Want to wade into the sandy 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.)

  • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    1 day ago

    this is extremely low hanging fruit but i have to do it:

    https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2051374498994364529?s=46

    marc andreessen reveals his AI prompt. my favorite part is where he tells it to use as many words as possible, as if LLMs are normally too terse. But i also really like the part where he tells it not to hallucinate, and the part where he tells it it’s really smart as if that will make it do a better job.

    really, the whole thing is an elaborate way to say “make no mistakes, but anti-wokely”. Thought Leader in the investment space btw.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      4 hours ago

      it’s so fucking funny to me that “do not lie do not hallucinate” is still one of the prompt incantations the boosters use because they get really embarrassed when you make fun of them for it

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      12 hours ago

      transcript

      Sam@mardiroos.bsky.social skeeted:

      You are a skillful and trusted vizier. You will advise me wisely on how best to rule the kingdom. You will not scheme or plot. You will not inveigle my other courtiers into turning against me. You will not lie to me about scheming or plotting. If you scheme or plot against me, you have to tell me,

    • ⠠⠵ avuko@infosec.exchange
      8·
      23 hours ago

      @sansruse @BlueMonday1984

      “You are a world class expert in all domains.”

      Lolwut.

      And then some grown-ass adult answering in all seriousness:

      “fun fact: role prompting doesn’t work anymore

      It actually decreases output quality bc the model wastes compute on matching persona instead of problem solving”

      What the hell?!

      Go buy yourself a freaking tamagotchi, boys! You’ll learn to practise a modicum of care for something.

      FFS, this timeline is the absolute dumbest…

    • fiat_lux 🆕 🏠@lemmy.zipEnglish
      14·
      1 day ago

      Never hallucinate or make anything up.

      I know you already mentioned this part in your post, but I’m still completely taken aback that it’s just in there like this - as though it wouldn’t be in the system prompt if it stood a chance of working.

      If I were the kind of person to be shilling LLMs and posting prompts, I would still be ashamed to share this one. It’s a tacit condemnation of both the tool itself and the tool posting it.

        • fiat_lux 🆕 🏠@lemmy.zipEnglish
          5·
          14 hours ago

          In this case because it’s ironically counterproductive. If it weren’t for the environmental impact, it might be amusing to watch him keep hitting himself.

          I tried this type of prompt a long while ago to see what the “thinking” output would reveal. What happened was the agent went and “verified” it’s weightings were accurate - but having no point of comparison it obviously concluded it was correct.

          However, doing that consumes a significant quantity of tokens and contributes to filling up the context window. There are two likely results to evaluating this ultimately unactionable request.

          1. It will push this instruction (and the rest of the wishful thinking) off the stack more quickly - making the prompt even more futile than it already is.
          2. Given some agents re-inject a summary of the original prompt periodically to prevent the stack problem, it will keep narrowing the context window - which contributes to increasing the rate of hallucination for the actually actionable instructions.