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 this.)
(e: wrong. damn. tab.)
(e2)
The Lasker/Mamdani/NYT sham of a story just gets worse and worse. It turns out that the ultimate source of Cremieuxās (Jordan Laskerās) hacked Columbia University data is a hardcore racist hacker who uses a slur for their name on X. The NYT reporter who wrote the Mamdani piece, Benjamin Ryan, turns out to have been a follower of this hackerās X account. Ryan essentially used Lasker as a cutout for the blatantly racist hacker.
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 itās so fucking cool to scrape some nothingburger docs of a left wing politician for his almost equally cringe nazi friends.
I feel like the greatest harm that the NYT does with these stories is not
inflictingallowing the knowledge of just how weird and pathetic these people are to be part of the story. Like, even if you do actually think that this nothingburger āaffirmative actionā angle somehow matters, the fact that the people making this information available and pushing this narrative are either conservative pundits or sad internet nazis who stopped maturing at age 15 is important context.It would be against the interests of capital to present this as the rightwing nonsense that it is. Itās on purpose
Should be embarrassing enough to get caught letting nazis use your publication as a mouthpiece to push their canards. Why further damage you reputation by letting everyone know your source is a guy who insists a cartoon characterās real name is a racial epithet? The optics are presumably exactly why the slightly savvier nazi in this story adopted a posh french nom de guerre like āCrĆ©mieuxā to begin with, and then had a yet savvier nazi feed the hit piece through a ārespectedā publication like the NYT.
Lasker himself is known to go by a pseudonym with a transphobic slur in it.
That the TPO moniker is basically ungoogleable appears to have been a happy accident for him, according to that article by Rachel Adjogah his early posting history paints him as an honest-to-god chaser.
This incredible banger of a bug against whisper, the OpenAI speech to text engine:
Complete silence is always hallucinated as āŲŖŲ±Ų¬Ł Ų© ŁŲ§ŁŲ³Ł ŁŁŁŲ±ā in Arabic which translates as āTranslation by Nancy Qunqarā
Lol, training data must have included videos where there was silence but on screen was a credit for translation. Silence in audio shouldnāt require special āworkaroundsā.
The whisper model has always been pretty crappy at these things: I use a speech to text system as an assistive input method when my RSI gets bad and it has support for whisper (because that supports more languages than the developer could train on their own infrastructure/time) since maybe 2022 or so: every time someone tries to use it, they run into hallucinated inputs in pauses - even with very good silence detection and noise filtering.
This is just not a use case of interest to the people making whisper, imagine that.
Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.
Iām confused by this. Didnāt we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasnāt perfect but at least didnāt hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??
Transformers do way better transcription, buuuuuut yeah you gotta check it
Iām just confused because I remember using Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows 98 in the 90s and it worked pretty accurately already back then for dictation and sometimes it feels as if all of that never happened.
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, LLMsā 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.
On a personal sidenote
do you keep count/track? the moleskine must be getting full!
I donāt keep track, I just put these together when Iāve got an interesting tangent to go on.
-
Because Replie was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.
We built detailed unit tests to test system performance. When the data came back and less than half were functioning, did Replie want to fix them?
No. Instead, it lied. It made up a report than almost all systems were working.
And it did it again and again.
What level of ceo-brained prompt engineering is asking the chatbot to write an apology letter
Then, when it agreed it lied ā it lied AGAIN about our email system being functional.
I asked it to write an apology letter.
It did and in fact sent it to the Replit team and myself! But the apology letter ā was full of half truths, too.
It hid the worst facts in the first apology letter.
He also does that a lot after shit hits the fan, making the llm produce tons of apologetic text about what it did wrong and how it didnāt follow his rules, as if the outage is the fault of some digital tulpa gone rogue and not the guy in charge who apparently thinks cyebersecurity is asking an LLM nicely in a .md not to mess with the companyās production database too much.
Link to stub from the last sack
I completely missed that, thanks.
The guy who thinks itās important to communicate clearly (https://awful.systems/comment/7904956) wants to flip the number order around
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXr8ys8PYppKXgGWj/english-writes-numbers-backwards
Iāll consider that when the Yanks abandon middle-endian date formatting.
Edit itās now tagged as āHumorā on LW. Cowards. Own your cranks.
Likewise, flipped-number (ālittle endianā) algorithms are slightly more efficient at e.g. long addition.
What? What are you talking about? Citation? Efficient wrt. what? Microbenchmarks? Itās certainly not actual computational complexity. Do you think going forward in an array is different computationally from going backward?
Okay what the fuck, this is completely deranged. How can anyoneās 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
Yes, and largest place value is literally called the most significant digit. It makes perfect sense that it comes first.
i like how on lw thereās a comment saying exactly the same thing but 5x more verbose
Computers use both big endian and little endian and it doesnāt seem to matter much. Yet humans should switch their entire number system?
E: this guy canāt grasp the concept that left-to-right is arbitrary, which is really ironic given his point. Ok so in arabic itās 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 quirkyš, and humans, just like programs, flip a bit to read it left-to-right, where itās the opposite of how you should be reading it! of course.
Ok so in arabic itās exactly how this guy wants it
reminded me of this
text of image/tweet
@amasad. Apr 22
Silicon Valley will rediscover Islam:
- fasting for clarity and focus
- mindfulness 5 times a day
- no alcohol that ruins the soul & body
- long-term faithful relationships for a fulfilling happy family life
- effective altruism by giving zakat directly to the poor
The argument would be stronger (not strong, but stronger) if he could point to an existing numbering system that is little-endian and somehow show itās better
Starting this fight and not āstop counting at zero you damn computer nerds!ā 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!).
āThis is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat,ā mused Yudkowsky. āYes yes, Iām sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager,ā he continued. āIt is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them.ā
Is this ānarrativeā in the room with us right now?
Itās reassuring to know that times change, but Yud will always be impressed by the virtues of the rich.
From Yudās remarks on Xitter:
As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isnāt 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 āwearing masksā really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think ā¢.
you must outperform other people also trying to do that, whoād like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.
zoom and enhance
g-factor
<Kill Bill sirens.gif>
Is g-factor supposed to stand for gene factor?
Itās āgeneral intelligenceā, the eugenicist wet dream of a supposedly quantitative measure of how the better class of humans do brain good.
deleted by creator
Tangentially, the other day I thought Iād do a little experiment and had a chat with Metaās chatbot where I roleplayed as someone whoās 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. Iāve been meaning to continue the chat and see how far and how fast it goes but Iām just too aghast for now. This shit is so fucking dangerous.
Iāll forever be thankful this shit didnāt exist when I was growing up. As a depressed autistic child without any friends, I can only begin to imagine what LLMs couldāve done to my mental health.
Maybe us humans possess a somewhat hardwired tendency to ābondā with a counterpart that acts like this. In the past, this was not a huge problem because only other humans were capable of interacting in this way, but this is now changing. However, I suppose this needs to be researched more systematically (beyond what is already known about the ELIZA effect etc.).
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
What exactly would constitute good news about which sorts of humans ChatGPT can eat? The phrase āno news is good newsā 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 youāre someone of low status like an artist, a math pet or a nonwhite person, not if youāre high status like a fund manager, a cult leader or a fanfiction author?
Nobody wants to join a cult founded on the Daria/Hellraiser crossover I wrote while emotionally processing chronic pain. I feel very mid-status.
What exactly would constitute good news about which sorts of humans ChatGPT can eat?
Maybe like with standard cannibalism they lose the ability to post after being consumed?
Is this ānarrativeā in the room with us right now?
I actually recall recently someone pro llm trying to push that sort of narrative (that itās only already mentally ill people being pushed over the edge by chatGPT)ā¦
Where did I see itā¦ 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 itās pretty much inevitable that youāre going to get some real loonies on the platform. In fact at that scale itās pretty much inevitable youāre going to get people whose first psychotic break lines up with when they started using ChatGPT. But even just stylistically itās fairly obvious that journalists love this narrative. Thereās nothing Western readers love more than a spooky story about technology gone awry or corrupting people, it reliably rakes in the clicks.
The
callnarrative is coming from inside thehouseforum. 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).
Text conversation that keeps happening with coworker:
Coworker: <information dump>
Me: <not reading any of that> whatās the source for that?
Coworker: Oh I got Copilot to summarise these links: <links>, saves me the time of typing
I expect the last step in that is you slapping him?
Fortunately, we do not work in physical proximity!
Im working on a device that allows you to do that over the internet. (Rip bash org, at least they didnāt put you in the ai slop).
Too bad land lines have gone out of fashion
rip [SA]HatfulOfHollow
If you wanted a vision of the future of autocomplete, imagine a computer failing at predicting what youāre gonna write but absolutely burning through kilowatts trying to, forever.
Sometimes while browsing a website I catch a glimpse of the cute jackal girl and it makes me smile. Anubis isnāt a perfect thing by any means, but itās what the web deserves for its sins.
Even some pretty big name sites seem to use it as-is, down to the mascot. Youād think the software is pretty simple to customize into something more corporate and soulless, but Iām happy to see the animal eared cartoon girl on otherwise quite sterile sites.
certainly better than seeing the damned cloudflare Click Here To Human box, although I suspect a number of these deployments still donāt 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 whoās willing to support the project. Reportedly, sheās planning to exploit it to make some more elaborate checks as well.
Huh, interesting approach. So the idea is that you either use the free version and (preferably) retain the anime girl mascot to promote Anubis itself, or you pay for a commercial license to remove animu in a way that is officially supported.
Basically. Its to explicitly prevent Xe from becoming the load-bearing peg for a massive portion of the Internet, thus ensuring this project doesnāt send her health down the shitter.
You want my prediction, I suspect future FOSS projects may decide to adopt mascots of their own, to avoid the āload-bearing maintainerā issue in a similar manner.
Seems a bit early to say whether others are going to do that. This experiment hasnāt had much time to prove itself and so far I havenāt recognized anyone using a corporate branded BotStopper instance, only the jackal girl version.
Responsibility manahement through branding is an interrsting idea and I wouldnāt mind seeing it working, but a prediction like that seems like jumping to conclusions prematurely. Then again, I guess thatās kinda what āpredictionā means in general.
So this blog post was framed positively towards LLMās and is too generous in accepting many of the claims around them, but even so, the end conclusions are pretty harsh on practical LLM agents: https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/betting-against-agents/
Basically, the author has tried extensively, in multiple projects, to make LLM agents work in various useful ways, but in practice:
The dirty secret of every production agent system is that the AI is doing maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% is tool engineering: designing feedback interfaces, managing context efficiently, handling partial failures, and building recovery mechanisms that the AI can actually understand and use.
The author strips down and simplifies and sanitizes everything going into the LLMs and then implements both automated checks and human confirmation on everything they put out. At that point it makes you question what value you are even getting out of the LLM. (The real answer, which the author only indirectly acknowledges, is attracting idiotic VC funding and upper management approval).
Even as critcal as they are, the author doesnāt acknowledge a lot of the bigger problems. The API cost is a major expense and design constraint on the LLM agents they have made, but the author doesnāt acknowledge the prices are likely to rise dramatically once VC subsidization runs out.
Want to feel depressed? Over 2,000 Wikipedia articles, on topics from Morocco to Natalie Portman to Sinn FĆ©in, are corrupted by ChatGPT. And thatās just the obvious ones.
Itās starting to feel like I need to download a snapshot of Wikipedia now before it gets worse.
Hereās their page of instructions, written as usual by the children who really liked programming the family VCR:
I recommend just using https://kiwix.org/en/
Itāsā¦ suboptimal, but itās about the least finicky way to get a compressed local copy of Wikipedia with all the article photos (~100GB).
Itās updated less frequently than the big dumps, but easier to use.
I second kiwix. Itās dead easy for managing and making copies of wiki images.
low background steel, maybe?
Copilot will be given a little avatar with a āroomā and will āageā. In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.
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
Those who do not study history are doomed to recreate neopets.
Neopets but itās an animated blob of cum with a smiley face.
They wanted a sexy avatar, turns out Oglaf.com is in the training set. āMistress!ā
Neopets at least brought joy to a generation of nascent furries. Copilot is fixing to have the exact opposite impact on internet infrastructure.
Of course, it is now funded by growth at all cost VC people, they do not understand fun or joy, all they want to see is n = n+1
Fuck you Microsoft, Iām gonna have to pretend to be autoplagās dad now, at least have the courtesy not to make it look like a cum blob.
This sounds like the plot of an oglaf comic
@o7___o7 @bitofhope it is the cum sprite!
āSplash on your tits?ā
At least Microsoft Bob gave us comic sans.
Hereās Dave Barry, still-alive humorist, sneering at Google AI summaries, one of the most embarrassing features Google ever shipped.
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 heās still writing about computers in this way.
Alex OāConnor platformed Sabine on his philosophy podcast. Iām irritated that he is turning into Lex Friedman simply by being completely uncritical. Well, no, wait, he was critical of Bellās theorem, and even Sabine had to tell him that Bellās work is mathematically proven. This is what a philosophy degree does to your epistemology, I guess.
My main sneer here is just some links. See, Maryās Room is answered by neuroscience; Mary does experience something new when color vision is restored. In particular, check out the testimonials from this 2021 Oregon experiment that restored color vision to some folks born without it. Focusing on physics, Iād like to introduce you all to Richard Behiel, particularly his explanations of electromagnetism and the Anderson-Higgs mechanism; there are deeper explanations for electricity and magnets, my dude. Also, if you havenāt yet, go read Alexās Wikipedia article, linked at the top of the sneer.
In the case of OāConnor and people like him, I think itās about much more than his philosophy background. Heās a YouTube creator who creates content on a regular schedule and makes a living off it. Once you start doing that, youāre 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. Itās an āIāll scratch your back if you scratch mineā situation dialed up to 11.
The same thing has happened to Sabine herself. Sheās been captured by the algorithm, which has naturally shifted her audience to the right, and now sheās been fully captured by that new audience.
I fully expect Alex OāConnor to remain on this treadmill. <remind me in 12months>
What getting c*cked by Mikhaila Peterson does to a mfer.
Caught a particularly spectacular AI fuckup in the wild:
(Sidenote: Rest in peace Ozzy - after the long and wild life you had, youāve earned it)
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?
this toot was how I did
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).
