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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting thisā¦)
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
Itās not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. [ā¦] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
that āimmersionā line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)
nice to see it hasnāt at least gotten worse
While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).
The heading means āBitcoin could protect from inflationā. If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!
Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I donāt know exactly what theyāre going to do with those reports, but itās feeling real bleak.
time to start reporting all those maga restaurants and shit
donāt want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.
My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.
Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracyās public enemy list. This is self serving but since January Iāve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).
Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!
It really looks like itās on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a āsimpleā plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
Iām rambling and itās late. Sympathies and solidarity.
Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and itāll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of āoh my gosh what am I even doingā, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after Iāve rejected my homeland in my heart.
Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Donāt forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and canāt shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesnāt make things worse mentally btw.
Itās a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, canāt imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.
I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, Iād probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.
Solidarity from TN
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Canāt Be Bothered
Itās a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you donāt have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didnāt think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, āan insult to life itselfā.
Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. Youāre doing fine donāt even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: āWhy are high fertility people always so weird?ā A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
Word of advice to the press: Stop š giving š natalists š free š platforms š
Every 3 months! Every 3 months fucking hell. (I know because last time they came in the news I opened a tab with them in it, and their faces was the last I saw before my monitor exploded, like literally suddenly I sat in darkness.
All Iāve learned from the most recent round of publicity is that herself has a new hat. It looks stupid
A new hat let me check almost clicks wait a minute, I canāt afford a new monitor, you are trying to trick me!
Just close your eyes and imagine a mediaeval yokel who has accused her sisterās girlfriend of being a witch so she can take over her turnip patch. No need for a new monitor
previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions
Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,youād be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden youāre forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And hereās where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was āexpected behaviorā under their new login policy
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to āmimic human responsesā
havenāt gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some
Cursorās cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.
That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.
Editā¦ looking at the orange site commentsā¦ some unironically cited Anthropic
researchmarketing hype, which (correctly) shows āChain-of-Thoughtā is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but itās Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).
jesus christ:
transcript
Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a āCalifornian incelā to avoid deportation.
Eminently punchable face
New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:
Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can āsave usā. Itās just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.
No, Iām sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.
His name is Scott.
This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.
Like itās either youāre a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or youāre 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.
I know zero Americans though, so maybe thereās a skew there.
Posting this as a stub because of reasons
- I donāt want to do the research on this
- This was pulled from the front page of reddit
- Connecting these two things is largely tabloid speculation, but funny enough for a stub.
X Is Ditching DMs Hours After News of Musk Messaging Women About Impregnating Them Breaks
LessWronger puts in the work and determines that LLMs canāt spacially vizualize for shit, comments are like āwell youāre prompting it wrongā (paraphrased) as well as āwhy not pay experiences machinists to videotape what theyāre doing os their work can be automatedā
The article itself is worth reading for some insights in the challenges of using current āAIā (LLMs) to work in the real world.
āwhy not pay experiences machinists to videotape what theyāre doing os their work can be automatedā
none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, itās called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot
e: ok at least op is a machinist
Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesnāt correlate with real world usefulness.
benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!
My high level impression when reading the response is āsomeone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesnāt know what theyāre talking aboutā.
with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these
The fact this commenter doesnāt mention the absolute fuckton of machining videos on Youtube tells me theyāre just talking out of their ass.
(not that forcing those into LLM slop would help but a hypothetical AGI would learn a lot)
Also
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone āin the same boat.ā
Dario is delusional. We donāt even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
I feel like there was time when nerds who hung out on blogs didnāt automatically believe everything a CEO said.
take us back!
@gerikson Iād like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesnāt get bed sores (ulcersāopen wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment whoās scared of robots.
@cstross @gerikson This doesnāt sound promising: āA growing body of evidence is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregiversā
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/
In each case, existing social and communication-Āoriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.
Thatās legitimately chilling. I guess just like quality of art and writing is too hard to quantify against āefficiencyā and āproductivityā so is quality of care. The slow AIs are literally optimizing humans out of the economy before our eyes and the people who were most afraid of being turned into paperclips are the ones leading the goddamn charge.
amazement at chatbots comes from demographic that did not binge watch how itās made in middle school
We donāt even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
at 1.5 totally-not-drivers per car, we donāt have them there eithe
Iāve got to acknowledge the sheer guts it takes to look at arguably the most predictable consequence of the cyberpunk dystopia youāre building and say ānah that wonāt happen because reasons.ā
Clearly self-driving teslas just need to mill their path through pedestrians
I got a spam message with a phishing linkā¦ Via Github? Seriously? Are we really doing this?
Not a completely unusual commentā¦ From the URL it was very obvious that this was a phishing link though. Curiosity got the better of me. The site shows you a ācloudflareā captcha. OK, letās click the checkbox. The usual loading animation starts, then this is shown:
Yeah ok, rightā¦
Iām actually a bit impressed with this, these captchas are so common, I didnāt even really think about checking the box. But of course, that interaction means the browser will allow the site to add something to your clipboard.
But likeā¦ Why distribute it via Github? I cannot think of a worse audience to try and con into āpaste something random into your windows consoleā. Am I just being naive here? Is this something common I somehow never experienced before?
Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.
Oh god
Althoughā¦ Do you think VideCodersTM read github issues?
Yeah that copy paste commands that give control over your pc shit is pretty nasty. Also over a year old at least. So it isnt specifically an attack at vibe coders. Not sure what the initial targets were but these usually try to target people not that knowledgeable in computer matters so lol that this now includes vibe coders.
Ah, I had been wondering if this is new, or I had just never noticed it. So itās the latter, good to know.
Itās kind of genius as wellā¦ A single comment will get the attention of potentially dozens of people, sent to a valid email address without having to guess/buy lists, and thereās an air of ātrustā around the (completely legit) mail you then get from github, containing the link.
I donāt know how new it is, but it first dropped on my radar about a year ago due to listening to the Risky Business cybersecurity podcast, not to be confused with the recent (and baffingly named (*)) podcast called āRisky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikovaā (**) by dweeb Nate Silver. So I donāt know how long it was going on the wild, and im talking about the windows button + r attack method and not the github comments, no idea how long they used comments as a vector. And yes that part is also good, like the addition of trust of github + quite an effective attack is clever. Shouldnāt work on Real Nerds however.
*: The name means that at least one of they didnāt [know|care|google] about the decades old cybersecurity podcast before naming their podcast that is true. Any of those is odd.
**: addition to above, the tagline of the podcast is āa weekly podcast about making better decisionsā Look inwards Nate, look inwards.
Github only catches strays, itās much more widely deployed
Yeah, that this happens elsewhere I have no doubt, I just never noticed on GH before.
āIn hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, āwe were creating conditions for a cult.āā, if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didnāt exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.
Source āTwo Vegan Lovers, an AI āCult,ā and a Trail of Dead Bodiesā, Archive
Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.
No, he didnāt. His āexplanationsā are turgid and useless even when theyāre not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers ā those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kidsā table, and who arenāt actually tested on how much theyāve learned.
Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.
No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.
Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance
OK, zero notes there.
article about the tactics that felon employs against the women bearing his children
features some notable sentences from his fixer, too. the sort of shit that just barely doesnāt qualify as him threatening to top off your kneecaps
Do note how this legion of kid slaves shit shows how he both doesnt believe will go to mars nor that ai/robots can automate things.
You dont make new children to save civilization in 18+ years if you think in 2 years you will go to mars/build robots that automate everything/build the robotgod.
oh yeah heās way too much of a coward to go to mars. besides, no-one there he could dominate or hurt
Eurgh!
Musk seems like heās 1cm away from Jeffrey Epstein.
idk when iāll have better opportunity to post this
Isnāt it more grammatically correct to say āJeffreys Epsteinā?
I thought we all knew the proper collective noun was a creepful of epsteins
Finally a use case for āAIā: defrauding community colleges.
sigh
