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.
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.