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.)
We regret to inform you that one of Googleās "AI leader"s is a transphobe:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/googles-2-7-billion-ai-hire-tests-companys-speech-limits-inflammatory-posts (paywall)
https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social/post/3m52bffg2222x (screenshot of relevant section)
Hey itās the character.ai guy, a.k.a. first confirmed AI assisted kid suicide guy.
Kind of feel the transphobia is barely scratching the surface of all the things wrong with this person.
That must be one of the more dumber things I have read in a while.
I think he is stating that people donāt have an invisible eternal Gender like a Christian thinks people have an invisible eternal Soul. I am a materialist so I donāt think either exists. Shazeer goes on to complain about āsterilizing childrenā which is a red flag of transphobia (ie. people who post a lot about that tend to have a screw loose).
There is no need to give transphobes the benefit of the doubt really.
You donāt believe in gender? I mean youāre wrong IMO but weāre cool. But if someone says the words āI donāt believe have an attribute called genderā as part of a bunch of totally obvious anti-trans dog-whistles when butting into a discussion about transgender day of remembrance? Now itās a problem.
Indeed, we also donāt have an attribute called friendship, nor does money have a value attribute or stuff like that. Doesnāt mean it doesnāt exist. It shows a total lack of understanding of what people are talking and arguing about, just what looks like a very dumb attempt at a gotcha, while butting into a conversation that has been had for years now (which isnāt even about him).
Time to derail conversations about computers by saying you donāt believe in digital ones and zeros because of the volt values are not one or zero. Iām reminded of Dawkins book where he magics away altruism by redefining the word away.
People who get angry about trans people and trans theory remind me of Dawkins and friends, because what starts as a factual/philosophical concern (there are probably no gods / the idea that people have a true gender inside them sounds mystical) gets twisted in a reactionary direction. I donāt have to understand why trans or nonbinary people feel the way they do to support them as they explore ways of being humans in the world.
BTW the official way to support trans people as they āexplore ways of being humansā is to punch Nazis in the face and dunk on techbros. Go forth and tell all your cis friends!
(If anyone finds some ways of not being human to explore do let me know, Iām holding out for Magical Girl)
Iād go for Motoko Kusanagiās prosthetic body, myself, as long as I could afford the upkeep. That whole ādonāt darken your Soul Gemā thing would go terribly for me.
Speaking this into existence. In an interview, Saltman suggests soul gems as the next phase in energy production for LLMs
I think that gender is a collection of roles in a specific society which people perform and have performed on them. Its not something which exists outside that context, any more than ābeing the kingā exists outside of a legal system. Of the three statements on BlueSky, its the third (the statement about sterilizing children) which makes me think he has been consuming angry things about trans people online.
@CinnasVerses @sailor_sega_saturn two bits, the one about god and the one about sterilizing children. The second is obvious, straight from transphobic material. The first is directly against what Iāve seen some people say, āgod put me in the wrong bodyā, as their explanation why they seek gender reassignment treatment.
At that point, what he thinks about attributes people might or might not have is of little relevance.
Sure, saying that about being in the wrong body was a dick move. You donāt have to accept all the theory to see that many people are in bodies that feel wrong to them, and many people are expected to present in ways that feel wrong to them. The quote implies that they should just try harder to perform the gender they were assigned at birth.
@CinnasVerses one would guess that they should work harder so his beliefs are not inconvenienced, or some similar egocentric drivel.
Now Iām wondering if that was written by gemini or grok.
Its also one of the authors of āAttention Is All You Needā, one of the founding texts of the AI ideology.
As far as I can tell thereās absolutely no ideology in the original transformers paper, what a baffling way to describe it.
James Watson was also a cunt, but calling āMolecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acidā one of the founding texts of eugenicist ideology or whatever would be just dumb.
Some legitimate academic papers and essays have served as fuel for the AI hype and less legitimate follow-up research, but the clearest examples that comes to mind would be either āThe Bitter Lessonā essay or one of the āscaling lawā papers (I guess Chinchilla scaling in particular?), not āAttention is All You Needā. (Hyperscaling LLMs and the bubble fueling it is motivated by the idea that they can just throw more and more training data at bigger and bigger model). And I wouldnāt blame the author(s) for that alone.
this is a recurring problem with them/their posts; if you look across history you can see a continual pattern of āde jour grumpword a la $somecommunityā leak forth
I have on occasion asked them to try to make better posts. they donāt seem to give a fuck to do so tho
to the latter part of my comment: both my own and also other peoplesā criticisms just turn into a dead avenue. the applicable poster just ghosts that subthread while happily posting elsewhere
guess thereās no desire to do better!