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 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.

(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    19 hours ago

    Saltman has a new blogpost out he calls ‘Three Observations’ that I feel too tired to sneer properly but I’m sure will be featured in pivot-to-ai pretty soon.

    Of note that he seems to admit chatbot abilities have plateaued for the current technological paradigm, by way of offering the “observation” that model intelligence is logarithmically dependent on the resources used to train and run it (i = log( r )) so it’s officially diminishing returns from now on.

    Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it’s used more, i.e. they’ll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.

    Third observation is that

    The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.

    which is hilarious.

    The rest of the blogpost appears to mostly be fanfiction about the efficiency of their agents that I didn’t read too closely.

    • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      4 hours ago

      1. My big robot is really expensive to build.

      2. If big robot parts become cheaper, I will declare that the big robot must be bigger, lest somebody poorer than me also build a big robot.

      3. My robot must be made or else I won’t be able to show off the biggest, most expensive big robot.

      QED, I deserve more money to build the big robot.

      P.S. And for the naysayers, just remember that that robot will be so big that your critiques won’t apply to it, as it is too big.

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      13 hours ago

      My ability to guess the solution of Boolean SAT problems also scales roughly with the log of number of tries you give me.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      16 hours ago

      It probably deserves its own post on techtakes, but let’s do a little here.

      People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create

      Diogenes’s corpse turns

      which leads to the world getting better for all of us.

      Of course Saltman means “all of my buddies” as he doesn’t consider 99% of the human population as human.

      Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more capable tools—electricity, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and soon AGI.

      Ugh. Amongst many things wrong here, people didn’t jerk each other off to scifi/spec fic fantasies about the other inventions.

      In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential.

      AGI IS NOT EVEN FUCKING REAL YOU SHIT. YOU CAN’T CURE FUCK WITH DREAMS

      We continue to see rapid progress with AI development.

      I must be blind.

      1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.

      “Intelligence” in no way has been quantified here, so this is a meaningless observation. “Data” is finite, which negates the idea of “continuous” gains. “Predictable” is a meaningless qualifier. This makes no fucking sense!

      1. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.

      “Moore’s law” didn’t change shit! It was a fucking observation! Anyone who misuses “moore’s laws” outta be mangione’d. Also, if this is true, just show a graph or something? Don’t just literally cherrypick one window?

      1. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.

      “Linearly increasing intelligence” is meaningless as intelligence has not been… wait, I’m repeating myself. Also, “super-exponential” only to the “socio” that Ol’ Salty cares about, which I have mentioned earlier.

      If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.

      Oh hm but none of them are true. What now???

      Stopping here for now, I can only take so much garbage in at once.

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          5 hours ago

          You’d think that, at this point, LW style AGI wish fulfilment fanfic would have been milked dry for building hype, but apparently Salty doesn’t!