Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 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 so 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. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
On Anthropic (and some other AI companies) and AI consciousness the final paragraph is the best part:
Around 4 years ago Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying that AI has feelings - which he testified was because when he spoke to it it just seemed to be intelligent.
Todayās tech has not fundamentally changed or evolved but the difference is that now the industry needs the hype to keep the valuation high!
I think thereās also an issue of framing here. Lemoineās words on the matter suggested that not only was AI conscious, but that this meant it was worthy of moral consideration and that Google wasnāt interested in that. The new line is that the company is interested in this exciting new capability of their product and of course theyāre undertaking the task of āmodel welfare researchā to make sure that nobody is doing anything objectively evil, so you should absolutely keep spending even more money on Anthropicās products.
Canāt believe that these guys are forgetting Data on Star Trek needed an emotion-chip upgrade to feel emotions, and he didnāt even get it full-time until the series was over and they were doing movies. Dario and friends are just giving away what could be an entire upgrade/upcharge cycle! āBe more intimate than ever with your workflows! Upgrade to feeling agents on FeelsCloud today! (ignore that itās just some bullshit we vibecoded in Verilog and then flashed to discount FPGAs we shoved in the bottom of the server racks)ā