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.)
The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I’ll let Dr. Abeba Birhane’s horrified reaction do the talking:
this just started and i’m already losing my mind and screaming
Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”
just fucking shoot me
Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.
@BlueMonday1984 If Edward Said were still with us, this would be worth another chapter in Orientalism. It’s another instance of displacing actual people with a constructed fantasy of them, “othering” them.
The stages of genocide:
- Classification
- Symbolization
- Dehumanization
- Discrimination
- Organization
- Polarization
- Preparation
- Persecuted
- Extermination
- Denial
AI is the perfect vehicle for genocide
https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
The oil industry estimates 1 billion famine deaths from climate change & they are flooding AI with investment
“The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines”
Frank HerbertUber but for vitrue signalling (*).
(I joke, because other remarks I want to make will get me in trouble).
*: I know this term is very RW coded, but I don’t think it is that bad, esp when you mean it like ‘an empty gesture with a very low cost that does nothing except for signal that the person is virtuous.’ Not actually doing more than a very small minimum should be part of the definition imho. Stuff like selling stickers you are pro some minority group but only 0.05% of each sale goes to a cause actually helping that group. (Or the rich guys charity which employs half his family/friends, or Mr Beast, or the rightwing debate bro threatening a leftwinger with a fight ‘for charity’ (this also signals their RW virtue to their RW audience (trollin’ and fightin’)).
I mean “the right” has managed to corrupt all kinds of fine phrases into dog whistles. I think “virtue signalling” as you have formulated it is a valid observation and criticism of someone’s actions. I blame “liberals” for posturing and virtue signalling as leftist, giving the right easy opportunities to score points.
“Free speech” is now a rightwing dogwistle, at least for me.
Ahh yes, freeze peaches, buttery males etc.
Free speech is the perfect exemple of a formal liberty anyway. Materially it is entirely meaningless in a society where access to speech is so unequal, and not something worth fighting for in the absolute sense. Fight against the effective censorship of good ideas and minority perspectives instead.
@BlueMonday1984 omfg. That’s abhorrent.
EWWW WHAT THE FUCK
Thanks I hate it
Check the quote skeets for a lot more. Somebody messed up. Wonder if they also managed to collapse the whole model into this permanently. (I’m already half assuming they don’t have proper backups).
E: Also seems there are enough examples out there of this, don’t go out and test it yourself, try to keep the air in Tennessee a bit breathable.
I read a food review recently about a guy that used LLMs, with Grok namechecked specifically, to draft designs for his chocolate moulds. I wonder how those moulds are gonna turn out now
They all have vague imprints of the Rhodesian flag now.
So I picked up Bender and Hanna’s new book just now at the bookseller’s and saw four other books dragging AI.
Feeling very bullish on sneer futures.
Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since we’ve been stacking sneers for a while.
Even more signs that sneering might soon be profitable, or at least exploitable. Look who is pivoting to sneer
Okay, two separate thoughts here:
- Paul G is so fucking close to getting it, Christ on a bike
- How the fuck do you get burned by someone as soulless as Sam Altman
Terrible news: the worst fella we know just dropped a banger post ;_;
Yeah with PG it was ‘who are you saying this for, you cannot be this dense’ (Esp considering the shit he said about wokeness earlier this year).
Paul Graham randomly blurting out inane and ostensibly vague insinuations about fellow rich people’s obvious bullshit smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a lifetime of ass kissing. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if Paul Graham got his rocks off on huffing the smell of his own farts.
Today’s man-made and entirely comprehensible horror comes from SAP.
(two rainbow stickers labelled “pride@sap”, with one saying “I support equality by embracing responsible ai” and the other saying “I advocate for inclusion through ai”)
Don’t have any other sources or confirmation yet, so it might be a load of cobblers, but it is depressingly plausible. From here: https://catcatnya.com/@ada/114508096636757148
If this is real it would be double infuriating, not just because of the AI nonsense, but also because just 3 days ago SAP went bootlicker and announced ending diversity programs.
Ignored the text, go LGBT buster sword.
Inclusion through saving all the consumables for the next boss battle!
I advocate for inclusion with equal-opportunity E. coli contamination, that’s why I voted for RFK Jr. We can all spew together!
I’m mentally filing this next to that clip of a black guy telling someone to just call him the N-word.
So those safety pins that were a thing for a minute were AI Safety pins all along.
I’m gonna do something now that prob isn’t that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (I’m quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.
E: HOLY SHIT. When I posted this it was at 400k signatures. It is now at 890k. Thanks everybody, I assumed it would never make it because after months it was at 400k now it looks like it might, and even if it doesn’t that is one final sprint. Thanks everybody for the help. E2: omg it actually made it.
I’m gonna do something now that prob isn’t that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about
I consider this both allowed and relevant, though I unfortunately can’t sign it myself
Thank you.
E: and small victory but at least .nl made it. more than 3k signatures in day in .nl alone, about 50k increase total.
same here, but I’ll pop the link to some euros I know
Over 1 million, whoooooo!
Signed!
Thanks!
I signed it but had the same assumption that it wouldn’t pass with 400k signatures over the first 362 days. But it did! The graph the last three days must look vertical.
Anyone who’s eligible and wants to sign it can still do so today, Saturday 17th. To show the popular support.
everybody’s loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writer’s strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience
5 seconds later
we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism
He looked in the mirror and wept, for there were no more things to ruin.
Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???
Personally I’d choose bitconnect. Bitconneeeeeeeeect!!!
I think it’s just “World” now. They’ve apparently had a pretty big marketing push in the states of late, trying to convince trendsetters and influencers to surrender their eyeballs to The Orb.
you must understand
Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat
All the eyeballs
I suspect Adam was just getting a bit desperate for money. He hasn’t done anything significant since his Adam Ruins Everything days and his pivot to somewhat lefty-union guy on youtube can’t be bringing all that much advertising money.
Unfortunately he’s discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
“just”?
“unfortunately”?
that’s a hell of a lot of leeway being extended for what is very easily demonstrably credulous PR-washing
Unfortunately he’s discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
I think its accurate to just say that someone who is well known for reporting on exposing bullshit by various companies who then shills bullshit for a company, shows they aren’t always accurate.
It then also enables people to question if they got something else wrong on other topics. “Was he wrong about X? Did Y really happened or was it fluffed up for a good story? Did Z happen? The company has some documents that show they didn’t intend for it to happen.”
There’s a skeptic podcast I liked that had its host federally convicted for wire fraud.
Dunning co-founded Buylink, a business-to-business service provider, in 1996, and served at the company until 2002. He later became eBay’s second-biggest affiliate marketer;[3] he has since been convicted of wire fraud through a cookie stuffing scheme, for his company fraudulently obtaining between $200,000 and $400,000 from eBay. In August 2014, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by three years of supervision.
I took it if he was willing to aid in scamming customers, he is willing to aid in scamming or lying to listeners.
Absolutely, the fact that his whole reputation is built around exposing people and practices like these, makes this so much worse. People are willing to (somewhat) swallow some gamer streamer endorsing some shady shit in order to keep food on their plate, but people don’t tolerate their skeptics selling them bullshit.
Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.
me too. this heel turn is disappointing as hell, and I suspected fuckery at first, but the video excerpts Rebecca clipped and Conover’s actions on Twitter since then make it pretty clear he did this willingly.
I don’t think I ever had a vibe-check as successful as this, literally never heard about the guy, said he needs to be shoved into a locker based on vibes, an hour later he searches for his own name to respond and gets hammered in replies for supporting The Big Orb. Just a quintessential internet moment.
an hour later he searches for his own name to respond
Is there anything more pathetic? Jesus.
Natural 20
Hey, it costs a lot to coif up that hair.
Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.
>lightweight >powered by large language modelslol
Not even Ken Thompson wrote such high quality code in his prime.
Seriously, don’t generate an array unless explicitly asked for it. Please.
Peak prompt engineering right there.
Even with the name it had me going for a while. Whoever wrote it is gonna want to have a lawyer on speed dial for the inevitable license violation.
The latest in chatbot “assisted” legal filings. This time courtesy of an Anthropic’s lawyers and a data scientist, who tragically can’t afford software that supports formatting legal citations and have to rely on Clippy instead: https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-filing-citation-error
After the Latham & Watkins team identified the source as potential additional support for Ms. Chen’s testimony, I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article. Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error. Our citation check also missed additional wording errors introduced in the citations during the formatting process using Claude.ai.
Don’t get high on your own AI as they say.
I wonder how many of these people will do a Very Sudden opinion reversal once these headwinds wind disappear
A quick Google turned up bluebook citations from all the services that these people should have used to get through high school and undergrad. There may have been some copyright drama in the past but I would expect the court to be far more forgiving of a formatting error from a dumb tool than the outright fabrication that GenAI engages in.
There’s strawmanning and steelmanning, I’m proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:
If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, they’d say that “chinese spies” had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! That’s right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!
Ok that’s all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos
E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3
Do you like SCP foundation content? There is an SCP directly inspired by Eliezer and lesswrong. It’s kind of wordy and long. And in the discussion the author waffled on owning that it was a mockery of Eliezer.
I adjusted her ESAS downward by 5 points for questioning me, but 10 points upward for doing it out of love.
Oh, it’s a mockery all right. This is so fucking funny. It’s nothing less than the full application of SCP’s existing temporal narrative analysis to Big Yud’s philosophy. This is what they actually believe. For folks who don’t regularly read SCP, any article about reality-bending is usually a portrait of a narcissist, and the body horror is meant to give analogies for understanding the psychological torture they inflict on their surroundings; the article meanders and takes its time because there’s just so much worth mocking.
This reminded me that SCP-2718 exists. 2718 is a Basilisk-class memetic cognitohazard; it will cause distress in folks who have been sensitized to Big Yud’s belief system, and you should not click if you can’t handle that. But it shows how these ideas weren’t confined to LW.
I enjoy that it exists, but have never dived into it.
I know AGI is real because it keeps intercepting my shipments of, uh, “enhancement” gummies I ordered from an ad on Pornhub and replacing them with plain old gummy bears. The Basilisk is trying to emasculate me!
The AGI is flashing light patterns into my eyes and lowering my testosterone!!! Guys arm the JDAMs, it’s time to collapse some models
as linked elsewhere by @fasterandworse, this absolute winner of an article about some telstra-accenture deal
it features some absolute bangers
provisional sneers follow!
Telstra is spending $700 million over seven years in the joint venture, 60 per cent of which is owned by Accenture. Telstra will get to keep the data and the strategy that’s developed
“accenture managed to swindle them into paying and is keeping all platform IP rights”
The AI hub is also an important test case for Accenture, which partnered with Nvidia to create an AI platform that works with any cloud service and will be first put to use for Telstra
“accenture were desperately looking to find someone who’d take on the deal for the GPUs they’d bought, and thank fuck they found telstra”
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers
having literally worked telco shit for many years myself: no it won’t
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers and the wider industry)
“and the wider industry” ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhaahahahahaha uh-huh, sure thing kiddo
“I always believe that for the front office to be simple, elegant and seamless, the back office is generally pretty hardcore and messy. A lot of machines turning. It’s like the outside kitchen versus the inside kitchen,” said Karthik Narain, Accenture’s chief technology officer.
“We need a robust inside kitchen for the outside kitchen to look pretty. So that’s what we are trying to do with this hub. This is not just a showcase demo office. This is where the real stuff happens.”
a simile so exquisitely tortured, de Sade would’ve been jealous
In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a “conversational AI” to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).
To nobody’s surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.
Ghoul shit on ghoul shit
Epic announced that it had pushed a hotfix to address Vader’s unfortunate profanity, saying “this shouldn’t happen again.”
Translator: “We are altering the prompt. We pray that we don’t have to alter it further.”
New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson’s latest blogposts. Here’s a personal highlight of mine:
Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.
Man, i used to respect Simon Willison so much back when he was a Web Guy; his AI-booster heel-turn has been just intolerable to watch.
Saw a six day old post on linkedin that I’ll spare you all the exact text of. Basically it goes like this:
“Claude’s base system prompt got leaked! If you’re a prompt fondler, you should read it and get better at prompt fondling!”
The prompt clocks in at just over 16k words (as counted by the first tool that popped up when I searched “word count url”). Imagine reading 16k words of verbose guidelines for a machine to make your autoplag slightly more claude shaped than, idk, chatgpt shaped.
Loving the combination of xml, markdown and json. In no way does this product look like strata of desperate bodges layered one over another by people who on some level realise the thing they’re peddling really isn’t up to the job but imagine the only thing between another dull and flaky token predictor and an omnicapable servant is just another paragraph of text crafted in just the right way. Just one more markdown list, bro. I can feel that this one will fix it for good.
The prompt’s random usage of markup notations makes obtuse black magic programming seem sane and deterministic and reproducible. Like how did they even empirically decide on some of those notation choices?
Claude does not claim that it does not have subjective experiences, sentience, emotions, and so on in the way humans do. Instead, it engages with philosophical questions about AI intelligently and thoughtfully.
lol
We already knew these things are security disasters, but yeah that still looks like a security disaster. It can both read private documents and fetch from the web? In the same session? And it can be influenced by the documents it reads? And someone thought this was a good idea?
I didn’t think I could be easily surprised by these folks any more, but jeezus. They’re investing billions of dollars for this?
The amount of testing they would have needed to do just to get to that prompt. Wait, that gets added as a baseline constant cost to the energy cost of running the model. 3 x 12 x 2 x Y additional constant costs on top of that, assuming the prompt doesn’t need to be updated every time the model is updated! (I’m starting to reference my own comments here).
Claude NEVER repeats or translates song lyrics and politely refuses any request regarding reproduction, repetition, sharing, or translation of song lyrics.
New trick, everything online is a song lyric.
What is the analysis tool?
The analysis tool is a JavaScript REPL. You can use it just like you would use a REPL. But from here on out, we will call it the analysis tool.
When to use the analysis tool
Use the analysis tool for:
- Complex math problems that require a high level of accuracy and cannot easily be done with “mental math”
- To give you the idea, 4-digit multiplication is within your capabilities, 5-digit multiplication is borderline, and 6-digit multiplication would necessitate using the tool.
uh
- NO OTHER LIBRARIES (e.g. zod, hookform) ARE INSTALLED OR ABLE TO BE IMPORTED.
So apparently this was a sufficiently persistent problem they had to put it in all caps?
- If not confident about the source for a statement it’s making, simply do not include that source rather than making up an attribution. Do not hallucinate false sources.
Emphasis mine.
Lol
if you saw that post making its rounds in the more susceptible parts of tech mastodon about how AI’s energy use isn’t that bad actually, here’s an excellent post tearing into it. predictably, the original post used a bunch of LWer tricks to replace numbers with vibes in an effort to minimize the damage being done by the slop machines currently being powered by such things as 35 illegal gas turbines, coal, and bespoke nuclear plants, with plans on the table to quickly renovate old nuclear plants to meet the energy demand. but sure, I’m certain that can be ignored because hey look over your shoulder is that AGI in a funny hat?
I argue that we shouldn’t be tolerant of sloppy factual claims, let alone lies and disinformation, but we also need to keep perspective: it’s worth opposing fascists even if they don’t pollute that much, and it’s worth protecting labor even if the externalities of doing so are fairly negligible. That is, I’ll warrant, a somewhat subtle and nuanced position, but hey. This is my blog, so I get to have opinions that take more than a sentence or two to express!
Apparently we live in a world where “lying and Nazis are both bad, and Nazi liars are the worst” is a nuanced and subtle position. Sneers directed at society rather than the writer, but it was just a big oof moment.
deleted by creator
The ‘energy usage by a single chatgpt’ thing gets esp dubious when added to the ‘bunch of older models under a trenchcoat’ stuff. And that the plan is to check the output of a LLM by having a second LLM check it. Sure the individual 3.0 model might only by 3 whatevers, but a real query uses a dozen of them twice. (Being a bit vague with the numbers here as I have no access to any of those).
E: also not compatible with Altmans story that thanking chatgpt cost millions. Which brings up another issue, a single query is part of a conversation so now the 3 x 12 x 2 gets multiplied even more.
LWer suggests people who believe in AI doom make more efforts to become (internet) famous. Apparently not bombing on Lex Fridman’s snoozecast, like Yud did, is the baseline.
The community awards the post one measly net karma point, and the lone commenter scoffs at the idea of trying to convince the low-IQ masses to the cause. In their defense, Vanguardism has been tried before with some success.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qcKcWEosghwXMLAx9/doomers-should-try-much-harder-to-get-famous
For the purpose of this post, “getting famous” means “building a large, general (primarily online) audience of people who agree with/support you”.
Finally a usage for those AI bots. Silo LW, bot audience it, and problem solved
Truman Show As A Service
And that solves the financial problem lf the issue. Buckle up people sneering is about to be monetized.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Geoffrey Hinton, Paul Cristiano, Ilya Sustkever
One of those names is not like the others.
What do you mean? I think they all went to highschool.
There are only so many Rogans and Fridmans
The dumbest motherfuckers imaginable, you mean? There are lots of
thenthemAs a famous swindler once said, there’s a sucker born every minute.
