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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Given the apparent state of the art for autogenerated captions (and by extension the initial challenge of speech recognition) being firmly in the "good enough" range I would not trust the chain of speech recognition -> translation -> text-to-speech. That's a lot of room for errors to chain, multiply, and obscure themselves through GIGO even if the latter two steps did work as expected.

  • How to explain our very good friends to normal humans?
  • So the primary doctrine is basically tech bros rewriting standard millenarian christianity from mythic fantasy into science fiction. But it seems like the founder wants to be a silicon valley influencer more than he wants to be a proper cult leader, meaning that some of the people who take this shit seriously have accumulated absurd amounts of money and power and occasionally the more deranged subgroups will spin off into a proper cult with everything that entails -- including, now, being involved in multiple homicides!

  • UK government cuts funds for actually-working anti-cancer AI
  • There's a particular failure mode at play here that speaks to incompetent accounting on top of everything else. Like, without autocontouring how many additional radiologists would need to magically be spawned inti existence and get salaries, benefits, pensions, etc in order to reduce overall wait times by that amount? Because in reality that's the money being left on the table; the fact that it's being made up in shitty service rather than actual money shouldn't meaningfully affect the calculus there.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • There's inarguably an organizational culture that is fundamentally disinterested in the things that the organization is supposed to actually do. Even if they aren't explicitly planning to end social security as a concept by wrecking the technical infrastructure it relies on, they're almost comedically apathetic about whether or not the project succeeds. At the top this makes sense because politicians can spin a bad project into everyone else's fault, but the fact that they're able to find programmers to work under those conditions makes me weep for the future of the industry. Even simple mercenaries should be able to smell that this project is going to fail and look awful on your resume, but I guess these yahoos are expecting to pivot into politics or whatever administration position they can bargain with whoever succeeds Trump.

  • Gemini 2.5 "reasoning", no real improvement on river crossings.
  • That's fascinating, actually. Like, it seems like it shouldn't be possible to create this level of grammatically correct text without understanding the words you're using, and yet even immediately after defining "unsupervised" correctly the system still (supposedly) immediately sets about applying a baffling number of alternative constraints that it seems to pull out of nowhere.

    OR alternatively despite letting it "cook" for longer and pregenerate a significant volume of its own additional context before the final answer the system is still, at the end of the day, an assembly of sochastic parrots who don't actually understand anything.

  • Gemini 2.5 "reasoning", no real improvement on river crossings.
  • I don't think that the actual performance here is as important as the fact that it's clearly not meaningfully "reasoning" at all. This isn't a failure mode that happens if it's actually thinking through the problem in front of it and understanding the request. It's a failure mode that comes from pattern matching without actual reasoning.

  • Gemini 2.5 "reasoning", no real improvement on river crossings.
  • write it out in ASCII

    My dude what do you think ASCII is? Assuming we're using standard internet interfaces here and the request is coming in as UTF-8 encoded English text it is being written out in ASCII

    Sneers aside, given that the supposed capability here is examining a text prompt and reason through the relevant information to provide a solution in the form of a text response this kind of test is, if anything, rigged in favor of the AI compared to some similar versions that add in more steps to the task like OCR or other forms of image parsing.

    It also speaks to a difference in how AI pattern recognition compared to the human version. For a sufficiently well-known pattern like the form of this river-crossing puzzle it's the changes and exceptions that jump out. This feels almost like giving someone a picture of the Mona Lisa with aviators on; the model recognizes that it's 99% of the Mona Lisa and goes from there, rather than recognizing that the changes from that base case are significant and intentional variation rather than either a totally new thing or a 'corrupted' version of the original.

  • it's yet another sign of the end times when you have to consider Nick fuckin Land's existence again. Here's one of his ex-students in the FT going "wtf"
  • The classic "I don't understand something therefore it must be incomprehensible" problem. Anyone who does understand it must therefore be either lying or insane. I'm not sure if we've moved forward or backwards by having the incomprehensible eldritch truth be progressive social ideology itself rather than the existence of black people and foreign cultures.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • It's also the sound it makes when I drop-kick their goddamned GPU clusters into the fuckin ocean. Thankfully I haven't run into one of these yet, but given how much of the domestic job market appears to be devoted towards not hiring people while still listing an opening it feels like I'm going to.

    On a related note, if anyone in the Seattle area is aware of an opening for a network engineer or sysadmin please PM me.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • I feel like cult orthodoxy probably accounts for most of it. The fact that they put serious thought into how to handle a sentient AI wanting to post on their forums does also suggest that they're taking the AGI "possibility" far more seriously than any of the companies that are using it to fill out marketing copy and bad news cycles. I for one find this deeply sad.

    Edit to expand: if it wasn't actively lighting the world on fire I would think there's something perversely admirable about trying to make sure the angels dancing on the head of a pin have civil rights. As it is they're close enough to actual power and influence that their enabling the stripping of rights and dignity from actual human people instead of staying in their little bubble of sci-fi and philosophy nerds.

  • lol they're gonna sell the Fort Knox gold to buy bitcoins
  • Nah, at that point you have the same problem that Bitcoin does. Well, one of the many problems that Bitcoin has. Okay it has another one of the many problems that Bitcoin has.

    In any event, you can't realize that kind of gain without crashing the asset price and rendering it all worthless. I would like to repeat the proposed solution from Auric G. Et Al to instead detonate a dirty bomb inside of Fort Knox, possibly with an English misogynist handcuffed to it, which will allow us to instead reduce the global supply and earn significantly higher returns in appreciation of our existing holdings.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • Only as a subset of the broader problem. What if, instead of creating societies in which everyone can live and prosper, we created people who can live and prosper in the late capitalist hell we've already created! And what if we embraced the obvious feedback loop that results and call the trillions of disposable wireheaded drones that we've created a utopia because of how high they'll be able to push various meaningless numbers!

  • Molly White breaks down a "Kamala should go easy on Crypto" poll
    www.mollywhite.net Annotated: Paradigm’s July 2024 Democratic Public Opinion Poll

    Annotating Paradigm’s July 2024 poll of Democratic voters on their crypto opinions.

    Annotated: Paradigm’s July 2024 Democratic Public Opinion Poll

    I don't have much to add here, but I know when she started writing about the specifics of what Democrats are worried about being targeted for their "political views" my mind immediately jumped to members of my family who are gender non-conforming or trans. Of course, the more specific you get about any of those concerns the easier it is to see that crypto doesn't actually solve the problem and in fact makes it much worse.

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    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/)YO
    YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems
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