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.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    NSFW, as NSAB, I know that anti-environmentalists shout a lot about ‘what about china china should go green first!’ while not knowing china is in fact doing a lot to try and go green (at least on the co2 energy front, I’m not asking here to go point out all the bad things china does to fuck up the environment). I see ‘we should develop AI before china does so’ be a big pro AI argument, so here is my question. Is china even working on massive A(G)I like the people claim?

    • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      I am overall very uninformed about the chinese thechnological day-to-day, but here’s two interesting facts:

      They set some pretty draconian rules early on about where the buck stops if your LLM starts spewing false information or (god forbid) goes against party orthodoxy so I’m assuming if independent research is happening It doesn’t appear much in the form of public endpoints that anyone might use.

      A few weeks ago I saw a report about chinese medical researchers trying use AI agents(?) to set up a virtual hospital in order to maybe eventually have some sort of a virtual patient entity that a medical student could work with somehow, and look how many thousands of virtual patients our handful of virtual doctors are healing daily, isn’t it awesome folks. Other than the rampant startupiness of it all, what struck me was that they said they had chatgpt-3.5 set up up the doctor/patient/nurse agents, i.e. they used the free version.

      So, who knows? If they are all-in in AGI behind the scenes they don’t seem to be making a big fuss about it.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Thanks, you and froztbytes reply answered my questions on if they were doing it and also a bit on how seriously they are all taking it.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      Typing from phone, please excuse lack of citations. Academic output in various parts of ML research have increasingly come from China and Chinese researchers over the past decade. There’s multiple inputs to this - funding, how strong a specific school/research centre is, etc, but it’s been ramping up. Pretty sure part of this is one of the fuel sources in keeping the pro-hegemonist US argument popular and going lately (also part of where the “we should before they do” comes from I guess)

      I’ve seen some mentions of recent legislation direction about LLM usage but I’m not fully up to scratch on what it is, haven’t had the time to read up

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Thanks I was not aware, so they are doing things regarding the research at least. So the “concern” isn’t totally made up. Which is what I wanted to know. As Architeuthis mentioned the legislation is against false info and against going against the party (which seem to be what you could expect).