this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 24 March 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don't quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!

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 here 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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Anthropic's Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

"But look how convincing [it] sounds!"

.... how did we get to the point where the ai bros are un-ironically telling us, as a selling point, that their shiny toy literally gives false yet convincing-sounding medical diagnoses ?!?!?!

If I were working on Claude and wanted to hype it up, I would not talk about this experiment online or in public. If I were working on Claude and wanted to be responsible towards "the public", I would use this example as a cautionary warning, not to further hype up the tool.

This feels like the slight period at the beginning of the NFT craze when I wasn't yet comfortable dismissing out of hand anyone excited about them, because surely there was a least some useful application that wasn't for scamming people, and surely this many people couldn't all be so deluded about the same idea.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

oh lol just made this a post too

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

“Oh, some patient data. Let me quickly casually scan this into the sv datacorp. What’s that…privacy concerns? Naaaaah I changed the filename”

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A friend that wants you to have an aggressive brain tumour to make an AI look good is no friend at all

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There are far too many people in this world who learned both wrong things from the “Pray tell, Mr Babbage” anecdote

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Vernor Vinge, patron saint of the singularity and noted winner of a couple of libertarian fiction awards, has passed. HN wanted a black bar[1] but were denied. They compensated by posting a lot of bad takes.

Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775304

'jart (aka Justine) has this to say about the impending Singularity (feat. Trump and Twitter!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777929

This hackernews wishes he has been frozen, to be thawed in the future (for some reason, no-one expects the future to be Idiocracy):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776217

[1] when a notable person in CS dies there's sometimes a black bar under the HN header

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Ah damn, Justine has my respect for a bunch of cool and interesting stuff but this is just embarrassing, unless I'm missing some extremely dry satire.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-bitcoin-halving-really-is-different-this-time/ar-BB1kb6o5

The halving will occur at block height 840,000 (a count of how many blocks have been hashed to the blockchain), and already people are predicting that will be the most valuable block to be mined to date. This is related to the point above: Ordinals works by assigning serial numbers to individual satoshis (or sats, the smallest denomination of BTC), which turns a fungible asset like bitcoin into something with provenance, identity and scarcity.

Tristan, the founder of Ordiscan.com, which tracks Ordinals projects, predicts that collectors of these “rare sats” could value the data in block 840,000 at $50 million dollars. Under the “Rodarmor Rarity” system, which assigns value to Bitcoin protocol events like difficulty adjustments and halvings, the first satoshi in the block alone could be worth upwards of $1 million, he wrote in a blog post.

They're turning ~~Bitcoins~~ satoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:

anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?

he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshi's Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius

anyway, he's decided it's time to flip to the non-losing side

https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735

https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430

(stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)

not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And, like every other crypto guy, Ryan has pivoted to AI now. His github profile says "Building AI with AI. Founder @artintellica."