Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)
An interesting thing came through the arXiv-o-tube this evening: āThe Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are Noneā.
Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something āreally isā and how something āappears to beā, and this gap helps us understand the mental processing that lead to how something appears to be. Illusions are also useful for investigating artificial systems, and much research has examined whether computational models of perceptions fall prey to the same illusions as people. Here, I invert the standard use of perceptual illusions to examine basic processing errors in current vision language models. I present these models with illusory-illusions, neighbors of common illusions that should not elicit processing errors. These include such things as perfectly reasonable ducks, crooked lines that truly are crooked, circles that seem to have different sizes because they are, in fact, of different sizes, and so on. I show that many current vision language systems mistakenly see these illusion-illusions as illusions. I suggest that such failures are part of broader failures already discussed in the literature.
Itās definitely linked in with the problem we have with LLMs where they detect the context surrounding a common puzzle rather than actually doing any logical analysis. In the image case Iād be very curious to see the control experiment where you ask āwhich of these two lines is bigger?ā and then feed it a photograph of a dog rather than two lines of any length. Iām reminded of how it was (is?)easy to trick chatGPT into nonsensical solutions to any situation involving crossing a river because it pattern-matched to the chicken/fox/grain puzzle rather than considering the actual facts being presented.
Also now that I type it out I think thereās a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger. But thatās neither here nor there.
I think thereās a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger
I disagree, or rather I think thatās actually a feature; āneitherā is a perfectly reasonable answer to that question that a human being would give, and LLMs would be fucked by since they basically never go against the prompt.
Surprised this hasnāt been mentioned yet: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/meta-ai-users-facebook-instagram-1235221430/
Spam bots are good now!
I think it did come up a few weeks back, but itās indeed a hilarious mess. the engagement must flow!
In my dreams, it wonāt take long until all user interactions are AI driven and people paying for ad space in that shit realizes that, leading to an immediate crash of metaās finances.
hoping for a 2025 with solidarity, aid, and good opsec for everyone who needs it the most
https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780#m
The whole thread is terrible; controlling and borderline abusive behavior.
I feel personally attacked because I have a BELOVED dino plush that looks almost exactly like that one, only is, you know, a fucking plush toy not an eldritch horror. They took a perfectly fine toy and ruined it with a stupid chatbot, the girl did the smartest thing and just uses it as a normal plushy.
Also if you listen to the video at the end you can really easily figure out why kids donāt like that toy, ITāS FUCKING ANNOYING. Kids donāt want to deal with your bullshit and fortunately they donāt yet know how to pretend to care.
āIn the meantime, would you like to play a game or maybe hear a fun fact?ā
āNo.ā
āThatās okay! Is there something else you would like to do or talk about? Iām here to chat about anything you like!āItās like a deliberately written comedy scene of a character who canāt pick up on social cues.
Teaching the girl how to deadpan ignore annoying guys in her DMs for the rest of her life, I mean, valuable skill
The video is hilarious. The idiot AI man is so gpt-pilled he cannot figure out that this thing is just bloody annoying!!
This guyās gonna be on whatever remains of Twitter in like 20 years vague posting about the missing missing reasons his kid doesnāt talk to him anymore.
Found a couple QRTs cooking the guy which caught my attention:
https://twitter.com/denimneverdies/status/1872364569743786286
https://twitter.com/TheWapplehouse/status/1873915404529406462
Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal yearā
Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering
Huh. I guess itāll be another weird one.
(I know I know, low effort post, Iām sick in bed and bored)
Hey, at least thereās no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?
Never mind.
They are also spinning it into āthe car is so great you cant do terrorism with it due to how strong it isā, which considering the several vehicle terrorism acts recently seems very unwise.
Also āit would be different for the bystandersā i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely) and still 7 people were hurt (and the driver died). Id wait a bit with drawing further conclusions.
Steel, like a pressure cooker
Somebody pointed out that I might have been wrong and steel might be a perfect shield for anything.
youād expect that active duty green beret would know how to make a bomb, especially after seeing these things in afghanistan, but no. (containment like pressure cooker works only for low explosives, because burn rate depends on pressure. this is common knowledge among some gun owners, particularly those that reload their own cartridges. proper high explosives donāt need that, any kitchenware and pieces of cybertruck would just add to fragmentation. one could expect that any highly trained soldier should know this too)
but hey, maybe taking info from different places and combining it in novel ways just isnāt his thing. he wouldnāt get there in the first place if it was
chalk it down to perp incompetence. single direct hit with old 155mm shell (7kg explosive) can destroy a normal modern tank, nevermind a car. no amount of shitty panels would contain anything at least mildly substantial. there were cases of suicide vests with bigger charge than that (10kg) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66355032
i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely)
symbolic building (??) still makes sense as a target for terrorist attack
Sure but id expect the perp to first use the cybertruck to ram into the building, or at least move closer, and not park nicely, otoh, if he was a terrorists what do I know, dont exactly know what goes through their mind shortly before things at high speeds go through their mind.
parking like this raises less suspicion. maybe he wasnāt sure enough about whatever igniting mechanism he had, he could end up stuck in a wall unable to get out to look it up
instead of high speed disassembly dude just burned down in automatically locked death trap, i guess he found that anticlimatic. not like isis (guessing) recruits brightest minds out there
Yeah the story is about to get weird. Your isis guess might not be far off. See this same military base as the guy who drove into the crowds.
Writers of 2025: āSomehow isis returned.ā (I know isis never left, media just looked less at it, but thought it would be a funny joke).
iāve seen that news piece on how they were in the same base and how they were deployed in afghanistan around the same time previously and thatās what i based this guess on
still, so far it could be anything else including complete coincidence. itās like dude forgot everything, he was radioman but couldnāt make remote controlled detonator and didnāt use efficient charge for some reason
not only isis never left, i guess they controlled some territory at least until last month even if it was only a couple of villages in desert
Sure, you know what, letās go with that. While obviously I donāt condone terrorism, I agree with Nic here that if you are going to do a car bombing, blowing up a Cybertruck is preferable to other cars. Because it contains the blast better or whatever.
Donāt worry about the low effort post, even the writers of 2025 are phoning it in.
āā¦according to my machine learning model we actually have a strong fit in favor of shooting at CEOs. Thereās a 66% chance that each shot will either jam or fail to hit anything fatal, which creates a strong Bayesian prior in favor, or at least merits collecting further data to scale our modelsā
āWhat do you mean Iāve defined the problem in order to get the desired result? Machine learning process said weāre good. Why do you hate the future?ā
Fellas, I was promised the first catastrophic AI event in 2024 by the chief doomers. Thereās only a few hours left to go, Iām thinking skynet is hiding inside the times square orb. Stay vigilant!
Iām sad to report that the catastrophic AI event already happened and it was this picture
mind horrors beyond your comprehension
Ow god it is 2025 in .nl, it is coming! Everything is exploding, ai is turning us into fireworks! Yud was right!!1!!one!!
Comment sections on awful.systems are similar to this Drew Gooden sketch sometimes:
Itās just hard for me to give MY input when I donāt even know whatās going on
If you stick around and do a bunch of research you will end up better informed and much unhappier.
Once a month or so Awful Systems casually mentions a racist in some sub-sub-culture who I had never heard about before and then I get to spend an hour doing background research on obscure net drama from 2013 or whatever.
Iām making a mental note to keep that link around for the next time someone barges into one of our threads and does the āI donāt know what this is, hereās my reaction to what I thought the topic was, no I didnāt read the article or lurkā routine
as a bonus they might accidentally watch the rest of the video and finally figure out how much AI sucks
āI donāt know what this is, hereās my reaction to what I thought the topic was, no I didnāt read the article or lurkā
bizarre that they actually just say this
You know guys, itās really hard for me to give MY input when you are so negative about all the terrible things I like. Next time you guys come CRAWLING to me for advice, try not hating me as a human being for everything my twisted value system represents.
Oh no Iām in this sketch and I donāt like it. Or at least, I would be. The secret is to acknowledge your lack of background knowledge or basic grounding in what youāre talking about and then blunder forward based on vibes and values, trusting that if youāre too far off base on the details youāll piss off someone (sorry skillissuer) enough to correct you.
A āhigh-techā grifter car that only endangers its own inhabitants, a Trump and Musk fan showing his devotion by blowing himself up alongside symbols of both, the failure of this trained and experienced murderer to think through the actual material function of his weaponry, welcome to the Years of Lead Paint.
from I Was Promised a More Aesthetically Pleasing Cyberpunk Dystopia by Vicky Osterweil
āA new report showed that Trumpās win was extremely narrow except in āNews desertsā, places where there is no local reporting or information, where he won by upwards of fifty pointsā
Apparently the repubs always do good there or something, i saw somebody complain that the news desert stuff claims there is a much stronger casual link between news desert and trump won than there actually is.
āif you chat with it about its designersā
I hope the people here at least realize how bullshit this is right? The ai doesnt know who designed it. It isnt a child talking about how their parents looked.
To be fair it also endangers people outside the car, just not when a deflagration is set off inside.
Wow, thatās bleak. The whole article I mean.
this isnāt surprising at all, but some of the details are interesting: Server found in apartment funded by Russian government used AI to interfere with 2024 US elections
LLMs really are designed for this kind of thing, arenāt they?
a reply from a mastodon thread about an instance of AI crankery:
Claude has a response for ya. āYouāre oversimplifying. While language models do use probabilistic token selection, reducing them to āfancy RNGsā is like calling a brain ājust electrical signals.ā The learned probability distributions capture complex semantic relationships and patterns from human knowledge. That said, your skepticism about AI hype is fair - there are plenty of overinflated claims worth challenging.ā Not bad for a bucket of bolts ārando number generatorā, eh?
maybe Iām late to this realization because itās a very stupid thing to do, but a lot of the promptfondlers who come here regurgitating this exact marketing fluff and swearing they know exactly how LLMs work when they obviously donāt really are just asking the fucking LLMs, arenāt they?
a non-zero amount of the time, yeah
also, that posterās profile, holy fuck. even just the About is a trip
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting? And lol at āim seeing evidence the voting public was HACKED! (emph mine)ā a few moments later āanybody know some big 5 webscrape API coders? I need them for evidence gatheringā. The delightful pattern of crankery where there is a big sweeping new idea that nobody else has seen, plus no actual ability in a technical field.
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting?
just an ordinary mastodon poster, doing the utterly ordinary thing of fedposting in every thread started by a popular leftist account, calling ātheir wingā a bunch of cowards for not talking in public about doing acts of stochastic violence, and pondering why they donāt have more followers
Right, well God says:
meditated exude faithful estimate nature message glittering indiana intelligences dedicate deception ruinous asleep sensitive plentiful thinks justification subjoinedst rapture wealthy frenzied release trusting apostles judge access disguising billows deliver range
Not bad for the almighty creator ārando number generatorā, eh?
That first post. They are using llms to create quantum resistant crypto systems? Eyelid twitch
E: also, as I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks, this made me realize how much worse science crankery is going to get due to LLMs.
As self and khalid_salad said, there are certainly other branches of CS that attract cranks. Iām not much of a computer scientist myself but even I have seen some š¤-ass claims about compilers, computational complexity, syntactic validity of the entire C programming language (?), and divine approval or lack thereof of particular operating systems and even the sorting algorithms used in their schedulers!
I thought those non crypto cranks were relatively rare, which is why I added the āreallyā part. There has been only one templeos after all. And cryptography (crypto too but that is more financial cranks) has that 'this will ve revolutionary feeling which cranks seem to love, while also feeling accessable (compared to complexity theory, which you usually only know about if you know some cs already). I didnāt mean there are no cranks/weird ass claims about the whole field, but Id think that cryptography attracts the lions share. The lambda calculus bit down thread might prove me wrong however.
I know what you mean. I think the main genre of CS cranks is people trying way too hard to prove something theyāve gotten way too attached to and cryptography (and its more or less obviously stupid applications) and functional programming (proven to be no more or less powerful than procedural, but sometimes more or less fun) seem to attract a particularly high share of cranks. Almost certainly other fields too.
I still need to finish that FPGA Krivine machine because itās still living rent-free in my head and will do so until itās finally evaluating expressions, but boy howdy fuck am I not looking forward to the cranks finding it
write a series of blog posts about it, all of which end āAnd in conclusion, punch a Nazi.ā
also sprinkle it at the start, and throughout
because you just know the tiring fuckers wonāt bother reading in depth
I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks
every once in a while we get a āhere is a compression scheme that works on all data, fuck you and your pidginsā but yeah i think this is right
thereās unfortunately a lot of cranks around lambda calculus and computability (specifically check out the Wikipedia article on hypercomputation and start chasing links; youāre guaranteed to find at least one aggressive crank editing their favorite grift into the less watched corners of the wiki), and a lot of them have TESCREAL roots or some ties to that belief cluster or to technofascism, because itās much easier to form a computer death cult when your idea of computation is utterly fucked
fair, there are cranks still trying to trisect an arbitrary angle with an unmarked straight-edge and compass, so i shouldnāt be surprised. there are probably cranks still trying to solve the halting problem
Not bad for a bucket of bolts ārando number generatorā, eh?
Becauseā¦ because it generated plausibly looking sentence? Doā¦ do you think the ājust electrical signalsā bit is clever or creative?
Hereās an LLM performance test that I call the Elon Test: does the sentence plausibly look like it couldāve been said by Elon Musk? Yes? Then your thing is stupid and a failure.
That test doesnāt totally work as Elon does often say fuck.
as an amuse bouche for the horrors that will follow this year, please enjoy this lobste.rs reaching the melting down end stage after going full Karen at someone who agrees with a submitted post saying LLMs are a dead end when it comes to AI.
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_tefto4
Thankfully, accusing someone of being a crapto promoter is seen as an attack that is beyond the pale.
Highlights from the rest of the thread include bemoaning the lack of a downvote button for registering disapproval:
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_ft9mpj
unilaterally deciding to reply multiple times to one comment, neccesitating them to add a meta comment with hyperlinks
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_jjk5ei
And of course is a MoreWronger (moroner?)
If you go over to LessWrong, you can get some ideas of what is possible
I just got a hit of esprit dāescalier, and wished Iād replied to this
But the road to Hackers News is paved with good intentions.
with
So too is the road to Rokoās Basilisk.
Iām increasingly convinced that this person is in a dark place mentally, and am fighting an internal battle to keep poking them for the lulz or just ignoring them.
https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_cyrxm4
(Iāve seen this behavior on lobste.rs before and I think sometimes people literally get banned for their own good)
Edit bored on a train so I did the math, in the comment thread, this user has made 30% of the comments by count and 20% by āvolumeā (basically number of bytes in the plaintext).
Edit bored on a train so I did the math, in the comment thread, this user has made 30% of the comments by count and 20% by āvolumeā (basically number of bytes in the plaintext).
thaās a lotta posting
Adderall will do that to a fellow
Lol of course they think they are civil and other people as pushing nasty rethoric. Quite the sealion feeling.
Wonder if they even notice how much communication weirdness they themself used. With the emphasis of emotional laden language. (They didnt use bold so i cant call it crank capitalization, but more crank cursive. A big deal for me! ;) )
Anyway the questioning of āhow do you know this is why there is no downvotingā shows the type of person they are. (And is quite the Rationalist annoying behavior, suddenly they demand excessive sourcing for small remarks of people they disagree with).
āDo you want to refine your claim?ā
one day iāll finally catch a lobste permaban thanks to your links :-)
enjoy your flags from outraged simps
:-)
I have landed on a āyou can get fucked if you make this annoying for me, I donāt need your product anywayā response to everything. The silver lining is that I will be dealing with way more bullshit while being just as angry all the time at everything.
Is the brain just a computer By Iris van Rooij, a psychologist and cognitive scientist (and she is also a bit skeptical about the claims about AI). Might be an interesting read for the people here.
