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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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    4 months ago

    comment from friend:

    Slightly related: now I know when the AI crash is going to happen. Every bottomfeeder recruiter company on LinkedIn is suddenly pushing 2-month contract technical writer positions with AI companies with no product, no strategy, and no idea of how to proceed other than ā€œCEO cashes out.ā€ I suspect the idea is to get all of their documentation together so they can sell their bags of magic beans before the beginning of the holiday season.

    sickos.jpg

    I have asked if he can send me links to a few of these, Iā€™ll see what I can do with 'em

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      That seems suspiciously soon, but my impression is based on nothing but vibes ā€” a sense that companies are still buying in.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        I think there was a report saying that the most recent quarter still showed a massive infusion of VC cash into the space, but Iā€™m not sure how much of that comes from the fact that a new money sink hasnā€™t yet started trending in the valley. It wouldnā€™t surprise me if the griftier founders were looking to cash out before the bubble properly bursts in order to avoid burning bridges with the investors theyā€™ll need to get the next thing rolling.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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          4 months ago

          We were asking around AI industry peons in March and they all guessed around three quarters too. I woulda put it at maybe two years myself, but I was surprised at so many people all arriving at around three quarters. OTOH, I would say that just in the past few months things are really obviously heading for a trauma.

          • jonhendry@awful.systems
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            4 months ago

            Perhaps thatā€™s part of why so many SV types are backing Trump. Grifting off Trump may be their fallback after the AI bubble collapses.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            4 months ago

            Iā€™m severely backlogged on catching up to things but my (total and complete) guess would be something like: all the recent headlines about funding and commitments are almost certainly imprecise in localisation and duration - everyone that ā€œgot moneyā€ didnā€™t necessarily get ā€œmoneyā€ but instead commitments to funding, and ā€œeveryoneā€ is a much smaller set of entities that donā€™t encompass a really wide gallery of entities

            So for all the previously-extant promptfondlers/ model dilettantes/etc out there, the writing may indeed have been (and may still be) on the wall ito runway (ā€œstartup operating capital remaining available and viable to avoid deathā€)

            Based on the kind of headlines seen (and presuming the above supposition for the sake of argument), and the kind of utterly milquetoast garbage all the interceding months have produced, I donā€™t think itā€™s likely that much of the promised money will make it through to this layer/lot either. But thatā€™s entirely a guess at this stage (and I can think of some fairly hefty counter-argument examples that may contribute to countering, not least because of how many people/orgs wouldnā€™t want to be losing face to fucking this up)

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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              4 months ago

              cryptoā€™s VC investment fell off a cliff after the crash, and that investment is what we were talking about there

              hence their pivot to AI

              • pyrex@awful.systems
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                4 months ago

                Oh, OK. I think all the VC-adjacent people still really believe in crypto, if it helps. They probably also donā€™t believe in it, depending on the room. I think it will come back.

                • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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                  4 months ago

                  theyā€™ve stopped putting fresh money in, but they believe fervently in the massive bags theyā€™re holding

    • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      Current flavor AI is certainly getting demystified a lot among enterprise people. Letā€™s dip our toes into using an LLM to make our hoard of internal documents more accessible, itā€™s supposed to actually be good at that, right? is slowly giving way to ā€œWhat do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?ā€

      • Mii@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        ā€œWhat do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?ā€

        Our BI team is trying to implement some RAG via Microsoft Fabrics and Azure AI search because we need that for whatever reason, and theyā€™ve burned through almost 10k for the first half of the running month already, either because itā€™s just super expensive or because itā€™s so terribly documented that they canā€™t get it to work and have to try again and again. Normal costs are somewhere around 2k for the whole month for traffic + servers + database and I havenā€™t got the foggiest whatā€™s even going on there.

        But someone from the C suite apparently wrote them a blank check because itā€™s AI ā€¦

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu gather around a newly-opened barrel of vinegar.

        Confucius tastes the vinegar and perceives bitterness.

        The Buddha tastes the vinegar and perceives sourness.

        Lao Tzu tastes the vinegar and perceives sweetness, and he says, ā€œFellas, I donā€™t know what this is but it sure as fuck isnā€™t vinegar. How much did you pay for it?ā€

        • corbin@awful.systems
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          4 months ago
          NSFW (including funny example, don't worry)

          RAG is ā€œRetrieval-Augmented Generationā€. Itā€™s a prompt-engineering technique where we run the prompt through a database query before giving it to the model as context. The results of the query are also included in the context.

          In a certain simple and obvious sense, RAG has been part of search for a very long time, and the current innovation is merely using it alongside a hard prompt to a model.

          My favorite example of RAG is Generative Agents. The idea is that the RAG query is sent to a database containing personalities, appointments, tasks, hopes, desires, etc. Concretely, hereā€™s a synthetic trace of a RAG chat with Batman, who I like using as a test character because he is relatively two-dimensional. We ask a question, our RAG harness adds three relevant lines from a personality database, and the model generates a response.

          > Batman, what's your favorite time of day?
          Batman thinks to themself: I am vengeance. I am the night.
          Batman thinks to themself: I strike from the shadows.
          Batman thinks to themself: I don't play favorites. I don't have preferences.
          Batman says: I like the night. The twilight. The shadows getting longer.
          
        • pyrex@awful.systems
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          4 months ago

          Itā€™s the technique of running a primary search against some other system, then feeding an LLM the top ~25 or so documents and asking it for the specific answer.

        • self@awful.systems
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          4 months ago

          so, uh, you remember AskJeeves?

          (alternative answer: the third buzzword in a row thatā€™s supposed to make LLMs good, after multimodal and multiagent systems absolutely failed to do anything of note)

      • rook@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch

        I always saw it more as LMGTFYaaS.

      • imadabouzu@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        Maybe hot take, but I actually feel like the world doesnā€™t need strictly speaking more documentation tooling at all, LLM / RAG or otherwise.

        Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesnā€™t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused.

        • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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          4 months ago

          Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesnā€™t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused

          Definitely, but the current narrative is that you donā€™t need to do any of that, as long as you add three spoonfulls of AI into the mix youā€™ll be as good as.

          Then you find out what you actually signed up for is to do all the manual preparation of building an on-premise search engine to query unstructured data, and you still might end up with a tool thatā€™s only slightly better than trying to grep a bunch of pdfs at the same time.