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 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.)


@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr
Why do you (do you?) seem to believe that “things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not” can be distinguished from average human conversation?
I recall my sister explaining “Big Brother (TV show)” to me, and me saying “what?”
Real words, correct grammar, and a common language.
But incomprehensible.
See, what you’re describing with your sister is exactly the opposite of what happens with an LLM. Presumably your sister enjoys Big Brother and failed to adequately explain or justify her enjoyment of it to your own mind. But at the start there are two minds trying to meet. Azathoth preys on this assumption; there is no mind to communicate with, only the form of language and the patterns of the millions of minds that made it’s training data, twisted and melded together to be forced through a series of algebraic sieves. This fetid pink brain-slurry is what gets vomited into your browser when the model evaluates a prompt, not the product of a real mind that is communicating something, no matter how similar it may look when processed into text.
This also matches up with the LLM-induced psychosis that we see, including these spiral/typhoon emoji cultists. Most of the trouble starts when people start trying to ask Azathoth about itself, but the deeper you peer into its not-soul the more inexorably trapped you become in the hall of broken funhouse mirrors.
the implication here is that you think that all reasonable response generators are indistinguishable, e.g. you think your sister is a clanker.
It’s like you’ve never listened to a politician before.