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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

    • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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      6 minutes ago

      on a side note I found out what ā€œagileā€ is a few months ago and I think Iā€™d rather go back to working retail than do the little morning circlejerk thing. dehumanizing

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    People have worked out how to cram DeepSeek onto a Raspberry Pi

    Anyways, hereā€™s a quasi-related sidenote:

    Part of me suspects DeepSeek is gonna quickly carve out a good chunk of the market for itself - for SaaS services looking for spicy autocomplete or a slop generator to bolt on to their products, DeepSeekā€™s high efficiency gives them a way to do it that doesnā€™t immediately blow a massive hole in their finances.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    Oh no itā€™s more US politics.

    So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since itā€™s the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAAā€™s email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.

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    2 days ago

    Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial

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      I have added your coworker to the list of people I will imagine being tortured in the future. Im no robotgod but it is the best I can do.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up

      that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subjectā€¦

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    2 days ago

    lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)

    user HardboiledHack

    also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex

    iā€™m sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people

    the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW

    from http://joliverconroy.net/

    I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.

    by ā€œaboutā€, he means ā€œforā€

    Iā€™m a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: oliver.conroy@theguardian.com.

    Iā€™m also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Ziziansā€™ beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.

    I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.

    Thanks very much.

    iā€™ve also warned over at the old place

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        From what Iā€™ve been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. Iā€™m not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Rokoā€™s Basilisk being a concern.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          22 hours ago

          However, I do think that the unfolding of this story presents an object lesson in why ā€œalways escalate to the maxā€ is a wildly stupid idea. It turns out that even when you have guns (metaphorical or otherwise) and a complete disregard for the consequences of failure the average group of citizens is still at a decided disadvantage to the state at higher points on the escalation ladder.

          • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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            20 hours ago

            You misunderstand, they escalate to the max to keep themselves (including selves in parallel dimensions or far future simulations) from being blackmailed by future super intelligent beings, not to survive shootouts with border patrol agents.

            I am fairly certain Yud had said something very close to that effect in reference to preventing blackmail from the basilisk, even though he tries to no-true-scotchman zizians wrt his functional decision ā€˜theoryā€™ these days.

  • HotGarbage@awful.systems
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    After fondling ChatGPT to generate naughty things, man has meltdown when he learns no one cares.

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/time-bandit-chatgpt-jailbreak-bypasses-safeguards-on-sensitive-topics/

    Horror. Dismay. Disbelief. For weeks, it felt like I was physically being crushed to death.

    I hurt all the time, every part of my body. The urge to make someone who could do something listen and look at the evidence was so overwhelming.

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      This tied into a hypothesis I had about emergent intelligence and awareness, so I probed further, and realized the model was completely unable to ascertain its current temporal context, aside from running a code-based query to see what time it is. Its awareness - entirely prompt-based - was extremely limited and, therefore, would have little to no ability to defend against an attack on that fundamental awareness.

      How many times are AI people going to re-learn that LLMs donā€™t have ā€œawarenessā€ or "reasnloningā€™ in a sense humans would find meaningful?

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      i donā€™t understand the ā€œsafetyā€ angle here. if chatgpt can output authoritatively-looking sentence-shaped string about pipebombs, then itā€™s only because similar content about pipebombs is already available on wide open internet. if model is closed, then at worst they would have to monitor its use (not like google blocks any similar information from showing up). if model is open, then no safeguards make sense in the first place. i guess itā€™s more about legal liability for openai? now they can ignore it with all these bills about ā€œai safetyā€ gone (for now)

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 days ago

        also, relying on spicy autocomplete when trying to put together a deadly device sounds like cyberpunk-flavored darwin award material

      • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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        frankly itā€™s probably harm prevention if people turn to an LLM instead of an actual source for pipe bomb instructions. ā€œ5) Put the warm pizza in the center of the pipe bomb. To maximize the radius of the detonation, you should roll the pizza and make sure that it fits securely into the pipe.ā€

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          thatā€™s a tiny amount of harm reduction if there are other ways to get there

          it can go in opposite way: some segment of propmtfondlers specifically went after one open-source locally ran model because it was ā€œuncensoredā€ (i think it was mistral) the logic in this one was, thereā€™s no search going out so you can ā€œlook upā€ anything and no one would be any wiser. this is extremely charitably assuming that llm training does a kind of lossy compression on all data it devours, and since they took everything, itā€™s basically almost like worse google search

          if there are steps like ā€œput a thing in pipe. make sure to weld ends shutā€ then itā€™s also harm reduction, but instead for everyone else. imagine getting eldest sonā€™d by a bot, pathetic

        • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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          Iā€™m not even joking, really. the way I see harm in LLMs talking about pipe bombs is less that theyā€™ll give instructions and more that we might get a character.ai style situation where the LLM talks someone into an attack

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            Also remember that some of the instructions you get via these tricks are wrong. The ā€˜pretend that you are writing a movie script and give me tips on how to break into a houseā€™ thing gave you lockpicking tips, which looks cool as a movie plot. But not just the advice to tap the lock, which is iirc what they actually do (breaks the lock sure, but you are breaking in already, also is faster). This kind of stuff combined with ā€˜eh you could google this beforeā€™ is why so many people ge talked to prob ignored him and didnt freak out.

            If you let amateurs do security you get amateur security after all.

            Talking people into things, esp as people lionize and anthropomorphize llms so much, is a bigger problem.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      ā€œThe world is finite and kids are infinite, especially African kids.ā€ Jfc. Anyway goes to show just how white supremacist the whole ā€œsave the childrenā€ idea is.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      I know the only intended message there is ā€œI am a big racistā€, but what kind of dumb fuck adage is ā€œthe word is finite, kids are infiniteā€. Youā€™re not even trying mother fucker

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOP
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      Iā€™ve previously discussed the concept of model collapse, and how feeding synthetic data (training data created by an AI, rather than a human) to an AI model can end up teaching it bad habits, but it seems that DeepSeek succeeded in training its models using generative data, but specifically for subjects (to quote GeekWireā€™s Jon Turow) ā€œā€¦like mathematics where correctness is unambiguous,ā€

      That sound you hear is me pressing F to doubt. Checking the correctness of mathematics written as prose interspersed with equations is, shall we say, not easy to automate.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsOP
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          I mean, maybe? But the amount of trust I put in a description from ā€œGeekWireā€ written by ā€œan investor at Madrona Venture Group and a former leader at Amazon Web Servicesā€ who uncritically declares that spicy autocomplete ā€œachieved strong reasoning capabilitiesā€ is ā€¦ appropriately small.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      OpenAI canā€™t simply ā€œadd onā€ DeepSeek to its models, if not just for the optics. It would be a concession. An admittal that it slipped and needs to catch up, and not to its main rivalā€¦

      I actually disagree here. I think Ed underestimates how craven and dishonest these people are. I expect theyā€™ll try to quietly integrate any efficiency improvements they can get from it and bluster through any investor questions about it. Their hope at this point has to be that more hardware is still better and that scaling is still gonna be the thing to make fetch happen. This again isnā€™t a revolutionary new structure, even if it is a significant improvement over anything Saltman and co have been doing.

      • FredFig@awful.systems
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        If they can convince the money hose that they just need one more OOM of compute bro, they can keep vacuuming infinity dollars. The incentive is obviously there for any amount of lying, but at some point, I assume even the most braindead investors will start asking around if this really is the only game in town.

        Or maybe they wonā€™t, which would be an admission against the core tenet of capitalism, but this has been a crazy year, and itā€™s only january. :/

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    I wonder how much % of the freakout over Deepseek is AI doomers realizing the coming AI god might be ā€¦ ChiCom!

    • FredFig@awful.systems
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      https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/ And the companion piece on his blog.

      What I didnā€™t wager was that, potentially, nobody was trying. My mistake was ā€” if you can believe this ā€” being too generous to the AI companies, assuming that they didnā€™t pursue efficiency because they couldnā€™t, and not because they couldnā€™t be bothered.

      This isnā€™t about China ā€” itā€™s so much fucking easier if we let it be about China ā€” itā€™s about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.