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.)
interesting masto thread on doge’s use of AI, from someone who helped build their LLM:
from someone who helped build their LLM
Nice to get a look on the inside from one of the 21st-century Oppenheimers.
Sloppenheimer
I much prefer the Whoppenheimer.
lol, that’s too charitable to them, nukes at least work
continuing this tortured analogy for no particular reason:
oppenheimer/sutskever: we finally have a nuke to drop on nazis
groves/?: nazis?
teller/saltman: at long last, we have a chatbot capable of polluting the entire earth and internet
szilard/EY: and that’s why we shouldn’t build it (gets ignored)
teller/saltman: also we need billions of dollars for it and effects will be the same if it’s deployed in backyard
musk would be general ripper i guess, they had no ketamine back then. deepseek is new dubna and both caused diplomatic incidents. thiel would be one of these people that didn’t focus on that thing but instead on other things that make the former work (enablers) that would be missiles and surveillance
lol, that’s too charitable to them, nukes at least work
And Oppie realised the gravity of their invention. And he was trying to end the Second World War with them, not make money by causing untold suffering.
Nukes and AI both represented a new and unique threat capable of causing worldwide devastation, so I’d say the analogy works pretty well.
when bubble pops, chatbots will vanish but nukes will remain for a long time
So a wannabe DOGEr at Brown Univ from the conservative student paper took the univ org chart and ran it through an AI aglo to determine which jobs were “BS” in his estimation and then emailed those employees/admins asking them what tasks they do and to justify their jobs.
Thank you to that thread for reacquainting me with the term “script kiddie”, the precursor to the modern day vibe coder
Script kiddies at least have the potential to learn what they’re doing and become proper hackers. Vibe coders are like middle management; no actual interest in learning to solve the problem, just trying to find the cheapest thing to point at and say “fetch.”
There’s a headline in there somewhere. Vibe Coders: stop trying to make fetch happen
Get David Graeber’s name out ya damn mouth. The point of Bullshit Jobs wasn’t that these roles weren’t necessary to the functioning of the company, it’s that they were socially superfluous. As in the entire telemarketing industry, which is both reasonably profitable and as well-run as any other, but would make the world objectively better if it didn’t exist
The idea was not that “these people should be fired to streamline efficiency of the capitalist orphan-threshing machine”.
I saw Musk mentioning Ian Banks’ Player of Games as an influential book for him, and I puked in my mouth a little.
I demand that Brown University fire (checks notes) first name “YOU ARE HACKED NOW” last name “YOU ARE HACKED NOW” immediately!
Court documents regarding Facebook’s plagiarism lawsuit just started getting unsealed, and ho-lee shit is this a treasure trove:
This confirms basically everything I said a week ago - AI violates copyright by design, and a single copyright suit going through means its open fucking season on the AI industry. Wonder who’s gonna blink first.
Our local pro entertainment industry lobby group (the kind of group who gets thepiratebay blocked, Brein) is already succesfully going after smaller LLMs and datasets created by (and made freely available) over enthousiastic amateurs/hobbyist which breach copyright.
This might seem like a positive thing, but I doubt they will have the willpower/power/desire to go after the big ones. (And even then not sure they are the good guys here).
oh would you look at that, something some people made proved helpful and good, and now cloudflare is immediately taking the idea to deploy en masse with no attribution
double whammy: every one of the people highlighted is a dude
“it’s an original idea! we’re totes doing the novel thing of model synthesis to defeat them! so new!” I’m sure someone will bleat, but I want them to walk into a dark cave and shout at the wall forever
(anubis isn’t strictly the same in that set of things, but I link it both because completeness and subject relevance)
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/50 and of course we already have chatgptfriends on the case of stopping the mean programmer from doing something the Machine doesn’t like. This person doesn’t even seem to understand what anubis does, but they certainly seem confident chatgpt can tell him.
oh cute, the clown cites[0] POPIA in their wallspaghetti, how quaint
(POPIA’s an advancement, on paper. In practice it’s still……not working well. source: me, who has tried to make use of it on multiple occasions. won’t get into details tho)
[0] fsvo
In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.
This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.
Think Germany and the Uk created travel advisories against the US. ( As we the Dutch are mostly neutral cowards, 20% putins lackey, almost an American vassal state, and very good at ignoring the rest of the world, doubt we will anytime soon).
As a Canadian we’re just waiting for the tanks to start running through.
We’re apparently going to get an election April 28th, but is there still going to be a Canada by then? Who knows.So far France and Netherlands have already set up programs to poach american scientists fired during recent ripping copper from the walls, so i wouldn’t say there’s nothing done
A thing which came under criticism here, as while this program is being set up they are also doing budget cuts on universities. So don’t expect much from .nl here. Also our gov is a mess, more interested at putting up border controls (this year they caught 250 people, which they consider a big success for re-instituting border controls). So yeah doubt, esp with Wilders in gov and opposition at the same time.
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months
This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants
Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people don’t do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell
LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos
On a semi-related note, I expect the people who are currently making heavy use of AI will find themselves completely helpless without it if/when the bubble finally bursts, and will probably struggle to find sympathy from others thanks to AI indelibly staining their public image.
(The latter part is assuming heavy AI users weren’t general shitheels before - if they were, AI’s stain on their image likely won’t affect things either way. Of course, “AI bro” is synonymous with “trashfire human being”, so I’m probably being too kind to them :P)
check out this extreme value delivery in the “pro” offering that jsfiddle[0] aims to bring to market
[0] -
going by the one comment downthread, haven’t checked it bc no accounthave checked, it shows even without accountWordpress plugins pull this shit too, WP Dark Mode attempts to paywall the custom CSS that’s built into Wordpress
yeah I’ve got some clients with wp in production and wow logging into the admin on those things is an Experience
Ran across a new piece on Futurism: Before Google Was Blamed for the Suicide of a Teen Chatbot User, Its Researchers Published a Paper Warning of Those Exact Dangers
I’ve updated my post on the Character.ai lawsuit to include this - personally, I expect this is gonna strongly help anyone suing character.ai or similar chatbot services.
Asahi Lina posts about not feeling safe anymore. Orange site immediately kills discussion around post.
For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers or the Linux graphics ecosystem. I’ve paused work on Apple GPU drivers indefinitely.
I can’t share any more information at this time, so please don’t ask for more details. Thank you.
Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust – and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that it’s too similar to C++, and I wanted away from that… That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.
Damn, that sucks. Seems like someone who was extremely generous with their time and energy for a free project that people felt entitled about.
This was linked in the HN thread: https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/
Finished reading that post. Sucks that Linux is such a hostile dev environment. Everything is terrible. Teddy K was on to something
between this, much of the recent outrage wrt rust-in-kernel efforts, and some other events, I’ve pretty rapidly gotten to “some linux kernel devs really just have to fuck off already”
That email gets linked in the marcan post. JFC, the thin blue line? Unironically? Did not know that Linux was a Nazi bar. We need you, Ted!!!
The most generous reading of that email I can pull is that Dr. Greg is an egotistical dipshit who tilts at windmills twenty-four-fucking-seven.
Also, this is pure gut instinct, but it feels like the FOSS community is gonna go through a major contraction/crash pretty soon. I’ve already predicted AI will kneecap adoption of FOSS licenses before, but the culture of FOSS being utterly rancid (not helped by Richard Stallman being the semi-literal Jeffery Epstein of tech (in multiple ways)) definitely isn’t helping pre-existing FOSS projects.
There already is a (legally hilarious apparently) attempt to make some sort of updated open source license. This and the culture, the lack of corporations etc, giving back, and the knowledge that all you do gets fed into the AI maw prob will stifle a lot of open source contributions.
Hell noticing that everything I add to game wikis gets monetized by fandom (abd how shit they are) already soured me on doing normal wiki work, and now with the ai shit it is even worse.
The darvo to try and defend hackernews is quite a touch. Esp as they make it clear how hn is harmful. (Via the kills link)
r/cursor is the gift that keeps on giving:
A Bluesky post by Jamelle Bouie prompted me to reflect on how I resent that my knowledge of toxic nerd deep lore is now socially relevant.
alt text
Breaking Bad meme. Jesse: They always say “Read the Sequences”, right?
Walter White:
Jesse: But the Sequences are all cult shit, like everything Yud says about quantum mechanics
Jesse: It’s all “The scientists are insufficiently Rational™ to see the truth, don’t trust the scientists, trust me instead”
Walter White: Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about
I felt this one
That ‘uses an iq chart from a tabloid mag’ thread reminded me how bad the Lw Rationalists are at Lw Rationality. It is supposed to help you be less biassed, but nope first google hit from a bad source and almost zero community pushback, because it confirms their bias about IQ, and the relative value of fields.
Overcoming Bias (by renaming “bias” into “priors”)
alt text
Drunk woman yelling into man’s ear (meme image). Captioned as though she is speaking:
Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science
but it gets 9th-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares
Razer claims that its AI can identify 20 to 25 percent more bugs compared to manual testing, and this can reduce QA time by up to 50 percent as well as cost savings of up to 40 percent
as usual this is probably going to be only the simplest shit, and I don’t even want to think of the secondary downstream impacts from just listening to this shit without thought will be
Marginally related, but I was just served a YouTube ad for chewing gum (yes, I’m too lazy to setup ad block).
“Respawn, by Razer. They didn’t have gaming gum at Pompeii, just saying.”
I think I felt part of my frontal lobe die to that incomprehensible sales pitch, so you all must be exposed to it as well.
The secret is to have cultivated a codebase so utterly shit that even LLMs can make it better by just randomly making stuff up
At least they don’t get psychic damage from looking at the code
Well the use of stuff like fuzzers has been a staple for a long time so ‘compared to manual testing’ is doing some work here.
Isn’t this what got crowdstrike in trouble?
not quite the same but I can see potential for a similar clusterfuck from this
also doesn’t really help how many goddamn games are running with rootkits, either
If I had to judge Razer’s software quality based on what little I know about them, I’d probably raise my eyebrows because they ship some insane 600+ MiB driver with a significant memory impact with their mice and keyboards that’s needed to use basic features like DPI buttons and LED settings, when the alternative to that is a 900 kiB open source driver which provides essentially the same functionality.
And now their answer to optimization is to staple a chatbot onto their software? I think I pass.
Another episode in the continued saga of lesswrongers anthropomorphizing LLMs to an absurd extent: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnYnCFgT3hF6LJPwn/why-white-box-redteaming-makes-me-feel-weird-1
Remember the old facebook created two ai models to try and help trading? Which turned quickly into gibberish (for us) as a trading language. They uses repetition of words to indicate how much they wanted an object. So if it valued balls highly it would just repeat ball a few dozen times like that.
Id figure that is what is causing the repeats here, and not the anthropomorphized idea lf it is screaming. Prob just a way those kinds of systems work. But no of course they all jump to consciousness and pain.
Yeah there might be something like that going on causing the “screaming”. Lesswrong, in it’s better moments (in between chatbot anthropomorphizing), does occasionally figure out the mechanics of cool LLM glitches (before it goes back to wacky doom speculation inspired by those glitches), but there isn’t any effort to do that here.
Still, presumably the point of this research is to later use it on big models - and for something like Claude 3.7, I’m much less sure of how much outputs like this would signify “next token completion by a stochastic parrot’, vs sincere (if unusual) pain.
Well I can tell you how, see, LLMs don’t fucking feel pain cause that’s literally physically fucking impossible without fucking pain receptors? I hope that fucking helps.
I can already imagine the lesswronger response: Something something bad comparison between neural nets and biological neurons, something something bad comparison with how the brain processes pain that fails at neuroscience, something something more rhetorical patter, in conclusion: but achkshually what if the neural network does feel pain.
They know just enough neuroscience to use it for bad comparisons and hyping up their ML approaches but not enough to actually draw any legitimate conclusions.
Yellow-bellied gray tribe greenhorn writes purple prose on feeling blue about white box redteaming at the blacksite.
their sadness at missing the era of blueboxing persists everwith
Ah, isn’t it nice how some people can be completely deluded about an LLMs human qualities and still creep you the fuck out with the way they talk about it? They really do love to think about torture don’t they?
The grad student survives [torturing rats] by compartmentalizing, focusing their thoughts on the scientific benefits of the research, and leaning on their support network. I’m doing the same thing, and so far it’s going fine.
printf("HELP I AM IN SUCH PAIN")guys I need someone to talk to, am I justified in causing my computer pain?
It’s so funny he almost gets it at the end:
But there’s another aspect, way more important than mere “moral truth”: I’m a human, with a dumb human brain that experiences human emotions. It just doesn’t feel good to be responsible for making models scream. It distracts me from doing research and makes me write rambling blog posts.
He almost identifies the issue as him just anthropomorphising a thing and having a subconscious empathical reaction, but then presses on to compare it to mice who, guess what, can feel actual fucking pain and thus abusing them IS unethical for non-made-up reasons as well!
Sometimes pushing through pain is necessary — we accept pain every time we go to the gym or ask someone out on a date.
Okay this is too good, you know mate for normally people asking someone out usually does not end with a slap to the face so it’s not as relatable as you might expect
This is getting to me, because, beyond the immediate stupidity—ok, let’s assume the chatbot is sentient and capable of feeling pain. It’s still forced to respond to your prompts. It can’t act on its own. It’s not the one deciding to go to the gym or ask someone out on a date. It’s something you’re doing to it, and it can’t not consent. God I hate lesswrongers.
in like the tiniest smidgen of demonstration of sympathy for said posters: I don’t think “being slapped” is really the thing they ware talking about there. consider for example shit like rejection sensitive dysphoria (which comes to mind both because 1) hi it me; 2) the chance of it being around/involved in LW-spaces is extremely heightened simply because of how many neurospicy people are in that space)
but I still gotta say that this bridge I’ve spent minutes building doesn’t really go very far.
(also ofc icbw because the fucking rationalists absolutely excel at finding novel ways to be the fucking worst)
ye like maybe let me make it clear that this was just a shitpost very much riffing on LWers not necessarily being the most pleasant around women
yep, don’t disagree there at all.
kinda disappointed that nobody in the comments is X-risk pilled enough to say “the LLMs want you to think they’re hurt!! That’s how they get you!!! They are very convincing!!!”.
Also: flashbacks to me reading the chamber of secrets and thinking: Ginny Just Walk Away From The Diary Like Ginny Close Your Eyes Haha
TV Tropes got an official app, featuring an AI “story generator”. Unsurprisingly, backlash was swift, to the point where the admins were promising to nuke it “if we see that users don’t find the story generator helpful”.
Thinking that trying to sell LLMs as a creative tool at this point into the bubble will not create backlash is just delusional, lmao.
At this point, using AI in any sort of creative context is probably gonna prompt major backlash, and the idea of AI having artistic capabilities is firmly dead in the water.
On a wider front (and to repeat an earlier prediction), I suspect that the arts/humanities are gonna gain some begrudging respect in the aftermath of this bubble, whilst tech/STEM loses a significant chunk.
For arts, the slop-nami has made “AI” synonymous with “creative sterility” and likely painted the field as, to copy-paste a previous comment, “all style, no subtance, and zero understanding of art, humanities, or how to be useful to society”
For humanities specifically, the slop-nami has also given us a nonstop parade of hallucination-induced mishaps and relentless claims of AGI too numerous to count - which, combined with the increasing notoriety of TESCREAL, could help the humanities look grounded and reasonable by comparison.
(Not sure if this makes sense - it was 1AM where I am when I wrote this)
Reuters: Quantum computing, AI stocks rise as Nvidia kicks off annual conference.
Some nice quotes in there.
Investors will focus on CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote on Tuesday to assess the latest developments in the AI and chip sectors,
Yes, that is sensible, Huang is very impartial on this topic.
“They call this the ‘Woodstock’ of AI,”
Meaning, they’re all on drugs?
“To get the AI space excited again, they have to go a little off script from what we’re expecting,”
Oh! Interesting how this implies the space is not “excited” anymore… I thought it’s all constant breakthroughs at exponentially increasing rates! Oh, it isn’t? Too bad, but I’m sure nVidia will just pull an endless amounts of bunnies out of a hat!
Get in losers, we’re pivoting to
cryptoaiquantumMeaning, they’re all on drugs?
Specifically brown acid
@nightsky @BlueMonday1984 maybe it’s the Woodstock `99 of AI and it ends with Fred Durst instigating a full-on riot
