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.)
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.
Hey, it costs a lot to coif up that hair.
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
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.
you must understand
Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat
All the eyeballs
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.
So I have two laser printers, a cute little HP one and an old Lexmark. The former works mostly OK, but requires fiddling* to get it working on Linux, and prints things smaller than their actual size. The latter is also good enough to be useful, but leaves streaks on page and is quite low on toner. Replacing the photoconductor and toner is just about expensive enough to justify consideration of buying a new printer altogether instead.
So anyway, I might be in the marker for a new printer, which reminded me of one of the best pieces of tech journalism of this decade . I also noticed it has been followed by sequels for subsequent years. Also a rare example of LLM use I can approve of, even if having to fight fire with fire (or search engines with slop) is a bit saddening.
A little offtopic (or I guess it’s almost ontopic for NotAwfulTech), but I found myself considering a color printer and seems that LED printers are the new hotness for that. Since the top results when searching “led vs laser color printer” are mind-numbing slop, I thought I’d ask if anyone here has experience with LED printers. Any typical pitfalls to watch out for? Is Brother still the least worst brand for them?
* For the curious, the printer requires a plugin called HPLIP. My distro has an automated installer for it in its repositories, but the installer’s Python code is not compatible with newest Python versions. Thankfully the fix only involves changing a
locale.formattolocale.format_stringin one file and ignoring some warnings about invalid escape sequences. The URL for automatically dowloading the plugin from HP website is also empty, so I had to manually download the.runfile from hplip’s sourceforge repository. The filename was also slightly different from what the installer was expecting and the cryptographic signature file was also mandatory, though when the installer tried and failed to download the corresponding key from a keyserver, it let me ignore the signature altogether. I can see how proprietary printer drivers made rms what he is, minus the pro child molestation stuff.brother remains the only brand of printer I don’t regret buying — some people keep buying new printers and trashing the old ones (which is a bit monstrous) because the starter toner cartridge lasts forever, but I’ve found that the move is to get one of the XL boxes that includes a normal-sized toner cartridge (which should last years) and an extra-large one (I don’t know how long that lasts, I don’t think I’ve had to use mine) along with a printer for much cheaper than the price of the individual parts bought separately.
the other move with brother is to ignore or reset the low toner warning and get almost twice the life out of the cartridge. supposedly the DRM in newer printers might prevent this? which is a damn shame. but the printer won’t stop you from printing with supposedly low toner either way. older printers also take to third party toner cartridges instantly, though I’ve bought toner so rarely I always went first-party when I did cause the savings didn’t feel too notable.
drivers for brother printers are excellent because they just work and are probably included, without bloatware, in your distro.
I don’t have any experience with modern color printing; I switched entirely to ordering color prints from local photo shops and online bulk printers a long time ago and ended up saving money for how rarely I printed. I haven’t heard too much about LED printers so they might be worth looking into; I’ve heard mixed (but not entirely negative, which is an improvement over plain inkjet!) things about the epson printers that take big tanks of ink — they’re somewhat cheaper to run than a plain inkjet (which isn’t hard), but the print heads might become a maintenance nightmare depending on your printing habits.
Is Brother still the least worst brand for them?
Can’t offer experience with Brother printers, but I’d throw in Canon as another option – at least I’ve had a small colour laser from their “i-Sensys” office line for many years now and it still works exactly as well as on the day I bought it, no complaints at all. Also works nicely on Linux (I did install a Canon thing for it, but IIRC it might even work without). Although keep in mind of course this is just a single anecdote with one model from many years ago.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder how many of these people will do a Very Sudden opinion reversal once these headwinds wind disappear
I suspect that the backdoor attempt to prevent state regulation on literally anything that the federal government spends any money on by extending the Volker rule well past the point of credulity wasn’t an unintended consequence of this strategy.
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 then
As a famous swindler once said, there’s a sucker born every minute.
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.
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?
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
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
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?
Not sure if satire. https://carebestie.com/
Personal rule of thumb: all autoplag is serious until proven satire.
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.
Not even Ken Thompson wrote such high quality code in his prime.
Seriously, don’t generate and array unless explicitly asked for it. Please.
Peak prompt engineering right there.
>lightweight >powered by large language modelslol
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.
I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
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.
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.
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.
Tante on the hype term ‘agentic AI’
Despite the snake-oil flavor of Vending-Bench, GeminiPlaysPokemon, and ClaudePlaysPokemon, I’ve found them to be a decent antidote to agentic LLM hype. The insane transcripts of Vending-Bench and the inability of an LLM to play Pokemon at the level of a 9 year old is hard to argue with, and the snake oil flavoring makes it easier to get them to swallow.
I now wonder how that compares to earlier non-LLM AI attempts to create a bot that can play games in general. Used to hear bits of that kind of research every now and then but LLM/genAI has sucked the air out of the room.
In terms of writing bots to play Pokemon specifically (which given the prompting and custom tools written I think is the most fair comparison)… not very well… according to this reddit comment a bot from 11 years ago can beat the game in 2 hours and was written with about 7.5K lines of LUA, while an open source LLM scaffold for playing Pokemon relatively similar to claude’s or gemini’s is 4.8k lines (and still missing many of the tools Gemini had by the end, and Gemini took weeks of constant play instead of 2 hours).
So basically it takes about the same number of lines written to do a much much worse job. Pokebot probably required relatively more skill to implement… but OTOH, Gemini’s scaffold took thousands of dollars in API calls to trial and error develop and run. So you can write bots from scratch that substantially outperform LLM agent for moderately more programming effort and substantially less overall cost.
In terms of gameplay with reinforcement learning… still not very well. I’ve watched this video before on using RL directly on pixel output (with just a touch of memory hacking to set the rewards), it uses substantially less compute than LLMs playing pokemon and the resulting trained NN benefits from all previous training. The developer hadn’t gotten it to play through the whole game… probably a few more tweaks to the reward function might manage a lot more progress? OTOH, LLMs playing pokemon benefit from being able to more directly use NPC dialog (even if their CoT “reasoning” often goes on erroneous tangents or completely batshit leaps of logic), while the RL approach is almost outright blind… a big problem the RL approach might run into is backtracking in the later stages since they use reward of exploration to drive the model forward. OTOH, the LLMs also had a lot of problems with backtracking.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for “LLM agents” is that people figure out how to use them as a “creative” component in more conventional bots and AI approaches, where a more conventional bot prompts the LLM for “plans” which it uses when it gets stuck. AlphaGeometry2 is a good demonstration of this, it solved 42/50 problems with a hybrid neurosymbolic and LLM approach, but it is notable it could solve 16 problems with just the symbolic portion without the LLM portion, so the LLM is contributing some, but the actual rigorous verification is handled by the symbolic AI.
(edit: Looking at more discussion of AlphaGeometry, the addition of an LLM is even less impressive than that, it’s doing something you could do without an LLM at all, on a set of 30 problems discussed, the full AlphaGeometry can do 25/30, without the LLM at all 14/30,* but* using alternative methods to an LLM it can do 18/30 or even 21/30 (depending on the exact method). So… the LLM is doing something, which is more than my most cynical sneering would suspect, but not much, and not necessarily that much better than alternative non-LLM methods.)
Cool thanks for doing the effort post.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for “LLM agents” is that people figure out how to use them as a “creative” component in more conventional bots and AI approaches
This was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already, with a less focus on the conventional bots/ai. Where they use the LLMs for some things still. But hard to spread fact from PR, and some of the things they say they do seem to be like it isn’t a great fit for LLMs, esp considering what I heard from people who are not in the hype train. (The example coming to mind is using LLMs to standardize some sort of reporting/test writing, while I heard from somebody I trust who has seen people try that and had it fail as it couldn’t keep a consistent standard).
his was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already
curious about this reference - wdym?
‘we use LLMs for X in our security products’ gets brought up a lot in the risky business podcast promotional parts basically, and it sometimes leaks into the other parts as well. That is basically the times I hear people speak somewhat positively about it. Where they use LLMs (or claim to use) for various things, some I thought were possible but iffy, some impossible, like having LLMs do massive amounts of organizational work. Sorry I can’t recall the specifics. (I’m also behind atm).
Never heard people speak positively about it from the people I know, but they also know I’m not that positive about AI, so the likelyhood they just avoid the subject is non-zero.
E: Schneier is also not totally against the use of llms for example. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/privacy-for-agentic-ai.html quite disappointed. (Also as with all security related blogs nowadays, dont read the comments, people have lost their minds, it always was iffy, but the last few years every security related blog that reaches some fame is filled with madmen).
Ah, I don’t listen to riskybiz because ugh podcast
Schneier’s a dipshit well past his prime, though. people should stop listening to that ossified doorstop
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.
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.
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!
Just thinking about how LLMs could never create anything close to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (specifically Dreams but, uh, you can go your own way, ig)
