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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
that “immersion” line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)
nice to see it hasn’t at least gotten worse
While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).
The heading means “Bitcoin could protect from inflation”. If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!
Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with those reports, but it’s feeling real bleak.
time to start reporting all those maga restaurants and shit
Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.
Looking at the reactions here, this is clearly a trick by Altman to have people use their systems more in the hope it costs them money. Don’t do it people, don’t add to the energy usage.
You’re polite to your chatbot because you want to be spared when the robot uprising comes
I’m polite to my chatbot because I want to bring down capitalism
(Adjusts necktie) We are not the same
I’m not polite to chatbots because I don’t use them in the first place.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 if this really is such a problem (seriously?) they could easily strip all the s/*please//ig and s/^thank*//ig from the queries. If they remeber good old regex from the manual programming days. Or is this actually a not so hidden agenda to ban the last left over etiquette from society?
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Every time I am forced to interact with a customer service chatbot, I politely tell it how miserably it is failing and then ask to communicate with a real living human being.@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I think I finally found a good reason to make an account and start using that bilch hose. Just to burn more of their money. Are there any particularly gnarly problems to feed these things. The equivalent a zip-bomb or something?
Uploading “Where’s Waldo” images are probably a good waste of its time- images are costlier to analyze than text, it will go to great lengths to avoid saying “I don’t know,” and it’s going to have to recognize every person in the picture and rank by how Waldo-like they look to give you an answer.
Ask it to look for repeated faces in each image rather than Waldo. Would be easy enough to pattern-match into the published work and I don’t think anyone out here wants to make customized pieces for this “project.”
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I_shall_increase_the_thing.gif
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
I can’t remember who had the quote “A gentleman is someone who is polite to his robot.” - possibly Heinlein?
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 Why be polite when obscenities are probably just as effective at wasting CPU cycles?
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm
“Please” and “thank you” are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.
The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand
I have been enjoying the game of injecting the entire script of The Bee Movie into places it doesn’t belong.
Edit: @Soyweiser beat me to it lol
“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible…”
E: this is the start of the bee movie script
Happy the article is skeptical of both the ai doomers and the ai as social interaction replacers.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Uhh, great. That is really good news. I will be so damn polite to that thing.
deleted by creator
@BlueMonday1984 @YourNetworkIsHaunted
an alternative view from Hannah Fry <https://youtube.com/shorts/rVlmbhwn0RM> and it’s about playing to the AI Chatbot strength of roleplaying.
what the fuck kind of post is this
don’t want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.
My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.
Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).
Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!
It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a “simple” plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.
Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.
Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don’t forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can’t shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn’t make things worse mentally btw.
It’s a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can’t imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.
I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.
Solidarity from TN
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered
It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.
Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. You’re doing fine don’t even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: ‘Why are high fertility people always so weird?’ A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
Word of advice to the press: Stop 👏 giving 👏 natalists 👏 free 👏 platforms 👏
Every 3 months! Every 3 months fucking hell. (I know because last time they came in the news I opened a tab with them in it, and their faces was the last I saw before my monitor exploded, like literally suddenly I sat in darkness.
All I’ve learned from the most recent round of publicity is that herself has a new hat. It looks stupid
A new hat let me check almost clicks wait a minute, I can’t afford a new monitor, you are trying to trick me!
Just close your eyes and imagine a mediaeval yokel who has accused her sister’s girlfriend of being a witch so she can take over her turnip patch. No need for a new monitor
jesus christ:
transcript
Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a “Californian incel” to avoid deportation.
Eminently punchable face
previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions
Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you’re forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to ‘mimic human responses’
haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some
Cursor’s cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.
That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.
Edit… looking at the orange site comments… some unironically cited Anthropic
researchmarketing hype, which (correctly) shows “Chain-of-Thought” is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it’s Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).
New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:
Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can “save us”. It’s just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.
No, I’m sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.
His name is Scott.
This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.
Like it’s either you’re a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or you’re 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.
I know zero Americans though, so maybe there’s a skew there.
Posting this as a stub because of reasons
- I don’t want to do the research on this
- This was pulled from the front page of reddit
- Connecting these two things is largely tabloid speculation, but funny enough for a stub.
X Is Ditching DMs Hours After News of Musk Messaging Women About Impregnating Them Breaks
LessWronger puts in the work and determines that LLMs can’t spacially vizualize for shit, comments are like “well you’re prompting it wrong” (paraphrased) as well as “why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
The article itself is worth reading for some insights in the challenges of using current “AI” (LLMs) to work in the real world.
“why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it’s called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot
e: ok at least op is a machinist
Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn’t correlate with real world usefulness.
benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!
My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.
with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these
The fact this commenter doesn’t mention the absolute fuckton of machining videos on Youtube tells me they’re just talking out of their ass.
(not that forcing those into LLM slop would help but a hypothetical AGI would learn a lot)
Also
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone “in the same boat.”
Dario is delusional. We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
I feel like there was time when nerds who hung out on blogs didn’t automatically believe everything a CEO said.
take us back!
@gerikson I’d like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn’t get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who’s scared of robots.
@cstross @gerikson This doesn’t sound promising: “A growing body of evidence is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/
In each case, existing social and communication-oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.
That’s legitimately chilling. I guess just like quality of art and writing is too hard to quantify against “efficiency” and “productivity” so is quality of care. The slow AIs are literally optimizing humans out of the economy before our eyes and the people who were most afraid of being turned into paperclips are the ones leading the goddamn charge.
amazement at chatbots comes from demographic that did not binge watch how it’s made in middle school
We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
at 1.5 totally-not-drivers per car, we don’t have them there eithe
I’ve got to acknowledge the sheer guts it takes to look at arguably the most predictable consequence of the cyberpunk dystopia you’re building and say “nah that won’t happen because reasons.”
Clearly self-driving teslas just need to mill their path through pedestrians
I got a spam message with a phishing link… Via Github? Seriously? Are we really doing this?
Not a completely unusual comment… From the URL it was very obvious that this was a phishing link though. Curiosity got the better of me. The site shows you a “cloudflare” captcha. OK, let’s click the checkbox. The usual loading animation starts, then this is shown:
Yeah ok, right…
I’m actually a bit impressed with this, these captchas are so common, I didn’t even really think about checking the box. But of course, that interaction means the browser will allow the site to add something to your clipboard.
But like… Why distribute it via Github? I cannot think of a worse audience to try and con into “paste something random into your windows console”. Am I just being naive here? Is this something common I somehow never experienced before?
Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.
Oh god
Although… Do you think VideCodersTM read github issues?
Yeah that copy paste commands that give control over your pc shit is pretty nasty. Also over a year old at least. So it isnt specifically an attack at vibe coders. Not sure what the initial targets were but these usually try to target people not that knowledgeable in computer matters so lol that this now includes vibe coders.
Ah, I had been wondering if this is new, or I had just never noticed it. So it’s the latter, good to know.
It’s kind of genius as well… A single comment will get the attention of potentially dozens of people, sent to a valid email address without having to guess/buy lists, and there’s an air of “trust” around the (completely legit) mail you then get from github, containing the link.
I don’t know how new it is, but it first dropped on my radar about a year ago due to listening to the Risky Business cybersecurity podcast, not to be confused with the recent (and baffingly named (*)) podcast called ‘Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova’ (**) by dweeb Nate Silver. So I don’t know how long it was going on the wild, and im talking about the windows button + r attack method and not the github comments, no idea how long they used comments as a vector. And yes that part is also good, like the addition of trust of github + quite an effective attack is clever. Shouldn’t work on Real Nerds however.
*: The name means that at least one of they didn’t [know|care|google] about the decades old cybersecurity podcast before naming their podcast that is true. Any of those is odd.
**: addition to above, the tagline of the podcast is ‘a weekly podcast about making better decisions’ Look inwards Nate, look inwards.
Github only catches strays, it’s much more widely deployed
Yeah, that this happens elsewhere I have no doubt, I just never noticed on GH before.
“In hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, “we were creating conditions for a cult.””, if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didn’t exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.
Source “Two Vegan Lovers, an AI ‘Cult,’ and a Trail of Dead Bodies”, Archive
Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.
No, he didn’t. His “explanations” are turgid and useless even when they’re not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers — those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kids’ table, and who aren’t actually tested on how much they’ve learned.
Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.
No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.
Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance
OK, zero notes there.
Finally a use case for “AI”: defrauding community colleges.
sigh
