sp3ctr4l @ sp3ctr4l @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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4 mo. ago

It is entirely disingenuous to just pretend that LLMs are not being widely promoted, marketed, and discussed as AGI, as a superintelligence that people are familiar with from SciFi shows/movies, that is vastly more capable and knowledgeable than basically any single human.

Yes, people who actually understand tech understand that LLMs are not AGI, that your metaphor of wrong tool wrong job is apt.

... But seemingly about +90% of humanity, including the people who own and profit from LLMs, including all the other business owners/managers who just want to lower their employee headcount ... do not understand this, that an LLM is actually basically an extremely advanced text autocorrect system, that frequently and confidently lies, spits out nonsense, hallucinates, etc.

If you think it isn't reasonable to continuously point out that LLMs are not superintelligences, then you likely live in a bubble of tech nerds who probably still think their jobs or retirement are secure.

They're not.

If corpos keep smashing """AI""" into basically every industry to replace as many workers as possible... the economy will collapse, as capitalism doesn't work without consumers who have jobs, and an avalanche of errors will cascade and snowball through every system that replaces humans with them...

...and even if those two things were not broadly true...

...the amount of literal power/energy, clean water and financial capital that is required to run the whole economy on these services is wildly unsustainable, both short term economically, and medium term ecologically.

... As best I can tell...

He actually, legally changed his first name to Thor.

And he has gone by Thor for... at least 5 years?... in his Twitch streaming career.

I fully agree this is an insult to the old Gods, but ... Thor is apparently literally his actual name.

His older username / online handle was 'Maldavius Figtree' or something like that, can't say I am aware of his actual birth name.

Well, there's at least two aspects here:

Fucking Thor, PirateSoftware.

Up untill Ross posted his 'SKG is dead' video... Thor had by far gotten the most views of anyone with a video discussing SKG.

And Thor... well, he was anti-SKG, and had been spreading a bunch of objectively false bullshit about it, actual FUDD.

So... about half of Ross's video was dedicated to pointing out how Thor was wildly misunderstanding things, and fairly graciously and politely trying to correct these misconceptions.

So here's the two sort of things at play I see, in terms of 'why sudden surge now?'

1. Thor was just shown to be objectively, factually wrong. Thus, the immediate effect of this would be to reiterate and clarify and reinforce with more specificity what SKG actually is... and that could directly convince people to give a damn, to believe in Ross's SKG over Thor's misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.

But uh, almost certainly much, much more relevant:

2. Ross doing (1) created an absolute drama shit storm via the way youtube works now... which is very much just drama mongers and commentators reporting on e-drama. (1) kicked off an actual, organic, honest to god, truly viral explosion of many, many people who'd basically never heard of any of this before, mostly dogpiling on Thor for being such a disingenuous, egotistical asshole and liar, but also of course encouraging people to sign the SKG petition.

This kind of absurd, out of nowhere explosion of popularity of some topic, idea, meme, whatever, that spreads from person to person to person, from the ground up instead of top down... this is what something going 'viral' originally meant in the earlier days of the internet, 15 to 20 ish years ago.

You know, it spreads, from host to host, like a pandemic outbreak, shockingly rapidly.

These days we have everything hypermanaged by algorithms that silo you into your own content niche... and this was an exceptional enough of an event that it broke containment.

Videos like ... this entire topic/event/story... used to be what the YouTube trending tab looked like.... just totally random shit that for whatever reason, a bunch of people organically shared with each other, back when the algos were much, much more primitive.

...

Anyway... extremely ironically, a whole lot of the viral nature of this is due to Thor being just such an astoundingly massive piece of shit liar and manipulator.

He has a whole entire history of being astoundingly cocky, arrogant, dishonest, deceptive, intellectually inconsistent, rhetorically manipulative, etc, and it is genuienly... just astounding, i dont know what other word to use, to go through every single shitty thing Thor has done or said, not only in regards to SKG, but many, many other things Thor has done.

Basically, Thor is now a lolcow, a perfect person to milk by making content criticizing him, because he really is that much of an unbelievable, outrageuous idiot asshole.

I mean, its not technically completely impossible, but the vast majority of EU countries require a valid name, id, address, etc, its usually a pretty dumb idea to bot spam an official government web portal, and I'm sure there will be a review process after July 31.

Also... its not like it hits a million and then just no one else can sign up to it anymore.

It'll stay open till the end of the month, could easily breach a million, maybe even two million if anything like this insane rate keeps up.

Ok, I may not have great photoshop skills, but I do have a knowledge of ancient memes:

<3

oops!

Fuck.

Wrote too hard.

Ross is the dude with long hair and laser eyes.

On the right in the second pic.

That and broad, massive economic collapse in basically every other sector, at least in the US.

Can't play vidya gaem if hev no food starve.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/adp-jobs-report-june-2025.html

Oops.

Labor market (# of actual jobs) is now actually net contracting, shrinking.

Expected: +100k jobs

Reality: -33k jobs

Firings / Layoffs > Hiring.

Also the population grows, so uh, it actually has to be something like +200k to +250k to remain steady in terms of working age people vs jobs.

Sure, there are lots of 'job openings', but they're all fake ghost job bullshit that never actually hire anyone.

And they don't pay enough to bother doing them, and they have insane requirements that make no sense.

Great Depression 2.0 Gaming!

(The housing market is also collapsing if any readers haven't been paying attention.

My semi-educated guess is about a 55% drop by 24 months from now, compared to roughly '23-'24 highs.

Hope your boomer parents didn't buy in the last 5 years rofl!)

Somebody should just convince him to add DMT and Shrooms to his Hunter S Thompson-esque drug kit, and maybe there's a chance he'll develop a modicum of self awareness and empathy after experiencing total ego death.

Well hey, I very much appreciate more info from someone who was actually there!

Yep.

There's the whole... apparently when Thor was essentially high school to post high school age, he managed to cajole a younger SecondLife user, who was actually decently talented at creating like clothes and custom player models...

So in SecondLife, you can actually make real money that way, you can cash out the SecondLife currency for actual realworld money.

Yeah SecondLife was actually quite a pioneer in a lot of ways, from a technical and just 'what even is a video game' standpoint, lets say uh 'eccentric' community and reputation aside.

And Thor basically convinced this other SL user, who was like 5 years younger than him... that he could make them both more money as a sort of salesman, promoter, of this other persons user made content... if they profit share.

I may have some details wrong here, but basically... Thor did basically nothing in terms of promotion, yet he made a significant chunk of change off of this other person.

Because ... SL just has basically a universal market you can list things in.

Like uh, Escape from Tarkov, or FF14's auction house or what not, fully built into the game... but even more so as it actually allows you to cash out to real world money.

its not like you'd have to do some kind of technical wizardry to enable sales, its not like Thor whipped up some kind of gray/black market system / payment processor way back when PayPal was still a fairly new idea.

Alongside that, there were allegations of basically ERP going waaay too far.

Now, this other person has I think entirely denied any kind of ERP abuse, sexual or just normal relationship abuse, says everything was fine...

But a good number of people seem to think that the essentially digital labor theft Thor did, basically amounts to its own kind of grooming, exploitation.

We investigated ourselves and everything looks peachy actually!

Yep, no need for any independent audit mr. auditor regulator man person!

=D

wtf AI in your mouse driver?

Oh yeah, totally not logging your every mouse movement, no sir, not at all!

I lack the photoshop skills, but uh

The 'plap plap GET PREGNANT' meme, but with a therapist shouting:

'accept what you can't change'

'don't blame yourself for things out of your control'

'oh, the copay is $125'

'you missed the last appointment so we charged you for not canceling in advance'

'im worried you're not taking our sessions seriously'

sorry psych professionals, there is no ethical therapy under capitalism

Wow, I hadn't even heard of that particular story of Thor being an egotistical asshat.

I'd been looking into the WoW debacle, then stumbled into other stuff, but nope, that one's new to me.

This is fucking bonkers.

I ran the math a few days ago, before this absolutely blew the fuck up, and I came to:

We'd need 11k sigs per day until July 31st.

... We're now apparently at more than double that and climbing exponentially.

Ho Lee Shit.

God DAMN has it been a while since I've seen something go actually, truly, organically viral.

Wait untill people realize that Ross Scott has had a running show, 'Freeman's Mind', going back to basically the fucking machinima days, where he just does a playthrough of all of Half Life and voices Gordon's inner thoughts.

Its still on his youtube channel!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PNZBb6b9LvDWpI-5CPYUxG1Rnm-vr9V

We are going to need another petition to get Ross an honorary title, a goddamned bust of an upraised fist in an HEV suit, clenching a crowbar, with 'For Exceptional Valor and Dutiful Service in the Defense of Video Gaming' emblazoned on its base.

Let the memes flow!

Probably not, I'm the one that's hated and shunned and gaslit by the entire family because of how easily and often I point out that they are both hypocrites and objectively wrong about nearly every single political, economic or sociological idea they have.

But I do appreciate your validation, lol!

Yeah, got two bachelors degree's simultaneously.

Managed to do it in 4 years + 1 summer quarter.

But uh yeah, I'm basically too knowledgeable for my own good, and the autism doesn't help with dealing with abusive narcissist family members.

Oh well!

I ghosted them to the point they probably think I am actually dead.