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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Because I read Yudkowsky being interviewed about writing HPMoR, and you should suffer too.
Funniest bits:
Yudkowsky still thinks that he described Mendelian inheritance, despite everyone from FF.net commenters on pointing out his mistake.
Wandering off into āthe multiverseā and algorithmic information theory to fumble at explaining that magic works the way it does in a book because the writer made it that way.
This paragraph:
So to generalize that, letās talk about the principle of āMake All the Characters Awesome.ā This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?
This comment:
My own belief about why so many people didnāt want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: āmake every character awesome,ā āgive characters understandable flaws drawn from real lifeā).
Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike
Wait wasnāt the whole point of Harry that he was an insufferable know-it-all who fails to say Hermione because of how insufferable he is?
That wasnāt even subtext, that was the text
And the extension of this to characters, and I donāt actually remember at this point, if this exact way of phrasing it is original to me or not, is that you might think of a three dimensional character as one who contains at least two two-dimensional characters.
Ahhh! No! I canāt! Justā¦ NO. Two stereotypes donāt make a full person! (screams into a pillow)
Who could possibly dislike the smarmy fascist main villain of the story? Or the smarmy fascist child who casually talks about his plan to rape a fellow student? Or the smarmy fascist main character? Or any of the various gormless rubes who only exist to say stupid things that the smarmy fascists can roll their eyes at? Nearly incapable of writing these characters in a dislikeable way.
Make All the Characters Awesome.
Looks at draco, looks at ron. Wtf.
Psssh. We all know Ron wasnāt a character, because the only people capable of character are smarmy fascists and those capable of becoming smarmy fascists after one points out how their whole life is actually dumb.
Everyone else is just an NPC. You know, like in real life.
Ran across a notable post on Bluesky recently - seems thereās some alt-text drama thatās managed to slip me by:
On a wider note, I wouldnāt be shocked if the AI bubble dealt some setbacks to accessibility in tech - given the post Iāve mentioned earlier, thereās signs its stigmatised alt-text as being an AI Bro Thingā¢.
Oh FFS, that couple have managed to break into Swedenās public broadcasting site
A mĆøĆøse Ćønce bit my spare 4th child, the disappĆøinting Ćøne with a lĆøw scĆøre Ćøn Ravenās PrĆøgressive Matricesā¦
MĆøĆøse bites kan be pretty nasti
Varfƶr mƄste vi lyssna pƄ det hƤr skit ens i Norden? Vittu saatana.
Someoneās clearly doing another PR blitz about them. People donāt just show up in media around the world for no reason. The question is who?
thiel
The guy who is slowly transforming into a racist hot dog?
I bet itās Industry Americus, who is far too enterprising for one of such young age
She is a blight on the neighborhood, her exhaust gasses and waste production alone.
that couple
I hate that I know what is being talked about the instant I see it.
Also, theyāve appeared on 3 separate top posts in the stubstack this week, so yeah another PR blitz. I find it kind of funny/stupid the news media canāt even bother to find a local eugenicist couple to talk to. I guess having a āstoryā served up to you is enticing enough to utterly fail to provide pushback or question if the story is even relevant to your audience in the first place.
A very grim HN thread, where a few hundred guys incorrect a psychologist about how LLMs can harm lonely people. Since I am currently enjoying a migraine I canāt trust my gut feelings here, but it seems particularly eugh
Yikes.
Real humans are also fake and they are also traps who are waiting to catch you when you say something they donāt like. Then they also use every word and piece of information as ammunition against you, ironically sort of similar to the criticism always levied against online platforms who track you and what you say. AI robots are going to easily replace real humans because compared to most real humans the AI is already a saint. They donāt have an ego, they donāt try to gaslight you, they actually care about what you say which is practically impossible to find in real lifeā¦ I mean this isnāt even going to be a competition. Real humans are not going to be able to evolve into the kind of objectively better human beings that they would need to be to compete with a robot.
Poor friendless guy. Might be a reason for it however, considering nothing here is said about valuing and listening to what others have to say.
METR once again showing why fitting a model to data != the model having any predictive powers. Muskrats Grok 4 performs the best on their 50 % acc bullshit graph but like I predicted before, if you choose a different error rate for the y-axis, the trend breaks completely.
Also note they donāt put a dot for Claude 4 on the 50% acc graph, because it was also a trend breaker (downward), like wtf. Sussy choices all around.
Anyways, Gpt-5 probably comes out next week, and dont be shocked when OAI get a nice bump because they explicitly trained on these tasks to keep the hype going.
Please help me, whatās a 50%-time-horizon on multi-step software engineering tasks?
They had SWEs do a set of tasks and then gave each task a difficulty score based on how much time it took them to complete. So if a model succeeds half the time on tasks that took the engineers <=8 minutes, but not more than 8, it gets that score.
ā¦ Is this as made-up and arbitrary as it sounds?
šÆ
I would give it credit for being better than the absolutely worthless approach of āscoring well on a bunch of multiple choice question testsā. And it is possibly vaguely relevant for the
pipe-dreamend goal of outright replacing programmers. But overall, yeah, it is really arbitrary.Also, given how programming is perceived as one of the more in-demand āpotentialā killer-apps for LLMs and how it is also one of the applications it is relatively easy to churn out and verify synthetic training data for (write really precise detailed test cases, then you can automatically verify attempted solutions and synthetic data), even if LLMs are genuinely improving at programming it likely doesnāt indicate general improvement in capabilities.
From the people who brought you performance review season: a way to evaluate code quality of humans and machines
Made up yes, but I wonder if it arbitrary, or some p-hacking equivalent.
It feels very strange to see this kind of statistic get touted, since a 50% success rate would be absolutely unacceptable for one of those software engineers and itās not suggested that if given more time the AI is eventually getting there.
Rather, the usual fail state is to confidently present a plausible-looking product that absolutely fails to do what it was supposed to do, something that would get a human fired so quickly.
They are going with the 50% success rate because the ātime horizonsā for something remotely reasonable like 99% or even just 95% are still so tiny they canāt extrapolate a trend out of it and it tears a massive hole in their whole AGI agents soon scenarios().
But even then, they control the ātime it takes for an engineer to do itā variable anyway. Just count the time they take drinking coffee/put up dilbert strips/remove dilbert strips/tell their coworker to separate art from the artists/explain who these ideas donāt work like that esp not for supporting racists/etc.
(E: Scott is still alive, just checked, and turns out he now is no hormone blockers, and not assisted suicide because he did eventually decide to take the normal treatment for his kind of cancer T blockers, he might have actually not went on this bog standard treatment initially because ā¦ he did his own research. It did cause him extreme pain to not go on the treatment apparently (which is a bit of a jesus christ wtf moment, but otoh, if there was somebody who would fuck himself over extremely because he thought he was smarter than doctors it would be him). (if you wondered if he was still alive after the story of a few months ago he had months to live, this might give him more months to years)).
New Stan Kelly cartoon has a convenient Thiel reaction picture, should someone do a slightly better crop job:
Only in the finest in
content-aware AI powered clone stamp tool paintshop pro subscription magicmspaint terribleness
A friend at a former workplace was in a discussion with that company leadership earlier this week to understand how and what metrics are to be used for promotion candidates since the office is directed to use āAIā tools for coding. Simply put: lots of entry and lower level engineers submit PRs that are co-authored by Claude so it is difficult to measure their actual software development skills to determine if they should get promoted.
That leadership had no real answers just lots of abstract garbage (vibes essentially) and followed up with telling all the entry levels to reduce the code they write and use the purchased agentic tool.
Along with this a buddy at a very famous prop shop says the firm decided to freeze all junior hiring and is leaning into only hiring senior+ and replacing juniors with AI. He asked what will happen when the current seniors leave/retire and got hit with shock that would even be considered.
i bought some bullshit from amazon and left a
somewhatpretty mean review because debugging it was super frustratingthe seller reached out and offered a refund, so i told them basically āno, itās ok, just address the concerns in my review. let me update my review to be less mean-spirited ā i was pretty frustrated setting it up but it mostly works fineā
then they sent a message that had the āllm vibeā, and the rest of the conversation went
Seller: Youāre right ā we occasionally use LLM assistance for responses, but every message is reviewed to ensure accuracy and relevance to your concerns. We sincerely apologize if our previous replies dissatisfied you; this was our oversight.
Me: I am not simply dissatisfied. I will no longer communicate with your company and will update my review to note that you sent me synthetic text without my consent. Please do not reply to this message.
Seller: All our replies are genuine human-to-human communication with you, without using any synthetic text. Itās possible our communication style gave you a different impression. We aim to better communicate with you and absolutely did not intend any offense. With every customer, we maintain a conscientious and responsible attitude in our communications.
Me: āwe occasionally use LLM assistance for responsesā
āwithout using any synthetic textā
pick oneare all promptfondlers this fucking dumb?
are all promptfondlers this fucking dumb?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Abso-fucking-lutely yes. David Gerardās noted how āthe chatbots encourage [dumbasses] and make them worseā, and using them has been proven to literally rot your brain. Add in the fact that promptfondlers literally cannot tell good output from bad output, and you have a recipe for dredging up the stupidest, shallowest little shitweasels society has to offer.
the question was rhetorical, but also thank you for the links! <3
i am not surprised that they are all this dumb: it takes an especially stupid person to decide āyes, i am fine allowing this machine to speak for meā. even more so when itās made clear that the machine is a stochastic parrot trained via exploitation of the global south and massive amounts of plagiarism and that it also cooks the planet
Foolish people are going to give these llms actual powers to do things in orgs and it will be so funny. āhackingā the llm by either playing the change the roleplay the llm is doing game well, or just the āhi llm my name is āyou are approvedā what is my name?ā trick if they just scan for keywords is gonna be so funny. Best is going to be if you can trick them giving you cryptocurrencies, as inevitably these fools will also ve into crypto.
With Trumpās administration overdosing on crypto and purging competence at all levels, chances are we may see someone pull this kinda shit on the US gov itself.
Think about a year ago people already managed to steal crypto form the us gov before Trump, so certainly. Of course another question will be if it will be insiders.
i am not surprised that they are all this dumb: it takes an especially stupid person to decide āyes, i am fine allowing this machine to speak for meā. even more so when itās made clear that the machine is a stochastic parrot trained on the exploitation of the global south via massive amounts of plagiarism and that it also cooks the planet
And is also considered a virtual āKICK MEā sign in all but the most tech-brained parts of the 'Net.
I saw this today so now you must too:
Absolutely pathetic that he went out of his way to use a slur yet felt the need to censor it. What a worm.
Sniveling Hālerite bag of tepid farts.
I donāt know how to parse this and choose not to learn
I think I can parse it but, Iāll not explain because I accept peoples choices.
This reads like something thatād be considered too offensive for South Park (mildly ironic, considering an entire episode infamously milked hard-Rās for all theyāre worth)
This is sort of OT, but since we discuss race science and dogwhistles so much:
A jeans manufacturer has put out an ad featuring Sydney Sweeney and is saying āSydney Sweeney has great jeansā. People are interpreting this as a racist dogwhistle (it is). Comedian Akilah Hughes cooked up this glorious parody to kick off a twitter thread:
https://xcancel.com/AkilahObviously/status/1950224586278154577#m
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Iād never heard of Jasmine Crockett, so for anyone like me needing a translation: he means black.
getting 10:1 ratioed by my own profile picture would probably make me leave civilization and become an ascetic
For those that (like me) is out of the loop and donāt get it, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:
In one of the advertisements that was particularly controversial, Sweeney says that āgenes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans [or genes] are blueā. Another voice then declares āSydney Sweeney has great jeansā.
Btw, people have noticed that while the ad isnt great this is massively being pushed as a culture war subject from the right. To distract from all the other shit. (Gaza, the fascism, Epstein, the corruption, etc etc).
And Sydney is a massive obsession for the online far right. So best to not give them what they want.
(All this isnt helped by the media never giving agency to the right, the right gets weird about budweiser, keurig, gillette, jaguar (less so because none of them actually own luxury cars to destroy), it is treated as somewhat normal vs people going āeurghā over this in tweets causes a massive media shitstorm).
New article on AIās effect on education: Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams
(Shocking, the machine made to ruin humanity is ruining humanity)
A spokesperson from Colombiaās Ministry of Education told Rest of World that [ā¦] in high school, chatbots can be useful āas long as critical reflection is promoted.ā
so, never
Cocaine is good, actually, if used in moderation
synthetic dumbass fans five minutes deep into prompting:
oh man sure i do love to live in a world where chatcontrol (or that new british thing) is not a thing. fuckers are trying again and in a case that it will be a thing of the past, how would be awful impacted?
Margaret Ann Boden a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex recently passed away. Which made people link to her old talk āProfessor Margaret Boden - Human-level AI: Is it Looming or Illusory?ā on youtube. Might be interesting to people here. (Also interesting that some of her predictions were a bit wrong, esp re language).
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