this post was submitted on 14 Jul 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.

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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 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Only way I can make the link between complexity theory and laying off people is thinking about putting people in 'can solve up to this level of problem' style complexity classes (which regulars here should realize gets iffy fast). So hope he explained it more than that.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

The only complexity theory I know of is the one which tries to work out how resource-intensive certain problems are for computers, so this whole thing sounds iffy right from the get-go.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah but those resource-intensive problems can be fitted into specific classes of problems (P, NP, PSPACE etc), which is what I was talking about, so we are talking about the same thing.

So under my imagined theory you can classify people as 'can solve: [ P, NP, PSPACE, ... ]'. Wonder what they will do with the P class. (Wait, what did Yarvin want to do with them again?)

[–] aio@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago

solve this sokoban or you're fired

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 8 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

There's really no good way to make any statements about what problems LLMs can solve in terms of complexity theory. To this day, LLMs, even the newfangled "reasoning" models, have not demonstrated that they can reliably solve computational problems in the first place. For example, LLMs cannot reliably make legal moves in chess and cannot reliably solve puzzles even when given the algorithm. LLM hypesters are in no position to make any claims about complexity theory.

Even if we have AIs that can reliably solve computational tasks (or, you know, just use computers properly), it still doesn't change anything in terms of complexity theory, because complexity theory concerns itself with all possible algorithms, and any AI is just another algorithm in the end. If P != NP, it doesn't matter how "intelligent" your AI is, it's not solving NP-hard problems in polynomial time. And if some particularly bold hypester wants to claim that AI can efficiently solve all problems in NP, let's just say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Koppelman is only saying "complexity theory" because he likes dropping buzzwords that sound good and doesn't realize that some of them have actual meanings.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 5 hours ago

Yeah but I was trying to combine complexity theory as a loose theory misused by tech people in relation to 'people who get fired'. (Not that I don't appreciate your post btw, I sadly have not seen any pro-AI people be real complexity theory cranks re the capabilities. I have seen an anti be a complexity theory crank, but that is only when I reread my own posts ;) ).

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 13 hours ago

I heard him say "quantum" and immediately came here looking for fresh-baked sneers