Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
I liked this takedown of METR’s task horizon “research”: https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/the-metr-graph-is-hot-garbage
In addition to all the complaints I already knew of and had, METR’s methodology for human baselining of tasks was even worse than I realized.
And you know… I actually kind of respect METR relative to a lot of boosters and doomers for at least attempting any hard numbers and not just vibes and anecdotes (METR is the ones that did the study showing LLMs actually reduced coders productivity even as it made them think it increased). But the standard for quantifying LLM performance in practical terms is absurdly low.
that one METR graph was also a big part of the AI 2027 “prediction”
It was basically the only “empirical” (scare quotes well earned) data they actually used in their “model”, even then, they decided exponential improvement wasn’t good enough, they plugged it into a hyper-exponential model that went to infinity at just a few years regardless of the inputs.
yeah lmfao it was bad. I thoroughly enjoyed titotal’s takedown of that graph. I can’t believe the documentary versions of that paper on youtube have millions of views and people eating it up
Those comment sections are gonna be a joy when 2027 and 2028 roll around
i thought they were yet another rationalist offshoot
They absolutely are. I am just giving them a tiny bit of credit for at least attempting academic research on LLM performance. But only a tiny bit, as they blog post I link discusses, their methodology is really sloppy and not to the level of most academic research and wouldn’t get through peer review of most decent journals.