Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
They want to build a Woe Engine next to our zoo.
https://www.change.org/p/nashville-zoo-says-no-to-proposed-data-center
I’m sure the tigers won’t be driven to a homicidal rage by the incessant Hummmmm.
It’s so dumb that I wonder if it’s some sort of profile-raising stunt.
CW: USA Politics
That suppressed Democratic National Committe 2024 “postmortem” report turns out to have been pure slop, with essentially no references and entirely made-up charts and plots while also missing entire sections. The author can produce exactly zero interview transcripts or source data. It also spends zero time interrogaring failures in addressing trans rights, the genocide in Gaza, or the affordability crisis.
The podcast “It Could Happen Here” does a good job of analysis (disgusted), but long-time sneerers will feel the futility of getting into the weeds on an extruded textual artifact:
Tl:dl the deeply institutionalist DNC chairman appointed his best buddy to the job with zero oversight, and this was the result.
lesswrong continues to mix sinophobia in with its AI crithype: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nmpzH6sLLtKsQhSPM/china-won-t-win-the-ai-race-but-would-it-be-much-worse-if-it
Previously, on awful.system: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
This article has the highlight of identifying the horrible cynical dystopian move of China’s government in response to AI and LLMs of… checks notes… protecting worker rights and workers from mass firings
“An arbitration panel ruled in favor of a map data collector whose entire department was laid off and replaced with artificial intelligence. The panel found that the company’s adoption of A.I. was a voluntary move to remain competitive and did not warrant the employee’s firing. Companies that benefit from technology must, at the same time, adopt “social responsibilities” and protect worker rights, the panel ruled.”
The author feels the need to emphasize how bad China is.
There are quite a few examples of the Chinese state punishing people for speaking out about true problems.
There is Li Wenliang, a doctor who posted to a group chat about COVID before it was officially acknowledged and was forced to sign a police document admitting he had broken a law by spreading false rumours. His reprimand was later withdrawn.
The advantage of the US system appears to be a greater ability to be transparent, in particular for a concerned person in the know to blow the whistle publicly.
Hahaha, no… For example, in Florida, DeSantis has the home of a fired state worker raided for her accessing her old work email (trying to collect accurate COVID numbers, iirc).
This lesswronger is so close to getting it but doesn’t quite make the leap to ‘are we the baddies’. They list out some bad ways the US has used AI and they do acknowledge
But I’m very aware that I’ve been inculcated in a media and cultural environment that says, in its most kind form, be suspicious of non-Western states.
But somehow hold out on actually changing there mind or overcoming their biases.
Re: the usa and whistleblowers.
At least there are some corrections about this in the comments right? The comments are not just agi fears and sinophobia right?
Narrator: … You sweet summer child.
The comments are not just agi fears and sinophobia right?
Lol the OP was actually being contrarian (to the standard lesswrong attitude) by even vaguely half-assedly considering that the US media may have created a biased narrative that should be questioned.
Shang Tsung contracting anemia after devouring too many
souls.mdOn Anthropic (and some other AI companies) and AI consciousness the final paragraph is the best part:
”Moreover, we should be skeptical when most of the noise on this topic is coming from the industry itself. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly dangled the possibility of AI consciousness in interviews. And his company’s research frequently makes bold claims about their models showing humanlike behavior, such as supposedly harboring “emotions.” Just remember that it’s easier for AI companies to string us along with wild Skynet doomsday scenarios instead of confronting the tech’s far mundane consequences currently playing out before our eyes.”
Can’t believe that these guys are forgetting Data on Star Trek needed an emotion-chip upgrade to feel emotions, and he didn’t even get it full-time until the series was over and they were doing movies. Dario and friends are just giving away what could be an entire upgrade/upcharge cycle! “Be more intimate than ever with your workflows! Upgrade to feeling agents on FeelsCloud today! (ignore that it’s just some bullshit we vibecoded in Verilog and then flashed to discount FPGAs we shoved in the bottom of the server racks)”
Around 4 years ago Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying that AI has feelings - which he testified was because when he spoke to it it just seemed to be intelligent.
He found Lamda showed self-awareness and could hold conversations about religion, emotions and fears. This led Mr Lemoine to believe that behind its impressive verbal skills might also lie a sentient mind.
Today’s tech has not fundamentally changed or evolved but the difference is that now the industry needs the hype to keep the valuation high!
I think there’s also an issue of framing here. Lemoine’s words on the matter suggested that not only was AI conscious, but that this meant it was worthy of moral consideration and that Google wasn’t interested in that. The new line is that the company is interested in this exciting new capability of their product and of course they’re undertaking the task of “model welfare research” to make sure that nobody is doing anything objectively evil, so you should absolutely keep spending even more money on Anthropic’s products.
Heartbreaking: the worst state actually has a point. I fully expected this to be some unhinged nonsense about how chatGPT is too woke or something, but they’re actually articulating some of the real harms pretty clearly. I’m not sure how well that translates to a theory of law that openAI can’t weasel their way out of, but I’m actually rooting for the Florida Men here, at least tentatively.
Still a fuck-everyone-involved but not as much as the Elon suit.
CW M:tG weirdo Zvi’s slobsack + Xhitter references, but he accuses an OpenAI / Palantir-funded PAC boosting a fake “AI doomer” account calling for violence:
ed zitron went on bloomberg podcasts, these might be actual end times
these might be actual end times
Good thing all those CEOs have set up their plan to run to Daddy Trump while everyone else foots their bill
Maybe that why it’s felt like he’s been somewhat more polite and explanatory of required knowledge in his latest posts.
I’ve got to give it to him, he found a winner and didn’t give up.
Not that this is news to anyone here but hey there’s a bubble
Time for another once in a lifetime financial crisis.
A keynote talk suggested, “Do away with a physics midterm, ask students to converse with AI Isaac Newton.”
In the quotes, we find the useful suggestion that the program could be ELIZA-sized.
— Hi, AIsaac! Can you tell me about physics?
— Go away.
— What?
— You’re a moron and you’re TRYING TO STEAL MY IDEAS.
— Look, AIsaac, I don’t think—
— DID LEIBNIZ PUT YOU UP TO THIS?
—
— just GO AWAY I have MERCURY FUMES TO BREATHE.
this one is dystopian
He gave an anecdote about his niece having a hard life moment, and him sending her a personalized song made with Suno to cheer her up. “Not the best, but it took 3 minutes!” Keep in mind, this man is a practicing musician who has composed an entire symphony.
If I were a skilled music person and I wanted to spend 3 minutes cheering someone up, I’d record myself playing “Here Comes the Sun” on my guitar, y’know?
I’d go for This Year by The Mountain Goats personally, but that may say more about me than it does the overall concept.
Got another chance to experience slop firsthand when the instructor for my electrician course was ‘encouraged’ to use the hallucinatron to help create our final exam on the NEC. Now given that the NEC is a dense technical document with a lot of minor but significant variation across its considerable length, this was clearly a perfect use case. Here’s how it shook out:
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It condensed 100 multiple choice questions from the input to 36
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On one question “1-2 inches” was simplified to “12”
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Units in general seem to have been dropped off a lot of questions and answer choices. Usually this didn’t matter too much but it’s a bad look
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Another question asked about fill percentages for a 30 inch conduit. If you look around your office or he and see a >2ft diameter piece of PVC pipe let me know because the tables in the NEC only go up to 6 inches. This is actually a unit issue again because one of the questions on the input test referred to a 30mm conduit which, you know, does actually exist.
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Other questions had a correct answer matching a generic part of the NEC, but had additional information added as a distractor that ended up matching to more specific elements that changes the relevant rule.
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Several questions asked about the reasoning behind a certain rule. Notably the NEC rarely actually gets into that information, as it’s already an incredibly long reference and policy document and would be made even more unweildy if it gave the justification for everything that you should be learning as part of becoming a licensed electrician.
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However, this rarely mattered as the answer choices for those questions uniformly included an obviously correct answer about a generic safety risk and distractors about doing things for cost savings, aesthetic reasons, or arbitrarily.
Given that one of the challenges of this test is time management and looking things up, having to deal with the extra layer of “is this just slop or am I missing something” ended up adding an extra and unintended layer of difficulty onto the test. As always, no matter how egregious or obnoxious the errors introduced by AI, the biggest problem is the loss of trust: you can no longer assume that the text you’re reading was put together with the intended purpose in mind rather than being generated to be statistically similar to text matching that purpose. Even if the differences are relatively small in scope, as they were for most questions on the test, they significantly harm the actual communication of information.
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OT: Finally had to break with a long-time friend after he started sliding more and more into fascism. Feeling quite overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted right now.
my commisserations. i severed contacts with a number of people who went the anti-vaccine way and it’s fucking sad.
Damn. That sucks.
That’s awful, losing a friend that way is like a death without a funeral.
Sorry to hear that, friend. It hurts to do even when it’s the right choice. Hang in there.
My old job had a last minute investor call - “startpage is benefiting significantly from AIO backlash” did not expect that and pretty mixed feelings. Like yeah AIO is bad but don’t run into the open arms of the long tail adtech industrial complex marketing monetization engine either :|
Time for me to eat a hat: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
Anyone familiar with the IPO process have any guessestimates about how long until the public complete S-1 usually follows a confidential S-1? Or odds that it leaks?
Reuters suggests 3-6 months for full listing process.
Space X may have filed confidentiality around 1st April, it was published 20th May, and had a target listing of 12th June. Given this is clearly now a race, 6-8 weeks for official S-1 and less than that for a leak?
Today from the ‘you have got to be fucking kidding me’- dept Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
Before AI, the user was the weakest part of any cybersecurity system. Now, that has completely changed.
They still are the weakest part. We just missed the projection part of the ‘great replacement theory’ pushed by the tech right.
What if we combined all the terrifying unfettered access of an admin user holding a USB stick in front of the server with the naive obedience of a particularly dumb golden retriever and the reliable execution of Windows ME if it was off its ADHD meds?
Here’s a pretty extensive rant/critique of how specifically GitHub is awful to use (and compares it to gitlab and also forgejo/codeberg).
Code forges render an empty repository using less than a million bytes challenge level impossible, etc etc
