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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
A friend of mine keeps suggesting Cursor to me. God damn I am sick of autoplag.
OpenAI’s business model:
Star Citizen, but for billionaires.
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google’s AI Overview.
Anyways, personal sidenote:
Beyond putting another blow to AI’s reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.
there used to be a shitposting fb page called “places in warsaw you had no idea about because they don’t exist”. glad that somebody weaponised that concept
In other news, Disney’s apparently planning some kind of “major AI initiative”.
Whatever it is, I’m expecting large-scale boycotts/strikes to kick off as a result of it, alongside AI’s lack of copyright protection getting exploited to troll the shit out of Disney.
Wasn’t Rise of Skywalker already written by a deficient AI of a Gonk droid?
No, it was written by a Star Wars fan. Can’t blame you for confusing the two, though - they’re equally dumb
I don’t think there’s a hell of a lot there that we don’t already know and discuss at length, but it’s cool to see Abby Thorne’s new video at Philosophy Tube get into surveillance capitalism, neo-reaction/tech fascism, and how much of the discussion historically on and around social media misses the point.
It might be a decent overview reference for anyone in your life who isn’t in as deep as we are, since you could do much worse in ~40 minutes.
Australian post-industrial is my favorite genre atm thanks to David, and I have a recommendation: https://moose-mouse.bandcamp.com/album/oxide an Australian kid that plays drums in restaurants around Melbourne and has produced delightful solo electronic albums.
That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Musk’s twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223
Only now? It is amazing how disconnected Musk is from that part of SV culture. Amazing, even sucks at the thing he should have a home field advantage at.
I had a mini identity crisis when i realized I’m more aware of techno-fascist writing than Elon Musk of all people.
If Elon had any self-awareness he wouldn’t be Elon
I wish I was cool enough to have the world’s worst people get so mad at me that they…make fan art and put it up on their website. What’s Elon going for here?
If their aim is to make DG look bad ass, they’re doing a good job.
Anti David Gerard David Gerard Club
david gerard refuses to respond to my allegations that he wears an awesome trenchcoat and uses magic to trap his opponents in a realm where everything is made of the pages of a failed novela, and I think that says a lot
no no, that one i totally did and i’ll fuckin do it again
Is it possible to learn this power?
“I want to speak to the manager” energy.
oh boy it’s gonna be funny/painful to see musk’s biggest fans try to litigate this on Wikipedia with all the banal nothing and weird stalking that trace’s article consists of
trace is on a quillette podcast about it too, prob where Musk got it
no new outbreak on Wikipedia itself
my condolences on the likely death threats. I’ve been there before and it sucks
so far it’s two (2) idiots on X the everything app
lol
It’s all happening on X the death threats app
well so far it’s the whiny little chuds app
though today’s was the Nigerian crypto guy who was angry I’d apparently deleted several of his articles
Update on LLM reviewer situation:
PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:
- a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
- intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
- intro to semiotics for the same
- show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why “automated AI detection” is also bullshit).
- show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
- Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didn’t use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)
We’ll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because it’s a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. I’m also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the “It can’t be that stupid” trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!
Wish us luck, heh!
good luck! it sounds like you’re coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless they’re gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PM’s better than that), you’re at least likely to make an impact
Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose
between this and all the SEO on OpenAI’s marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, it’s exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, I’ve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAI’s promises didn’t pan out. I’m hoping you can find what you need — our back archives might have a few links if you haven’t searched through here yet.
Best of luck!
o7 much appreciated!
Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.
Mostly VAT fraud.
News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard
But your honor, we’re a crypto mining company; we don’t add any value!
‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit
“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”
I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.
Okay, quick personal sidenote:
With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect we’re gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful they’re gonna be, I don’t know, but at the bare minimum it’ll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.
they wish this technology didn’t exist
this is supposed to be invalidating, but like… yes? what’s wrong with that?
They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.
Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity’s business model again?
On one hand, big “let them fight” energy. On the other hand this is a bit more Alien v Predator than Godzilla v Kong. No matter who wins, we lose.
idea landlords: making sure that no one is living rent free in someone elses head
You know you’re dealing with serious people when the dogwhistles come out.
Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.
Quick update: The open letter on AI training (https://aitrainingstatement.org/) has reached 15k signatures:
Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.
Update on the character.ai lawsuit:
Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they’ve also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site’s chatbots.
So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.
I have something that I want to post to MoreWrite and this is very convenient for my story
Glad I could be of help.
Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.
In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.
literally the exact crowd shitting on the mere rumor of a Lix NixOS fork are clapping for this like trained seals. and I don’t think this getting announced right after those rumors is an accident — it gets Jon the most attention for his low-effort bullshit and might even let him hurt another fork by way of community fragmentation
something I’m confused about is, is Ringer even effectively banned anymore? I stopped monitoring when someone with mod privileges unbanned him from a bunch of Nix community spaces. is he back to banned, or is this just a continuing tantrum from Jon having Release Manager stripped from him and given to someone who could do that incredibly thoroughly automated job without stirring up a fucking hate mob?
Is their branding dominated an anime girl of ambiguous age?
Just guessing, I promise I haven’t checked.
there is one silver lining: for once, I don’t have the cognitive load of another Nix fork to carefully consider switching to. there’s no way in fuck I’m using Ringer’s fork under any circumstances, and my brain already filed it away under “weird name, starts with an E, don’t remember the rest” seconds after I closed the tab
You’re right, Borkfan is too easy to remember, my not-ban fork is now called Frabnok.
> FRABNOK LANTERN Your lantern explodes into a rant about the wokes, killing you instantly. *** You have died *** Your score is 0 out of a possible 10 points, in 1 move. This gives you the rank of Release Manager.
More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe’en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.
For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It’s like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.
The gist of Liveline
Joe is complaining about TFI putting up the taxi fares in Dublin.
The ad is for a TFI competition.
Ciarán works in advertising and thought that the TFI ad must be a scam first because of the use of AI.
Ciarán points out that TFI has plenty of money and could afford to pay a graphic designer or an illustrator.
Joe is furious that TFI won’t say whether the ad was AI-generated or not. Ciarán points out that they didn’t even mark the image as AI-generated.
Gerry O’Brien from Actors Equity is on the line. He’s explaining the issues faced by background actors and voiceover actors who are being pressured into signing over their image/voice rights
Hannah Lockhead from Lucan is on the line. “I don’t disagree with what anyone is saying, but personally I think the most offensive thing about this ad is just that it’s ugly”.
Gerry O’Brien is talking about fair compensation and clear consent for actors whose images are being used.
Hannah says that “Frankenstein’s Wife is Margot Robbie”
Ciarán says that the AI art is “quite tacky” and compares poorly with the iconic London Underground logo.
Joe Duffy has seized the opportunity of having Gerry O’Brien on the line to complain that the Abbey Theatre has been closed for a year.
Joe Duffy has asked Hannah Lockhead (who is an actress) “are you working Hannah or are you resting”. She’s just finished filming a horror film in Wales called Esoteric.
That’s pretty much it.
TFI have now apologised.
