this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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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.

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Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

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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.

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[–] hirvox@mastodon.online 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] cstross@wandering.shop 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

@hirvox @mountainriver @froztbyte Like a lot of other things that were funny in the late 80s and early 90s, the NPC meme has lost its shine …

[–] hirvox@mastodon.online 4 points 4 months ago

@cstross @mountainriver @froztbyte What's old is new again. I hear even phrenology is making a comeback.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

agreed, far too much chan shittery attached to it

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I thought that was Hirvox point, that the NPC meme now goes hand in hand with Chan shittery because the NPC meme allows for an easy format to say that other people are not real people. With the added bonus of a built-in "just joking" defence.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I see echoes of it when idiots discuss ChatGPT being AGI - “it’s at the level of the average (dumb) human, so it’s AGI”. Implicit is that the average human isn’t just not intelligent, but unaware of reality in a way that makes them like NPCs in computer games.

—-

Edit here’s an example, no source because I don’t want to start a dogpile.

If you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is, then I don’t think that argument against ChatGPT’s sentience is gonna be particularly persuasive either.

If you say “ChatGPT doesn’t actually think” and later on, “and some humans don’t either” - that weakens the strength of the first assertion by a lot, imo.

I mean, if ChatGPT is only sentient to the degree that the least sentient (conscious) human is, then we’re still talking about AGI.

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago

If you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is

If you concede that cats are made of marmalade and always win Texas Hold 'Em games, then I don't think the argument against squaring the circle holds up.

[–] hirvox@mastodon.online 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@mountainriver @froztbyte Yes, and if confronted the memelord can retreat into the more palatable-in-polite-company form of “they just repeat what they’re told _as if_ they were reprogrammable and without any individual thought”. And _clearly_ the confronter is one of them, because they didn’t recognize this important nuance, thus proving the point.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

such people are not much different from movie sharks: you boop ‘em on the nose to make them go away