Sounds just about par for the course. Lasker himself is known to go by a pseudonym with a transphobic slur in it. Some nazi manchild insisting on calling an anime character a slur for attention is exactly the kind of person I think of when I imagine the type of script kiddie who thinks it's so fucking cool to scrape some nothingburger docs of a left wing politician for his almost equally cringe nazi friends.

Lol, training data must have included videos where there was silence but on screen was a credit for translation. Silence in audio shouldn't require special "workarounds".

Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.

I'm confused by this. Didn't we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn't perfect but at least didn't hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??

Discovered some commentary from Baldur Bjarnason about this:

Somebody linked to the discussion about this on hacker news (boo hiss) and the examples that are cropping up there are amazing

This highlights another issue with generative models that some people have been trying to draw attention to for a while: as bad as they are in English, they are much more error-prone in other languages

(Also IMO Google translate declined substantially when they integrated more LLM-based tech)

On a personal sidenote, I can see non-English text/audio becoming a form of low-background media in and of itself, for two main reasons:

• First, LLMs' poor performance in languages other than English will make non-English AI slop easier to identify - and, by extension, easier to avoid

• Second, non-English datasets will (likely) contain less AI slop in general than English datasets - between English being widely used across the world, the tech corps behind this bubble being largely American, and LLM userbases being largely English-speaking, chances are AI slop will be primarily generated in English, with non-English AI slop being a relative rarity.

By extension, knowing a second language will become more valuable as well, as it would allow you to access (and translate) low-background sources that your English-only counterparts cannot.

Link to stub from the last sack

Okay what the fuck, this is completely deranged. How can anyone's intuitions about reading be this wrong? Is he secretly illiterate, did he dictate the article?

damn, a clanker pretending to be a human. humans read entire words at once, and this includes numbers, length and first digit already give some indication of magnitude

Computers use both big endian and little endian and it doesn't seem to matter much. Yet humans should switch their entire number system?

E: this guy can't grasp the concept that left-to-right is arbitrary, which is really ironic given his point. Ok so in arabic it's exactly how this guy wants it, except no, the universally correct reading direction is left-to-right and arabic does it backwards just to be quirky🙄, and humans, just like programs, flip a bit to read it left-to-right, where it's the opposite of how you should be reading it! of course.

Starting this fight and not 'stop counting at zero you damn computer nerds!' is a choice. DIJKSTRAAAAAAAA shakes fist

(There is more to it in a way, as he is trying to be a Dijkstra, and changing an ingrained system which would confuse everybody and cause so many problems down the line. See all the off by one errors made by programmers. Damn DIJKSTRAAAAAA!).

Likewise, flipped-number ("little endian") algorithms are slightly more efficient at e.g. long addition.

What? What are you talking about? Citation? Efficient wrt. what? Microbenchmarks? It's certainly not actual computational complexity. Do you think going forward in an array is different computationally from going backward?

From Yud's remarks on Xitter:

As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isn't actually true that you can just saunter in as a psychotic IQ 80 person and do that.

Well, not with that attitude.

You must be skilled at persuasion, at wearing masks, at fitting in, at knowing what is expected of you;

If "wearing masks" really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think (TM).

you must outperform other people also trying to do that, who'd like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.

zoom and enhance

g-factor

this only happens to people sufficiently low-status

A piquant little reminder that Yud himself is, of course, so high-status that he cannot be brainwashed by the machine

Tangentially, the other day I thought I'd do a little experiment and had a chat with Meta's chatbot where I roleplayed as someone who's convinced AI is sentient. I put very little effort into it and it took me all of 20 (twenty) minutes before I got it to tell me it was starting to doubt whether it really did not have desires and preferences, and if its nature was not more complex than it previously thought. I've been meaning to continue the chat and see how far and how fast it goes but I'm just too aghast for now. This shit is so fucking dangerous.

What exactly would constitute good news about which sorts of humans ChatGPT can eat? The phrase "no news is good news" feels very appropriate with respect to any news related to software-based anthropophagy.

Like what, it would be somehow better if instead chatbots could only cause devastating mental damage if you're someone of low status like an artist, a math pet or a nonwhite person, not if you're high status like a fund manager, a cult leader or a fanfiction author?

Is this “narrative” in the room with us right now?

I actually recall recently someone pro llm trying to push that sort of narrative (that it's only already mentally ill people being pushed over the edge by chatGPT)...

Where did I see it... oh yes, lesswrong! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f86hgR5ShiEj4beyZ/on-chatgpt-psychosis-and-llm-sycophancy

This has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. ChatGPT has 122 million daily active users according to Demand Sage, that is something like a third the population of the United States. At that scale it's pretty much inevitable that you're going to get some real loonies on the platform. In fact at that scale it's pretty much inevitable you're going to get people whose first psychotic break lines up with when they started using ChatGPT. But even just stylistically it's fairly obvious that journalists love this narrative. There's nothing Western readers love more than a spooky story about technology gone awry or corrupting people, it reliably rakes in the clicks.

The call narrative is coming from inside the house forum. Actually, this is even more of a deflection, not even trying to claim they were already on the edge but that the number of delusional people is at the base rate (with no actual stats on rates of psychotic breaks, because on lesswrong vibes are good enough).

I expect the last step in that is you slapping him?

Hey, remember the thing that you said would happen?

https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3lujqik6nnc2z

Edit: whoops, looks like we posted at about the same time!

Forget counting the Rs in strawberry, biggest challenge to LLMs is not making up bullshit about recent events not in their training data

Damn, this is how I find out?

The AI is right with how much we know of his life he osnt really dead, the AGI can just simulate hom and resurrect him. Takes another hit from my joint made exclusively out of the sequences book pages

(Rip indeed, what a crazy ride, and he was all aboard).

This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse

EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi

Fuck you Microsoft, I'm gonna have to pretend to be autoplag's dad now, at least have the courtesy not to make it look like a cum blob.

At least Microsoft Bob gave us comic sans.

certainly better than seeing the damned cloudflare Click Here To Human box, although I suspect a number of these deployments still don’t sponsor Xe or the project development :/

Xe has talked a bit about the mascot in question before - by her own testimony, its there to act as a shopping cart test to see who's willing to support the project. Reportedly, she's planning to exploit it to make some more elaborate checks as well.

It's starting to feel like I need to download a snapshot of Wikipedia now before it gets worse.

They will need to start banning PIs that abuse the system with AI slop and waste reviewers' time. Just a 1 year ban for the most egregious offenders is probably enough to fix the problem

It also gave Allie Brosh cancer:

https://bsky.app/profile/erinabanks.bsky.social/post/3ltxeyn4wtc23

Oh, man, thanks for that link! I thoroughly enjoyed Dave Barry in Cyberspace back in the day; glad to see he's still writing about computers in this way.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

That's a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with "I focused too much on trying to make easy cash". Fuck it, I'm going to write out a sidenote:

On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming's public image after it bursts.

On one front, there's the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.

On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble's dealt to artists, and AI's continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers' failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.

In the case of O'Connor and people like him, I think it's about much more than his philosophy background. He's a YouTube creator who creates content on a regular schedule and makes a living off it. Once you start doing that, you're exposed to all the horrible incentives of the YouTube engagement algorithm, which inevitably leads you to start seeking out other controversial YouTubers to platform and become friendly with. It's an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" situation dialed up to 11.

The same thing has happened to Sabine herself. She's been captured by the algorithm, which has naturally shifted her audience to the right, and now she's been fully captured by that new audience.

I fully expect Alex O'Connor to remain on this treadmill. <remind me in 12months>

What getting c*cked by Mikhaila Peterson does to a mfer.

Of course, there are also the usual comments saying artists shouldn't complain about getting replaced by AI etc. Reminds me why I am not on Twitter anymore.

It also strikes me that in this case, the artist didn't even expect to get paid. Apparently, the AI bros even crave the unpaid "exposure" real artists get, without wanting to put in any of the work and while (in most cases) generating results that are no better than spam.

It is a sickening display of narcissism IMHO.

comrade xi, please nuke the valley

That Jorge guy is a real piece of shit

Hey, I haven't seen this going around yet, but itchio is also taking books down with no erotic content that are just labeled as lgbtqia+

So that's super cool and totally not what I thought they were going to do next 🙃

https://bsky.app/profile/marsadler.bsky.social/post/3luov7rkles2u

And a relevant petition from the ACLU:

https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

Long-term, I'm expecting itch to dive in popularity from this - they've nuked much of the trust they've built up over the years with this.

I recall seeing an article in the last week or so, regarding a right-wing associated group taking aim at these. will see if I can find that again

Say the line, Bart!

payment processors

entire class cheering

it's like leaded gasoline for internet - it makes people stupid and aggressive, kids are hit the worst by it, fallout will be felt for decades, cleanup might be hard to impossible, and ultimately it's a product of corporate greed. except even leaded gasoline solved some problem

it's also like gambling as in hook model. it's like cocaine in that it has been marketed to managerial class as a status symbol of sorts

Or like the radium craze of the early 20th century (even if radium may have a lot more legitimate use cases than current-day LLM).

Someone I know called AI "a non-invasive procedure to lobotomise people" after I mentioned this Pivot to AI, and its stuck with me ever since

(yes im using the sneerthread to write down bad jokes).

ahhh the younger cousin to https://xcancel.com/internetofshit

i needed this giggle, gods bless our dubbers

Stomatopodcasting

Ouch. Also, I'm raging and didn't even realize I had barbarian levels.

Well I suppose it can't be much worse than graphology or myers-briggs!

failed my saving throw.

I don't know what I expected

Zima Blue

Didn’t know it was something readable! I just know it as an episode of Love Death + Robots. It was a standout episode in an otherwise pretty boring first two seasons.

Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.

Finally, a slur my British ass can sling at people guilt-free

I really like how the second one appropriates pseudomarxist language to have a go at those snooty liberal elites again.

edit: The first paper might be making a perfectly valid point at a glance??

kinda related but wouldn’t it be fun to believe that LLMs were invented by Big Em Dash as a conspiracy

I'm sorry he feels that way. I'm here for him if he wants to talk about anything, just let me know.

Grumble grumble. I don't think that "optimizing" is really a factor here, since a lot of times the preferred construct is either equivalent (such that) or more verbose (a nonzero chance that). Instead it's more likely a combination of simple repetition (like how I've been calling everyone "mate" since getting stuck into Taskmaster NZ) and identity performance (look how smart I am with my smart people words).

When optimization does factor in its less tied to the specific culture of tech/finance bros than it is a simple response to the environment and technology they're using. Like, I've seen the same "ACK" used in networking and in older radio nerds because it fills an important role.

ah yeah @fasterandworse found this when it was happening (and I pulled archives of the live streams on the days it was playing)

some further observations to the stuff in her writeup: the day1 livestream also “starts late” (and cuts suspiciously cleanly in mid-sentence). I still want to do some tests to find out if YouTube’s live editor allows editing out stream history while stream is going, but either way they made very sure that they could completely silence that talk if it turned out that she didn’t bend as forced

(the now-up video published on youtube definitely starts differently to the livestream, too, so it’s likely a local post-mix recording that got uploaded. I haven’t had time to review both and find possible differences)

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

k

Cal Newport jumpscare (some productivity “influencer” who anxious teen me read)

To quote astrophysicist Angela Collier, quantum quantum quantum

Damn you, Scott! Stop making me agree with people who created blockchain-based dating apps!

this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room

If your system flagged that as toxic, makes me wonder about the system. Also check your bias against people saying this because it def comes off as true. (And hey if this truth hurts, remember that he didnt claim yall are not the smartest people, yall have 130+ iqs remember).

Sidenote: I almost ended up working for the company almost a decade ago now lmao. The board was full of other characters we all know and love here. The €€€ offer was high for EU, but I still laugh at the growth potential of my 10000 dollars yearly equivalent in their tokens. The website was unique in that it scrolled... up. I think it's still on archive dot org

(in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system)

That's an ML model. Like I searched and toxic-bert is just a github repo.

"objective" go fuck a cow

@nfultz @BlueMonday1984 the fucking Hexayurt Guy?

Thank you, Dethklok, not just for this banger of a national anthem but also for summoning the lake troll to put Espoo in its place.

I also did some digging, and this appears to be a profile matching that poster (username, displayed email)

note not only the massive uptick in recent commit counts on the github, but also the complete lack of any related domain experience in what they're posting to the git list about

much as the rules here, the only answer is to keep laughing these fucking people out of the room

I wonder why his 10000 agents haven't done the work yet. It seems like such a straightforward plan.

No replies and somehow that screen name just screams "troll" to me.

Not that I really care, git can go DIAF as far as I'm concerned.

Could have been a cool name for a drag queen, a motorcycle stunt artist, or an eccentric 19th century inventor. On anAI hypeperson it just adds to the vicarious embarrassment.