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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
New piece from WIRED: Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove āIdeological Biasā From Powerful Models
Iāll let Baldur do the talking here:
Well, letās not let Baldur be a complete dumbass. There is something bad here, and weāve discussed it before (1, 2), but itās not āUS authoritiesā gaining ācontrolā over ābigotry and biasesā. The actual harm here is appointing AI-safety dorks to positions in NIST. For those outside the USA, NIST is our metrologist organization, and thereās no good reason for AI safety to show up there.
I mean, it does amount to the US government - aka āthe confederation of racist duncesā - declaring their intention to force the LLM owners - all US-based companies (except maybe those guys out of China, a famous free speech haven) - to make sure their model outputs align with their racist dunce ideology. They may not have a viable policy in place to effect that at this point, but it would be a mistake to pretend theyāre not going to implement one. The best case scenario is that it ends up being designed and implemented incompetently enough that it just crashes the AI markets. The worst case scenario is that we get a half-dozen buggy versions of Samaritan from Person of Interest but with a hate-boner for anyone with a vaguely Hispanic name. A global autocomplete that produces the kind of opinions that made your uncle not get invited to any more family events. Neither scenario is one that you would want to be plugged into and reliant on, especially if youāre otherwise insulated by national borders and a whole Atlantic ocean from the worst of Americaās current clusterfuck.
Hopefully, this will also probably kill any notion of tech being apolitical for good.