Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)Y

YourNetworkIsHaunted

@ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

Posts
1
Comments
638
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

    Jump

  • And once it does they'll quietly stop talking about it for a while to "focus on the human stories of those affected" or whatever until the nostalgic retrospectives can start along with the next thing.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

    Jump

  • Oxford Economist in the NYT says that AI is going to kill cities if they don't prepare for change. (Original, paywalled)

    I feel like this is at most half the picture. The analogy to new manufacturing technologies in the 70s is apt in some ways, and the threat of this specific kind of economic disruption hollowing out entire communities is very real. But at the same time as orthodox economists so frequently do his analysis only hints at some of the political factors in the relevant decisions that are if anything more important than technological change alone.

    In particular, he only makes passing reference to the Detroit and Pittsburgh industrial centers being "sprawling, unionized compounds" (emphasis added). In doing so he briefly highlights how the changes that technology enabled served to disempower labor. Smaller and more distributed factories can't unionize as effectively, and that fragmentation empowers firms to reduce the wages and benefits of the positions they offer even as they hire people in the new areas. For a unionized auto worker in Detroit, even if they had replaced the old factories with new and more efficient ones the kind of job that they had previously worked that had allowed them to support themselves and their families at a certain quality of life was still gone.

    This fits into our AI skepticism rather neatly, because if the political dimension of disempowering labor is what matters then it becomes largely irrelevant whether LLM-based "AI" products and services can actually perform as advertised. Rather than being the central cause of this disruption it becomes the excuse, and so it just has to be good enough to create the narrative. It doesn't need to actually be able to write code like a junior developer in order to change the senior developer's job to focus on editing and correcting code-shaped blocks of tokens checked in by the hallucination machine. This also means that it's not going to "snap back" when the AI bubble pops because the impacts on labor will have already happened, any more than it was possible to bring back the same kinds of manufacturing jobs that built families in the postwar era once they had been displaced in the 70s and 80s.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

    Jump

  • Even if they aren't actively relying on each other here I would assume that we're reaching a stage where all of the competing LLMs are using basically the entire Internet as their training data, and while there is going to be some difference based on the reinforcement learning process there's still going to be a lot of convergence there.

  • AI brings huge enterprise efficiencies! Except in making money

    Jump

  • I found this article in Fortune that similarly says 95% of GenAI pilots at companies fail to have a positive impact on the bottom line. They spend a lot of ink trying to sidestep the obvious explanation in favor of talking about the ways people are probably just prompting it wrong, and I couldn't be bothered to fill out the form asking MIT's group for access to the underlying report.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

    Jump

  • Okay so I know GPT-5 had a bad launch and has been getting raked over the coals, but AGI is totally still on, guys!

    Why? Because trust me it's definitely getting better behind the scenes in ways that we can't see. Also China is still scary and we need to make sure we make the AI God that will kill us all before China does because reasons.

    Also despite talking about a how much of the lack of progress is due to the consumer model and this is a cost-saving there's no reference to the work of folks like Ed Zitron on how unprofitable these models are, much less the recent discussions on whether GPT-5 as a whole is actually cheaper to operate than earlier models given the changes it necessitates in caching.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

    Jump

  • In related news I've been getting podcast ads for Anthropic touting Claude's emotional intelligence and value in working through life's challenges and listening to your relationship issues.

    They're not explicitly saying that their chatbot is a therapist, but they're getting about as close as the law would allow, I'm sure.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • When are they going to learn that it's all about the alien tech med beds that I definitely have in my basement and can sell you 14 seconds on for just $6660?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • Looking to exploit citogenesis for political gain.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • [...] it actually has surprisingly little to do with any of the intellectual lineages that its proponents claim to subscribe to (Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, conflict studies, etc.) but is a shockingly pervasive influence across modern culture to a greater degree than even most people who complain about it realize.

    I mean, when describing TESCREAL Torres never had to argue that it's adherents were lying or incorrect about their own ideas. It seems like whenever someone tries this kind of backlash they always have to add in a whole mess of additional layers that are somehow tied to what their interlocutors really believe.

    I'm reminded, ironically, of Scott's (imo very strong) argument against the NRx category of "demotist" states. It's fundamentally dishonest to create a category that ties together both the innocuous or positive things your opponents actually believe and some obnoxious and terrible stuff, and then claim that the same criticisms apply to all of them.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more direct interaction between my "watching the far-right like heavily armed chimpanzees in a zoo" podcast circles and our techtakes sneerspace. Zitron's work on Better Offline is great, obviously, but I've been listening through QAA, for example, and their discussions of AI and its implications could probably benefit from a better technical grounding.

    You love to see it, though.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • Yeah. I think there's definitely something interesting here, but it's mostly in how badly compromised the final pproduct ends up being in order to support the AI tools.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • That's how I remember it too. Also the context about conserving N95 masks always feels like it gets lost. Like, predictably so and I think there's definitely room to criticize the CDC's messaging and handling there, but the actual facts here aren't as absurd as the current fight would imply. The argument was:

    1. With the small droplet size, most basic fabric masks offer very limited protection, if any.
    2. The masks that are effective, like N95 masks, are only available in very limited quantities.
    3. If everyone panic-buys N95 the way they did toilet paper it will mean that the people who are least able to avoid exposure i.e. doctors and medical frontliners are at best going to wildly overpay and at worst won't be able to keep supplied.
    4. Therefore, most people shouldn't worry about masking at this stage, and focus on other measures like social distancing and staying the fuck home.

    I think later research cast some doubt on point 1, but 2-4 are still pretty solid given the circumstances that we (collectively) found ourselves in.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • The on-camera duo are exempt for obvious reasons, but they've definitely hit at least one of their mods. Before The Wheel was implemented I seem to remember they even specifically targeted them sometimes for the joke.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

    Jump

  • I'm reminded of the comedy/gaming stream that I watch that opens every episode with banning a random member of chat based on a spin of the wheel. It certainly lends the community a certain flavor, even if it is more "jingly keys" rather than "strong community."

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025

    Jump

  • It's kind of a missed opportunity too, what with how heavily the OG Persians feature in the early chapters of the racist "clash of civilizations" narrative.

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025

    Jump

  • You could try getting laid off, scrambling for a year trying to get back into a tech position, start delivering Amazon packages to make ends meet, and despair at the prospect of reskilling in this economy. I... would not recommend it.

    It looks like there are a weirdly large number of medical technician jobs opening up? I wonder if they're ahead of the curve on the AI hype cycle.

    1. Replace humans with AI
    2. Learn that AI can't do the job well
    3. Frantically try to replace 2-5 years of lost training time

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025

    Jump

  • I've seen it pick up lately, particularly in non-sneer-adjacent spaces, but it's definitely recent and I'm not sure how common it really was, which is a shame because I love it.

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025

    Jump

  • If only there was some widely-known Rationalist cliche about incredibly small probabilities with absurdly high negative impacts.