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)
Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.
A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (itās not always good thoughā¦). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!
I donāt want to catastrophise too much here but Iām not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.
The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)
Thereās been a moderate tsunami of āAI EVERYTHINGā in a bunch of production tools lately too. Most Iāve seen have looked like just rebranding the further development of previously existing algorithmic tools, but there have also been a couple principally from the āwe trained on everything possible!ā camp
unsurprising that someoneās fallen over themselves to integrate the llm-style synthesis into the pipeline too, although itās still extremely exhausting
the cultural fallout of this is going to suuuuuck. itās going to be so much worse than receiving the dancing baby from your weird relatives in 2008
If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the āprompt engineeringā article, consult your physician.
I was expecting a spicier Talk page :(
Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (thereās also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if youāre interested).
Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you wonāt get DMCAād into oblivion, theyāre still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.
Of course, thatās assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose sonās suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means youāre likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its outputā¦
Skimming the reddit thread in search of general public sentiment about this, but unfortunately mostly just found a greatest hits compilation of very gross comments.
According to these very smart people, parents should expect your teenager to die as an outcome of not being perfect people 24/7, technology can never be at fault even when it literally tells you to commit suicide in coded language, and itās actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we canāt do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.
This is nothing, The characterAi subreddit was in full meltdown earlier.
HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up
Pretty good sneer there:
BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states heās tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family
what fascinating timing, whatās it been, a month or so since he got outed as a Russian agent?
US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I canāt tell if this is brilliant satire or not.
Fuck, I didnāt need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was āBenderā or āWall-Eā too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disneyās trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?
My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.
this is peak AI. you might not like it, but itās how top of the bubble looks like
Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who donāt exist, seems baffled people donāt like it starring three bots and deepfake of WisÅawa Szymborska
related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired a dozen or so* people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations arenāt probably bringing serious money either way now
homepage of that radio boasts about their āalmost entirely created by AIā content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. itās gonna go great
apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govtās propagandists from public media
*original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as āfewteenā and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive
What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai donāt sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the sĆ©ance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill Iāve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPTās attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who itās trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.
you gotta admit one thing: this cures imposter syndrome
A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI āhostsā (non-English link).
Theyāre trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason theyāre firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be āan experiment to appeal to Gen Zā. Fortunately, most peopleās response seems to be āfuck off with this crapā.
I justā¦ canāt with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run āexperimentsā with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
I justā¦ canāt with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run āexperimentsā with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place
deleted by creator
Vivaldi Browser has an important teaser AI announcement: https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/113351393167122198
spoiler
āItās not AIā
Thatās kinda funny. If Iām ever in the market for a proprietary chromium-based web browser, they have my interest.
Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.
KendrickZitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavanās recent kicking upstairs, and Googleās bleak future.Main highlight was this snippet:
I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Googleās ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Googleās gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. Itās more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.
Man, itās almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.
If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, howās GE doing these days again?
Itās not that the money is unaware this kills the business. They know. They donāt care because their process is business-agnostic. By design and intent they extract value from the business like it was a capri sun pouch and when line no longer goes up, itās discarded for the next one.
But paying executives in stock options helps āalign incentivesā or whatever
Really enjoying watching Ed level up from week to week. The Zingularity is Near.
As the AI bubble weakens, he only gets stronger.
I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy
When I hear about tech companies going all in on AI as a hedge against the future, Iām reminded of this scene from Ice Age:
I donāt go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling
https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/
https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/
the Determinate Nix move was such an obvious next step I was convinced they had already done it; I guess they can let the mask fall off now that theyāve consolidated their control over the community. as was pointed out on mastodon, Determinate Systems previously promised this wasnāt their goal, which goes to show how much a promise from a fascist is worth.
fortunately it seems like Lix has a NixOS fork on the horizon? I only know about it because the ājust fork it or shut upā assholes are now complaining that a forkās happening (which they seem to only know about by obsessively monitoring Lixās git forge ā I donāt think thereās been an announcement yet)
I do hope Lix sticks around and flourishes
I hope so too! I like their approach so far, and a NixOS fork by the same folks seems like something Iād switch to as soon as I reasonably could
in other news, holy fuck nix
notably, this weirdo seems to have only started the podcast that looks like the only thing theyāre supposedly known for a couple months before the Nix open letter, and I really donāt recognize them from the Nix community otherwise. they also appear to be using their podcast to interview Steering Committee candidates, which seems like a real obvious way to influence the selection process given the kinds of questions they seem to be asking.
Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.
In other news, thereās been a statement on AI training thatās racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:
Now, Iām way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so Iāll whip one out:
Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artistsā work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghmanās run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.
A direct link: aitrainingstatement.org.
