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We regret to inform you that Ray Kurzweil is back on his bullshit
  • If only there was any large active warzone that has largely devolved into positional warfare for two years now to disprove that claim, damn.

  • We regret to inform you that Ray Kurzweil is back on his bullshit
    1. Sure, I'm not even going to verify this one since it's so low stakes.
    2. This is ill-defined.
    3. Again ill-defined, and I need dates on this, we've been sequencing DNA for like 50yrs at this point.
    4. Lol, Neuralink kills monkeys, there's zero indication of its "inevitability".
    5. Lol^2, none of that shit works mate. Name one person whose life was extended with cryonics.
    6. AI is ill-defined, plus dates please.
    7. And how well did that go?
    8. First of all, that's called Moore's Law after the actual guy who made this prediction, you can't credit someone else than Moore for Moore's Law, wtf. Second, this hasn't held for at least a decade now; we've been focusing on completely different things than raw CPU speed to actually increase compute.
    9. "Answer questions" there is a load-bearing term. Did he mean search engines? Is this deriberately vague?
    10. I'm sorry? First, a 3D printed prosthetic is not an exoskeleton, what kind of a logic leap is that. Second, citation needed on "3D printable prosthetic limbs" actually being in use right now on any scale.
  • We regret to inform you that Ray Kurzweil is back on his bullshit
  • The US doesn't have a functional healthcare system yet, and they're like a century behind on that at this point.

  • We regret to inform you that Ray Kurzweil is back on his bullshit
  • searches for who tf this is

    Wikipedia:

    Lol, this is the most passive-aggressive way of saying "known for absolutely nothing of value to anyone or anything" I've seen.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??

    This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.

  • what if, right, what *if* our super-duper-autocomplete was just *tricking* us so it could TAKE OVER ZEE VORLD AHAHAHAHAHAHA! that'd be wild, hey
  • If we grow AIs too big, say, bigger than the Moon, then well, the Moon could get jealous and mad at us.

  • It can't be that the bullshit machine doesn't know 2023 from 2024, you must be organizing your data wrong (wsj)
  • Did no one tell them that "evangelist" is not exactly a positive term? Do they call their sales people "crusaders", too?

  • It can't be that the bullshit machine doesn't know 2023 from 2024, you must be organizing your data wrong (wsj)
  • I'm sorry but "evangelist" to me conjures an image of a techbro on a street corner with a makeshift shelf of Google Cloud brochures advertising free documentation study hours.

    There's Jehowa Witnesses doing the same schtick one block over and they're absolutely furious he took their favourite spot.

  • It can't be that the bullshit machine doesn't know 2023 from 2024, you must be organizing your data wrong (wsj)
  • Also, speaking from experience trying to do any database work for large corporate clients, no data house is in order. It's basically saying "assume a spherical cow, then AI works".

  • It can't be that the bullshit machine doesn't know 2023 from 2024, you must be organizing your data wrong (wsj)
  • Google Cloud Chief Evangelist

    That cannot be an official title someone has, can it?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • I just want to latch onto one more thing there:

    GPTs are great at transforming information. Transformations include compression, decompression, and inter-language translation, among others.

    Okay mister computer scientist, sure, what is "transforming information"? From what you're saying it appears like you're describing basically any map from information to other information. But AMONG OTHERS that includes a map going from NO INFO to CONFIDENT BULLSHIT. And I do agree LLMs are amazing at it.

    Here, I'll sketch it out for you in fucking LaTeX:

    $\emptyset \mapsto \mathit{Nonsense}$

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • How do they sysadmin a server that doesn't have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • Amazing.

    I could "publish" my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and that'd be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that they're still divided into 7-8 sections, each one-paragraph long. Just a guy who was never told he was wrong in his life and his idea of what research looks like.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • There's one classified as "SSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal article", I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the "almost", but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an "electronic journal"? No fucking idea.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • I am unfairly misrepresenting that for sneer purposes but if you want to see what happens when someone with typical cryptobro brainworms gets access to a paper-looking PDF template:

    http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.17616.99845

    http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.13443.99364

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • Those "papers" are gold, they're mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:

    • How to calculate a mean of numbers?
    • What is a number?
    • Atheism is actually a religion.
    • Ethereum is a store of energy.

    I've never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isn't healthy.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • This thread is an unending source of amusement.

    Someone there found his ORCID and... It's not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521

    He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different "preprints", read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.

    I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology1. [emph. mine]

    🤡


    1 No he doesn't? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
  • I'm sorry, but you're wrong. You're also mansplaining to an expert. While I admit that I am not an expert on law and am listening when corrections related to LAW and the practice of LAW are concerned, you do not want to admit your lack of understanding of this technology.

    My god DANIEL, no, people are not mansplaining to you, unless that's a mask for a Danielle.

    EDIT: Down the thread he responds to Kathryn Tewson, an actual expert, with

    Yeah I'm not obligated to answer every question by a horde of people. You should change your name to Karen, because you sure act like a fucking entitled white bitch.

    This guy has such a punchable face, even though I've never seen him. I can just tell.

  • Devin, the obviously fake "AI Developer", turns out to be fake

    Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a small shell script large language model.

    !

    The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

    First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

    Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

    It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

    The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

    It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

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    Zuckerberg ordered Snapchat to literally man-in-the-middle attack customers
    arstechnica.com Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

    Zuckerberg told execs to “figure out” how to spy on encrypted Snapchat traffic.

    I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

    In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

    > "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan. > > "Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

    Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

    I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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    V0ldek V0ldek @awful.systems
    Posts 3
    Comments 46