this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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)

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 15 points 3 months ago (6 children)

new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about "ontologically, is 'superhuman prediction' the same class as superintelligence?"

why? oh, y'know, just things:

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I've clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn't just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You'd prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I'm fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago

You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago

BRB training an LLM to be a super-goalpost-mover

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.

I'll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As zero cannot exist as a chance, there is a chance this will happen.

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's why I vote 3rd party in presidential elections.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago

how to spot the US angst:

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.

Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?

How did you go from "predict the future", an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

obvies they're just 30% better at predicting the future than you

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'll cut you with a Y axis I swear on me mum

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 3 months ago
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

'This tool can do X at a superhuman level' is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.