blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

So, there's this new phenomenon they've observed in which text does not convey tone. It can be a real problem, especially when a statement made by one person as a joke would be made by another in all seriousness — but don't worry, solutions have very recently been proposed.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago

Banned from the community for advertising.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

Here, have a community ban to enforce that self-proclaimed flounce.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 15 points 3 weeks ago

Air so polluted it makes people sick, but it's all worth it because you can't be arsed to remember the syntax of a for loop.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 4 weeks ago

The pro-child-porn caucus.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Science writer Philip Ball observes,

Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say "We believe as an industry... that within 3-5 years we'll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician ... I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco... Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we're not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that...There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans"

"Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco" approaches "the female orgasm is a myth" levels of self-own.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Back in the twenty-aughts, I wrote a science fiction murder mystery involving the invention of artificial intelligence. That whole plot angle feels dead today, even though the AI in question was, you know, in the Commander Data tradition, not the monstrosities of mediocrity we're suffering through now. (The story was also about a stand-in for the United States rebuilding itself after a fascist uprising, the emotional aftereffects of the night when shooting the fascists was necessary to stop them, queer loneliness and other things that maybe hold up better.)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

Being unsure of whether you want to fuck robo-Maria or be robo-Maria is a classic sign of bisexuality among reconstructors of lost film media.

Yes, it's a niche, but you know it's not an empty niche.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

I've noticed the occasional joke about how new computer technology, or LLMs specifically, have changed the speaker's perspective about older science fiction. E.g., there was one that went something like, "I was always confused about how Picard ordered his tea with the weird word order and exactly the same inflection every time, but now I recognize that's the tea order of a man who has learned precisely what is necessary to avoid the replicator delivering you an ocelot instead."

Notice how in TNG, everyone treats a PADD as a device that holds exactly one document and has to be physically handed to a person? The Doylist explanation is that it's a show from 1987 and everyone involved thought of them as notebooks. But the Watsonian explanation is that a device that holds exactly one document and zero distractions is the product of a society more psychologically healthy than ours....

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

🎵 I'm a drop-shipping girl / in a shittified world / chat me up / bot me down / let's go party! 🎵

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Comment removed for being weird (derogatory). I refrained just barely from hitting the "ban from community" button on the slim chance it was a badly misfired joke from a person who can otherwise behave themself, but I won't object if any other mod goes ahead with the banhammer.

 

In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.

 

So, there I was, trying to remember the title of a book I had read bits of, and I thought to check a Wikipedia article that might have referred to it. And there, in "External links", was ... "Wikiversity hosts a discussion with the Bard chatbot on Quantum mechanics".

How much carbon did you have to burn, and how many Kenyan workers did you have to call the N-word, in order to get a garbled and confused "history" of science? (There's a lot wrong and even self-contradictory with what the stochastic parrot says, which isn't worth unweaving in detail; perhaps the worst part is that its statement of the uncertainty principle is a blurry JPEG of the average over all verbal statements of the uncertainty principle, most of which are wrong.) So, a mediocre but mostly unremarkable page gets supplemented with a "resource" that is actively harmful. Hooray.

Meanwhile, over in this discussion thread, we've been taking a look at the Wikipedia article Super-recursive algorithm. It's rambling and unclear, throwing together all sorts of things that somebody somewhere called an exotic kind of computation, while seemingly not grasping the basics of the ordinary theory the new thing is supposedly moving beyond.

So: What's the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in your field of specialization?

 

Yudkowsky writes,

How can Effective Altruism solve the meta-level problem where almost all of the talented executives and ops people were in 1950 and now they're dead and there's fewer and fewer surviving descendants of their heritage every year and no blog post I can figure out how to write could even come close to making more people being good executives?

Because what EA was really missing is collusion to hide the health effects of tobacco smoking.

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