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 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.)
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 someone’s 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 lawn’s 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 there’s 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
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.
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.
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.
Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to “sue” journalists by “summoning” them to a “tribunal” staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first “lawsuit”, which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D’Souza
threw a hissy fithas shuttered everything “temporarily”.I don’t 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 they’re mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal ‘social credit score’ 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 D’Souza implies here:
One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)
but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That’s just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it’s 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. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.
“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
Honestly, I think D’Souza explains the business best:
Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding “so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,” D’Souza says. “What 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 don’t 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, ‘I did not go to Epstein Island.’”
Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.
Twitter really broke their brains.
In D’Souza’s interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
D’Souza continued, “Ultimately, what’s the last job? It won’t be knowledge work. It won’t be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”
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.
D’Souza has observed that his friends are “the best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.”
and wiped out several cities in the processMy profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objection’s tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. “You’re Exhibit A,” D’Souza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the company’s soft launch: “Building software is hard.”
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 D’Souza about it. He explained that Objection would “hold off publishing any adjudications” until “a new major strategic partnership” was announced.
so it seems
(As a general matter, D’Souza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting “experts” as part of coverage.)
it does fit a pattern
oh lol
“I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
I would pay to see a billionaire or CEO in tears over an article.
And if stopping them were that easy, why hasn’t it happened yet?
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 — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — 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.
UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You won’t 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 isn’t 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).
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"The instructions say “You are an agent that writes the various article sections for an encyclopedia entry on Joseph Kanuku.”
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“[Note: Britannica is encyclopedia, but instructions say no Britannica. Wait, replace with another.]”
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“Wait, instructions say NEVER cite Wikipedia. Oops. Let me adjust.”
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“The instructions say prioritize peer reviewed, books, etc.”
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“Wait, but instructions say never cite social media, so omit that last part. Wait, adjust. Since Instagram is social media, omit that.”
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“Wait, instructions say avoid “References” as a section, but for completeness, I’ve omitted it from structure.)”
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“The guidelines say “Include any of the following where relevant: - Factual details…” under Missing Information or Knowledge Gaps Examples. And in format, it’s to list only critical issues or all missing info or knowledge gaps.”
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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 doesn’t like what you’re asking. It’s couched as a “safety countermeasure” but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.
We’ve moved from ‘accidental’ hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and you’re paying $$$ for the privelige.
Claude can now be silently nerfed. Anthropic has decided it won’t tell users when this happens.
considering how many habitual llm users can’t tell good from bad output anyway, they always could have done that
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 it’s still rather depressing.
“You’re holding it wrong” as official policy
massive bong rip musk is broadsides-ing the spacex ipo so hard not only because he’s desperate for cash (he is) but also because he wants to stick it to saltman after losing the recent court case
3 weeks after the “as soon as Friday” news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure don’t 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 we’re 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 it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.
May, likely, if… Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.
Edit: also Altman’s eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now
Don’t they have their CFO not even reporting directly to be CEO? I would bet that there’s 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. I’m sure you’re 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 isn’t 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!
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. That’s how I read OpenAI’s statement. But it’s not completely clear what “it” means in “we expect it to leak”.
Draft filings involve feedback from the SEC, so I think they may be throwing shade on government employees, whom they can’t fire or control directly.
But I’m also thinking they may be salty about the aforementioned “as soon as Friday” articles, and then Anthropic beating them to filing.
Hard to tell how much of it is what, they’re toxic inside and out.
Old: AI Winter
Bold: AI Ragnarok
Botterdamerung
Noice
AI Winter but with the same connotations as a nuclear one
New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so they’ve blocked it for everyone.
They’re claiming they believe it’s because someone has managed to find a “minor” vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.
My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.
I question how robust Anthropic’s geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
I think it’s more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. It’s an IPO race to the bottom.
It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
It also saves them on the cost of actually serving the model, and stalls the cycle of people gradually realizing the new model isn’t much better than the previous one.
Very fair point. I’m still inclined to think this wasn’t primarily a marketing decision, because I don’t think they would point the finger so directly at the government if that were the case. Perhaps the directive was a blessing in disguise for them though.
Either way, I think this is pretty telling for what we can expect over the next couple of months before we see any public SEC docs from either OpenAI or Anthropic. If it weren’t for the immense damage it will cause for innocent people, I might have broken out some popcorn. Popcorn might be my staple food for financial reasons soon anyway.
Yall sneer, but I made a couple of thousand bucks this saturday standing on a dark street corner selling illegal Fable and Mythic linkups. Gave the first question free to any boomers that came asking, to get them hooked.
Now seeing one-shotted Europeans calling for the development of AI/LLMs at home - “Mistral” is not adequate
Literally just started a discussion on European booster fanfic hype a few days ago: https://awful.systems/post/8591627/11736760
I wonder if Europe 2031 will get a boost out of this, it is really perfect timing for them, they can even claim an early prediction success on the US cutting Europe off! (But as with AI 2027, Europe 2031 assumes a much more competent US that can implement strategies like that in a competent fashion instead of some disorganized demands after 5pm on a Friday).
I’ve already seen “Europe 2031 was right. Shortest time between a work of science fiction and science fact” on LinkedIn… 🙃🙃🙃
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 “audience immersive presentations” 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 haven’t found a decent replacement for the market niche JoAnn fabrics occupied.
The slop startup dubs this “Audience Intelligence” and claims pixar experience. There are two “interactive movies” 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.
What if we replaced the kid in the Omelas hole with the wealthiest guy in Omelas?
I approve of this
Please enjoy this comment saying “Nate Silver is a major proponent of AI assisted writing” like that’s a good thing, and the reply that argues against slop from the weird premise that enjoying one’s own writing process is bad.
AI slop will absolutely kill any forum in which it proliferates. So I’m totally fine with it proliferating on LW.
This all reads as a very elitist and privileged perspective.
Dude look where you’re commenting
I trust Nate Silver’s 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 didn’t they would perhaps write in more concise way
