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 soo 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.)

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      22 days ago

      The most recent iteration of this is “Functional genetic programming with combinators” (2007), previously, on Lobsters; the generated programs have structured subprograms which can be extracted and analyzed on their own.

    • Nicole Parsons@mstdn.social
      5·
      22 days ago

      @jackwilliambell @BioMan @BurgersMcSlopshot

      The standard for scientific study is “Is it reproducible?”

      OpenAI & others of its ilk, only rarely spits out reproducible results on anything but its original data set.

      In the meantime a wholesale attack on privacy is being waged to gather data to feed LLM’s.

      That data is enormously useful for creeps stalking dissidents, imposing surge pricing & “personalized pricing”, enabling ICE raids, spreading disinformation & for fraudsters.

    • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      22 days ago

      There’s some really cool work with running evolution-type algorithms versus gradient descent showing that training a network through gradient descent creates a training ‘trajectory’ (how it changes over time during the training process, in a very high dimensional space) that is basically the ‘average’ central tendency trajectory in the middle of the ‘cloud’ of trajectories that individual replicates of an evolutionary processes create. Of course, something like code is discrete chunks rather than real numbers you can calculate a gradient of, and kind of necessitates such an evolutionary process.

      Sorry if I just get super nerdy technical here, I am in the middle of a project at work about the relationship between evolutionary processes and machine learning processes that’s resulting in a lot of very interesting math about the nature of both and the kinds of things that they can learn.

      • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        22 days ago

        I would say it’s more that the relationship between a text prediction model’s output and real text is precisely mathematically the relationship between a leaf bug and a leaf, down to being made by very different processes, optimized by different forces over their origin, and doing very different things inside.

        Trying to force an LLM to produce true statements is like trying to get a leaf bug to photosynthesize. What they do is unrelated to that, they just happen to have been optimized over time to resemble something that does do that as seen by a certain mode of inspection.