument' (yeah if you are right you are right, but the debate is about if you are right not 'assume im right'). The 'I refuse your question' guy is simply somebody who noticed one of those debatebro tricks and refused to go along with it. (the patron saint, may your hair remain long, and your bluetooth have good connections forever). Note that this prob doesn't work on the more experienced debatebros as they would have prepared an answer for 'why can't we both have lgbt people and economic stability' and it gives them a way to spout hate and misinfo again. As all work is skilled work, being a bad faith debate bro propagandist is also a skill (which the Koch brothers paid Kirk well for).

    Related to this "Those who walk away from debatebros".

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025

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  • I know it is not accurate, but some liberty has been taken with the statements.

    An text image in the style of a Dark Souls death message. The red text on a black background says "mind changed" in all caps