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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Interesting (in a depressing way) thread by author Alex de Campi about the fuckery by Unbound/Boundless (crowdfunding for publishing, which segued into financial incompetence and stealing royalties), whose latest incarnation might be trying to AI their way out of the hole theyāve dug for themselves.
From the liquidatorās proposals:
We are also undertaking new areas of business that require no funds to implement, such as starting to increase our rights income from book to videogaming by leveraging our contacts in the gaming industry and potentially creating new content based on our intellectual property utilizing inexpensive artificial intelligence platforms.
(emphasis mine)
They donāt appear to actually own any intellectual property anymore (due to defaulting on contracts) so I canāt see this ending well.
Original thread, for those of you with bluesky accounts: https://bsky.app/profile/alexdecampi.bsky.social/post/3lqfmpme2722w
Loose Mission Impossible Spoilers
The latest Mission Impossible movie features a rogue AI as one of the main antagonists. But on the other hand, the AIās main powers are lies, fake news, and manipulation, and it only gets as far as it does because people allow fear to make themselves manipulable and it relies on human agents to do a lot of its work. So in terms of promoting the doomerism narrative, I think the movie could actually be taken as opposing the conventional doomer narrative in favor of a calm, moderate, internationally coordinated (the entire plot could have been derailed by governments agreeing on mutual nuclear disarmament before the AI subverted them) response against AIās that ultimately have only moderate power.
Adding to the post-LLM hype predictions: I think post LLM bubble popping, āTerminatorā style rogue AI movie plots donāt go away, but take on a different spin. Rogue AIās strengthās are going to be narrower, their weaknesses are going to get more comical and absurd, and idiotic human actions are going to be more of a factor. For weaknesses it will be less āfailed to comprehend loveā or ācleverly constructed logic bomb breaks its reasoningā and more āforgets what it was doing after getting drawn into too long of a conversationā. For human actions it will be less āits makers failed to anticipate a completely unprecedented sequence of bootstrapping and self improvementā and more āits makers disabled every safety and granted it every resource it asked for in the process of trying to make an extra dollar a little bit fasterā.
New Blood In The Machine: The āAI jobs apocalypseā is for the bosses
So far away we wait for the AGI
For the billions all wasted and gone
We feel the pain of compute time lost in few thousand days
Through the sneering and the flames we carry onOT: Welp. Think interview went well. Just waiting for them to check references (oh god) and I should know whats what by Monday.
Good luck! Iām rooting for you.
I hate Iām so terminally online I found out about the rumor that Musk and Stephen Millerās wife are bumping uglies through a horrorfic parody account
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/114593332907413196
Midnight Pals is pretty great.
Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:
- The āwhite-collar bloodbathā is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
- AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search
Am I the only person not impressed by veo3? Yeah there are more details yada yada, but the details are still wrong.
The view of the garbage fractal isnāt improved by zooming deeper into the Bullshit-Mandlebrot Set.
I saw an ad for a local gin festival generated with veo3 and now Iāve sworn off gin
Sobering!
Looks like shit and itās mostly entirely static because anything with a little more movement would look like complete piss.
Holy hell all the examples I found made me seasick. I am apparently physically incapable of watching veo3 videos.
that is because you can both read and write. the average social media slobbyist does not care. clevage, beats, teeth and consumptionā¦
let us talk about what the difference between animals and humans is. some say it is the art we create. and i wonder if birds have a lower quality output that letās say taylor swift or jk rowling. have doubts. maybe we are not so fucking special and 99% of media we consume is trash? did you ever check out spotifyā¦theyāve proven ppl love slob by faking companies for jazz labels. and deezer has proven comsumer over 30 dont even access any new music. humans love slob. and your incapability tells me you think you were consuming prime rib before while it was just another industry slob.
Hard disagree, as much as I loathe JK Rowlingās politcal ideas, and the at-times unecessary cruelty found in the HP novels, it still shaped a large part of the imaginary world of a generation. As beautiful as bird songs are (who the hell refers to birdsong as āoutputā), this simply cannot be compared.
Yes commercial for-profit shareholder-driven lackadaisical āartā is already an insult to life and creativity, but a fully-or-mostly automated slop machine is an infinitely worse one.
Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through, people still made choice, even subjected to crazy uninispired didacts from above, the hands that fashion books, movies, music, video-games, tv-shows still haveāmust haveāroom to bring a given vision together.
I think people DO care.
I donāt know exactly what you wanted to say, if you wanted to express despair, cynisism, nihilishm or something else, but I would encourage you not to give up hope with humanity, people arenāt that stupid, people arenāt that void of meaning.
this is painfull. you compare lovecraft to rowlingā¦sorryā¦no. she didnt come up with a backstory for most characters. hell no.
Oh no! I wasted my time on Troll. Typical.
just because your arguments dont stick doesnt make no one a troll. you hallucinate āthis simply cannot be compared.ā and then overvalue humans again and again.
Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through,
No. again you declare something art without the proof what makes this art. It is not art if someone is able to play a beat on old cans. It is a profession or skill. And that is all I ever saw from jkrowling,dua lipa and all that other human slob. please provide an argument where the sloppy art happend and what made it art. āMade by humansā != art
Dua lipa on the other hand is absolute slob - it made the existing art worse. Not only do all songs sound the same, they are also not original. Yet the fanarmy will use exactly your way of reasoning. pathetic. Do dua lipa fans care? so far they obviously haventā¦it is all old products from the industry revamped with studio1 and a human with zero personality. People DO care, right?
In an completely unprecedented turn of events, the word prediction machine has a hard time predicting numbers.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-says-its-still-2024/
Hey, mentally some people are still in 2019/early 2020. /s
Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.
Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.
Girls think the āeuā in āeugenicsā means EW. Donāt get the ick, girls! It literally means good.
So if youāre not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what
ā¦ how is this man still able to post from inside the locker he should be stuffed in 24/7
sounds like heās posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school
So, heās essentially Drake if he got into AI doom
Seeing Yarvin mansplain eugenics really does make one wonder how he doesnāt just get suckerpunched whenever he says anything at someone in public.
Not beating the sexism allegations.
The eigenrobot thread heās responding to is characteristically bizarre and gross. Youād think eigenrobot being anti-eugenics is a good thing but he still finds a way to make it suspect. (He believes being unable to make babies is worse than death?)
I think he means āmass sterilisation of a populationā Vs āmass murder of the same populationā, which is genocide either way, and then he would opt for the faster method.
Or something. Feels extra creepy discussing which genocide is better with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
I mean I guess you can argue that straight up murder has a certain honesty to it? At the same time that is mainly good because it makes it harder to justify whatās happening compared to anti-miscegenation laws or restricting people to an open-air prison for a few generations. And we can see how thatās working out in the current political climate.
Re: extra creepy: and also with people their people in power.
I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:
It doesnāt even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isnāt plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldnāt do.
A new LLM plays pokemon has started, with o3 this time. It plays moderately faster, and the twitch display UI is a little bit cleaner, so it is less tedious to watch. But in terms of actual ability, so far o3 has made many of the exact same errors as Claude and Gemini including: completely making things up/seeing things that arenāt on the screen (items in Virdian Forest), confused attempts at navigation (it went back and forth on whether the exit to Virdian Forest was in the NE or NW corner), repeating mistakes to itself (both the items and the navigation issues I mentioned), confusing details from other generations of Pokemon (Nidoran learns double kick at level 12 in Fire Red and Leaf Green, but not the original Blue/Yellow), and it has signs of being prone to going on completely batshit tangents (it briefly started getting derailed about sneaking through the tree in Virdian Forestā¦ i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).
I donāt know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the cornerā¦ well actually I do know: hopium, cope, cognitive bias, and deliberate deception. The whole LLM playing Pokemon thing is turning into less of a test of LLMs and more entertainment and advertising of the models, and the scaffold are extensive enough and different enough from each other that they really arenāt showing the modelsā raw capabilities (which are even worse than I complained about) or comparing them meaningfully.
I like how all of the currently running attempts have been equipped with automatic navigation assistance, i.e. a pathfinding algorithm from the 60s. And thatās the only part of the whole thing that actually works.
I wouldnāt say even that part works so well, given how Mt. Moon is such a major challenge even with all the features like that.
The actual pathfinding algorithm (which is surely just A* search or similar) works just fine; the problem is the LLM which uses it.
I donāt get it, how is every one of the most touted people in the AI space among the least credible people in the industry.
Like literally every time its a person whose name I recognize from something else theyāve done, that something else is something I hate.
In the collection of links of what Ive has done in recent years, thereās one to an article about a turntable redesign he worked on, and from that article:
The Sondek LP12 has always been entirely retrofittable and Linn has released 50 modular hardware upgrades to the machine, something that Ive said he appreciates. āI love the idea that after years of ownership you can enjoy a product thatās actually better than the one you bought years before,ā said Ive.
I donāt know, should I laugh, or should I scream, that itās Ive, of all people, saying that.
ED ZITRON
FROM THE TOP ROPE
Im sure this is fine https://infosec.exchange/@paco/114509218709929701
"Paco Hope #resist @[email protected]
OMG. #Microsoft #Copilot bypasses #Sharepoint #security so you donāt have to!
āCoPilot gets privileged access to SharePoint so it can index documents, but unlike the regular search feature, it doesnāt know about or respect any of the access controls you might have set up. You can get CoPilot to just dump out the contents of sensitive documents that it can see, with the bonus feature* that your access wonāt show up in audit logs.ā
The S in CoPilot stands for Security! https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/remembering-f00fs-of-old/"
