Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
Molly White continuing to slam it out of the park with a pivot to AI. As always, worth a read in full, but this intro bit stuck out to me after reading lots of inane blather on how crypto and AI are different:
Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake ā the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of cryptoās 2024 spending ā is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.
Literally the only pivot to AI that I am happy about. Molly is GOAT
Good timing since it seems even Crypto folks are getting out of Crypto.
Coworker got fired because he used AI to plan for a site installment of our product. The AI made a very nice looking plan but it failed to include enough packing material so nearly half of the units arrived broken. Boss still thinks AI is going to revolutionize work for the better though.
Came across this today: the purpose of a system is what it does. Based on that I would say the purpose of Claude was to make mistakes and get my coworker fired.
to be fair, the plan would have worked if you had included the allotted number of goblins in the box in addition to the packing material.
Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to āsueā journalists by āsummoningā them to a ātribunalā staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first ālawsuitā, which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron DāSouza
threw a hissy fithas shuttered everything ātemporarilyā.I donāt understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people theyāre mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal āsocial credit scoreā for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as DāSouza implies here:
One of my final questions for DāSouza ā who told me heād been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (āIām coming to New York next week to meet all the big guysā)
but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. Thatās just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? itās staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.
Special mentions:
Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. DāSouza believes that āmany journalists are more powerful than billionaires,ā explaining, āI canāt tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.ā
god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.
āItās only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creatorsā when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
š«©
Honestly, I think DāSouza explains the business best:
Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding āso it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,ā DāSouza says. āWhat I know from the Gawker litigation, having dealt with not just Hulk Hogan but dozens of other parties who felt like they were aggrieved by the media, is that they actually donāt want a financial remedy. What they want is a moral victory. Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, āI did not go to Epstein Island.āā
Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.
Twitter really broke their brains.
In DāSouzaās interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: āItās only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creatorsā when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
DāSouza continued, āUltimately, whatās the last job? It wonāt be knowledge work. It wonāt be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.ā
Taken together it becomes incredibly transparent that the actual goal here is to transform themselves into a kind of priest-king class, exercising absolute authority on behalf of the remote and unfathomable god that they built. Just please pay no attention to who built the AI, who runs the AI, or where all the money and power end up.
DāSouza has observed that his friends are āthe best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.ā
and wiped out several cities in the processMy profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objectionās tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. āYouāre Exhibit A,ā DāSouza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the companyās soft launch: āBuilding software is hard.ā
did they try to turn their first target into unwilling and adversarial beta-tester?
After we spoke, I awaited my verdict before the Objection tribunal in the Sackler case. None arrived. Eventually, the landing page was taken offline. I asked DāSouza about it. He explained that Objection would āhold off publishing any adjudicationsā until āa new major strategic partnershipā was announced.
so it seems
(As a general matter, DāSouza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting āexpertsā as part of coverage.)
it does fit a pattern
āI canāt tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.ā
I would pay to see a billionaire or CEO in tears over an article.
And if stopping them were that easy, why hasnāt it happened yet?
oh lol
Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.
Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someoneās RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.
And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.
I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawnās uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.
We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.
Anyway I reported him to nobody, because thereās no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.
Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.
NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.
this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy
This is poetry, AI could never
What if we replaced the kid in the Omelas hole with the wealthiest guy in Omelas?
I approve of this
UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You wonāt be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.
Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach
There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isnāt expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.
Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.
Finally, a machine which makes it impossible to watch the movie batman and robin.
(Joke explainer: the batsuit had nipples).
Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess whatā¦
Iāve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. š
When Frontiers started automating the editorial process, I stayed. I reasoned that as long as the automation could be turned off, human editors can still ensure rigorous, high-quality peer review. This now became impossible - the system has been entirely hijacked by algorithms. āŖ
Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting āreviewersā with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts. āŖ
I emailed and met with the editorial office to ask for the AI assistant to be turned off. I was told this is not possible. Instead, I was treated to some vague promises of potential future improvements and a dose of gaslighting. āŖ
If human editors canāt control who reviews science, itās no longer peer review ā itās a rubber-stamp machine designed for volume and profit, not quality. I have no intention of attaching my name to it. So Iām out.
https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25
A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. Theyāre probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
Link for that development, in case anyone missed it:
https://awful.systems/post/8263538/11477939
I did, indeed, turn them down, and I told the journal why.
Sigh.
ACM will no longer require disclosure of the use of #generativeAI in writing papersā¦ an absolutely terrible change by the @ACM Publications Board to the Policy on Authorship. Yes, this will give ACM more papers. No, the ideology of ānumber go upā productivism is not the path to responsible, ecological or ethical computing, but to irrelevance.
I signed up for ACM last year, just hit my expiry (like, today), and truly donāt know if I want to renew
itās been an extreme avenue of generative hype, constantly pushing talks, books, etc. I have no idea how they square it with the ethical pledge
By not thinking about it, one presumes.
I was flipping through this monthās magazine on the bus, donāt worry, they have a solution for reviewersā¦
https://cacm.acm.org/research/from-volunteerism-to-duty-reforming-peer-review-with-tokens/
:(
To prevent fraud and rule exchanges, tokens can be implemented as a digital entity, representing a fungible unit of value. Tokens can be transferred through cryptographic protocols and governed by rules running in the TMS.
Theyāre gonna do it. Peer review is going ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
Anything to avoid paying people for their time.
massive bong rip musk is broadsides-ing the spacex ipo so hard not only because heās desperate for cash (he is) but also because he wants to stick it to saltman after losing the recent court case
The new Claude model will silently decide whether what you asked it to do is in line with anthropic ToS and silently corrupt your prompt if it doesnāt like what youāre asking. Itās couched as a āsafety countermeasureā but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.
Weāve moved from āaccidentalā hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and youāre paying $$$ for the privelige.
Claude can now be silently nerfed. Anthropic has decided it wonāt tell users when this happens.
considering how many habitual llm users canāt tell good from bad output anyway, they always could have done that
āYouāre holding it wrongā as official policy
To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust
I know this outcome was inevitable after software became a mass market thing, but itās still rather depressing.
Please enjoy this comment saying āNate Silver is a major proponent of AI assisted writingā like thatās a good thing, and the reply that argues against slop from the weird premise that enjoying oneās own writing process is bad.
AI slop will absolutely kill any forum in which it proliferates. So Iām totally fine with it proliferating on LW.
This all reads as a very elitist and privileged perspective.
Dude look where youāre commenting
I trust Nate Silverās writing advice exactly as much as I trust his recommendations for hair-care products
weird, for people who write so many superfluous words i guessed that they at least like it
Gwern apparently hates slop for text but loves it for pictures.
i mean the process of writing, if they didnāt they would perhaps write in more concise way
3 weeks after the āas soon as Fridayā news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure donāt sound confident about it. Whole post in full (sans legal fine print):
We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so weāre just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But itās a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.
May, likely, ifā¦ Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.
Edit: also Altmanās eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now
Donāt they have their CFO not even reporting directly to be CEO? I would bet that thereās a ton of internal dissent about timing and strategy of how to cash out.
That CFO thing was definitely the case, at least a few months ago. Iām sure youāre right about the internal chaos, even if that CFO drama has changed, and it would align with how non-committal this announcement is.
I would love to be a fly on that wall.
Wait why would they expect it to leak? (assuming that mentioning it isnāt just some marketing stunt, which it probably is)
Ed Zitron might have got hold of it, if his bsky is anything to go by.
We could be feasting soon!
Draft filings involve feedback from the SEC, so I think they may be throwing shade on government employees, whom they canāt fire or control directly.
But Iām also thinking they may be salty about the aforementioned āas soon as Fridayā articles, and then Anthropic beating them to filing.
Hard to tell how much of it is what, theyāre toxic inside and out.
They asked a chatbot and the chatbot is trained on shadowrun and cyberpunk2077 sourcebooks.
IANAL, but my understanding is that companies are allowed to keep confidential the fact that they even filed the S-1. Thatās how I read OpenAIās statement. But itās not completely clear what āitā means in āwe expect it to leakā.
āEndless Shrimp Jesusā: Red Lobster (a) still exists and (b) is going all-in on AI
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/red-lobsters-ceo-says-hes-153500558.html
Oh, OK, cool. Let me know how the chatbot handles temperature management, stock rotation, allergen cross-contamination for seafood, all that good stuff.
Someone saw the infinite orgasming shrimp idea and decided to pivot.
Theyāve gone bankrupt once in '24 , Iād bet good money theyāre gonna go bankrupt again.
Gary Marcus has been spamming out sneers at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic over the last 24h. Heās right but heās such a knob about it. The first of his posts was a whopper where he just quoted himself predicting things correctly from like a year ago. It is nice to feel vindicated and say āI told you soā but itās way too much. It reminds me of Juergen Schmidhuber who was famous on x-twitter for shouting āI ALREADY INVENTED THIS 30 YEARS AGOā every time a new notable paper came out of an AI Lab and whose name became a verb for āclaiming credit for somethingā
He keeps going on about how we will have AGI but it wonāt be via transformers. Dude why do we even need or want AGI? He comes so close to being āone of the good guysā and then shows his true colours every single time.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
To solve biology and physics and live forever amongst the stars, obvs.
Or to allow a tiny elite to treat the rest of humanity like cattle since they no longer depend on them for physical and mental labour.
Itās striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
We need salvation but it wonāt come via rapture this decade
It might have come this decade, had they faithfully funded the path of symbolic AI, but instead they wandered around in the desert chasing the false idols of connectionism and deep learning.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
MONAAYYY
Garyās been on a sneering spree this whole week. While good for him and everything, I truly could not care less for his neurosymbolic AI rambles and mostly read the stuff where he dunks on the current state of AI
Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.
All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI āaudience immersive presentationsā where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.
Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).
was there an ownership change or something? this is atrocious
Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently
I have some modest proposals for handling private equity but they would all probably count as fedposting. We still havenāt found a decent replacement for the market niche JoAnn fabrics occupied.
The slop startup dubs this āAudience Intelligenceā and claims pixar experience. There are two āinteractive moviesā by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.
J-R Conlin has left Mozilla after 15 years, and has some choice words for the company.
