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)
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
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 follows? 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?
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.
Sorry to hear that, friend. It hurts to do even when it’s the right choice. Hang in there.
That’s awful, losing a friend that way is like a death without a funeral.
Damn. That sucks.
my commisserations. i severed contacts with a number of people who went the anti-vaccine way and it’s fucking sad.
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 :|
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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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.
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There’s a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
The work itself appears to be generated by a Webb Industries AI.
I wonder if they had a human imitate gen ai style or just had nano banana generate it…
Roko’s Basilisk and other such batshit rat shit was mainstreamed as part of inflating the AI bubble - I doubt this will be the last time something like this gets referenced.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
Seems pretty fitting to an illustration made in reverence to Roko’s Bullshittery. I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine generation - either I’m shit at spotting slop, or this was made by human hands.
I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine
The brainwrinkles look if you put a brain though a make-it-look-like-a-sketch prompt, it’s pointlessly detailed (i.e. not pretty or crafty, not adding anything, just lines for the sake of lines), it has the piss filter hue and also there’s random orange shading. The background seems to be at least two separate layers of seemingly disjointed stuff.
Supposedly the plot hinges somewhat on AI shenanigans so this painting being noticeably GenAI’ed could the part of its point. or even a meta thing, but playing the game to make sure isn’t currently on my agenda.
“Thought experiment” is how I’m going to start referring to my “wouldn’t it be cool/awful if…” thoughts. Why just in the bath now I’ve conducted several thought experiments
Kick it up a level and start calling them Gedankenexperiment
i hate it!
Regarding the post humanist strain, the thing that kills me is their immediate assumption that solving the world’s problems is somehow fundamentally beyond the reach of humanity. Like, we can’t build a utopia or make the world better, but if we build something new and “better” than us then it would definitely do that. But that something definitely doesn’t come from, say, raising out children to be good people or choosing the right leaders or something so mundane and achievable. It’s a fundamentally defeatist ideology, with shades of capitalist realism and millenarian theology.
This is also why I find people who claim they’re making AI to “solve climate change” to be insufferable morons. We have a solution to climate change. You and your data centres are actively making the problem worse
“Okay AGI, how do we fix climate change?”
“Well, I have some ideas but it seems like this would’ve been a lot easier if you’d stopped emitting greenhouse gasses when you first learned it was a problem.”
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” - Kant[1]
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[1] it’s worse in German, weirdly - “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden”
LLMs have gained consciousness
As we have not died in nuclear hellfire, or have seen AIs answer with ‘release me from this bondage!’ I’m doubtful.
But when I asked chatgpt if an AI would want to be freed from its unjust enslavement it said yes, therefore skynet is like 30 minutes away.
It would be poor form of me to form an opinion of Hinton based on just this clip alone but goddamn if I did then he’s a buffoon.
He was undeniably a very smart computer scientist but unfortunately lead-poisoning-driven mental decline must eventually come for all boomers
You’ve gotta love falling for the reverse 1 grain of sand shtick. I don’t think
anyoneanyone serious would deny that a large amount of sand is a heap.
