this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (18 children)

Lesswronger reads about Orcas the first time in their life. Decided that training them to become smarter than humans is now the next important step.

(I'm very very far from an orca expert - basically everything I know about them I learned today.)

They made several posts about it, and just the opening bits are funny. I obv didn't read any of them an only looked at the opening statements. I will produce a quote from each.

It is currently plausible (~~352115%~~[1]23%) to me that average orcas have at least as high potential for being great scientists as the greatest human scientists, modulo their motivation for doing science[2].

Yes, the weird percentage is in the text, the [1] footnote says 15%, no idea why they can't edit their text normally.

(For speed of writing, I mostly don't cite references. Feel free to ask me in the comments for references for some claims.)

Context: I think there’s a ~17% chance that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.

And from the last article, two lines as a treat:

TLDR: I now think it’s <1% likely that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.

(I now think the relevant question is rather whether orcas might be >=+4std intelligent, since that might be enough for superhuman wisdom and thinking techniques to accumulate through generations, but I think it’s only 2% probable. (Still decently likely that they are near human level smart though.))

(Nice of the person to think of the orcas btw, just wish it was more preservation than 'how can we make these animals help us out).

E: apparently "An alternative approach to superbabies" is also about orcas, they just no longer stand behind it.

Can someone please look into this?

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago

All I need to know about HDI (human-dolphin interaction) (read: fuckin) is covered in many episodes of my favorite podcast Doughboys

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