Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    8 小时前

    HN, lobste.rs and LW are jizzing themselves over the newspress release that ChatGPT[1] has disproven an Erdos[2] conjecture.

    no-one pauses to think this is a transparent attempt to goose interest in OpenAI before they commit an IPO

    [1] I know it’s not literally ChatGPT, it’s an “internal model”

    [2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      2 小时前

      Did it actually solve this one or did it just find a pre-existing solution like it did the last time?

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      6 小时前

      [2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o

      in afrikaans: “deelteken”

      in english: I literally can never remember it, but I remember “umlaut”

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        3 小时前

        In fairness, mathematicians here are like scientists at a magic show, i.e., ill suited to asking good critical questions. How much money did OpenAI burn to get what they say they got? How many false starts got quietly tossed in the circular file drawer? When, even, did their work start? It is easy for a company to say, for example, “We spent only three weeks on thus problem”, casually eliding months of prior effort (all that was the testing phase, you see, before a specific task had been settled upon…). OpenAI has no reason to be honest about anything like this. Indeed, a company will naturally get regular practice being dishonest by careful omission at every opportunity.

        Meanwhile:

        ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          3 小时前

          Better than the original (in that it’s not a bad model of media literacy given slick packaging in order to support climate change denial)