Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.)
simon willison, the self-styled reasonable ai researcher, finds it hilarious and a good use of money throwing $14000 at claude to create an useless programming language that doesn't work.
good man simon willison!
I mean it's still just funny money seeing the creator works for some company that resells tokens from Claude, but very few people are stepping back to note the drastically reduced expectations of LLMs. A year ago, it would have been plausible to claim that a future LLM could design a language from scratch. Now we have a rancid mess of slop, and it's an "art project", and the fact it's ersatz internally coherent is treated as a great success.
Willison should just have let this go, because it's a ludicrous example of GenAI, but he just can't help himself defending this crap.
That's a good point that I'm not sure many people are talking about. There's a shift happening where while I'm still seeing way too much "you're just not prompting it right", it has lessened. Now I'm seeing a lot more "well of course it can't do that" even from the believers.
They're still crying "the problem is that you're using it wrong", and blaming on the end user but it seems to be quietly shifting so they're now calling people dumb for ever believing the hype that they were the ones pushing to begin with.