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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 hours ago

      OpenAI can’t simply “add on” DeepSeek to its models, if not just for the optics. It would be a concession. An admittal that it slipped and needs to catch up, and not to its main rival…

      I actually disagree here. I think Ed underestimates how craven and dishonest these people are. I expect they’ll try to quietly integrate any efficiency improvements they can get from it and bluster through any investor questions about it. Their hope at this point has to be that more hardware is still better and that scaling is still gonna be the thing to make fetch happen. This again isn’t a revolutionary new structure, even if it is a significant improvement over anything Saltman and co have been doing.

      • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 hours ago

        If they can convince the money hose that they just need one more OOM of compute bro, they can keep vacuuming infinity dollars. The incentive is obviously there for any amount of lying, but at some point, I assume even the most braindead investors will start asking around if this really is the only game in town.

        Or maybe they won’t, which would be an admission against the core tenet of capitalism, but this has been a crazy year, and it’s only january. :/

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      8 hours ago

      I’ve previously discussed the concept of model collapse, and how feeding synthetic data (training data created by an AI, rather than a human) to an AI model can end up teaching it bad habits, but it seems that DeepSeek succeeded in training its models using generative data, but specifically for subjects (to quote GeekWire’s Jon Turow) “…like mathematics where correctness is unambiguous,”

      That sound you hear is me pressing F to doubt. Checking the correctness of mathematics written as prose interspersed with equations is, shall we say, not easy to automate.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          0·
          6 hours ago

          I mean, maybe? But the amount of trust I put in a description from “GeekWire” written by “an investor at Madrona Venture Group and a former leader at Amazon Web Services” who uncritically declares that spicy autocomplete “achieved strong reasoning capabilities” is … appropriately small.