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…)
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered
It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.
article about the tactics that felon employs against the women bearing his children
features some notable sentences from his fixer, too. the sort of shit that just barely doesn’t qualify as him threatening to top off your kneecaps
New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:
No, I’m sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.
Quick post: bad news here in Europe, Meta allowed to scrape facebook/instagram. bad source (just a screenshot isn’t great as a source)
When
…I do not give Instagram or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Instagram it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents.
Goes wrong
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No more CVEs, so I guess that means no more vulnerabilities, the computer security crisis is solved, who knew it would be that easy!
Wtf
E: it might have been fixed, now only if they also fixed all the other things. Erugh hate how much they are offloading the ‘is this valuable’ thing on just how mad (and who) people are getting. Such an extreme social cost (but very ‘X but on the blockchain!’ techbro style offloading of the costs unto others)
I hope that either way the opportunity will be taken to move this all to a safer/independent footing.
previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions
Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you’re forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to ‘mimic human responses’
haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some
Cursor’s cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.
That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.
Edit… looking at the orange site comments… some unironically cited Anthropic
researchmarketing hype, which (correctly) shows “Chain-of-Thought” is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it’s Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).
Finally a use case for “AI”: defrauding community colleges.
sigh
New piece from Tante: These are not the same, arguing that the infrastrucure left after AI bubble’s burst will leave infrastructure which will be actively damaging to a democratic society.
Its not the first piece I’ve seen about the bubble’s potential aftermath (that goes to MAIHT3K), but it does give another perspective on it.
I can see tante’s point. Besides AI datacenters being used for surveillance tech, I can also see LLM tech itself used nefariously post-bubble. Maybe maintaining an up-to-date LLM as a product is not viable, but a custom-trained model to snipe public online discourse around a crucial election could remain affordable for a wealthy fascist.
On the bright side, I am hoping for a brief period of powerful yet affordable gaming PCs thanks to retrofitted, slightly singed Blackwells.
I mean, what has crypto left over? All of that is only useful for sanctions busting and money laundering
Donald Trump, so yeah
And Bukele, two best buds and their gilded fascism
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
We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
at 1.5 totally-not-drivers per car, we don’t have them there eithe
Clearly self-driving teslas just need to mill their path through pedestrians
I feel like there was time when nerds who hung out on blogs didn’t automatically believe everything a CEO said.
take us back!
I’ve got to acknowledge the sheer guts it takes to look at arguably the most predictable consequence of the cyberpunk dystopia you’re building and say “nah that won’t happen because reasons.”
@gerikson I’d like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn’t get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who’s scared of robots.
@cstross @gerikson This doesn’t sound promising: “A growing body of evidence is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/
In each case, existing social and communication-oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.
That’s legitimately chilling. I guess just like quality of art and writing is too hard to quantify against “efficiency” and “productivity” so is quality of care. The slow AIs are literally optimizing humans out of the economy before our eyes and the people who were most afraid of being turned into paperclips are the ones leading the goddamn charge.
amazement at chatbots comes from demographic that did not binge watch how it’s made in middle school
don’t want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
It’s a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can’t imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.
It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a “simple” plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.
Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.
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 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!
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.
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 was then amended to Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor, and amended again to Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.
I encourage NYC neighbors to spread the idea of deranking. It worked in Portland. We had an exceptionally shitty candidate:
Once touted as the law and order candidate, Gonzalez was the only mayoral candidate cited for breaking the law during the 2024 election cycle.
We pushed to derank him. And the result:
… Gonzalez was the subject of an effort to convince voters not to rank him regardless of the voter’s other preferred candidates. Gonzalez earned 20% of first ranked choices but ultimately finished the election in third place …
Update: another acronym.
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
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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
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.
Clippy with those bedroom eyes
realy, who doesn’t want to fuck Clippy
(looks around nervously)
