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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)
128 Comments
blakestacey@awful.systems · 22 pts · 1y
An interesting thing came through the arXiv-o-tube this evening: "The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None".
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 16 pts · 1y
It's definitely linked in with the problem we have with LLMs where they detect the context surrounding a common puzzle rather than actually doing any logical analysis. In the image case I'd be very curious to see the control experiment where you ask "which of these two lines is bigger?" and then feed it a photograph of a dog rather than two lines of any length. I'm reminded of how it was (is?)easy to trick chatGPT into nonsensical solutions to any situation involving crossing a river because it pattern-matched to the chicken/fox/grain puzzle rather than considering the actual facts being presented.
Also now that I type it out I think there's a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger. But that's neither here nor there.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
I disagree, or rather I think that's actually a feature; "neither" is a perfectly reasonable answer to that question that a human being would give, and LLMs would be fucked by since they basically never go against the prompt.
arbitraryidentifier@awful.systems · 18 pts · 1y
Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/meta-ai-users-facebook-instagram-1235221430/
Facebook and Instagram to add AI users. I'm sure that's what everyone has been begging for...
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 17 pts · 1y
Spam bots are good now!
froztbyte@awful.systems · 12 pts · 1y
I think it did come up a few weeks back, but it's indeed a hilarious mess. the engagement must flow!
ICastFist@programming.dev · 10 pts · 1y
In my dreams, it won't take long until all user interactions are AI driven and people paying for ad space in that shit realizes that, leading to an immediate crash of meta's finances.
self@awful.systems · 17 pts · 1y
hoping for a 2025 with solidarity, aid, and good opsec for everyone who needs it the most
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 16 pts · 1y
Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal year--
Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering
Huh. I guess it'll be another weird one.
(I know I know, low effort post, I'm sick in bed and bored)
mii@awful.systems · 12 pts · 1y
Hey, at least there’s no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?
Never mind.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
They are also spinning it into "the car is so great you cant do terrorism with it due to how strong it is", which considering the several vehicle terrorism acts recently seems very unwise.
Also 'it would be different for the bystanders' i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely) and still 7 people were hurt (and the driver died). Id wait a bit with drawing further conclusions.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
Steel, like a pressure cooker
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
Somebody pointed out that I might have been wrong and steel might be a perfect shield for anything.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 1y
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 1y
chalk it down to perp incompetence. single direct hit with old 155mm shell (7kg explosive) can destroy a normal modern tank, nevermind a car. no amount of shitty panels would contain anything at least mildly substantial. there were cases of suicide vests with bigger charge than that (10kg) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66355032
symbolic building (??) still makes sense as a target for terrorist attack
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
Sure but id expect the perp to first use the cybertruck to ram into the building, or at least move closer, and not park nicely, otoh, if he was a terrorists what do I know, dont exactly know what goes through their mind shortly before things at high speeds go through their mind.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 1y
parking like this raises less suspicion. maybe he wasn't sure enough about whatever igniting mechanism he had, he could end up stuck in a wall unable to get out to look it up
instead of high speed disassembly dude just burned down in automatically locked death trap, i guess he found that anticlimatic. not like isis (guessing) recruits brightest minds out there
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
Yeah the story is about to get weird. Your isis guess might not be far off. See this same military base as the guy who drove into the crowds.
Writers of 2025: "Somehow isis returned." (I know isis never left, media just looked less at it, but thought it would be a funny joke).
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 1y
i've seen that news piece on how they were in the same base and how they were deployed in afghanistan around the same time previously and that's what i based this guess on
still, so far it could be anything else including complete coincidence. it's like dude forgot everything, he was radioman but couldn't make remote controlled detonator and didn't use efficient charge for some reason
not only isis never left, i guess they controlled some territory at least until last month even if it was only a couple of villages in desert
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 1y
update 2: yeah it's not that
so far what is known: active duty green beret, trumper, freshly (?) after breakup, wrote a "list of grievances" but it's not cited anywhere in full (maybe it's too racist for polite company). appears to be cooked in some ways. while he was a green beret he wasn't 18C or 18B so he wasn't specifically trained for use or handling of high explosives, (no cross-training?) he was more in business of communications, surveillance, intelligence gathering (18E, then 18F) also worked with drones and there was something about drones in that list of grievances
bitofhope@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
Sure, you know what, let's go with that. While obviously I don't condone terrorism, I agree with Nic here that if you are going to do a car bombing, blowing up a Cybertruck is preferable to other cars. Because it contains the blast better or whatever.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
Don't worry about the low effort post, even the writers of 2025 are phoning it in.
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 15 pts · 1y
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 14 pts · 1y
HotGarbage@awful.systems · 12 pts · 1y
https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780#m
The whole thread is terrible; controlling and borderline abusive behavior.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 12 pts · 1y
I feel personally attacked because I have a BELOVED dino plush that looks almost exactly like that one, only is, you know, a fucking plush toy not an eldritch horror. They took a perfectly fine toy and ruined it with a stupid chatbot, the girl did the smartest thing and just uses it as a normal plushy.
Also if you listen to the video at the end you can really easily figure out why kids don't like that toy, IT'S FUCKING ANNOYING. Kids don't want to deal with your bullshit and fortunately they don't yet know how to pretend to care.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 10 pts · 1y
"In the meantime, would you like to play a game or maybe hear a fun fact?"
"No."
"That's okay! Is there something else you would like to do or talk about? I'm here to chat about anything you like!"
It's like a deliberately written comedy scene of a character who can't pick up on social cues.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 14 pts · 1y
Teaching the girl how to deadpan ignore annoying guys in her DMs for the rest of her life, I mean, valuable skill
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
The video is hilarious. The idiot AI man is so gpt-pilled he cannot figure out that this thing is just bloody annoying!!
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
This guy's gonna be on whatever remains of Twitter in like 20 years vague posting about the missing missing reasons his kid doesn't talk to him anymore.
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 10 pts · 1y
Found a couple QRTs cooking the guy which caught my attention:
https://twitter.com/denimneverdies/status/1872364569743786286
https://twitter.com/TheWapplehouse/status/1873915404529406462
istewart@awful.systems · 14 pts · 1y
Not sure where this came from, but it can't be all bad if it chaos-dunks on Yudkowsky like this. Was relayed to me via Ed Zitron's Discord, hopefully the Q isn't for Quillete or Qanon
bitofhope@awful.systems · 12 pts · 1y
Curtis
IQ:300, Special Move: Urbital Laser
Curtis Boldmug has defined the meta for years. A competitive staple that strongly influences even builds not running him. Special attack causes unavoidable psychic damage even if you resist its charm effect. Vulnerable to sunlight.
Balaji
IQ: 300, Special Move: Yes Country for Old Men
A support type character. Good for ramping grift mana, but can't carry a game on his own. His ultimate is overcosted and just sucks up the hypecoins he spent the entire game producing.
Ray
IQ: 300, Special Move: Black Hole Graviton
Mostly just receives support thanks to boomer nostalgia factor. Low but nonzero win rate in modern tournament meta. Highly viable in time machine formats.
Eliezer
IQ: 300, Special Move: Goffik the Hedgehog and the Enders of Game
Former newbie favorite, fairly accessible and flashy. The Yud has seen heavy nerfs in the past years and at medium to high levels, his stats plateau severely much like his special move's plot. Thiel synergy has also shifted towards Curtis mains leaving Yud in shambles. Still a fun archetype and enjoys popularity as a smurf build.
Jack
IQ: 300, Special Move: Snorting an entire ground up bitcoin
Rather run of the mill character whose effectiveness was rather limited for a long time. The Blue Sky archetype made him meta relevant for all of five minutes until he got reclaimed by the toxic playerbase built around the social media platform he originally started and the uber braingenius currently in charge of that company. Beard gives him +1 armor bonus which is fine I guess.
Peter
IQ: 300, Special Move: Pondering my Orb
The apex predator of SV capitalism. The Black Lotus of technofascist grifters. His character is rumored to be based on Count Dracula. Even most SV billionaires can't touch him in a 1v1 matchup. Truly classic S-tier thinky boi.
Beff
IQ: 300, Special Move: World's Most Divorced Man First Date Percent Speedrun
Likely intended as a joke character, a guy named Guillaume pretending to know how to pretend to be cool on the internet. His posts turned out to be so lethally cringeworthy he started an entire archetype of */acc brainos. Not quite on the power level of Peter or Curtis, but surprisingly influential for an obvious meme build. Extremely weak to heartbreak from women named Ruth.
Leopold
IQ: 300, Special Move: To The Moooooon
Honestly, I had never heard of this guy before today but the data doesn't lie. The dots do go up and to the right and he posts a lot of them. Extrapolating from current trends, he will single-handedly reach singularity by the end of Q3 of this year.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 10 pts · 1y
each of them needs a scale (logarithmic) showing how much adderall they take
gerikson@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
I recognize everyone except Leopold. Increase my suffering by telling me who it is.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 1y
https://xcancel.com/leopoldasch Leopold Ashenbrenner, some chart maker and
substackblog haver with twitter account. swallows all openai marketing materials hook line and sinker, i had enough of abyss gazing duty today won't tell you moreskillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 1y
his academic output is funny, he has 2 arxiv preprints, an article (?) published not in any normal journal, but instead on some other dude's blog (??), and an article at somewhere called unjournal, which claims that it's not a journal, (???) but instead it's a nonprofit packed with EAs. and that nets him 230 citations (that's looking up in google scholar, not going to fire up scopus just for that)
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
For all their talk about "cathedrals" and "gatekeeping" I think we don't gatekeep the ability to compile a PDF enough.
We should at least require all the weirdoes to write their bullshit by hand with a quill
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 1y
none of his articles (not preprints, arxiv handles this) have DOIs. even paper mills much worse than MDPI can get these
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
He retweeted Ivanka praising him... 🤢
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 1y
this logo in corner is for something called overfit qs, they have instagram page and that image was posted there
self@awful.systems · 14 pts · 1y
a reply from a mastodon thread about an instance of AI crankery:
maybe I’m late to this realization because it’s a very stupid thing to do, but a lot of the promptfondlers who come here regurgitating this exact marketing fluff and swearing they know exactly how LLMs work when they obviously don’t really are just asking the fucking LLMs, aren’t they?
V0ldek@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
Because... because it generated plausibly looking sentence? Do... do you think the "just electrical signals" bit is clever or creative?
Here's an LLM performance test that I call the Elon Test: does the sentence plausibly look like it could've been said by Elon Musk? Yes? Then your thing is stupid and a failure.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
That test doesn't totally work as Elon does often say fuck.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
That first post. They are using llms to create quantum resistant crypto systems? Eyelid twitch
E: also, as I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks, this made me realize how much worse science crankery is going to get due to LLMs.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
As self and khalid_salad said, there are certainly other branches of CS that attract cranks. I'm not much of a computer scientist myself but even I have seen some 🤔-ass claims about compilers, computational complexity, syntactic validity of the entire C programming language (?), and divine approval or lack thereof of particular operating systems and even the sorting algorithms used in their schedulers!
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
I thought those non crypto cranks were relatively rare, which is why I added the "really" part. There has been only one templeos after all. And cryptography (crypto too but that is more financial cranks) has that 'this will ve revolutionary feeling which cranks seem to love, while also feeling accessable (compared to complexity theory, which you usually only know about if you know some cs already). I didn't mean there are no cranks/weird ass claims about the whole field, but Id think that cryptography attracts the lions share. The lambda calculus bit down thread might prove me wrong however.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
I know what you mean. I think the main genre of CS cranks is people trying way too hard to prove something they've gotten way too attached to and cryptography (and its more or less obviously stupid applications) and functional programming (proven to be no more or less powerful than procedural, but sometimes more or less fun) seem to attract a particularly high share of cranks. Almost certainly other fields too.
self@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
I still need to finish that FPGA Krivine machine because it’s still living rent-free in my head and will do so until it’s finally evaluating expressions, but boy howdy fuck am I not looking forward to the cranks finding it
dgerard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
write a series of blog posts about it, all of which end "And in conclusion, punch a Nazi."
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
also sprinkle it at the start, and throughout
because you just know the tiring fuckers won't bother reading in depth
khalid_salad@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
every once in a while we get a "here is a compression scheme that works on all data, fuck you and your pidgins" but yeah i think this is right
self@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
there’s unfortunately a lot of cranks around lambda calculus and computability (specifically check out the Wikipedia article on hypercomputation and start chasing links; you’re guaranteed to find at least one aggressive crank editing their favorite grift into the less watched corners of the wiki), and a lot of them have TESCREAL roots or some ties to that belief cluster or to technofascism, because it’s much easier to form a computer death cult when your idea of computation is utterly fucked
khalid_salad@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
fair, there are cranks still trying to trisect an arbitrary angle with an unmarked straight-edge and compass, so i shouldn't be surprised. there are probably cranks still trying to solve the halting problem
bitofhope@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
Right, well God says:
Not bad for the almighty creator 'rando number generator', eh?
froztbyte@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
a non-zero amount of the time, yeah
also, that poster's profile, holy fuck. even just the About is a trip
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting? And lol at 'im seeing evidence the voting public was HACKED! (emph mine)' a few moments later 'anybody know some big 5 webscrape API coders? I need them for evidence gathering'. The delightful pattern of crankery where there is a big sweeping new idea that nobody else has seen, plus no actual ability in a technical field.
self@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
just an ordinary mastodon poster, doing the utterly ordinary thing of fedposting in every thread started by a popular leftist account, calling “their wing” a bunch of cowards for not talking in public about doing acts of stochastic violence, and pondering why they don’t have more followers
ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 pts · 1y
Comment sections on awful.systems are similar to this Drew Gooden sketch sometimes:
gerikson@awful.systems · 20 pts · 1y
If you stick around and do a bunch of research you will end up better informed and much unhappier.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 18 pts · 1y
Once a month or so Awful Systems casually mentions a racist in some sub-sub-culture who I had never heard about before and then I get to spend an hour doing background research on obscure net drama from 2013 or whatever.
self@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
I’m making a mental note to keep that link around for the next time someone barges into one of our threads and does the “I don’t know what this is, here’s my reaction to what I thought the topic was, no I didn’t read the article or lurk” routine
as a bonus they might accidentally watch the rest of the video and finally figure out how much AI sucks
V0ldek@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
You know guys, it's really hard for me to give MY input when you are so negative about all the terrible things I like. Next time you guys come CRAWLING to me for advice, try not hating me as a human being for everything my twisted value system represents.
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
bizarre that they actually just say this
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 10 pts · 1y
Oh no I'm in this sketch and I don't like it. Or at least, I would be. The secret is to acknowledge your lack of background knowledge or basic grounding in what you're talking about and then blunder forward based on vibes and values, trusting that if you're too far off base on the details you'll piss off someone (sorry skillissuer) enough to correct you.
BigMuffin69@awful.systems · 12 pts · 1y
Fellas, I was promised the first catastrophic AI event in 2024 by the chief doomers. There's only a few hours left to go, I'm thinking skynet is hiding inside the times square orb. Stay vigilant!
V0ldek@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
I'm sad to report that the catastrophic AI event already happened and it was this picture
::: spoiler mind horrors beyond your comprehension
:::
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
Ow god it is 2025 in .nl, it is coming! Everything is exploding, ai is turning us into fireworks! Yud was right!!1!!one!!
mirrorwitch@awful.systems · 12 pts · 1y
I find it impressive how gen-AI developed a technology that is fine-tuned to generate content that looks precisely passably plausible, but never good enough to be correct or interesting or beautiful or worthwhile in any way.
Like if I was trying to fill the Internet with noise to ruin it, on purpose, I couldn't do better than this. (mostly on accounr of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still). It's like the ideal infohazard weapon if your goal is to worsen as many lives as you can
jonhendry@iosdev.space · 7 pts · 1y
@mirrorwitch
It was made to write copy for catalogs, alumni bulletins, and mediocre in-flight magazines.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
It also is 'great' for creating post for people who want to debate others but who dont actually care to make up arguments themselves, quality of the argument doesnt even matter. Which is quite the shit development.
At least you can recognize real replies as there are words they never fucking use.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
https://nltimes.nl/2024/12/29/ai-generated-objections-overwhelm-dutch-municipalities well that sucks.
dgerard@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
https://bsky.app/profile/alexblechman.bsky.social/post/3lertjt6oyk26
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
"...according to my machine learning model we actually have a strong fit in favor of shooting at CEOs. There's a 66% chance that each shot will either jam or fail to hit anything fatal, which creates a strong Bayesian prior in favor, or at least merits collecting further data to scale our models"
"What do you mean I've defined the problem in order to get the desired result? Machine learning process said we're good. Why do you hate the future?"
self@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
from I Was Promised a More Aesthetically Pleasing Cyberpunk Dystopia by Vicky Osterweil
jonhendry@iosdev.space · 5 pts · 1y
@self
To be fair it also endangers people outside the car, just not when a deflagration is set off inside.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
Wow, that's bleak. The whole article I mean.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
Apparently the repubs always do good there or something, i saw somebody complain that the news desert stuff claims there is a much stronger casual link between news desert and trump won than there actually is.
I hope the people here at least realize how bullshit this is right? The ai doesnt know who designed it. It isnt a child talking about how their parents looked.
self@awful.systems · 10 pts · 1y
this isn’t surprising at all, but some of the details are interesting: Server found in apartment funded by Russian government used AI to interfere with 2024 US elections
LLMs really are designed for this kind of thing, aren’t they?
froztbyte@awful.systems · 10 pts · 1y
LLMs continue to be so good and wagmi that they've progressed to the serving ads part of the extractivist SaaS lifecycle
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 10 pts · 1y
ellison wants to compete with thiel for title of chief boot-wielder https://archive.is/cOnPx
bitofhope@awful.systems · 17 pts · 1y
Not that I expect anything better from the fucking lawnmower but the flippant attitude on display is little short of amazing. How bad is it when Business Insider of all publications calls your vision a "surveillance dystopia"?
Body cam footage of the officer-involved shooting was not available, as the AI system supervising the involved officers was coincidentally disregarding its previous instructions and instead writing a minstrel show routine at the time of the event.
istewart@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
I can't help but feel like for Ellison in particular, he must have given himself no choice but to believe this stuff is more capable than it is. He's 80 years old now, and if building towards honest-to-god "real AI" wasn't what his whole career was about, then what was the point? The twilight of the older generations of tech executives is going to be its own special kind of pathology.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 10 pts · 1y
For Larry? Building a corporation that will last a thousand years fueled by greed and contempt to developer and consumer alike, and which would make nazis blush for its industrial disregrad for ethics in pursuit of profit. He did build a legacy for himself. I'll go to my grave cursing his name and he'll hear it from the depths of hell and smile.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
Nobody outside the company has been able to confirm whether the impressive benchmark performance of OpenAI's o3 model represents a significant leap in actual utility or just a significant gap in the value of those benchmarks. However, they have released information showing that the most ostensibly-powerful model costs orders of magnitude more. The lede is in that first graph, which shows that for whatever performance gain o3 costs over ~$10 per request with the headline-grabbing version costing ~$1500 per request.
I hope they've been able to identify a market willing to pay out the ass for performance that, even if it somehow isn't over hyped, is roughly equivalent to an average college graduate.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 10 pts · 1y
if all of that $1500 cost is electricity, and at arbitrarily chosen but probably high electricity price of $0.2/kWh, that's 7.5MWh per request. could be easily twice that. this is approx how much electricity four 4-person households consume in a year in poland. or about half of american one. six tons of TNT equivalent, or almost 2/3 ton of oil equivalent if you prefer
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
Actually wait I'm pretty sure it's even worse because I'm terrible at reading logarithmic scales. It's roughly halfway between $1,000 and $10,000 on their log scale, which if I do the math while actually awake works out closer to $3,000.
JFranek@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
I'm wondering about the benchmark too. It's way above my level to figure out how it can be gamed. But, buried in the article:
The most expensive o3 version achieved 87.5%
gerikson@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
as an amuse bouche for the horrors that will follow this year, please enjoy this lobste.rs reaching the melting down end stage after going full Karen at someone who agrees with a submitted post saying LLMs are a dead end when it comes to AI.
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_tefto4
Thankfully, accusing someone of being a crapto promoter is seen as an attack that is beyond the pale.
Highlights from the rest of the thread include bemoaning the lack of a downvote button for registering disapproval:
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_ft9mpj
unilaterally deciding to reply multiple times to one comment, neccesitating them to add a meta comment with hyperlinks
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_jjk5ei
And of course is a MoreWronger (moroner?)
blakestacey@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
I just got a hit of esprit d'escalier, and wished I'd replied to this
with
gerikson@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
I'm increasingly convinced that this person is in a dark place mentally, and am fighting an internal battle to keep poking them for the lulz or just ignoring them.
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_cyrxm4
(I've seen this behavior on lobste.rs before and I think sometimes people literally get banned for their own good)
Edit bored on a train so I did the math, in the comment thread, this user has made 30% of the comments by count and 20% by "volume" (basically number of bytes in the plaintext).
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
tha's a lotta posting
gerikson@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
Adderall will do that to a fellow
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
Lol of course they think they are civil and other people as pushing nasty rethoric. Quite the sealion feeling.
Wonder if they even notice how much communication weirdness they themself used. With the emphasis of emotional laden language. (They didnt use bold so i cant call it crank capitalization, but more crank cursive. A big deal for me! ;) )
Anyway the questioning of "how do you know this is why there is no downvoting" shows the type of person they are. (And is quite the Rationalist annoying behavior, suddenly they demand excessive sourcing for small remarks of people they disagree with).
gerikson@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
this feeling
https://mastodon.social/@crinstamcamp@thecanadian.social/113751062959542755
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
"Do you want to refine your claim?"
mawhrin@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
one day i'll finally catch a lobste permaban thanks to your links :-)
gerikson@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
enjoy your flags from outraged simps
mawhrin@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
:-)
khalid_salad@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
I have landed on a "you can get fucked if you make this annoying for me, I don't need your product anyway" response to everything. The silver lining is that I will be dealing with way more bullshit while being just as angry all the time at everything.
gerikson@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
noodling on a blog post - does anyone with more experience of LW/EA than me know if "AI safety" people are referencing the invention of nuclear weapons as a template for regulating/forbidding "AGI"?
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
A notable article from our dear friend Nick Bostrom mentions the atmospheric auto-ignition story:
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
(this goes on for a number of paragraphs)
This whole article has some wild stuff if you haven't seen it before BTW, so buckle up. He also mentions this story in https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks and https://existential-risk.com/concept.pdf if you want older examples.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
I'd be surprised if Eliezer hasn't mentioned it at some point, maybe more in the way that you're after. Can't find any examples though.
In his Times article the only place he mentions nukes is what we should do to countries that have too many GPUs: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/
Edit: Not Mr. Yudkowski but see https://futureoflife.org/document/policymaking-in-the-pause/
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
When they mention AI guardrails, they mean so it does become racist, spamming, abusive and based on the largest abuse of the cultural sector since spotify right?
Right?
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
*jerking off motion*
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 1y
just after end of manhattan project there was an idea coming from some of manhattan project scientists to dispose american nukes and ban development of nukes in any other country. that's why we live in era of lasting peace without nuclear weapons. /s
some EAs had similar idea wrt spicy autocomplete development, which comes with implied assumption that spicy autocomplete is dangerous or at least useful (as in nuclear power, civilian or military)
gerikson@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
Yeah, my starting position would be that it was obvious to any competent physicist at the time (although there weren't that many) that the potential energy release from nuclear fission was a real thing - the "only" thing to do to weaponise it or use it for peaceful ends was engineering.
The analogy to "runaway X-risk AGI" is there's a similar straight line from ELIZA to Acausal Robot God, all that's required is a bit of elbow grease and good ole fashioned American ingenuity. But my point is that apart from Yud and a few others, no serious person believes this.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 1y
I don't think it was obvious from first principles in 30s that fission works or releases energy, but if provided experimental evidence there was no other way to interpret it. also people had general sense that nuclear materials can be a source of energy because there were attempts at controlling decay, i think in interbellum. the other part is cult thinking and i don't have links for this particular one
gerikson@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
Yeah it's been decades since I read Rhodes' history about the atom bomb, so I missed the years a bit. My point is that even if we couldn't explain exactly what was happening there was something physically there, and we knew enough about it that Oppenheimer and co. could convince the US Army to build Oak Ridge and many other facilities at massive expense.
We can't say the same about "AI".
dgerard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
choose your silicon valley thinkboi
edit: goddammit istewart got in first because we both saw this on the zitron discord
istewart@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
alas, there is no honor or glory to be had from winning the meme race
BigMuffin69@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
ong Yann LeCun was sharing this post too and i was shook that he was seeing quality shit post like this before me. We are not ready for whats coming next . jpg
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
via this I just learned that google's about[0] to open the taps on fingerprinting allowance for advertisers
that'll go well.
I realize that a lot of people in the rtb space already spend an utterly obscene amount of effort and resources to try do this shit in the first place, but jesus, this isn't even pretending. guess their projections for ad revenue must be looking real scary!
edit [0] - "about", as in next month. and they announced it last month.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
The Google post appears to be Updating our platform policies to reflect innovations in the ads ecosystem.
I have no idea what the heck those words mean (it appears to be some bizarro form of English), so I diffed the policy itself. Here are the parts I found notable.
This will be removed:
This will be removed:
This will be added:
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
you just gotta love how vacuously pointless the wording is
google-rfc "must": "we want something we can bend you over a barrel with if you're caught out by one, but that's all we'll bother committing because otherwise it eats into our lovely extortion profits"
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1y
Also I'm having a fun time imagining an accurate device fingerprinting disclosure from someone who was really really thorough.
Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD may collect the following information:
::: spoiler Don't worry none of it is a cookie :D
Some stuff in this list is me being silly, but overall it shows that the talk about "privacy-enhancing technologies" is premature on the web platform. The web has been trying to have better privacy defaults over time; but there's a long legacy of features from before this was considered as much, as well as Google tossing around their weight in the web standards and browser space.
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 1y
now i wonder how much of that is blocked by firefox enhanced tracking protection. not all, of course, and it's probably much more than needed for unique identifier. there's mozilla security blog post on this topic says that some anti-fingerprinting measures were built in all the way back in 2020 (firefox 72)
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
Above I listed a bunch of things which would help narrow down browser version, but that's hopeless anyway -- an adversary will probably be able to figure out your rough browser version even if you fake the UA string, and that you're running in anti-fingerprinting mode.
So assuming that's out of scope I think these are probably the big categories:
That said while I've worked with browsers, I'm not in the biz of fingerprinting or anti-fingerprinting, so there's surely stuff I haven't thought of.
* Actually we should probably just disable non-HTTPS entirely...
** Running under a VM is probably the minimum required to mitigate the chances of cutting-edge side-channel timing attacks from James Bond level adversaries, but at that point maybe you just want a dedicated browsing computer heh. I did chuckle at the idea of someone trying to apply cryptographic constant-time algorithm techniques to writing a browser though.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
I remember during my very very first job a security guy explaining to me why I can't record work emails of people borrowing stuff from the company's internal library because GDPR. In a company of like 100 people. I guess Google is too big to care.
It's the same feeling as when it's reported some guy was able to defraud literal millions from public funds while I had to separately report and bring a receipt for the $5 I spent on a city bus while out on a business trip because it was funded from a public grant or I'd get fired and sued, in that order.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1y
I'm not a gdpr person (nor even european) but this sounds like bullshit - was it?
V0ldek@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
I simplified , but:
The problem is that if someone leaves the company you should delete all of their PII you don't need for compliance reasons. The emails were firstname.lastname@company.com, as is usual, so it was PII. So if someone borrowed something from the library and that record stayed in the database, when their company profile got deactivated we would've had to have a flow that deleted that row or at least anonymised it. Needless to say, this was a minor side project with a time budget of one month, so we just ended up not storing any PII in the first place instead of bothering with archiving and removal.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1y
Is the brain just a computer By Iris van Rooij, a psychologist and cognitive scientist (and she is also a bit skeptical about the claims about AI). Might be an interesting read for the people here.
gerikson@awful.systems · 4 pts · 1y
Techdirt - 2024: AI Panic Flooded The Zone, Leading To A Backlash
mountainriver@awful.systems · 11 pts · 1y
While a good description of how AI Doom has progressed during 2024, I think the connection to regulation (at least the EU regulation, I am not familiar with what was proposed in California) is of the mark.
The EU regulation isn't aimed at AI Doom, it's aimed at banning and regulating real world practices. Think personal data, not AI going conscious.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 9 pts · 1y
I think that's something to keep an eye on. The existence of the AI doom cult does not preclude there being good-faith regulations that can significantly reduce these people's ability and incentives to do harm. Indeed the technology is so expensive and ineffective that if we can find a "reasonable compromise" plan to curb the most blatant kinds of abuse and exploitation we could easily see the whole misbegotten enterprise wither on the vine.
mawhrin@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1y
oh, typical techdirt eu-bashing, this time again because we have regulations.
(i wouldn't be surprised if they're conflating regulations with panic on purpose and packing valid criticism of llms and image plagiarism generators with the ridiculous tescreal screeds just to discredit the former; masnick's primary stance was always extreme tech libertarianism and american exceptionalism, and the whole publication follows this)