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)
I just want to share this video because I think it is a work of art
āIām gonna replace AIā by Olivia Squizzle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g
sorry for yt link, invidious didnāt like it
OpenAIās business model:
Star Citizen, but for billionaires.
A friend of mine keeps suggesting Cursor to me. God damn I am sick of autoplag.
I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but thereās some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs
fresh install:
- at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that itās going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
- figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myselfā¦)
while Iām certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think itās fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you donāt even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s
christ Iām gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time
tangentially, I think about this thread every so often too. this just made me think of it again.
curser
fuck why didnt i think of that
In other news, Disneyās apparently planning some kind of āmajor AI initiativeā.
Whatever it is, Iām expecting large-scale boycotts/strikes to kick off as a result of it, alongside AIās lack of copyright protection getting exploited to troll the shit out of Disney.
Wasnāt Rise of Skywalker already written by a deficient AI of a Gonk droid?
No, it was written by a Star Wars fan. Canāt blame you for confusing the two, though - theyāre equally dumb
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Searchās reliance on Reddit and Googleās AI Overview.
Anyways, personal sidenote:
Beyond putting another blow to AIās reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.
there used to be a shitposting fb page called āplaces in warsaw you had no idea about because they donāt existā. glad that somebody weaponised that concept
That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Muskās twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223
Only now? It is amazing how disconnected Musk is from that part of SV culture. Amazing, even sucks at the thing he should have a home field advantage at.
Maybe not super amazing, he probably avoids/firewalls out most of these people because theyād constantly be hitting him up for money
deleted by creator
I had a mini identity crisis when i realized Iām more aware of techno-fascist writing than Elon Musk of all people.
If Elon had any self-awareness he wouldnāt be Elon
I wish I was cool enough to have the worldās worst people get so mad at me that theyā¦make fan art and put it up on their website. Whatās Elon going for here?
If their aim is to make DG look bad ass, theyāre doing a good job.
Anti David Gerard David Gerard Club
david gerard refuses to respond to my allegations that he wears an awesome trenchcoat and uses magic to trap his opponents in a realm where everything is made of the pages of a failed novela, and I think that says a lot
no no, that one i totally did and iāll fuckin do it again
Is it possible to learn this power?
youāve got the abyss diving down pat
āI want to speak to the managerā energy.
oh boy itās gonna be funny/painful to see muskās biggest fans try to litigate this on Wikipedia with all the banal nothing and weird stalking that traceās article consists of
trace is on a quillette podcast about it too, prob where Musk got it
no new outbreak on Wikipedia itself
my condolences on the likely death threats. Iāve been there before and it sucks
so far itās two (2) idiots on X the everything app
lol
Itās all happening on X the death threats app
well so far itās the whiny little chuds app
though todayās was the Nigerian crypto guy who was angry Iād apparently deleted several of his articles
I donāt think thereās a hell of a lot there that we donāt already know and discuss at length, but itās cool to see Abby Thorneās new video at Philosophy Tube get into surveillance capitalism, neo-reaction/tech fascism, and how much of the discussion historically on and around social media misses the point.
It might be a decent overview reference for anyone in your life who isnāt in as deep as we are, since you could do much worse in ~40 minutes.
Update on LLM reviewer situation:
PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:
- a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
- intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
- intro to semiotics for the same
- show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why āautomated AI detectionā is also bullshit).
- show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
- Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didnāt use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)
Weāll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because itās a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. Iām also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the āIt canāt be that stupidā trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!
Wish us luck, heh!
good luck! it sounds like youāre coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless theyāre gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PMās better than that), youāre at least likely to make an impact
Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose
between this and all the SEO on OpenAIās marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, itās exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, Iāve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAIās promises didnāt pan out. Iām hoping you can find what you need ā our back archives might have a few links if you havenāt searched through here yet.
Kinda nervous about it, not gonna lie. Really appreciate the positive vibes!
Edit: And thanks so much for keeping this community alive!
hah of course!
Best of luck!
o7 much appreciated!
Australian post-industrial is my favorite genre atm thanks to David, and I have a recommendation: https://moose-mouse.bandcamp.com/album/oxide an Australian kid that plays drums in restaurants around Melbourne and has produced delightful solo electronic albums.
Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.
Mostly VAT fraud.
News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard
But your honor, weāre a crypto mining company; we donāt add any value!
āThey wish this technology didnāt existā: Perplexity responds to News Corpās lawsuit
āThere are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didnāt exist,ā said the Perplexity team in the blog. āThey prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.ā
I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.
Okay, quick personal sidenote:
With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect weāre gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful theyāre gonna be, I donāt know, but at the bare minimum itāll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.
they wish this technology didnāt exist
this is supposed to be invalidating, but likeā¦ yes? whatās wrong with that?
They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.
Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexityās business model again?
On one hand, big ālet them fightā energy. On the other hand this is a bit more Alien v Predator than Godzilla v Kong. No matter who wins, we lose.
idea landlords: making sure that no one is living rent free in someone elses head
You know youāre dealing with serious people when the dogwhistles come out.
Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.
Quick update: The open letter on AI training (https://aitrainingstatement.org/) has reached 15k signatures:
Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.
Update on the character.ai lawsuit:
Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, theyāve also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the siteās chatbots.
So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.
I have something that I want to post to MoreWrite and this is very convenient for my story
Glad I could be of help.
Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.
In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.
literally the exact crowd shitting on the mere rumor of a Lix NixOS fork are clapping for this like trained seals. and I donāt think this getting announced right after those rumors is an accident ā it gets Jon the most attention for his low-effort bullshit and might even let him hurt another fork by way of community fragmentation
something Iām confused about is, is Ringer even effectively banned anymore? I stopped monitoring when someone with mod privileges unbanned him from a bunch of Nix community spaces. is he back to banned, or is this just a continuing tantrum from Jon having Release Manager stripped from him and given to someone who could do that incredibly thoroughly automated job without stirring up a fucking hate mob?
Is their branding dominated an anime girl of ambiguous age?
Just guessing, I promise I havenāt checked.
there is one silver lining: for once, I donāt have the cognitive load of another Nix fork to carefully consider switching to. thereās no way in fuck Iām using Ringerās fork under any circumstances, and my brain already filed it away under āweird name, starts with an E, donāt remember the restā seconds after I closed the tab
Youāre right, Borkfan is too easy to remember, my not-ban fork is now called Frabnok.
> FRABNOK LANTERN Your lantern explodes into a rant about the wokes, killing you instantly. *** You have died *** Your score is 0 out of a possible 10 points, in 1 move. This gives you the rank of Release Manager.
