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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy 4th July in advance…I guess.)
Oh, I would.
I’ve seen people say stuff like “you can’t disagree the models have rapidly advanced” and I’m just like yes I can, here: no they didn’t. If you’re claiming they advanced in any way please show me a metric by which you’re judging it. Are they cheaper? Are they more efficient? Are they able to actually do anything? I want data, I want a chart, I want a proper experiment where the model didn’t have access to the test data when it was being trained and I want that published in a reputable venue. If the advances are so substantial you should be able to give me like five papers that contain this stuff. Absent that I cannot help but think that the claim here is “it vibes better”.
If they’re an AGI believer then the bar is even higher, since in their dictionary an advancement would mean the models getting closer to AGI, at which point I’d be fucked to see the metric by which they describe the distance of their current favourite model to AGI. They can’t even properly define the latter in computer-scientific terms, only vibes.
I advocate for a strict approach, like physicist dismissing any claim containing “quantum” but no maths, I will immediately dismiss any AI claims if you can’t describe the metric you used to evaluate the model and isolate the changes between the old and new version to evaluate their efficacy. You know, the bog-standard shit you always put in any CS systems Experimental section.
To be clear, I strongly disagree with the claim. I haven’t seen any evidence that “reasoning” models actually address any of the core blocking issues- especially reliably working within a given set of constraints/being dependable enough to perform symbolic algorithms/or any serious solution to confabulations. I’m just not going to waste my time with curve pointers who want to die on the hill of NeW sCaLiNG pArAdIgM. They are just too deep in the kool-aid at this point.
The singularity is near worn-out at this point.