Want to wade into the sandy 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 you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    15 hours ago

    this is extremely low hanging fruit but i have to do it:

    https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2051374498994364529?s=46

    marc andreessen reveals his AI prompt. my favorite part is where he tells it to use as many words as possible, as if LLMs are normally too terse. But i also really like the part where he tells it not to hallucinate, and the part where he tells it it’s really smart as if that will make it do a better job.

    really, the whole thing is an elaborate way to say “make no mistakes, but anti-wokely”. Thought Leader in the investment space btw.

    • ⠠⠵ avuko@infosec.exchange
      4·
      4 hours ago

      @sansruse @BlueMonday1984

      “You are a world class expert in all domains.”

      Lolwut.

      And then some grown-ass adult answering in all seriousness:

      “fun fact: role prompting doesn’t work anymore

      It actually decreases output quality bc the model wastes compute on matching persona instead of problem solving”

      What the hell?!

      Go buy yourself a freaking tamagotchi, boys! You’ll learn to practise a modicum of care for something.

      FFS, this timeline is the absolute dumbest…

    • fiat_lux 🆕 🏠@lemmy.zipEnglish
      9·
      10 hours ago

      Never hallucinate or make anything up.

      I know you already mentioned this part in your post, but I’m still completely taken aback that it’s just in there like this - as though it wouldn’t be in the system prompt if it stood a chance of working.

      If I were the kind of person to be shilling LLMs and posting prompts, I would still be ashamed to share this one. It’s a tacit condemnation of both the tool itself and the tool posting it.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          7 hours ago

          The problem is less that the system would somehow ignore that part of the prompt and more that “hallucinate” or “make stuff up” aren’t special subroutines that get called on demand when prompted by an idiot, they’re descriptive of what an LLM does all the time. It’s following statistical patterns in a matrix created by the training data and reinforcement processes. Theoretically if the people responsible for that training and reinforcement did their jobs well then those patterns should only include true statements but if it was that easy then you wouldn’t have [insert the entire intellectual history of the human species].

          Even if you assume that the AI boosters are completely right and that the LLM inference process is directly analogous to how people think, does saying “don’t fuck up” actually make people less likely to fuck up? Like, the kind of errors you’re looking at here aren’t generated by some separate process. Someone who misremembers a fact doesn’t know they’ve misremembered until they get called out on the error either by someone else with a better memory or reality imposing the consequence of being wrong. Similarly the LLM isn’t doing anything special when it spits out bullshit.