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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.
And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this oneās thankfully unrelated to the articleās main point):
The idea that ā[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitabletmā (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.
That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valleyās failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.
Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.
I read this line basically in this voice
Really appreciate that link to Unserious Academic! This piece underlines something very important about the forces (by forces I mean weirdos) we struggle against.
Also, this bit:
This technology was pre-ordained by the universe
i am hearing that ProQuest has been quietly contacting small publishers to see if it can ingest their published output for AI training.
ProQuest has an AI thing now, but itās denied itās training on hosted content ā¦ yet.
if you are, or know, an author whoās had a letter of this sort recently, mentioning ProQuest or no, iād love to know and please tell your friends - email is dgerard@gmail.com
Like Vitalik Buterin creating eth because he was mad his op WoW char got nerfed, we now have more gamers lore. J D Vance played a Yawgmothās Bargain deck.
the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over
We cannot allow a dark ritual gap.
āO Cent O Pence (R)ā is an anagram for āNecropotenceā
Trump is clearly campaigning on the critically overlooked black draw engine platform, possibly to spite blue voters.
Edit: āOne Percent Co.ā was right there! Itās all coming together now!
brb, ran out of red cord.
NYT: āMicrosoft and OpenAIās Close Partnership Shows Signs of Frayingā (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html)
Archive: https://archive.ph/Bas23
HN link from whence I got this, have not mined this for sneers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41878281
edit oh wait found one
OpenAIās revenue isnāt from advertising, it should be slightly easier for them to resist the call of enshittification this early in the company history.
Canāt enshittify that which is already shit
Twice in the last week Iāve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership) and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates. Both times I turned to ChatGPT and it gave me an answer immediately
Just a normal hackernews, testing if the models they use are racist
Well, at this point most new data being created is conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation logs are their moat.
Twice in the last week Iāve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)
The unspecificity is damning. āFacts about their membershipā might range from āwhat racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member ofā to āam I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculateā.
and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.
Thatās an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?
tl;dr of the article: ever since the ousting of altman, microsoft, which virtually owns openai, has been suspicious of openaiās actual worth. therefore MS has cut down on the infinite resource flow. openai employees are whining about this.
there is one additional point in three of the near final paragraphs, which Iāll quote in full because they are so amusing to me
Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of A.I. that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasnāt given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.
Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. ā roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain ā Microsoft loses access to OpenAIās technologies.
The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the companyās negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.
The first paragraph surprised me. I didnāt know there were still some true believers left.
I think I see a possible future here. Just as the promptfondlers are now trying to talk down human accomplishments to make the LLMs sound more impressive (āit learns just like a child!ā (no, it doesnāt)). As when you are trying to reach a deal on a car, you either need the buyer to raise the price, or the seller to lower theirs. This will lead to a lawsuit where they are going to drop down the theoretical capabilities of an AGI just to trigger this clause.
And as the judge thinks that emojiās are a form of novelty pasta, any potential jury canāt spell stattistical, there is a 50% chance that they will be convinced it is AGI because humans like the AGI also make mistakes.
Still unclear how OpenAI declaring theyāve created an AGI (and getting this adjudicated as ātrueā) and thus being released from their MSFT partnership helps OpenAI. Theyāre just lost all their compute, and will have a worse negotiating position from which to get more compute. Whatās the upside?
They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isnāt great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.
Yeah fair
As Nina Power was mentioned before, here is an article on a Welsh ādruidā/forger which touches that subject (and Marx) a bit. People might find it an interesting read.
Anti-Woke Druids and Radical Bards - āWhat links Welsh 18th century romantic Druid-Bards, gathering around a circle of pebbles in North London, and the contemporary online right?ā
Then there is John Michael Greerā¦
Wow, thatās a name I havenāt heard in a long time.
A regular contributor at UnHerdā¦
I did not know that, and I hate that it doesnāt surprise me. I tended to dismiss his peak oil doomerism as wishing for some imagined āharmony with natureā. This doesnāt help with that bias.
It was an interesting read, thanks for posting it.
Found a pretty good Tweet about HL: Alyx today:
Update: My previous statement was wrong, turns out @ai_shame is still around
pivot to ai now has working dark mode! all praise to the illustrious @fasterandworse@awful.systems
i still hate dark mode, but others fucking love it so
Thank for letting me know there are other people indifferent to dark mode. Sometimes I feel I am the only one.
i have already had whiny shits demand that I (a) set dark mode default (b) remove the switch
default is currently set to whatever your browser thinks is the default and you can switch it otherwise
this is the best default imo
the only times I dislike it are when the siteās dark mode implementation is trash. I occasionally get to notice these, because their implementation is such way that dark reader activates (time trigger), I suddenly get flashblind on some site because dark reader flips their thing to eye-stabbing light colours
itās a little magical and not entirely reliable so iām not a fan, but the switch is there
God forbid you go out of your way to do something nice without some most entitled asshole in the world giving you shit for it.
Awful.systems defaults to dark mode.
like a good developer, I made my personal preference the default (and I think when we started there were major issues with switching themes?)
booooo should be my personal preference (light)
brb banning David from the awful.systems plugin repo, modifying the login page so everyone has to swear they donāt know him, and launching a lawsuit for (throws a dart at a dartboard) uhh shoplifting, he shoplifted my website
YOU wouldnāt
shoplift a WEBSITE
imma fuckin do it again
Common mistake, but David is from the UK. He was actually just looking online for ways to improve wheelchair accessibility in a multistory house. On a lift-shopping website.
Isnt he a goth? Dont think he needs more lifts.
and now that damn jingle is playing in my head at early oā clock
awful.systems: where the abyss delivers, always
This is what the BDFL model is all about.
The only reason I use dark mode is because my phone is OLED so it uses less power. Otherwise I go for light.
Over on /r/politics, there are several users clamoring for someone to feed the 1900 page independent counsel report into an LLM, which is an interesting instance of second-order laziness.
They also seem convinced that NotebookLLM is incapable of confabulation which is hilarious and sad. Could it be sneaky advertising?
our good buddy Jordan Lasker aka Cremieux aka TP0 gives a talk to Stanford libertarians
i havenāt watched this but i am confident it is the most cursed fuckin thing
one hour thirty frickin eight
Somebody on the twitter is doing an expose on TP0 (This is part 2, part 1 also linked).
Just amazing that he worked for a YC-backed startup (āWarp, accounting and payroll for foundersā) whose social media team (prolly this dude) just handed out affiliation icons to all manners of like-minded twitter racists.
Butterfly Man Template
Is this āFounder Modeā?
yep, iām in touch with college hill, sheās aware of our esteemed site too
Great!
deleted by creator
Ah, so apparently Google has found a new way to make Youtube comments worse.
Thatās amazing, I wish I had that kind of discipline to learn!
I canāt decide whatās worse: the fucking insulting tone that sounds like Iām about to get a pamphlet about Joseph Smith or GameStop or some shit, or that the suggestions just make up opinions you donāt have and events that didnāt happen
deleted by creator
Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.
I know you probably had no intention behind the number, but I just had to check. 2686 days ago was 12 June 2017. Pretty sure weāve known about how google fumbles shit from way before then!
That was the day when the transformer paper was released that kicked off this whole LLM shitshow. So my intention was just a little nod towards that. ;)
But yeah, the real number is probably quite a bit larger than that.
I see. Please forgive this philistine!
somone could make a command-line utility like
sdate, but for blarney engines!what would be a good name for it, do you reckon? The first thing to pop into my head was
shitdatebut thatās too close to the original and distro maintainers might get prissy about packages with swears in themslopdate
ASTx, autoplag standard time, but with tzdb entries localized as relative to each seminal paper/workfor geolocale, I suggest coordinates such as null island, and wraparound/bounding-box corners (per multiple mainstream map projection)
this is a masterpiece
According to an interview with the ceo of signal, when she worked at google the new ai wave shit was started by a paper in 2012, the authors of which were hired by google. So they saw the writing on the wall a bit sooner. When did they remove their dont be evil thing?
That will certainly improve the mh of yters who already feel they are under extreme pressure.
But users like engagement! Which means seeing that the person wrote a thing and not reading the thing and making a human connection with someone who is, yāknow, engaged in conversation.
I know chatbots donāt track meaning, but Iām pretty sure words still mean things.
Eurgh!
Bob Dylan has responded to a Bitcoin Groyper account
sammy boi is giving up on the pretense that any of this was about enriching lives, and is now only focusing on the eyegrab (archive)
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu weāll see
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu weāll see
I suspect weāll see a fair amount. Giving some specifics:
-
I suspect weāll see Sammy accused of endangering all of humanity for a quick buck - taking Altman at his word, OpenAI is attempting to create something which they themselves believe could wipe out humanity if they screw things up.
-
I expect calls to regulate the AI industry will louden in response to this - what Sammyās doing here is giving the true believers more ammo to argue Silicon Valley may potentially trigger the robot apocalypse that Silicon Valley themselves have claimed AI is capable of unleashing.
perhaps saltman will have enough audacity to promote this as a way to ensure that some account is owned by a human, after flooding every corner of internet with ai slop and fake accounts
thatās almost certainly the plan ā I remember there was some horrific āproof of humanityā shit tied in with this, supposedly so that you could tell if youāre interacting with a human rather than a chatbot. thereās so many problems with that technically of course, not least of which is the chatbot guy also owning the proof of not-bot, but thereās deeper horrifying implications: this is the technology conservatives have been begging for to block access to āadult sitesā (see: LGBTQ+ spaces and associates) and āprotect votingā (see: purge voter registries). that the technology is fucking stupid and doesnāt work doesnāt matter to them ā as always with technofascism, thatās a feature.
-
Create the problem and sell the solution.
Did Sam anticipate the easily foreseeable avalanche of AI slop, decide that proof of humanity was a worthwhile investment, and only then notice that all the suggested search completions for āproof ofā were crypto?
Worldcoin has been around for longer than OpenAI. Sama is the OG pivot-from-crypto-to-AI.
Kinda surprised World(Coin) was still ongoing, thought saltman would have quietly buried the project now heās busy shilling ChatGPT
The 0.000001% chance that this thing morphs into the new global reserve currency is enough for a proper rationalist to keep it trundling along, donāt you think?
Also donāt underestimate the value of having someplace to park useful cronies you donāt currently have any other job for
A quick update: @ai_shame is quitting Twitter, and Musk using posts for AI training is the reason why:
hereās the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:
New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. Thatās water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Hereās a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, āI resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offerā You donāt have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply āThank you.ā Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it wonāt be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.
thereās a (mid) joke here about how a boy whoās obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics
and who wouldnāt trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:
After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenwegās recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, heās upped the ante with another buyout offerāand a threat that employees speaking to the press should āexit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.ā
alignment offer
Thatās sure a choice of words, aināt it
this guyās information diet is 90% recycled memes by volume, isnāt it
