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YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • I don't know if this is good news for the underlying risk of how willing the nuts and bolts of society are to resist unlawful or monstrous policies. IDK, on the subject of complicity I think the fact that we eventually joined the war has caused a deep cultural amnesia about how much influence the Reich had on the states and vice versa. Charles Lindbergh, Madison Square Garden, etc. We didn't really acknowledge how much our cultural and political structures are open to authoritarianism, much less addressing those issues.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • It is a long-established truth that it's significantly easier to con someone who thinks they're smarter than you. Also as I think about it a little bit there seems to be a reasonable corollary of their approach towards Bayesian thinking that you not question anything that matches your expectations, which is exactly how you get taken advantage of by the kind of grifter they're attached to. Like, they've been thinking about the singularity for long enough that the Sams (bankman-fried, Altman, etc) have a well-developed script for what they expect the first stages to look like and it is, as demonstrated, very easy to fake that.

  • OpenAI launches Operator agent, Stargate money will go only to OpenAI
  • Dan Shipper, who has been testing Operator for a few days, found that it often cannot access websites because they have blocked OpenAI from crawling it.

    Wait so ghoulishly scraping the entire internet without regard for the performance impact on the sites you're scraping and getting blocked from anyone with the good sense to do so has downsides?!?

  • US Congress proposes bill to allow AI to prescribe drugs and medical treatment
  • Yeah. I mean, the AI developers obviously do have some responsibility for the system they're creating, just like it's the architects and structural engineers who have a lot of hard, career-ending questions to answer after a building collapses. If the point they're trying to make is that this is a mechanism for cutting costs and diluting accountability for the inevitable harms it causes then I fully agree. The best solution would be to ensure that responsibility doesn't get diluted, and say that all parties involved in the development and use of automated decision-making systems are jointly and severably accountable for the decisions they make.

  • Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027
  • It falls into a broader type of tech hype based in the idea that if it would be good for something to work a certain way then if we can make it work at all it will obviously work in that optimal way. Like, it would be cool if we could get exponential growth in our rockets somehow (Maybe they reproduce? Do the rockets fuck, Elon?) so therefore assuming we can get rockets at all we can definitely make them scale like that.

    Call it the Milliways argument. Because if you've already done five thousand impossible things before breakfast, why not cap it off with lunch at the restaurant at the end of the universe?

  • AI weapon detection system at Antioch High School failed to detect gun in Nashville shooting
  • Once again the sophisticated method for undermining the AI system is exactly the thing you would do if you didn't know it was there. At best this reduces costs relative to paying a human being to look at cameras. More reasonably I don't know how to compare the relative error rates but I suspect it isn't nearly as favorable as the hype men would try to tell us.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • My favorite part of the carnivore diet is that apparently scurvy can become enough of a problem that you'll see references to "not wanting to start the vitamin C debate" in forums.

    I'm pretty sure it's not just a me thing, but I thought we all knew that sailors kept citrus on board specifically to prevent scurvy by providing vitamin C and that we all learned about this as kids when either a teacher tried to make the colonial era interesting or we got vaguely curious about pirates at some point.

  • A Line-by-Line Breakdown of Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order
  • You know, the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" argument being implicitly extended to cover second-generation immigrants should if taken seriously, imply that these people aren't actually obligated to follow US law, which presumably includes immigration law. You know, if you go by a text-first originalist interpretation of the constitution and the law.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • You gotta love how in the announcement the guy is so blatantly "hey they said and did such nice things for me that I just got a throw them a bone, and if releasing the leader of a notorious drug bazaar who tried to put out a hit on one of his employees is what they want then they can have it!"

  • North Korea, take notes
  • Oh wait, there's one! How could I miss it when it's got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

    Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

  • did scoot at one time have the mask on, cos if so that must be the *distant* past
  • It's almost like when despots funnel oil money into maintaining power and self-aggrandizing megaprojects instead of basic public services you don't see the "lots of education" part kicking in.

    Meanwhile, if there are these outliers where low IQ didn't prevent people from getting wealthy and there isn't some kind of political economy reason for it, doesn't that undermine the value of IQ as a metric? Like, you and I know that IQ is garbage but it's worth noting how "maybe IQ is just garbage" is always floating at the edge of their reasoning.

  • 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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