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.)
I guess a certain country is using LLMs to try to engage people 1:1 to change their opinions of said country.
Could be a LLM, could be a call-center worker in Kenya or Mumbai or Manilla. Its an old move.
Good point. Now I imagine someone trying to pass the turing test by having their bot pretend to be a sales person.
We have already all died and been uploaded, but it happend so seamlessly nobody noticed.
Of course! That “AI Black Death in 2 years” this channel also predicted must’ve happened while we all slept and the AI uploaded us all so it could torture everyone who didn’t contribute to its development!
Are you worried about AI taking over the world and killing everyone? Fear not, the people who can stop it are collecting hats. Surely everything is under control.
Oddly this reminds me of a weird thing. (Not trying to attack you or others here btw, for reasons that I will make clear in the end). When I was active in student activism, I recalled how annoyed our leaders of the group were that a small but vocal (and inactive) part of the organisations membership didnt allow the leaders to be people.
When they (after already working crazy hours btw, these people were committed), spend some time in the evening to wind down and make some sort of joke(*), the inactive members alway would start to send angry emails. 'how dare you make an internal joke while students have less rights/the uni isnt eco friendly/etc". I though back on how that impulse from inside to org was indeed quite weird. Esp as the people complaining didnt seem to be that active members. (If they were they would know how much work was being done and the strain people were under and how the jokes were good for morale).
Something to take into account if you see lesswrong people react negatively to the hat post.
Of course none of this applies tonus as outsiders who do not take them that seriously at all. It is a weird thing to make a long post about indeed, esp with one of the hats being one of yuds it seems? Im wondering if this lesswrong thing is perhaps more of a personality cult that anything serious. A well at least nobody is using the org as a dating hunting ground, that would be bad.
*: basically they would spend their whole day prepping for meetings with the uni/other orgs, sending out emails trying to get the members to help out, doing research and summarizing that for the members etc etc, and at the end of the day they send one internal email about talk like a pirate day, and the next morning they get 21 replies to their work, 20 of those people being mad about the talk like a pirate email.
I haven’t experienced the situation you’re describing myself, but it feels very plausible.
Similarly, all developed societies depend on a number of people selflessly working in positions of elected or non-elected authority (local councils, HOAs, school boards) and treating them like people who cannot afford to make any mistakes is not a recipe for increased democratic engagement.
Anyway, so far no-one has commented, negatively or otherwise, and I think most LWers are treating it as harmless fun.
It’s not making me any more interested in coming more than 200 feet from any of these people, and neither is this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GtZKzWgAqWrE2tXrQ/contra-dance-at-lessonline, but maybe that’s just me being mean.
Isn’t that the hat from the picture that Yudkowsky showed off to prove he wasn’t a cult leader? Are they trying to beat the cult allegations by ha ha jokingly wearing the same silly clothes as their founder?
You would expect the leader of the ‘make sure the prompt doesnt turn us into paperclips’ movement to better right.
that’s just me being mean.
It prob is, stuff like this seems to be quite common at various nerdy events. Just harmless fun(*). So a bitch eating crackers moment perhaps. I know I have those myself.
*: initially made a typo there and wrote ‘hatless fun’.
Olay but this is good though. This is the kind of autism Lesswrong should focus more on. No bullshit, just the facts.
owning us with hats and logic
Remember Crazy Taxi? Its back, infected with AI slop!
(I saw the massive wave of hype that game’s announcement unleashed, and its almost impressive how Sega wiped out every last bit of it with AI.)
Crazy taxi? In this house we remember Quarantine
New pride month Odium Symposium episode. We go through the life and activism of notorious homophobe and orange juice queen, Anita Bryant
Is AI profitable yet? a website that tracks the spending and revenue of leading AI companies. The answer is so helpfully provided at the top of the page
It’s also fun to sort by pnl and see just how far the gap is for others that aren’t nvidia
Anthropic insists that you should use their demon-as-a-service. Hackernews debates the finer points of pentangle construction.
Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.
oh fuck off. going full SCP in their press releases now. insufferable.
Babe wake up, new model that’s too dangerous for public consumption but not really just dropped.
lol
Time is a dumb circle
On a related note Mythos has been released and as pointed out, the original “GPT-2 is too dangerous to be released” post was written by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and Jack Clark, who are all Anthropic’s founders. Same ploy, different model
I’ve also seen mention of “Fable” and I’ve been too sick to go check up on whatever the fuck that is
Mythos with extra safety dust sprinkled on top and they listened to The Safety Dance while writing the system prompt. Also a hand painted sign on the front that says “no chinese were serius”
Hope you get to feeling better fast!
after calling the con about a super hacker AI the “mythos”, now they’re calling the next spiel “fable”? are they like, just taking the piss at this point?
They want to invent the AI Named For Untruth from the hit Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Do Not Invent the AI Named for Untruth”.
Claude v6.0, “Tall Tale”
Claude v6.1 “Big Fish Story”
just taking the piss at this point?
always-have-been.jpg
okay damn you o7 I checked
Claude Fable 5 introduces our 5th model generation for your most ambitious work. Tackle days-long, complex, and asynchronous tasks previous models couldn’t sustain.
folks, can I get a “please god pay us for even more tokens” for 500?
and they listened to The Safety Dance
not sure they’re cool enough even to do that
Hope you get to feeling better fast!
ty! rest is helping, but why are sinuses
remarkably educational, nice
It’s pretty good! The kids want to be influenza for dragoncon lol
It’s on netflix in the states
Let’s all just agree that it’s a beloved RPG game by Lionhead Studios and we’ll leave it at that
This is a new method of bootlicking: if you as a FLOSS developer don’t use LLMs to fix vulnerabilites identified by LLMs, you’re being unethical
Lol what a weak argument. Not only does this limit your llm use to only bugfixing (which is what the op is limiting their use to right?), it also ignores how a few big recent outages were prob caused by llms. And it treats ethical concerns like some sort of numbers game. We have one ethical concern for and one against so it cancels out.
And it leads to ‘Mengeles experiments were not unethical because some of the torture he did actually provided valuable insights on the extremes a human body can go through’
“It is your moral duty to send as much money as you can to Sam Altman”
The counterargument is basically rule utilitarianism, right? That not only the direct outputs of your actions matter, but also the processes and social norms that you reinforce, and the total side effects of those.
(At least I think that’s what rule utilitarianism is.)
I don’t think op has thought that well about it, this felt more like a gotcha argument. 'you say it is all unethical but I found a small (for me) exception so all your arguments are invalid.
Saw much of people do a similar thing on bsky last weekend. A sort of thing going (from a different era) ‘ha you say you are totally against blockchains/nfts? Well you still use github and that is a blockchain, sl better stop using all software’.
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"The instructions say “You are an agent that writes the various article sections for an encyclopedia entry on Joseph Kanuku.”
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“[Note: Britannica is encyclopedia, but instructions say no Britannica. Wait, replace with another.]”
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“Wait, instructions say NEVER cite Wikipedia. Oops. Let me adjust.”
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“The instructions say prioritize peer reviewed, books, etc.”
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“Wait, but instructions say never cite social media, so omit that last part. Wait, adjust. Since Instagram is social media, omit that.”
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“Wait, instructions say avoid “References” as a section, but for completeness, I’ve omitted it from structure.)”
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“The guidelines say “Include any of the following where relevant: - Factual details…” under Missing Information or Knowledge Gaps Examples. And in format, it’s to list only critical issues or all missing info or knowledge gaps.”
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UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You won’t be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.
Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach
There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.
Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and maybe furry art.
Finally, a machine which makes it impossible to watch the movie batman and robin.
(Joke explainer: the batsuit had nipples).
Edward W. Niedermeyer, who wrote the book on how Tesla is a tax fraud and pump-and-dump disguised as a car company, will livestream the SpaceX IPO Friday https://atmo.rsvp/p/niedermeyer.online/e/3mo23aiagjs3t The real drama will be spread over at least a month.
Remember, investing is about decades and national economies not days and individual companies. If you think the US stock market is going to become more like Russia’s than France’s, you can make a policy and act on it to reduce your stocks’ exposure to the Mega-IPOs.
So very excited for the biggest pump and dump in the history of consumer investing, brought to us by a man actively inciting race riots in northern ireland. Can’t wait for this afternoon 🙏
Hardly anyone who matters is on twitter any more so I think many policymakers (and most retail investors) don’t understand what Musk is tweeting every few minutes
Coworker got fired because he used AI to plan for a site installment of our product. The AI made a very nice looking plan but it failed to include enough packing material so nearly half of the units arrived broken. Boss still thinks AI is going to revolutionize work for the better though.
Came across this today: the purpose of a system is what it does. Based on that I would say the purpose of Claude was to make mistakes and get my coworker fired.
to be fair, the plan would have worked if you had included the allotted number of goblins in the box in addition to the packing material.
Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess what…
https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
Link for that development, in case anyone missed it:
https://awful.systems/post/8263538/11477939
I did, indeed, turn them down, and I told the journal why.
Sigh.
ACM will no longer require disclosure of the use of #generativeAI in writing papers… an absolutely terrible change by the @ACM Publications Board to the Policy on Authorship. Yes, this will give ACM more papers. No, the ideology of “number go up” productivism is not the path to responsible, ecological or ethical computing, but to irrelevance.
I signed up for ACM last year, just hit my expiry (like, today), and truly don’t know if I want to renew
it’s been an extreme avenue of generative hype, constantly pushing talks, books, etc. I have no idea how they square it with the ethical pledge
I was flipping through this month’s magazine on the bus, don’t worry, they have a solution for reviewers…
https://cacm.acm.org/research/from-volunteerism-to-duty-reforming-peer-review-with-tokens/
:(
Anything to avoid paying people for their time.
To prevent fraud and rule exchanges, tokens can be implemented as a digital entity, representing a fungible unit of value. Tokens can be transferred through cryptographic protocols and governed by rules running in the TMS.
They’re gonna do it. Peer review is going ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
By not thinking about it, one presumes.
A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They’re probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.
You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?
Well now malware authors are including biology terms like “saccharide” in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway
What a time to be alive
The first I heard of a project doing this was iocaine, an anti-scraper tool (that I think awful.systems uses??) which has module names like “sex_dungeon” and “GargleBargle” intended to make the codebase unmanageable to navigate for llm tooling. It’s pretty funny that this has become an established technique.
ig chucking in a segment of merck index (short entries with compound properties, 2000 pages of) to iocaine training corpus would trip it
awful does indeed use iocaine! and yeah the codebase is fun :)
it’s stunningly effective at handling scrapers, and it’s even more fucked how intense a plague the scrapers (combined with running shitty job scheduling with even worse code through resproxies) are
Amazing stuff. LLM security is so cooked.
New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/
It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)
Some highlights in sneering:
The hours Christian’s team pulled were insane – seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, people sleeping in the office.
One of the character’s is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.
Someone mentioned, in passing, that they thought artificial general intelligence - AI that is better than any human at most tasks - was probably two or three years out.
This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.” Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to ‘most’ and not ‘all’ and swapped ‘cognitive tasks’ for ‘benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks’ and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.
Standalone American AI tools are considered a data-protection risk.
This ‘scenario’ has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.
The infrastructure story is just as grim. The largest AI supercomputer in the US runs at 1,250 megawatts. The largest in Europe runs at eighty-three.
So I couldn’t a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the ‘planned’ American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.
Up to this point, everything we’ve said has happened – with only Caroline’s and Christian’s personal stories representing fictional elements. From here on out, we start speculating. We no longer single out individual AI companies, and instead refer to made-up actors: Atlas for the leading American AI company, Helios for the leading European company, and Zimo for the leading Chinese one.
They are even copying AI 2027’s stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!
Works councils slow the deep adoption of powerful AI tools; employment protections make it hard to let go of staff whose jobs can be automated and whose labour force would be needed in parts of the labour market that faces shortages.
Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is “Europe needs to copy America’s lack of labor laws or other regulations”. I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other ‘parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing’ or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.
But Europe has one last card to play. After five years of failing to build a frontier AI sector, it still owns the one bottleneck which the entire race runs through. ASML remains the only company in the world capable of building the EUV lithography equipment that is used to print cutting-edge chips. Without access to its machines, the US could not keep extending its lead in AI; with access to its machines, China would likely have caught up some time ago.
So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?
Europe’s slide into irrelevance was not inevitable. Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course, had it shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures.
By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.
I love the deep lack of specificity in “other sectors of the economy facing shortages”. Either you have to acknowledge that you’re talking about the cafe economy and gig economy and those sectors aren’t so much facing labor shortages as much as leveraging the worker’s chronic underemployment to keep costs down or you’re making shit up wholesale. Also please note that American companies are already finding that as the investor capital subsidies run out it’s often cheaper to hire a person than pay the token costs to do the job with AI.
Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition
They do this with everything, because the tech doesnt hold up to the dreams, a lot of things get diluted. Esp noticably when they compared llms to humans learning and instead of noting llm advancements they talked down how humans learned.
See also the fields reaction to the chinese room thought experiment.
Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!
We are already a few years behind on the planned AI destroying the world
I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because apparently that’s the latest date Kurzweil gives for his Singularity™ (can’t be arsed to go reread his book and double-check, my copy was a PDF that came via the high seas 5 computers ago anyway)
We can (and probably will) keep having AI bubbles as long as capitalism exists (and thus rich idiots with too much money are looking for ways to get richer) and there are new AI approaches/paradigms (with flashy demo-able potential) left to discover.
