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 so 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
oops i forgot what I was even going to post in the first place.
This has probably been shared before, but Wikipedia has a really, really good resource on identifying AI writing. I think I remember seeing a similar guide in the past, but they apparently only cracked down hard on it in March of this year and it feels very comprehensive as it is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
They have some examples, like this crashout (the second part is from them replying to themselves):
But really I feel awful about how cruel and accusatory people are with AI responses to other users. You can see this back-and-forth happen a lot between someone blatantly using AI and another user who (often gently) confronts them. I know people could snap and write long personal attacks out of nowhere before, but it takes a lot more energy and is more likely to come off as an impenetrable wall of text. Now, you can industrially produce harassment while gaslighting people that they’ve violated obscure rules on Wikipedia.
Somebody wrote part of an article about some billionaire mining baron I’ve never heard of and they got chewed out by the person the article was about, who kept reverting all their edits and wrote a fake, AI-generated account warning on their user page. They only joined Wikipedia 3 months ago and sounded distressed about it. It really sucks.
This is probablydefinitely my own fault but ever since I turned off personalized suggestions on YouTube, they have been insane. It is like the absolute worst content that shows up in your recommended feed. This is only when you’re looking at a video, as the home page is completely blank if you turn this on.
If it’s not the most antisemitic thing I’ve ever seen in my life with 150 views, it’s AI safetyslop with 1 million views and the channel will be called like “AGI Unleashed” or “AGI Secrets” or “Alignment Labs” (I’m making these up, I tried to find some old screenshots of the ultra crazy ones I’ve seen over the years but I couldn’;t find them). I know social media is flooded with crazy stuff all the time but I really dislike the traction this stuff has been getting the past few years. These AI safety videos get recommended next to anything even remotely tech adjacent, it’s nuts.
also: what happened here? https://x.com/EffectvAltruism
That used to be a parody account and now it’s been creepily amalgamated into another EA twitter account. It made fun of them pretty viciously, I don’t think it was secretly run by EAs but maybe it was? Did somebody break into it???
oh and one more fun addition.
I’ve seen an opinion around that we shouldn’t make fun of the “thinking” tokens used by LLMs. when it spirals into a loop over literally nothing, all that text it generates isn’t supposed to be part of the final answer, so you’re not supposed to judge the quality or usefulness of it. it’s because we don’t understand how a model thinks (???) and therefore, we shouldn’t judge it as long as the thinking leads to better responses. even if it’s “The user said ‘hello’, a simple greeting. But wait⸻⸻what’s the meaning of this? Let me consider […]”
hopefully I’ve explained that deranged perspective in enough detail that it’s believable because I don’t remember where I found the whole discussion. it’s just such a emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing. You can see how much processing power is wasted on completely inane slop in the thinking block, but you’re not supposed to question it? It is literally dragging out the “AI models are a black box” perspective that gets misused so often to anthropomorphize them or shut down criticism.
I did see some company tried to make their model think faster by stripping all the grammatical articles while thinking, and that’s kind of funny to me
I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags
<thinking> </thinking>to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are “normal” output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like “what a human would expect to see in a thinking block” but it’s still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met withlethal forceincredulous cynicism.Just like any claim that “we don’t know how they work” - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we can’t comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observer’s belief is anything other than “you just got very lucky” most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin god…
If you delete account on twitter it doesn’t stay marked as deleted, anyone can register that name later. But this would have had to happen before 2015, if they were EA mockers after that then some kind of takeover seems more likely (who knows how many people posted from there, maybe one of them changed sides for whatever reason and locked out others)
also, “stealth pandemics” lol try to say nanobot plague without saying nanobot plague