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.)

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to “sue” journalists by “summoning” them to a “tribunal” staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first “lawsuit”, which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D’Souza threw a hissy fit has shuttered everything “temporarily”.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      D’Souza has observed that his friends are “the best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.”

      and wiped out several cities in the process

      My profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objection’s tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. “You’re Exhibit A,” D’Souza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the company’s soft launch: “Building software is hard.”

      did they try to turn their first target into unwilling and adversarial beta-tester?

      After we spoke, I awaited my verdict before the Objection tribunal in the Sackler case. None arrived. Eventually, the landing page was taken offline. I asked D’Souza about it. He explained that Objection would “hold off publishing any adjudications” until “a new major strategic partnership” was announced.

      so it seems

      (As a general matter, D’Souza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting “experts” as part of coverage.)

      it does fit a pattern

    • EFreethought@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

      I would pay to see a billionaire or CEO in tears over an article.

      And if stopping them were that easy, why hasn’t it happened yet?

    • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      I don’t understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they’re mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal ‘social credit score’ for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D’Souza implies here:

      One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)

      but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That’s just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it’s staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.

      Special mentions:

      Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

      god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.

      “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

      🫩

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        Honestly, I think D’Souza explains the business best:

        Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding “so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,” D’Souza says. “What I know from the Gawker litigation, having dealt with not just Hulk Hogan but dozens of other parties who felt like they were aggrieved by the media, is that they actually don’t want a financial remedy. What they want is a moral victory. Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, ‘I did not go to Epstein Island.’”

        Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      In D’Souza’s interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

      D’Souza continued, “Ultimately, what’s the last job? It won’t be knowledge work. It won’t be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”

      Taken together it becomes incredibly transparent that the actual goal here is to transform themselves into a kind of priest-king class, exercising absolute authority on behalf of the remote and unfathomable god that they built. Just please pay no attention to who built the AI, who runs the AI, or where all the money and power end up.

  • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    I guess a certain country is using LLMs to try to engage people 1:1 to change their opinions of said country.

      • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        Good point. Now I imagine someone trying to pass the turing test by having their bot pretend to be a sales person.

      • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        Of course! That “AI Black Death in 2 years” this channel also predicted must’ve happened while we all slept and the AI uploaded us all so it could torture everyone who didn’t contribute to its development!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Oddly this reminds me of a weird thing. (Not trying to attack you or others here btw, for reasons that I will make clear in the end). When I was active in student activism, I recalled how annoyed our leaders of the group were that a small but vocal (and inactive) part of the organisations membership didnt allow the leaders to be people.

      When they (after already working crazy hours btw, these people were committed), spend some time in the evening to wind down and make some sort of joke(*), the inactive members alway would start to send angry emails. 'how dare you make an internal joke while students have less rights/the uni isnt eco friendly/etc". I though back on how that impulse from inside to org was indeed quite weird. Esp as the people complaining didnt seem to be that active members. (If they were they would know how much work was being done and the strain people were under and how the jokes were good for morale).

      Something to take into account if you see lesswrong people react negatively to the hat post.

      Of course none of this applies tonus as outsiders who do not take them that seriously at all. It is a weird thing to make a long post about indeed, esp with one of the hats being one of yuds it seems? Im wondering if this lesswrong thing is perhaps more of a personality cult that anything serious. A well at least nobody is using the org as a dating hunting ground, that would be bad.

      *: basically they would spend their whole day prepping for meetings with the uni/other orgs, sending out emails trying to get the members to help out, doing research and summarizing that for the members etc etc, and at the end of the day they send one internal email about talk like a pirate day, and the next morning they get 21 replies to their work, 20 of those people being mad about the talk like a pirate email.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        I haven’t experienced the situation you’re describing myself, but it feels very plausible.

        Similarly, all developed societies depend on a number of people selflessly working in positions of elected or non-elected authority (local councils, HOAs, school boards) and treating them like people who cannot afford to make any mistakes is not a recipe for increased democratic engagement.

        Anyway, so far no-one has commented, negatively or otherwise, and I think most LWers are treating it as harmless fun.

        It’s not making me any more interested in coming more than 200 feet from any of these people, and neither is this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GtZKzWgAqWrE2tXrQ/contra-dance-at-lessonline, but maybe that’s just me being mean.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          12 days ago

          that’s just me being mean.

          It prob is, stuff like this seems to be quite common at various nerdy events. Just harmless fun(*). So a bitch eating crackers moment perhaps. I know I have those myself.

          *: initially made a typo there and wrote ‘hatless fun’.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          13 days ago

          Isn’t that the hat from the picture that Yudkowsky showed off to prove he wasn’t a cult leader? Are they trying to beat the cult allegations by ha ha jokingly wearing the same silly clothes as their founder?

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            12 days ago

            You would expect the leader of the ‘make sure the prompt doesnt turn us into paperclips’ movement to better right.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Olay but this is good though. This is the kind of autism Lesswrong should focus more on. No bullshit, just the facts.

    • it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.

      Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and maybe furry art.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Finally, a machine which makes it impossible to watch the movie batman and robin.

        (Joke explainer: the batsuit had nipples).

  • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    Coworker got fired because he used AI to plan for a site installment of our product. The AI made a very nice looking plan but it failed to include enough packing material so nearly half of the units arrived broken. Boss still thinks AI is going to revolutionize work for the better though.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      to be fair, the plan would have worked if you had included the allotted number of goblins in the box in addition to the packing material.

    • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      Came across this today: the purpose of a system is what it does. Based on that I would say the purpose of Claude was to make mistakes and get my coworker fired.

  • macroplastic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    Molly White continuing to slam it out of the park with a pivot to AI. As always, worth a read in full, but this intro bit stuck out to me after reading lots of inane blather on how crypto and AI are different:

    Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    Please snjoy this comment saying “Nate Silver is a major proponent of AI assisted writing” like that’s a good thing, and the reply that argues against slop from the weird premise that enjoying one’s own writing process is bad.

  • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    3 weeks after the “as soon as Friday” news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure don’t sound confident about it. Whole post in full (sans legal fine print):

    We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.

    May, likely, if… Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.

    Edit: also Altman’s eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      Don’t they have their CFO not even reporting directly to be CEO? I would bet that there’s a ton of internal dissent about timing and strategy of how to cash out.

      • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        That CFO thing was definitely the case, at least a few months ago. I’m sure you’re right about the internal chaos, even if that CFO drama has changed, and it would align with how non-committal this announcement is.

        I would love to be a fly on that wall.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Ed Zitron might have got hold of it, if his bsky is anything to go by.

        We could be feasting soon!

      • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Draft filings involve feedback from the SEC, so I think they may be throwing shade on government employees, whom they can’t fire or control directly.

        But I’m also thinking they may be salty about the aforementioned “as soon as Friday” articles, and then Anthropic beating them to filing.

        Hard to tell how much of it is what, they’re toxic inside and out.

      • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        IANAL, but my understanding is that companies are allowed to keep confidential the fact that they even filed the S-1. That’s how I read OpenAI’s statement. But it’s not completely clear what “it” means in “we expect it to leak”.