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.)
More of a notedump than a sneer. I have been saying every now and then that there was research and stuff showing that LLMs require exponentially more effort for linear improvements. This is post by Iris van Rooij (Professor of Computational Cognitive Science) mentions something like that (I said something different, but The intractability proof/Ingenia theorem might be useful to look into): https://bsky.app/profile/irisvanrooij.bsky.social/post/3lpe5uuvlhk2c
You can make that point empirically just looking at the scaling that’s been happening with ChatGPT. The Wikipedia page for generative pre-trained transformer has a nice table. Key takeaway, each model (i.e. from GPT-1 to GPT-2 to GPT-3) is going up 10x in tokens and model parameters and 100x in compute compared to the previous one, and (not shown in this table unfortunately) training loss (log of perplexity) is only improving linearly.
I think this theorem is worthless for practical purposes. They essentially define the “AI vs learning” problem in such general terms that I’m not clear on whether it’s well-defined. In any case it is not a serious CS paper. I also really don’t believe that NP-hardness is the right tool to measure the difficulty of machine learning problems.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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?
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.
- 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
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.
Quick update on the Conover Catastrophe: the man’s making an attempt to recover his dignity:
I don’t think announcing he’s “genuinely grateful” to his newly earned dogpile is helping recover his dignity too much. A simple admission and apology suffice, I don’t need you to go “thank you daddy punish me more” while at it.
In that thread I learned that he went for a interview with the outright fash (Tim Pool), so…yeah.
nazi bar owner tinkers with techfash bot trying to vibecode a nazi service on nazi network and gets his crypto stolen https://awful.systems/post/4364989
(this fucker is responsible for soapbox, which is frontend used almost invariably by nazi-packed pleroma instances. among other crimes of similar nature)
Chad move: doing jumping jacks\star jumps in a mine field
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
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
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.
Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???
Personally I’d choose bitconnect. Bitconneeeeeeeeect!!!
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.
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.
Movie script idea:
Idiocracy reboot, but its about ai brainrot instead of eugenics.
Trying to remember who said it, but there’s a Mastodon thread somewhere that said it should be called Theocracy. The introduction would talk about the quiverfull movement, the Costco would become a megachurch (“Welcome to church. Jesus loves you.”), etc. It sounds straightforward and depressing.
I can see that working.
The basic conceit of Idiocracy is that its a dystopia run by complete and utter morons, and with AI’s brain-rotting effects being quite well known, swapping the original plotline’s eugenicist “dumb outbreeding the smart” setup with an overtly anti-AI “AI turned humanity dumb” setup should be a cakewalk. Given public sentiment regarding AI is pretty strongly negative, it should also be easy to sell to the public.
It’s been a while since I watched idiocracy, but from recollection, it imagined a nation that had:
- aptitude testing systems that worked
- a president people liked
- a relaxed attitude to sex and sex work
- someone getting a top government job for reasons other than wealth or fame
- a straightforward fix for an ecological catastrophe caused by corporate stupidity being applied and accepted
- health and social care sufficient for people to have families as large as they’d like, and an economy that supported those large families
and for some reason people keep referring to it as a dystopia…
eta
Ooh, and everyone hasn’t been killed by war, famine, climate change (welcome to the horsemen, ceecee!) or plague, but humanity is in fact thriving! And even still maintaining a complex technological society after 500 years!
Idiocracy is clearly implausible utopian hopepunk nonsense.
Yeah but they all like things poor people like, like wrestling, and farts! We can’t have that!
Ai is part of Idiocracy. The automatic layoffs machine. For example. And do not think we need more utopian movies like Idiocracy.
Beff back at it again threatening his doxxer. Nitter link
what a strange way to sell your grift no one knows what it’s for. “bad people want to force me to tell you what it is we’re building.”
On one hand the AI doomers are convinced he’s building a suitcase nuke.
On the other hand, skeptical viewers want more assurance he’s not just taking the money and building dumb tweets.
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.
Uber 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.
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.
Ahh yes, freeze peaches, buttery males etc.
