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.)

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        6 days ago

        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?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      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?

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        6 days ago

        I didn’t think I could be easily surprised by these folks any more, but jeezus. They’re investing billions of dollars for this?

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 days ago

      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

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago
      • 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?

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        6 days ago
        • 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

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      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

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    6 days ago

    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

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      7 days ago

      I wonder how many of these people will do a Very Sudden opinion reversal once these headwinds wind disappear

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      7 days ago

      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.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    27·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      11 days ago

      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

    • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      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.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        14·
        12 days ago

        Ow god that thread. And what is it with ‘law professionals’ like this? I also recall a client in a project who had a law background who was quite a bit of pain to work with. (Also amazing that he doesn’t get that getting a reaction where somebody tries out your very specific problem at all is already quite something, 25k open issues ffs).

        E: Also seeing drama like this unfold a few times in the C:DDA development stuff (a long time ago), which prob was done by young kids/adults and not lawyers. My kneejerk reaction is to get rid of people like this from the project. They will just produce more and more drama, and will eventually burn valuable developers out. (E2: also really odd that despite saying he has a lot of exp talking to OSS devs, he thinks the normal remarks are all intended very hostile. “likely your toolchain setting it or your build script” and “I’ll unsubscribe from this bug now” seem to me to be pretty normal reactions, one a first suggestion at what the problem potentially could be, and the other disclosing that he will not be working on the bug (holy shit the (non lawyer) guy being complained about here is prolific. ~100 contribs on average daily last week and an almost whole green year)). Also “I value such professional behavior very much” tags post with ‘korruption’.

        Another edit: Looked more at this guys blog and that are a lot of quite iffy opinions my man. (I noticed that the other post tagged ‘korruption’ talks about the how the AfD should be allowed to go against ‘the rainbow flag’ (I dont know the exact details of the incident), which while yes, legally ok, it still is a bit iffy). And then I scrolled more and saw this: “Deutschland braucht eine konservative Revolution! Warum wir uns ein Beispiel an den USA nehmen sollten” “Germany needs a conservative revolution, why we should follow the USA’s example”. He is a Musk/Trump/Venture Capitalist Manifesto true believer. Deregulate, stop the ideology build cars and go to space! The Bezos/Zuckerburg revolution. Common sense! “Musk, der Inbegriff des amerikanischen Unternehmergeistes” (If you allow me to react to this in Dutch: Lol). We need modern nuclear power, like how the USA does it (??). Deregulation, AI, humanitarian immigration that also only selects skilled workers, Freedom of speech which includes banning of “cancel culture”, education reform, tax reform, stop crime, quantum computers, biotech, do more things online. We need to look forward, and change things, and thus a conservative revolution!

        There is more stuff like: “Die temporäre Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD in einer Verfahrensfrage wird das Parteiensystem nicht nachhaltig beschädigen.”, or https://seylaw.blogspot.com/2021/04/der-negerkuss-eine-suspeise-die-gemuter.html (If you don’t speak German and want to listen to the weirdly racist drunking ramblings of a guy at the bar who is ‘joking’ throw it through google translate).

        E: also forgot, lol at him going ‘just run these two bash scripts I provided only takes 30 secs’ like the devs need not first check of none of these is doing something malicious.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        12 days ago

        I ended up doing a messy copypasta of the blog through wc -c: 21574

        dude was so peeved at getting told no (after continually wasting other peoples’ time and goodwill), he wrote a 21.5KiB screed just barely shy of full-on DARVO (and, frankly, I’m being lenient here only because of perspective (of how bad it could’ve been))

        as Soyweiser also put it: a bit of a spelunk around the rest of his blog is also Quite Telling in what you may find

        fuck this guy comprehensively, long may his commits be rejected

        (e: oh I just saw Soyweiser also linked to that post, my bad)

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          11 days ago

          It gets better btw, nobody mentioned this so far. But all this is over warnings. From what I can tell it still all compiles and works, the only references for the build failing seem to come from the devs, not the issue reporter.

          E: I’m a bit tempted to send the guy a email to go ‘I saw your blog and had a question, was it an error or did it stop compilation’ but that would imho cross the line into harassment, esp as to be fair I think I should also divulge where I come from as an outsider which would not go over well with a guy in that kind of mindset (if I have him pegged correctly). The next blogpost would be about me personally.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      12 days ago

      He is even politely asked at first “no AI sludge please” which is honestly way more self-restraint than I would have on my maintained projects, but he triples down with a fucking AI-generated changeset.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      20·
      12 days ago

      The coda is top tier sneer:

      Maybe it’s useful to know that Altman uses a knife that’s showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it can’t be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste. If that’s any indication of how he runs the company, insolvency cannot be considered too unrealistic a threat.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      12 days ago

      It starts out seeming like a funny but petty and irrelevant criticism of his kitchen skill and product choices, but then beautifully transitions that into an accurate criticism of OpenAI.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      15·
      12 days ago

      Its definitely petty, but making Altman’s all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.

      Definitely goes a long way to show why he’s an AI bro.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    19·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • FoolishOwl@social.coop
      15·
      8 days ago

      @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.

    • Nicole Parsons@mstdn.social
      10·
      8 days ago

      @BlueMonday1984

      The stages of genocide:

      1. Classification
      2. Symbolization
      3. Dehumanization
      4. Discrimination
      5. Organization
      6. Polarization
      7. Preparation
      8. Persecuted
      9. Extermination
      10. 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 Herbert

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      8 days ago

      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’)).

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        8 days ago

        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.

          • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            7 days ago

            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.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    10 days ago

    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.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      12·
      10 days ago

      Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since we’ve been stacking sneers for a while.

        • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          10·
          9 days ago

          Okay, two separate thoughts here:

          1. Paul G is so fucking close to getting it, Christ on a bike
          2. How the fuck do you get burned by someone as soulless as Sam Altman
          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            9 days ago

            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).

            • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
              9·
              9 days ago

              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.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    10 days ago

    “apparently Elon’s gotten so mad about Grok not answering questions about Afrikaners the way he wants, xAI’s now somehow managed to put it into some kind of hyper-Afriforum mode where it thinks every question is about farm murders or the song “Kill the Boer” ALT”

    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.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      10 days ago

      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

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    11 days ago

    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

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        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.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        11 days ago

        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.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      10 days ago

      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.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        10 days ago

        “just”?

        “unfortunately”?

        that’s a hell of a lot of leeway being extended for what is very easily demonstrably credulous PR-washing

      • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        10 days ago

        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.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          10 days ago

          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.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    9 days ago

    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

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    16·
    12 days ago

    Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:

    “…no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.

    If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    10 days ago

    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