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 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.)
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183
Quantum scoot is quantum spooked š± after GPT-5 manages to solve a subproblem for him (after multiple attempts), thanks the powers that be for his tenure!
ā¦ even though GPT-5 probably generates the answer via websearch
After seeing this, I reminded myself that Iāve seen this type of thing happen before. Over the past half year, so many programmers enthusiastically embraced vibe coding after seeing one or two impressive results when trying it out for themselves. We all know how that is going right now. Baldur Bjarnason had some great essays (1, 2) about the dangers of relying on self-experimentation when judging something, especially if youāre already predisposed into believing it. Itās like a mark believing in a psychic after he throws out a couple dozen vague statements and the last one happens to match with something meaningful, after the mark interprets it for him.
Edit: Accidentally hit reply too early.
You think he would maybe, idk, search around to see if this was a known formula before making such a bombastic statementā¦
Oh yeah, he wrote an update saying that the LLM is still great, even if the result is already known, because it saves him time. We have come full circle back to the exact same value proposition as the vibe coders.
Maybe next he can get an LLM to automate his apologetics for genocide.
He could call it Vibonism.
Funny how when there is something novel it always a) already existed in the training data or b) doesnāt actually seem to work.