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On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • Dan asked me “what’s the fastest Big O notation?” and hey, to my credit despite not having a college degree, I knew the answer from self studying! “Oh, I know this. O(1) Constant time”, I said over the phone. “No, see it’s O(0). The fastest program is the one that never runs. It’s clear you don’t have enough experience for this role. So let’s test you on your sysadmin capabilities. Maybe you can redeem yourself there”.

    There is something about the simultaneous pedantry and total ignorance in this that is enraging. Everything is O(1) space because there are 1081 atoms in the universe, and everything is O(1) time because of the heat death of the universe, don'tcha know. Also did I just solve the halting problem?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024
  • At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.

    The reason I think it was a freebie is:

    1. Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
    2. Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
    3. Cyberpunk 2022 2077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch

    It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn't seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck "like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works" subscription model, always gets me.

    Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • Whoops! Google's reached a new level of JAQing off and decided to answer the questions instead of just leading to them
  • It's a reference to the fact that the kind of person who would try and justify this sort of race science is also the kind of person who is "just asking questions." Combined with the tech industry's tepid "it's just a tool, it's not inherently evil" bullshit, I think OPs point is obvious to anyone who isn't a pedant, deliberately acting in bad faith.

  • OpenAI’s Whisper audio transcriber makes up hospital treatments and medications
  • https://www.nabla.com/

    Dr. Ambrosio Romero

    Board Certified Family Medicine, Geriatrics, Home Care

    Detailed, accurate, HIPPA compliant visit or phone documentation in under a minute! How could we ever have done our jobs without this? Helps the smooth flow of information in the office. The staff has the documentation they need right away!

    Jul 2, 2024

    Jesus. H. Christ.

  • LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data
  • Well, two responses I have seen to the claim that LLMs are not reasoning are:

    1. we are all just stochastic parrots lmao
    2. maybe intelligence is an emergent ability that will show up eventually (disregard the inability to falsify this and the categorical nonsense that is our definition of "emergent").

    So I think this research is useful as a response to these, although I think "fuck off, promptfondler" is pretty good too.

  • The Nobel Prize in physics goes to Geoffrey Hinton for his work in computer science. What?
  • So Geoffrey Hinton is a total dork.

    Hopefully, [this Nobel Prize] will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they're saying. [There] is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks it's nonsense to say these things understand language. That school is wrong. Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo

    It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities ... but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control

    😩

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025
  • "I only had this problem because I was very reckless," he continued, "partially because I think it's interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it 'when you've finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,' I wouldn't have had this problem.

    just instruct it "be sentient" and you're good, why don't these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?

  • 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/)KH
    khalid_salad @awful.systems
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