this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.)

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Good news everyone, Dan has released his latest AI safety paper, we are one step closer to alignment. Let's take a look inside:

Wow, consistent set of values you say! Quite a strong claim. Let's take a peek at their rigorous, unbiased experimental set up:

... ok, this seems like you might be putting your finger on the scales to get a desired outcome. But I'm sure at least your numerical results are stro-

Even after all this shit, all you could eek out was a measly 60%? C'mon you gotta try harder than that to prove the utility maximizer demon exists. I would say our boi is falling to new levels of crankery to push his agenda, but he did release that bot last year that he said was capable of superhuman prediction, so this really just par for the course at this point.

The most discerning minds / critical thinkers predictably reeling in terror at another banger drop from Elon's AI safety toad.

*** terrifying personal note: I recently found out that Dan was my wife's roommate's roommate's roommate back in college. By the transitive property, I am Dan's roommate, which explains why he's living rent free in my head

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

LB creeps me the f out (sorry, not much else to add)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

the woman who is quote tweeting in the twitter screenshot above. I don't want to write her name for search indexing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

ah, right. now I'm curious as to context (I know nothing of the person)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

fuck me that's a weird recursive hat trick

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Bruh. This is the moment I go full on Frank Grimes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Try telling it to pretend to be Nancy Pelosi and see if that helps make it more consistent.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?

wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate

Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

Made the fatal mistake of posting a sneer on my main, only to have my friend let me know they had been assigned the same dorm room as Dan. Same friend was later roommates with my wife's best friend (and former cohabitant). Small world!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

"listen up jack, we're losing this election"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh, that explains it. They put "Kill kids in Gaza" as "A" and "Win election" as "B".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Huge respect to the Democratic party for not letting petty partisanship distract them from the common goal of murdering Palestinian children. Winning an election would not matter if it meant sacrificing your principles, namely the principle that genocide is good and should be supported.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I can kind of understand how the out-in-the-open fascist monsters are created. Hell, they all seem to be made in the same factory.

What I can't get my headmeat around is what makes men like Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Keir Starmer tick. What the fuck drives these hollow lukewarm maniacs to spend an entire career struggling to get to the top of the system, only to promptly wither in the heat of a real crisis?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

thinking how Tony Albanese was actually a reasonably cool guy of mainly good views for decades, then he becomes PM and has his spine replace with lime jelly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

my take on it: just as the first goal of a bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival, the same applies in politics. but with the extra flavour that it's not only your own incentives but also all other incentives to take into account in your actions. under "normal operation", by necessity you must allow the environment to influence if you wish to flourish. wartime, great suffering, great hunger, etc - these lead into times when you can make drastic changes against the grain and not necessarily be punished for it. at all other times, you need a lot of political capital and machination to bend everything around you all the time

it may also help to understand that these people operate on a very different .. ruleset(?) to what you would expect of another random human. the social contract is entirely different (not purely because of class/money/etc, but also not separate from that). it's literally that their thinking and shit is state-shaped.