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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but there’s some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs

      fresh install:

      • at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that it’s going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
      • figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myself…)

      while I’m certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think it’s fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you don’t even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s

      christ I’m gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      14·
      4 days ago

      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

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    4 days ago

    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.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    23·
    5 days ago

    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!

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      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.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    5 days ago

    ‘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.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      17·
      5 days ago

      they wish this technology didn’t exist

      this is supposed to be invalidating, but like… yes? what’s wrong with that?

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      18·
      5 days ago

      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?

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 days ago

      Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    5 days ago

    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.

  • flizzo@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      5 days ago

      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?

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        5 days ago

        Is their branding dominated an anime girl of ambiguous age?

        Just guessing, I promise I haven’t checked.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        5 days ago

        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

        • flizzo@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          5 days ago

          You’re right, Borkfan is too easy to remember, my not-ban fork is now called Frabnok.

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            12·
            5 days ago
            > 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.