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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)
LessWronger puts in the work and determines that LLMs can’t spacially vizualize for shit, comments are like “well you’re prompting it wrong” (paraphrased) as well as “why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
The article itself is worth reading for some insights in the challenges of using current “AI” (LLMs) to work in the real world.
“why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it’s called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot
e: ok at least op is a machinist
Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn’t correlate with real world usefulness.
benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!
My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.
with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these
The fact this commenter doesn’t mention the absolute fuckton of machining videos on Youtube tells me they’re just talking out of their ass.
(not that forcing those into LLM slop would help but a hypothetical AGI would learn a lot)
Also
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone “in the same boat.”
Dario is delusional. We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
don’t want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don’t forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can’t shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn’t make things worse mentally btw.
I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.
I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.
My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.
Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).
Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!
Solidarity from TN
Noted sex pest Andrew Cuomo wants to run for Mayor in New York, and he might actually have a chance given the incumbent Democratic candidate is corruption magnet Eric Adams. Housing is a big issue in New York, so what’s Cuomo’s plan? Well, his plan is to use chat gpt to write his plan.
Angry New York Democrats were using the slogan DREAM meaning Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor. It’s was then amended to Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor, and amended again to Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.
eric adams should change his platform to “I’m not cuomo”
I dunno, how’s the “I’m not Donald Trump” platform been working out so far?
Well. I don’t want adams to win
COMMERCIAL NOTICE: Pivot to AI now has T-shirts! yeah, I sorted out Redbubble. Also does mugs and stuff. All proceeds go to a worthy cause, i.e. me.
New piece from Ed Zitron - a 44-minute read about OpenAI’s threat to the entire tech industry
If OpenAI’s funding round with Softbank goes as planned, it’ll raise the equivalent of the entire GDP of Estonia — a fairly wealthy country itself, and one that’s also a member of Nato and the European Union. That alone should give you a sense of the truly insane scale of this.
so not only saltman is capable of burning enough power to be comparable to middle-sized euro country, he can also burn small euro country gdp
they are not serious people. damn if i only started grifting instead of getting socially useful skillset
Link to vote Ed for eternal podcast president:
eek
I was reminded of Risky Business and how some of the cybersecurity is sometimes relevant to this sub, which reminded me they talked about this Cryptocurrency people being actually rubber hosed
Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. You’re doing fine don’t even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: ‘Why are high fertility people always so weird?’ A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
Word of advice to the press: Stop 👏 giving 👏 natalists 👏 free 👏 platforms 👏
Every 3 months! Every 3 months fucking hell. (I know because last time they came in the news I opened a tab with them in it, and their faces was the last I saw before my monitor exploded, like literally suddenly I sat in darkness.
All I’ve learned from the most recent round of publicity is that herself has a new hat. It looks stupid
A new hat let me check almost clicks wait a minute, I can’t afford a new monitor, you are trying to trick me!
Just close your eyes and imagine a mediaeval yokel who has accused her sister’s girlfriend of being a witch so she can take over her turnip patch. No need for a new monitor
Infamous Dr Who “big name fan” Ian Levine is using generative AI to recreate lost episodes of the show. This got some mainstream press coverage and fans seem miffed.
christ. can’t he go back to disco, he was good at that
I think Ian Levine loves Doctor Who more than he loves disco. That’s the only explanation for Doctor In Distress.
I got a spam message with a phishing link… Via Github? Seriously? Are we really doing this?
Not a completely unusual comment… From the URL it was very obvious that this was a phishing link though. Curiosity got the better of me. The site shows you a “cloudflare” captcha. OK, let’s click the checkbox. The usual loading animation starts, then this is shown:
Yeah ok, right…
I’m actually a bit impressed with this, these captchas are so common, I didn’t even really think about checking the box. But of course, that interaction means the browser will allow the site to add something to your clipboard.
But like… Why distribute it via Github? I cannot think of a worse audience to try and con into “paste something random into your windows console”. Am I just being naive here? Is this something common I somehow never experienced before?
Yeah that copy paste commands that give control over your pc shit is pretty nasty. Also over a year old at least. So it isnt specifically an attack at vibe coders. Not sure what the initial targets were but these usually try to target people not that knowledgeable in computer matters so lol that this now includes vibe coders.
Ah, I had been wondering if this is new, or I had just never noticed it. So it’s the latter, good to know.
It’s kind of genius as well… A single comment will get the attention of potentially dozens of people, sent to a valid email address without having to guess/buy lists, and there’s an air of “trust” around the (completely legit) mail you then get from github, containing the link.
I don’t know how new it is, but it first dropped on my radar about a year ago due to listening to the Risky Business cybersecurity podcast, not to be confused with the recent (and baffingly named (*)) podcast called ‘Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova’ (**) by dweeb Nate Silver. So I don’t know how long it was going on the wild, and im talking about the windows button + r attack method and not the github comments, no idea how long they used comments as a vector. And yes that part is also good, like the addition of trust of github + quite an effective attack is clever. Shouldn’t work on Real Nerds however.
*: The name means that at least one of they didn’t [know|care|google] about the decades old cybersecurity podcast before naming their podcast that is true. Any of those is odd.
**: addition to above, the tagline of the podcast is ‘a weekly podcast about making better decisions’ Look inwards Nate, look inwards.
Github only catches strays, it’s much more widely deployed
Yeah, that this happens elsewhere I have no doubt, I just never noticed on GH before.
Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.
Oh god
Although… Do you think VideCodersTM read github issues?
“Inference Magazine,” a substack written by a young feller named “Wiseman” who, in the most recent article, says “nuh-uh, you’re the parrot” to the work of Dr. Bender and co (and the rest of humanity, by extension).
https://inferencemagazine.substack.com/
The hackernews thread is a real Bad Philosophy turkey shoot:
These people need to sit through a college level class on linguistics or something like that. This is a demonstration of why STEM majors need general higher education.
Orange site really is out here reinventing hard behaviorism.
“We can’t directly observe internal states beyond our own subjectivity” -> Let’s try to ignore them and see what we get" -> “We’ve developed a model that doesn’t feature internal states as a meaningful element of cognition” -> “there are no internal states” -> “I know I’m a stochastic parrot but what are you?”
Damn well put!
some parrots are more stochastic than others
Serious question: what are people’s specific predictions for the coming VC bubble popping/crash/AI winter? (I’ve seen that prediction here before, and overall I agree, but I’m not sure about specifics…)
For example… I’ve seen speculation that giving up on the massive training runs could free up compute and cause costs to drop which the more streamlined and pragmatic GenAI companies could use to pivot to providing their “services” at sustainable rates (and the price of GPUs would drop to the relief of gamers everywhere). Alternatively, maybe the bubble bursting screws up the GPU producers and cloud service providers as well and the costs on compute and GPUs don’t actually drop that much if any?
Maybe the bubble bursting makes management stop pushing stuff like vibe coding… but maybe enough programmers have gotten into the habit of using LLMs for boilerplate that it doesn’t go away, and LLM tools and plugins persist to make code shittery.
I’ve repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubble’s discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.
Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-nami’s given us, LLMs’ countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the public’s come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.
Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.
With the current bubble’s link to esoteric fascism, the far-right’s open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the public’s got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someone’s character in and of itself - a “tech asshole signifier”, to quote Baldur Bjarnason.
And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubble’s shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.
I think you are much more optimistic than me about the general public’s ability to intellectually understand fascism or think about copyright or give artists their appropriate credit. To most people that know about image gen, it’s a fun toy: throw in some words and rapidly get pictures. The most I hope for is that AI image generation becomes unacceptable to use in professional or serious settings and it is relegated to a similar status as clip art.
I think we’re going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. I’m guessing there’s going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt we’re going to see major pushes.
One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content “creation” and “communication” is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a “good enough” ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.
Yeah I also worry the slop and spam is here to stay, it’s easy enough to make, of as passable quality for the garbage uses people want from it, and if GPUs/compute go down in price, affordable enough for the spammers and account boosters and karma farmers and such to keep using it.
