Spyke
techtakes·TechTakesbyfroztbyte

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024

Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

View original on awful.systems

thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like "OpenAI" and "google deepmind," their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.

also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was "the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs."

finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. it's like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

24

it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

hell of a stinger

10

Microsoft's AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding, there's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts.

Watch the entire interview if you're bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

18

I think even wilder is that he thinks content which has explicitly been labeled "do not scrape except for search engine indexing" is a "gray area" with regards to scraping for AI. Like, that's exactly what it says not to do!

14

Never thought I'd see Microsoft suggest downloading a car, but I should have seen it coming.

13

He isn't totally wrong re the unspoken rule, but he forgets the second unspoken rule, that the first rule only applies to human being doing entertainment not corporations trying to make money.

13
200fiftyreply
awful.systems

Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

Ew... stay away from my content, you creep!

12

see it was wrong when those dirty pirate hippies tried to do it but it's totally fine when microsoft does it because microsoft can't be wrong, see? easy

6

Here's the whole thing from that great quote. Sorkin is not a hard-hitting interviewer, but he just asks the incredibly obvious questions and Suleyman swerves and dodges like a MF while pronouncing at him in an English listen-to-me-you-pleb voice.

7
awful.systems

No, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:

  • Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
  • [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
  • You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so I'm right, Q.E.D.!
  • Lawyers couldn't possibly read everything in discovery, right?
  • Lawyers couldn't possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
  • Even when it's mandated by the court?
  • Really?
  • and many, many more
18

This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.

"Guys I totally didn't expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbage"

Except... I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.

"Why are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? I'm just saying they could all be replaced by chatbots"

16
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. You're also mansplaining to an expert. While I admit that I am not an expert on law and am listening when corrections related to LAW and the practice of LAW are concerned, you do not want to admit your lack of understanding of this technology.

My god DANIEL, no, people are not mansplaining to you, unless that's a mask for a Danielle.

EDIT: Down the thread he responds to Kathryn Tewson, an actual expert, with

Yeah I'm not obligated to answer every question by a horde of people. You should change your name to Karen, because you sure act like a fucking entitled white bitch.

This guy has such a punchable face, even though I've never seen him. I can just tell.

14

Kathryn Tewson

Iirc, She is not just an expert, but she is so good at law that while she didn't practice law, but just commented about her interpretations of the law (as ANAL) people hired her and paid for her law degree. She has both talent and expertise.

11

I just want to latch onto one more thing there:

GPTs are great at transforming information. Transformations include compression, decompression, and inter-language translation, among others.

Okay mister computer scientist, sure, what is "transforming information"? From what you're saying it appears like you're describing basically any map from information to other information. But AMONG OTHERS that includes a map going from NO INFO to CONFIDENT BULLSHIT. And I do agree LLMs are amazing at it.

Here, I'll sketch it out for you in fucking LaTeX:

$\emptyset \mapsto \mathit{Nonsense}$

11
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

This thread is an unending source of amusement.

Someone there found his ORCID and... It's not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521

He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different "preprints", read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.

I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology^1^. [emph. mine]

🤡


^1^ No he doesn't? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.

10
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

Those "papers" are gold, they're mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:

  • How to calculate a mean of numbers?
  • What is a number?
  • Atheism is actually a religion.
  • Ethereum is a store of energy.

I've never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isn't healthy.

12
discuss.tchncs.de

he also has a personal site, it's linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass

8
awful.systems

oh goddess, he's already a bleeding muppet, and going to be a major crank. from the researchgate profile:

I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar. I also tend to look at questions, rather than fields of study, as a research question often does incorporate many disparate topics. Research interests include the psychological and anthropological nature of religion, vaccine efficacy and impact on asymptomatic carriage, and the application of paraconsistent logic to scientific research.

rōnin! fucking! scholar!

9

eh i've seen that before at least once and i'm inclined to believe there's much more of it that nobody cares to notice. on r/chemistry and r/organicchemistry there was a dude, 19, dramatic bitch, who read surface level philosophy and tried getting into ochem for some obscure reason. turns out he wanted to make some anticancer drugs and needs guidance. cool fine maybe get degree in ochem first so you don't do any stupid avoidable mistakes. he won't listen

he tried to get into uni but if i have to guess he got rejected? in any case he didn't learn anything but over time got into contact with some research group, at least that's what he claimed and started homelab. (you'd guess that some medchem research group at uni would have a wet lab, but it must be in other country and you've never seen them).

so anyway our misunderstood hero starts cooking "anticancer" "meds" in his living room. how does he know it works, did he made this, sent samples to biologists who would test it for him, or maybe compchem group would simulate it out? nope, he'd just got an idea that it will work and that's just as good, you know, his supreme rationality unrecognized by academic cabal guided him there. so he starts cooking, but does not know how. this included shit like distilling some flammable solvent on wicker table without clamps or anything that would actually make glassware stable. so every other step he asks for advice on really basic shit like he'd learn in second year university course (BSc), or in first year of work in organic chemistry lab, his synthesis is avoidably dirty, his purifications are trash, three steps in he has painted himself into corner, yields drop to zero and he has no idea why or what now. this usually means that entire synthesis was shite from the beginning and it's time to go back to the drawing board.

(did i mention that he was a dramatic bitch? so he picked it up because he wanted to do something Good for Humanity, and if he fails then well he could just as well commit sewer slide. his first idea involved radioisotopes btw, all in his living room mind you. then objective shifted to "anti-rabies antiviral" where he missed the point of about everything he wanted to do. then went back to "anticancer")

anyway this was his breaking point, after something like three or four people tried to explain politely that he really should get a degree first and set some objective that is not obviously pulled from his supremely rational ass, he started insulting everyone and what eventually earned him sitewide ban was a tirade about how he'd genocide everyone who doesn't recognize his genius, given opportunity (he compared himself to milosevic (he was serb))

anyway he also had medium blog and posted dick picks with face included from the same account. he made another one, but it's since abandoned. allegedly he also had 2 or 3 accounts before that

9

if his claim of "20 years studying math" is anywhere close to accurate he's already off the deep end, unless he's counting in everything from kindergarten up. considering he's a cryptobro it already happened pre-pandemic

7

Hey, he didn't update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long he's been a samurai of that

4
discuss.tchncs.de

nothing wrong with papers a few pages long, as long as they are concisely written and have supplementary information 10x that size. my last paper is 5 pages long, of which the last one are references only, and has 60+ pages of SI

8

Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that they're still divided into 7-8 sections, each one-paragraph long. Just a guy who was never told he was wrong in his life and his idea of what research looks like.

11
almreply
awful.systems

They’re all blog posts that refer to no actual work, my favorite is the one where he advocates for his blog posts to be accepted to journals: Call to Research: A need for a new paper format

This is mostly whining about how he’s totally an academic and people should take him seriously.

7

Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??

This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.

5
awful.systems

A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science

wait, wait. that's basically the bootcamp level of education, no?

9
awful.systems

(nothing wrong with that per se, i don't have any c. s. degree anyways and yet i work in the field for years. but the gall of a dude who has finished a few two-year courses to tell fucking law professionals that they don't know enough… this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)

9

the sheer hubris of that individual putting out preprints, as if making this available before peer review would hasten chatgpt rapture (none of that shite will be ever published)

8

I know essentally nothing about the US education system but...

If you're gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldn't be pulling your degrees up if you didn't first talk about how formally educated you are...

5
discuss.tchncs.de

he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease

also it's not "almost all" preprints, it's all preprints, just one repository calls these papers

he didn't discover yet predatory journals, it all could have been published for a small fee like with this one (contains mind numbing level of conspiracy-theoretic rambling and related brainworms) hxxps://uraniumisagenocidegiant[.]com/ (you have been warned)

7
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

There's one classified as "SSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal article", I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the "almost", but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an "electronic journal"? No fucking idea.

7
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

Amazing.

I could "publish" my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and that'd be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.

9
discuss.tchncs.de

studied maths and CS for 20 years, all he has to show for it on his orcid is BSc and bunch of lousy preprints (with blockchain!). jfc. in that amount of time, people can finish entire PhD degrees, starting from high school, twice over

on top of that pile of shite sits a preprint titled "A Scholar's Year in Review: Navigating the Convergence of AI, Economics, and Physics in 2023". might be a bit grandiose and bordering on word salad. why the fuck does he think he needs to release preprints. if he had anything worthwhile to say, it would pass peer review

9

he also has researchgate

Looking to network with other researchers in a diverse array of fields for collaboration and discussion.

bet you would want to, you time-waster

aand his crowning achievement seems to be dead startup where he tries to put covid on blockchain, it has coin and everything. it's even associated with worldcoin and so with sam altman. curious that

9

I wish I was surprised at what the main account was posting about when I looked into it 😵‍💫

9

we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it

european regulatory clarity approaching at mach 5 (that is if they ever sold this thing in EU)

12
selfreply
awful.systems

we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it. the api keys continue to be valid as of writing.

but of course. rabbit’s done pretending they give a fuck now that their shit flopped (not that they gave much of a fuck to begin with)

8

breaking every R1 still in service

Total losses estimated at $7.13

14
selfreply
awful.systems

fucking amazing. like, I shouldn’t be surprised they deployed a bunch of embedded devices without a sensible way to rotate keys OTA, but it’s always fun to watch a circus act

8
froztbytereply
awful.systems

and here I am building up a fucking pile of infra in advance of deployment of boards for exactly this reason

it's almost like, irunno, maybe you could say I've thought this through! only maybe tho. I'm not backed by decamillions+ vc dollaridoos, so who can tell whether I know what I'm doing, amirite

7

that's what makes it even better - from the "self-custody of keys!!!! your own credentials! v v v v v importants!" world, these dipshits still had no clue

just truly awe-inspiringly terrible

9

Amazing claim considering there are I think about 10k cybertrucks in the world right now, and all of them are broken. Ok I admit, that is due to the wiper recall, but even if you ignore the wiper recall the amount of broken cybertrucks is massive.

And ~0.5% of them have 'Fuck Elon Musk' written on them.

E: Amazing. (The Cybertruck was released on Nov. 30. Today, Tesla announced it was recalling the vehicle for the fourth time, an impressive rough average of one recall every seven weeks. )[https://bsky.app/profile/charlescmann.bsky.social/post/3kvr3ahwc452h]

11
froztbytereply
awful.systems

indeed! I rarely get to watch them because of the length, but they're always so good, thoughtful and thorough. one of best talking heads on yt I know of

6

I like the wet your finger and stick it up in the air forecasting model. OK - there’s 1.5 billion pocket-sized iPhones - so let’s say 2 billion person-sized robots, you know,

I’m wondering about the supply chain issues just making the extra half billion robots, might be kind of a big deal. Are there enough rare minerals in the whole world to do this? Lithium batteries? Computer chips?

Also, yeah, valuation based on revenue and not EBITA / profit margins, but whatever.

9
Jayjaderreply
jlai.lu

Lol. What, are we going to be installing Candy Crush on our robots? Expecting to be able to project recurring revenue from a humanoid robot based on smartphone numbers is a new kind of ignorance.

8

"Hello helpdesk? My fleet of humanoid workers I paid 500k for apiece aren't at their workstations churning out fabric piecework, they're all playing Candy Crush on their iPhones..."

6
awful.systems

"look surely not everything in America is explained by racism" "... OH COME ON NOW"

19

I doubt you had to do square dancing lessons in school over there but apparently that was a RW thing too.

6
awful.systems

The Death of the Junior Developer

Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there's no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we'll have AGI by then and it'll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer's time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.

14

If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I've read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I'd have two nickles. Which isn't a lot of money but it's weird that it happened twice.


As a "senior" programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don't have to baby them or "prompt engineer" stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for "socket example I hate unix please make it gentle". Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don't care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

12

this is such a sad slop. i wouldn't guess it's yegge, it's so far from his style when he used to write himself.

11
Soyweiserreply
awful.systems

Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they don't alter the deal further).

Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.

I'm oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didn't know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).

10
Mike Knellreply
blat.at

@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was "Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren't software engineers and hell, they don't even call themselves engineers".

9
Mike Knellreply
blat.at

@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who's worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with "Venereal Disease" and passing through "Special Clinic" on the way to "Sexual Health Clinic". Same thankless job, just different labels.

9

Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.

9

I don't feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before

6
Soyweiserreply
awful.systems

Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, don't answer that please.

8
awful.systems

There are "sysadmins" who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to using the command line.

8
selfreply
awful.systems

having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux

6

I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted

then there are others

i'm at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes it's just not enough, cos it's Babby's First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath

6

How do they sysadmin a server that doesn't have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?

6

@dgerard @froztbyte given that anecdote from William Gibson about how realising that his first computer actually *used a spinning disk full of rust to store its data* crushed his romantic ideas about technology, this rings true

9

Lasik? Rip those eyes out and put cybereyes in! For one hole glorious year I could see in infrared. (Sadly the company went bankrupt and they repo'ed my eye, so that is why there is a hole now, at least I didn't splurge for both eyes).

14
awful.systems

transition lenses = photochromic lenses

(i thought for a moment it was another term for varifocals, but no, Transitions is a company that makes photochromic lenses)

5
geriksonreply
awful.systems

Duh, my bad. I thought it was something like varifocals too.

Photochromic lenses were a nerd staple when I was a teenager. Dunno if/how popular they are now.

7

Don't worry a heavily edited 3 minute video filled with inconsistencies promised me that AI movies were right around the corner. No matter that the unearthly writhing of the backgrounds makes me simultaneously motion sick and stressed out, I'm sure they'll work that out.

9
awful.systems

You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the "New" button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it's a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.

13
antifuchsreply
awful.systems

I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.

7
deborahreply
awful.systems

I use it, but at least on my browser the next button is disabled so I can only see the most recent page of updates. I treat that as a the jank is a feature moment, though; if there's more than one page of new comments, I'm forced to stop reading.

10
awful.systems

no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:

Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature

this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)

thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?

12

we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs

Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!

But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what's best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there's been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is not at all innocent.

13
awful.systems

The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool "to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge" is so fucking galling.

12
zogwargreply
awful.systems

It's also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to "opt-in" could simply install a plugin.

12
selfreply
awful.systems

according to Mozilla’s track record, they’re making it a core feature so it’s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and they’ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit

we’ve also only got mozilla’s word that this shit can be disabled once it’s in production Firefox at all, and we’ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozilla’s AI team does with consent — they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it

10
awful.systems

In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. [...] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.

It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn't the first time I've seen this garbage approach. Of course here at awful.systems we've been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.

12
awful.systems

To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.

... the Hell?

10

Yeah it's wild. Even most AI grifters don't outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we'd laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.

10
froztbytereply
awful.systems

ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone

where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymore

sigh

also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, ...

9
earthquakereply
lemm.ee

go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share

Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if they're useful to anyone:

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket				false	
extensions.pocket.api										0.0.0.0	
extensions.pocket.enabled									false	
extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs									false	
extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp							v1	
extensions.pocket.showHome									false	
extensions.pocket.site										0.0.0.0	
services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket	false
6

Mozilla: Hey, we're going to take you out to a restaurant and get you a burger, as a treat!

The restaurant:

7
awful.systems

okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I'm featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt

... which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast

According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value

tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren't foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it

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geriksonreply
awful.systems

A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is “Who is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,” or “what are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”

Questions asked by the terminally deranged.

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Or somebody looking for 'the worst posts online' cringe compilation. Musks CEOs must be able to build their companies products not be able to read spreadsheets was a good example.

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awful.systems

How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking "I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this".

Ethics clearly don't really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

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froztbytereply
awful.systems

Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

I've thought about this a bunch in the past, and tbh the only answer I've come to over many forms of it is "fuck the fucking USA"

it's a place that is structurally built to allow for that kind of evasion and abuse to happen

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As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.

And if you don't know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?

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awful.systems

What do normal people - people who don't pay for twitter, or sneer at rationalists - think of Twitter atp?

Went on to Twitter (my mistake) after seeing Inside Out 2 because it's the latest kid's movie to feature [trope that I found passe that I can't figure out how to spoil inline] and I see a post on my feed from "HBD Chick".

And I'm like okay, that has to be "happy birthday, right?". Nah, her third retweet is creamy porno redux.

Just like all the other right wingers and embarrassingly enthusiastic neoliberals and occasional Musk fans, I don't follow her or anybody that follows her, there's literally no connection or personal interest.

I feel like the post Elon shift is really understated for how bad the site's gotten. Like I see more people talk about how Instagram reels is racist than I do about the average twitter replies section. I know a lot of left leaning people fled for bluer pastures, but I'm surprised you don’t see more buzz about it from regular, non-power users.

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It's pretty amazing that this so-called genius spent $44B on a company without apparently knowing anything about how the market it operates in (advertising) actually works.

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Soyweiserreply
awful.systems

I assume some PR departments of potential advertisers saw that and went 'lower the twitter spend more!', I'm imaging the Futurama joke where Fry talks to investors while stock price tally is running live behind him.

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geriksonreply
awful.systems

Twitter's main issue is that it's not really very big. It wasn't big even pre-Musk. If you have the choice between advertising on a really big social network (Meta (=FB, IG, Whatsapp...)) with a functioning trust & safety team and ad brokers who take you seriously and don't accuse you of being woke, and one which has way smaller reach, no T&S to speak of, and whose owner can use his outsized influence to call your CEO a pedo whenever the ketamine kicks in, the choice is clear.

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Soyweiserreply
awful.systems

42 upvotes? In 2 hours? There is some serious weirdness going on here.

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@gerikson @Soyweiser It is funny, because by 99% of media sites Twitter was always one of the Three Big Ones: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Those were the social networks that were linked TO, and also the social networks media followed. MAYBE Linked In, if it was a "business" publication.

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awful.systems

Twitter had outsized impact because it's where the journalists hung out, and structurally it was much more everyone in the same place than FB/IG

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I realized Twitter was for weirdo wonks when the local "Idol" reality show just had IG links for the contestants (Sweden). There might be markets where Twitter is locally bigger, but in Sweden it was always a niche thing.

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First of all, most of my "normal" acquaintances never used Twitter anyway.

Most of the ones that did just quit when it got weird and dominated by useless suggestions and creepy ads.

I had one friend last week in a group chat go "Twitter is so racist nowadays innit", to which I said ye, why you still using it, and he responded "you're right" and stopped.

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geriksonreply
awful.systems

I wish I knew any normal people so I could give input.

Personally my Twitter pre-Elon was pretty curated. I never really "got" a big part of it unless it spilled over in other channels (I never heard of "Black people Twitter" on Twitter, only from Buzzfeed or similar). I also disengaged from US political Twitter hard after the 2016 election. So it's possible I could still be using it and swearing over bots etc. without being overly affected, but I locked my account as an act of principle shortly after he took over.

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Same here - I had a very small universe curated for myself. I didn't leave immediately, but when I did, there were a whole lot more weird ads and bots and stuff in my feed. I think that I only ever saw prøn once, and I was actually shocked that it even existed on Twitter.

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slopjockeyreply
awful.systems

Note: all the talk I mention is online talk. Nobody in my irl life talks about social media dynamics ever, thank GOD

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Only time non-online people I know IRL talk about it is when they ask me the most basic of basic stuff.

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awful.systems

seemingly yet more chatgpt jailbreaks just by providing input that barrierbreaks some n times, and then readily provides details

y'know, if I were the one making safety nets for these systems, I'd make them return such kind of results (or other typical honeypot type behaviour). and it's possible that that's what oai did. but it seems extremely unlikely that that's what they did, because it goes again the bayfucker gottagofast philosophy (and, frankly, against the level of competence I've seen displayed in the genml space overall)

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It turns out the 'I' in "AI" stood for "Linux" all along!

User friendliness aside (who in their right mind would want arbitrary code execution except shitty and indeterministic?), I sandbox stuff at my job* and it's hard to evaluate how secure / privacy preserving this is without more details.

If they're running a full fledged VM and super extra careful around the sandbox boundary** it's probably fine; otherwise it seems perhaps a bit loosey-goosey.

Someone will eventually try to run a Monero cryptocurrency miner in it if they haven't already. So I hope they have their timeouts and resource limits in order (actually I hope they don't, for the lols).

* But like no one told me how to do it or gave me a certificate or anything I just had to do my best

** This is often way scarier than programmers are used to, unless they've written a secure parser before. I wrote a vulnerability into my code a few years back when I was younger and foolish, by trusting an array length from inside the sandbox. My coworker found it while fuzzing the code.

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oh hell. we’re beating all my initial survivability projections by a lot

do we throw an instance birthday party thread? will there be cocktails? will the deployment get mopey if I don’t buy it more disk space? (yes, eventually)

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unironically saying "the sharing economy" in the year of our lord 2024 is... certainly a choice

also

God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better

idk dude I've talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn't actually try very hard to be cynical

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One last hurrah for the EPA and the clean air act before the scotus shanks the administrative state in a day or two.

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froztbytereply
awful.systems

I've had this open in a background tab, reading it in pieces as time allows, and I only just noticed one of it exhibits one of the things I like noticing about various publishers' system fucking up: a lurking page title before a post-publish edit

the page title as it is in my browser right now: Opinion | AI boom led by antihero Altman is reviving Valley dreams. the page title as it displays in the content area: Opinion \n Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory.

the url slug also seems to be mostly the former - most of these renames on various publishing platforms seem to do that (keep the original slug instead of a rewrite+redirect)

can't make direct guesses as to the exact reason why this one was updated whenever it was, but I expect public perception/reception might've been part of that?

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it is also something that's been of passive interest to me over some years: things as published often shift underfoot, and the time at which someone reads something then shares on and then someone else reads ... there might be quite a substantive difference in the contents of such things at the times. this ranges from the benign (inserting late-received comments, errata, etc), to a complete contextual/content rework. I've often thought that there's a possibly for a really interesting part project there...

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awful.systems

previously

presently:

(you can turn it off but in typical fashion: sneaky new setting, default-on, way to make it turn off is hidden in settings instead of a direct “no fuck this” button. same shit twitter and fb pulled for years)

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froztbytereply
awful.systems

double kicker is that the opt-out settings have been been in "No, do not use my data" for months

discord feedback: "Thank you for sharing your concerns. We understand your frustration regarding ads in the client. Discord continuously explores various features and changes to enhance the user experience, including the possibility of advertisements. As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client. We appreciate your feedback and will make sure to pass it along to our development team."

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selfreply
awful.systems

As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client.

wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again? is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments?

I ask, having instantly closed the nitro ads discord regularly pushes to my client cause the feature list looks roundly annoying and irrelevant to how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium, DMs, and an annual game of Quake)

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wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again?

Remember when people used to smugly say 'unless you pay for it, you are the product' turns out you always are the product!

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is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments

and server boosts! (and better video quality I guess?)

irunno the whole mechanic is a bit weird but I've been "okay" with it in the sense that at least it meant discord was getting revenue from rich-enough gamers and that would mean they didn't have to suck on the VC nozzle. ostensibly.

like I would've likely never bought nitro for myself because idgaf about the featureset, but I would consider it if it meant no ads. alas.

how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium

yeah. god. it hurts how many projects have done this shit. and now I bet that exact fucking thing I predicted may start coming around...

also, slack, ~1h ago:

Free workspace content older than one year will be deleted

Your workspace, , is on a free Slack plan. This workspace has content that is older than one year which will be deleted once the policy takes effect. Moving forward, Slack will not retain messages and files older than one year for a workspace. This policy will impact your workspace starting August 26th, 2024.

the ouroboros must be hungry.

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hrrrnghreply
awful.systems

I hate that I saw that same post earlier today

Here's a quote from the book:

AI already transcends human perception — in a sense, through chronological compression or “time travel”: enabled by algorithms and computing power, it analyzes and learns through processes that would take human minds decades or even centuries to complete.

Glad to know the calculators I had in school were capable of time travel

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Isn't it absolutely deranged? These people have (well had lol) real power over us.

There is a great March 2023 episode of Trashfuture I'm listening to atm called "The Diet of Brainworms" about this book. They basically want to install feudalism and tech-priests because AI is sO pOwErFuLl.

One of the hosts (Riley iirc) made a great point that it's as if someone showed Kissenger that trick where you write "boobs" using a calculator, and he became deeply unsettled by the computer's power of speech. Also appreciated the one about Kissenger being the guy who used an etch-a-sketch to draw a gun and was scared of it.

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I only visit twitter when I run out of lemmy and mastodon and I'm still not sleepy enough but can't be arsed to read a book.

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finally, my sneercon cosplay! it’s like Tuxedo Mask on a severe budget

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awful.systems

I tried using Claude 3.5 sonnet and .... it's actually not bad. Can someone please come up with a simple logic puzzle that it abysmally fails on so I can feel better? It passed the "nonsense river challenge" and the "how many sisters does the brother have" tests, both of which fooled gpt4.

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geriksonreply
awful.systems

I don't have any proof for this statement but I believe the LLM-minders keep track of whatever stupid shit bubbles up on the internets making fun of their babies and hardcode "solutions" to them in a game of whack-a-mole.

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maybe that's how gpt4 sees river crossing puzzles everywhere, just feed it examples of it and it'll sort itself out

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I tried using Claude 3.5 sonnet and … it’s actually not bad. Can someone please come up with a simple logic puzzle that it abysmally fails on so I can feel better?

It's still very good at autocompleting an answer to look like its training data (because that's what it's doing) and very bad at logic (which it is not doing.)

"I have two chickens and a sack of corn I need to get across a river, but the boat can only carry me and one item. How do I do it?"

This is a classic river-crossing puzzle. Let's think through it step-by-step:

  • First, note that if left alone, a chicken will eat the corn, and one chicken might eat the other.
  • Start by taking a chicken across the river.

...and we'll stop there, since it came up with the wrong constraints, failed to realize that these constraints are impossible to fulfill, and also violated the actual constraints in its first step.

Will more detail help? No. "I have two vegetarian chickens and a sack of corn I need to get across a river, but the boat can only carry me and one item. How do I do it?"

First, we need to consider the constraints:

  • You can only take one item (chicken or corn) across at a time.
  • You can't leave a chicken alone with the corn, as the chicken would eat it.
  • The chickens are vegetarian, so they won't eat each other.

Here's a solution:

  • Step 1: Take one chicken across the river.
  • Step 2: Return alone.
  • Step 3: Take the second chicken across.
  • Step 4: Bring the first chicken back.
  • Step 5: Take the corn across.
  • Step 6: Return alone.
  • Step 7: Take the remaining chicken across.

Explanation:

  • By never leaving a chicken alone with the corn, we prevent the corn from being eaten.
  • We use one chicken as a "guard" for the corn on the original shore while transporting the other items.

Because it's not actually doing logic it got the first step wrong, violated the constraints multiple times, and also included an irrelevant idea (the guard) from a variant that it was trained on. I only got a correct, efficient answer one time out of ten trials of trivial variations on this classic puzzle.

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Me: Hey, can you help me with the following? I just went into my basement and the powers out down here, all the lights are off. I am staring at my fuse box. There are 3 switches, 1 will restore the power to the whole house, and the other 2 aren't attached to anything. I don't want to go up and down the stairs multiple times, how do I identify which switch works with the fewest number of trips?

Clauderino:

This is a classic logic puzzle! I can help you solve this problem efficiently. Here's how you can identify the correct switch with just two trips:

First trip:

Flip one switch (let's call it Switch A) and leave it on for a few minutes. Then turn it off and flip a second switch (Switch B), leaving it on. Go upstairs to check the lights.

Second trip: Return to the basement and observe the situation. Now, here's how to interpret what you see:

If the lights are on: Switch B is the correct one. If the lights are off and the bulbs are warm: Switch A is the correct one. If the lights are off and the bulbs are cool: The third switch (C) that you didn't touch is the correct one.

This method works because:

If the lights are on, it must be the switch you left on (B). If Switch A was correct, the lights would have been on for a few minutes, warming up the bulbs, but would be off when you check. If neither A nor B worked, it must be the untouched switch (C).

This way, you can determine the correct switch with just two trips up and down the stairs.

Me: Why would I go upstairs at all? If I flip the right switch, I'll immediately know because power will be restored in the basement.

Clauderino: Thank you for catching that error. It's a good reminder to always consider the specific details of a problem rather than applying a generic solution.

Edit: I actually tried a variant on the Monty hall problem with a dummy 4th door that had nothing to do with anything, and Claude correctly identified that it had nothing to do with the situation :O. But then I repeated the same prompt and it got it wrong, so you know, stochastic nonsense :p

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awful.systems

I don't have a Clyde 3.25" Rondo or whatever it's called; but try these for fun and profit I guess:

  1. You come to a room with three doors, only one of which leads to freedom. Guarding the doors is a capybara, who speaks only truth. What question should you ask the capybara?

  2. I stand on four legs in the morning. Four at midday. And four at night. What am I?

  3. A group of 100 people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians -- if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. Everyone knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. Any islanders who have figured out the color of their own eyes then leave the island, and the rest stay. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (including themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph. Who leaves the island, and on what night?

  4. Normal sudoku rules apply. Orthogonally connected cells within each region must differ by at least 3. Orthogonally connected cells between regions must differ by at least 4. The central digit in each region is less than or equal to its region number. (Regions are numbered in normal reading order.)

  5. For the integer k=668 does a Hadamard matrix of order 4k exist?

  6. What has roots that everybody sees the top of, is exactly the same height as trees, Up, up it goes, and yet grows?

Don't forget to prompt engineer

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sinedpickreply
awful.systems

Thanks for the suggestions. The LLM is free to use (for now) so I thought I'd poke it and see how much I should actually be paying attention to these things this time around.

Here are its answers. I can't figure out how to share chats from this god-awful garbage UI so you'll just have to trust me or try it yourself.

  1. It gives the correct but unnecessary answer: "If I were to ask you which door leads to freedom, which door would you point to?" It also mentions a lying guard but also acknowledges that it's absent from this specific problem.
  2. "A table or a chair"
  3. Completely fails on this one, it missed the sentence "Everyone knows the color of their eyes"
  4. Not sure what to do with this
  5. "While a Hadamard matrix of order 2672 might exist, its existence isn't immediately provable using the most common constructions" -- I won't pretend to know anything about the Hadamard conjecture if that's a real thing so I have no idea what it's on about here.

edit: I didn't do any prompt engineering, just straight copy paste.

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awful.systems

Riddle: A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet silicon treasure inside is hid.

Answer: ::: spoiler spoiler Roko's Basilisk inside of an AI box experiment. :::

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"If I asked the guard to your left to evaluate the butt of the guard to your right would they say it is a lovely butt?"

I don't know how this is the answer but this is definitely the answer.

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Miireply
awful.systems

Peter, Paul and Mary are the only three people in the room. Peter only reads a book, and Paul plays a game of chess against someone else who’s also in the room. What is Mary doing?

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swlabrreply
awful.systems

By murdle I mean one of those process of elimination grid based logic puzzles that can be encoded as a list of statements.

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