We are defederating awful.systems from:
- lemmy.dbzer0.com
- anarchist.nexus
- quokk.au
because it's extremely anarchist to use the chatbot as your moderator (no no it's totally human in the loop) and post corporate DARVO-filled excuses when caught.
This is a last straw after a string of dubious and exhausting behaviour.
If you're an awful.systems user and you post to communities on those instances, you will need to create an account on one of them.
59 Comments
ebu@awful.systems · 17 pts · 111d
db0's roundup doesn't pass the sniff test either. i'm supposed to take on your word that it was an "experiment" (testing what hypothesis?) and an "inside joke" (where is the explanation?) despite the paper trail showing approximately 0% of this being true, but you're totally comfortable speculating on the actions and motivations of Rimu -- nay, a mysterious unnameable "piefed developer"? you have the gall to be salty they didn't edit your narrative into their post about your instance admin's behavior when you refuse to even say their fucking name? it's gross! it's gross.
lol at "corporate-LLMs"
fullsquare@awful.systems · 16 pts · 111d
given opportunity they'll make anarchist palantir then will insist it's all fine because it's open source, sorry "open weight"
corbin@awful.systems · 14 pts · 111d
I could be charitable enough to imagine a conversation on Discord where one mod posts "heres the log, ngl he looks pretty bigoted, i already pre emptively banned them", next mod posts "lol ran it through deepseek for funsies and got <clipboard.png>", and finally somebody says "lmao gettin smarter erry day, verra nice, big thanks to big brother sponsor OpenAI™", to which there are many Borat stickers and thumbs-up. I can't be charitable enough to ignore their own wiki:
Wrong fucking dog-whistle, dudes. If you want to communicate that you're open to responsible self-hosted machine learning which doesn't simulate humans, then say that. As read, this sounds like they enjoy using
llama.cppat home, and the median friend in my orbit who is doingllama.cppat home is suffering light chatbot psychoses already. Honestly, it's a little cringe that they haven't declared aNeo-LeninistAnarchist Butlerian Jihad By Zero instead.froztbyte@awful.systems · 12 pts · 111d
I kept asking for the code, and their response was all manner of telling
scruiser@awful.systems · 10 pts · 111d
Good on you for pushing that point. Trying to pass off the logging details identifying their llm as ChatGPT as a "joke" was incredibly stupid, but more people might have bought that lie if you didn't press that followup question.
rainwall@piefed.social · 8 pts · 111d
Yeah I'd like to see the python "query" script and its git history to ensure it just pulls user comment into a txt file and doesnt then autoprompt it into an LLM api/mcp. That's the logical end point of querying user comments if you're going to use an LLM to "analyze" them anyway.
Maybe some proof of this qwen instance with setup logs or something that shows it existed at the time of the supposed local query.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 12 pts · 111d
your read of this situation is entirely correct, but things aren't as bad as you think. things are a bit worse
they're running a distributed computing thing that hosts some llms and diffusion models, for their own and their users use
froztbyte@awful.systems · 11 pts · 111d
and, frankly, given the “what makes you think there even is a repo?” type answers, I’d have some Ops Maturity questions there too
(nvm even the code itself (which apparently is something in the ballpark of heisenberg dynamics))
fullsquare@awful.systems · 9 pts · 111d
update 2: they found the repo, week+ later, but won't show you and it was made by yet another admin (tbf it was said straight previously deep in some thread). just a rogue mod, nothing to see here
fullsquare@awful.systems · 8 pts · 111d
i'm not a professional computer toucher, but i bet you'll find something to sneer at here https://haidra.net/deleting-users/
istewart@awful.systems · 10 pts · 111d
Ray Kurzweil Thought gonna be stimulating ideological incoherence for years to come
scruiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 111d
wtf are these ideals supposed to be?
If its "libertarian, but doesn't want people dying in the streets or dying of preventable diseases", I will give them the tiniest modicum of credit for being better than standard libertarians, but being libertarian at all still leaves them deep in the negative on credibility in my books.
By which I assume they mean corporate models that got released as open weight models (and at-best/at-most got a touch of fine-tuning from a community effort), but still ultimately originated from mass plagiarism and are still not useful beyond generating slop...
dgerard@awful.systems · 13 pts · 110d
"libertarian" outside the US is the leftist term that Rothbard specifically and knowingly co-opted for shitheadry
blakestacey@awful.systems · 10 pts · 110d
So now, in the US, "libertarian socialist" sounds like it means "a socialist who knows too much about age-of-consent laws".
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 110d
Ah, that makes sense. Right-wingers are regularly trying to twist left wing and academic terms to their own use.
it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems · 11 pts · 111d
Very little relation to capital-L Libertarians. Libertarian socialism is broadly socialism that seeks to replace the state with smaller-scale social structures and direct democracy that can satisfy everyone's needs equitably without the threat of violence or enforcement of property rights. Libertarianism is meant to protect capitalism from the state; libertarian socialism is meant to protect people from both the state and capitalism. I don't want to get into the details of leftist ideological micro-labels, but generally confusing anarchists with anarcho-capitalists is the quickest way to piss off both.
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 110d
Thanks for the explanation.
Using an LLM is a pretty fundamental failure at protecting people from capitalism! I guess db0 hasn't paid any serious attention to the discussion we've had on awful.systems...
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 9 pts · 111d
“libertarian” outside of a US context is a perfectly valid word to use to describe “non-authoritarian” or anarchist left ideologies, e.g. libertarian communism or “libcom”
i suppose you’d say “left-libertarian” if the meaning is ambiguous, but here it should be implied by “socialism”
scruiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 110d
Yeah I guess my Americanness is showing here.
If they mean to claim the identity of being non-authoritarian or leftist... LLMs are pretty intrinsically fascist and authoritarian along multiple axes (as we've discussed many, many times here on awful.systems). Even if it really was a locally-run open weights model, that only mitigates the issues not removes them.
dgerard@awful.systems · 7 pts · 111d
lol if i'd seen that i'd have moved to part ways long before this, goodness me
ebu@awful.systems · 13 pts · 110d
after scrolling through a couple days and accounts on the extended db0verse it's extremely hard not to come to the conclusion that it's a haven for people who think Rimu specifically is some kind of combination antichrist/lolcow who is personally here to destroy all of mastodon, lemmy, and the concept of federation itself. some choice extracts from the very fine people over there:
very reasonable and normal account to have on your instance
that's right, he's personally deleting every post on the internet forever
fucking lol it's these chuds again
that last one is on a thread completely detached from Rimu, by the way. Rimu possesses a kind of hyperagency, capable of superconvincing everyone of everything which is why any and all defederation due to AI slop is actually secretly his fault
so yeah, good riddance
scruiser@awful.systems · 10 pts · 110d
I too was drawn with a morbid fascination to see what they were saying... db0 tried labeling all of awful.systems as dgerard's collection of sockpuppets acting as his PR machine with maybe a few other humans. ...I feel like I'm not living up to the hype, I'm not generating nearly enough PR for dgerard! Also, labeling us as a bunch of trolls. Which yes, one of our is literally called sneerclub, but since we don't actually go onto lesswrong (or other rat communities) to stir up shit (we can find plenty pre-stirred) I don't think trolls actually fits as a label.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 11 pts · 110d
Much like the Clock People in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues deliberately invented one ritual into which they could channel all their compulsions toward ritual, SneerClub is the place within which we can quarantine all our pettiness and have it manifest in an appropriate manner, i.e., reading Yudkowsky's posts in the voice of Augustus St. Cloud from Venture Bros.
dgerard@awful.systems · 10 pts · 110d
db0 gets new job at IMAX with that projection power
self@awful.systems · 9 pts · 110d
db0 posted here for years but also thinks we’re all dgerard
given that the guy runs fediseer, an algorithmic spam blocklist that previously had a glowing endorsement for awful.systems and our moderation style straight from db0 until he deleted it yesterday, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine fediseer is about to go the direction all similar projects go and turn into some group’s personal shitlist, and the idea that we’re somehow all david and somehow all trolling (even though our instance pretty much keeps to itself) is going to be why we end up on the spam shitlist and possibly automatically defederated by a few large instances
db0 posted on awful.systems communities for long enough we were slow to deal with him being a huge problem and for that I apologize
blakestacey@awful.systems · 8 pts · 110d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GiCfqQEEwk
Joke's on them, odds are federation is broken anyway
o7___o7@awful.systems · 8 pts · 110d
The jank is a feature <3
fullsquare@awful.systems · 3 pts · 109d
that night, dgerard's sock drawer grew three sizes
fullsquare@awful.systems · 10 pts · 110d
the enemy is both strong and weak etc etc
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 109d
(not too long ago) I spent just over a year working with/for someone who was like that (always both the victim and the hero, etc) and, god, what an utter fucking cost
same person was all up elon's ass, into "energy", and much more. it was truly an education to watch it up close
fullsquare@awful.systems · 11 pts · 111d
also, poor wittle intern mod unruffled who was there as an admin barely for three years since day one, that's no time to learn how to moderate at all
then after defed immediately came complaining on dedicated community
o7___o7@awful.systems · 10 pts · 111d
This right here.
LLM usage is bad, but could be forgiven if the instances shut it down and put a plan in place to prevent a recurrence. A little "sorry" goes a long way.
The lying means that they aren't sorry and can't be trusted.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 13 pts · 111d
we're talking about openly pro-genai instance where good majority of community banners is slop and that runs distributed chatbot cluster. apparently when you don't just enourage brainrot as a service but also take it into your own hands and cook your own users autonomously, that must be some kind of revolutionary praxis
zbyte64@awful.systems · 14 pts · 111d
Man they wrote a lot of words to say "We didn't use an LLM to feed it user data, except for the fact we did." Cool distinction that it wasn't used to decide on the ban, just to communicate it 🙄
V0ldek@awful.systems · 13 pts · 111d
Happy for you/sorry that happened
LostWanderer@fedia.io · 11 pts · 111d
Hmm, a good move, as the implications using LLMs in moderation work is a big no-no. As moderation requires both human interpretation and care in order to be successful. Feeding the latest torment nexus that the Silicon techno-fascists have concocted with user comments is only doing long term harm. While there is no money in generating slop for the masses, there is in surveillance, and feeding user comments to the beast is only going to help those twats. I'll have to figure out my instance's position on LLMs and see if I can get them to defed from these three offenders. If not, I'll happily spin up an account on an instance that defederates from the growing list of ick: lemmy.ml, hexbear, and the db0 triplets...
froztbyte@awful.systems · 10 pts · 110d
I’m not gonna link it but it was rather hilarious to see db0 go full SBF over on the other side
meanwhile, damn near every other interaction I’ve seen to this anywhere else: “lol, they really like to dig huh”
anise@awful.systems · 10 pts · 109d
Well, glad I have to switch instances because of AI bullshit again
glad to be on an instance that is very unlikely to fall for it tho, and also to not have constant federation issues with sneerclub and the stubsack and the like
self@awful.systems · 7 pts · 109d
glad to have you! we’re happy to be comfortably LLM-free (to my knowledge at least, these shitheads get off on when the slop machine temporarily tricks a person into thinking they’re not touching slop) and frankly still a bit shocked an established ActivityPub instance figured they could get away with using the things at all
blakestacey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 109d
Hi!
anise@awful.systems · 6 pts · 109d
hi! fan of your writing!
blakestacey@awful.systems · 6 pts · 109d
I knew there had to be one out there... thanks!
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 109d
welcome! consadulations on having to move, great you could find this one
anise@awful.systems · 7 pts · 109d
Thanks! Spiritually this already was kind of my home instance, which is to say that I have unfortunately read every sneerclub post and all the comments, possibly multiple times. So this is mostly just making that official I suppose
dgerard@awful.systems · 5 pts · 109d
Hello!
anise@awful.systems · 4 pts · 109d
hi! Big fan, especially of whatever you did to piss off trace as much as you did
scruiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 111d
I don't have anything especially useful or insightful to add, but I just want to thank our mods for acting decisively to defederate us.
Edit: seeing the discussion over on https://awful.systems/post/8293548 I think our mods were actually extraordinarily patient in giving db0 a pretty solid chance to own up to their mistakes and commit to no LLM usage in the future and they instead doubled down hard.
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 8 pts · 111d
Good thing I haven't heard of either of them until now.
self@awful.systems · 9 pts · 111d
the only worthwhile thing they do is piracy and they’re very proud to be the only worthwhile place for it
self@awful.systems · 7 pts · 111d
the awful dot systems open source moderation model codenamed anarchy cop spit out this image:
::: spoiler image description kids on a police tricycle :::
what does it mean?
dgerard@awful.systems · 8 pts · 111d
sorry sorry the chatbot posted a fisher price police tricycle im trying to delete it
dgerard@awful.systems · 9 pts · 111d
(image deletion is a lemmy joke for the advanced sufferer)
mawhrin@awful.systems · 4 pts · 110d
isn't it possible through a magic incantation?
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 110d
you need to go into the image store with a machete by hand, there's no image moderation interface as such
it's one of the wonderful things about lemmy
dgerard@awful.systems MOD · 5 pts · 109d
This post has probably run its course, so we're going to lock it now. (Also, this community probably shouldn't federate at all? it's local!)
but thank you all for the surprisingly high quality of this discussion :-)
db0@hachyderm.io · -3 pts · 111d
self@awful.systems · 15 pts · 111d
wow I wonder why having you around is fucking exhausting
cultivate this horseshit elsewhere thanks
fullsquare@awful.systems · 10 pts · 111d
don't you know, nuance is when you leave it to chinese confabulation engine to determine political leanings
scruiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 111d
The best case scenario (for them) is that is a Chinese confabulation engine. But that requires that the logs mention ChatGPT as an in-joke. And code or logs of interfacing with a local instance of the Chinese confabulation are for some reason not available for totally innocent reasons. The more likely scenario is that it was ChatGPT.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 7 pts · 111d
I was trying to figure out how to make that post earlier
(I know that range has been studied a bit but I’m not up to the latest on how much, and I ain’t gonna go post out my ass)