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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
A medium nationās worth of electricity!
Today in āPromptfondler fucks around and finds out.ā
So Iām guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesnāt end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesnāt actually understand what itās doing or when to stop, especially when itās being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesnāt remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.
Emphasis added.
so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:
āÆ pbpaste| wc -c 2063wow, so efficient! Iām so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection
these fucking people
Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Letās try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:
there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)
if it were me, Iād be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers donāt seem to have that awareness
But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!
I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:
Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.
wat
Thanks for sharing this lol
itās a classic
similarly, Mickens talks. if you havenāt ever seen āem, thatās your next todo
āI only had this problem because I was very reckless,ā he continued, "partially because I think itās interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it āwhen youāve finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,ā I wouldnāt have had this problem.
just instruct it ābe sentientā and youāre good, why donāt these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?
so, Iāve always thought that blindās āweāll verify your presence by sending you shit on your corp mailā (which, yāknow, mail logs etcā¦) is kinda a fucking awful idea. but!
this is remarkably fucking unhinged:
Folks, I need some expert advice. Thanks in advance!
Our NSF grant reviews came in (on Saturday), and two of the four reviews (an Excellent AND a Fair, lol) have confabulations and [insert text here brackets like this] that indicate that they are LLM generated by lazy people. Just absolutely gutted. Itās like an alien reviewed a version of our grant application from an parallel dimension.
Who do I need to contact to get eyes on the situation, other than the program director? We get to simmer all day today since it was released on the weekend, so at least I have an excuse to slow down and be thoughtful.
I havenāt had to report malfeasance like that, but if that happened to me, I would be livid. Iād start by contacting the program officer; Iād also contact the division director above them and the NSF Office of Inspector General. I mean, that level of laziness canāt just have affected one review! And, for good measure, Iād send a tip to 404media, as they have covered this sort of thing. That might well go nowhere, but it canāt hurt to be in their contact list.
Total amateur here, but from quickly reviewing the process it looks like the program officer would be your primary point of contact within NSF to address this kind of thing? But then I would assume they read the reviews themselves before passing them back to you so I would hope they would notice? The bit of my brain thatās watched too much TV would like to see them answer some questions from an AI skeptic journalist, but thatās not exactly a great avenue for addressing your specific problem.
Mostly commenting to make it easier to keep track of the thread tbh. Thats some kinda nonsense youāre dealing with here.
Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: āEven after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree withā
the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band
organisers: āWe have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.ā yeah you have a great show guys
I wish them a merry cable grounding fault and happy earth buzz to all
By āliberal mobā he means āpeople who asked for their money back and arenāt coming anymoreā
So the ongoing discourse about AI energy requirements and their impact on the world reminded me about the situation in Texas. It set me thinking about what happens when the bubble pops. In the telecom bubble of the 90s or the British rail bubble of the 1840s, there was a lot of actual physical infrastructure created that outlived the unprofitable and unsustainable companies that had built them. After the bubble this surplus infrastructure helped make the associated goods and services cheaper and more accessible as the market corrected. Investors (and there were a lot of investors) lost their shirts, but ultimately there was some actual value created once we were out of the bezzle.
Obviously the crypto bubble will have no such benefits. Itās not like energy demand was particularly constrained outside of crypto, so any surplus electrical infrastructure will probably be shut back down (and good riddance to dirty energy). The mining hardware itself is all purpose-built ASICs that canāt actually do anything apart from mining, so itās basically turning directly into scrap as far as I can tell.
But the high-performance GPUs that these AI operations rely on are more general-purpose even if theyāre optimized for AI workloads. The bubble is still active enough that there doesnāt appear to be much talk about it, but what kind of use might we see some of these chips and datacenters put to as the bubble burns down?
But the high-performance GPUs that these AI operations rely on are more general-purpose even if theyāre optimized for AI workloads. The bubble is still active enough that there doesnāt appear to be much talk about it, but what kind of use might we see some of these chips and datacenters put to as the bubble burns down?
If those GPUs end up being used for Glaze and Nightshade, Iād laugh like a hyena.
App developers think thatās a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.
aww, does the widdle appās business model collapse completely once it canāt harvest data? how sad
this reinforces a suspicion that Iāve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because itās an all or nothing choice and they donāt know the full impact (because itās intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs
@froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.
(Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)
āGen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764ā:
Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:
This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that āAI trainingā has become synonymous with āart theft/copyright infringementā in the public consciousness.
Between AI bros publicly scraping against peopleās wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMsā datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldnāt blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.
I researched cool topics using ChatGPT, Claude, Google
Thatās not what research means, you embossed carbuncle.
I linked NotebookLM to the Wikipedia entry of each topic and generated the podcast audio
Itās fucking James Somerton with extra steps!
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1841848120897912967#m
jfc
Edit: replaced screenshot of tweet + description with link to tweet
jesus christ, as if āpodcastsā consisting of random idiots regurgitating wikipedia werenāt bad enough as it is
aaaaaaaah
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
ācuratedā
it shouldnāt surprise me that the dipshit who was massively involved in āsolving languageā doesnāt understand the meaning of words, but grrrrr
(and I say that as an armchair linguist who understands that language is as people use it (fuck prescriptivism))
dipshit who was massively involved in āsolving languageā
āIn the what now?ā, he said, voice trembling with a mixture of horror and excitement
2015 - I was a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI.
proudly displayed on his blog timeline
Wait, did OpenAI claim somewhere they will āsolve languageā?
no, thatās a personal extrapolation/framing characterising some of the shit Iāve seen from these morons
(they engaged with very few linguists in the making of their beloved Large Language Models, instead believing they can just data-bruteforce it; this plan gone as well as has been observed)
from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:
and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders
nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects
oh, whatās that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then
a debt in the special non-financial sense
the miracle of VC is learning to write like ChatGPT
ah, the special non-financial sense, you mean blood debts? I think many of us will be happy to hold tan et co to account for blood debts
Theyāre getting paid in āexposureā
So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with āWeāre living through a technological paradigm shift.āā¦ and right there I didnāt bother reading the rest of it because I donāt want to expose my brain to it further.
But what I found funny is that also today, thereās this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support
So Hololens is discontinuedā¦ you knowā¦ ARā¦ the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.
Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.
It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.
Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!
With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing lifeās complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. [ā¦], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.
(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)
Itās interesting that someone thought āsmoothing lifeās complexitiesā is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.
Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out lifeās complexities without smoothing out peopleās complexities, but itās not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and thatās if it actually worked, which it doesnāt).
Iāve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole itās hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but itās a shame we couldnāt as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).
Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.
re: how can a chatbot help with life?
This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.
A lot less, āCopilot make this list of bullet points into an emailā and more āCopilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactorā.
I think that āgiving microsoft the power to do things in my behalfā is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!
E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants
I am neutral on MSFT - to me itās a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because itās not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But itās really impressive how theyāve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Appleās 1984 ad, via the āHalloween Papersā era where they were every Linux weenieās biggest boogeyman, to todayās bland backer of OpenAI. Note that theyāre not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilotās Recall feature also know theyāre the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
Despite the industryās deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.
I canāt help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to ācoding for non-programmersā akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet thereās a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.
Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now theyāre actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)
And now theyāre actually Open Source!
Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromiumās case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).
You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but letās not kid ourselves. They wouldnāt need to openwash if most of their stuff werenāt still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.
Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052
@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.
For your delectation, here are the HN comments
Iām in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.
Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.
Thereās not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.
Hereās the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk
oh i dunno, there was
Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.
This remark is actually part of a long fight between CS and CS people. And it is really frustrating in various ways, as CS always thinks they did better than CS while being blind of the actual accomplishments of CS they donāt know and just how complex the subject matter is. It is an annoying failure to communicate between both disciplines. (A lot of people donāt fall victim to this btw, but it can be really annoying to encounter a āOur CS is good, and theirs is bad because strawmanā, who often donāt even realize that various words have different meanings in the different fields).
For the record, I think the Counter-Strike people are correct on this one, mainly because heuristically Confederate States advocates are wrong by default.
Exactly the problem im talking about. What about all the good things the confederate state ā¦ no wait.
Hopefully this doesnāt break the rules. But where can I find some educational podcasts that arenāt overly capitalist, reactionary, rationalist, or otherwise right-leaning or authoritarian in nature.
I want to specifically avoid content like Lex Friedman, Huberman, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. That sounds good on the surface but goes down a rabbit hole of affirming reactionary bias.
Iām not amazing with words, so I hope what Iām saying makes sense. Thanks.
If you want interesting historical deep dives, I always enjoy Dig - the history podcast. Well researched by actual scholars, which goes hand in hand with the episodes not dropping that often.
I tend to like āCool People Who Did Cool Stuffā more than āBehind the Bastardsā. Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.
My daily podcast is āIt Could Happen Hereā, but some other mainstays in the educational side include:
- Live Like the World is Dying
- Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
- Itās Going Down
- Final Straw Radio
- Reaction (especially liked her dives on the Pinkertons and āThe Business Plotā)
- Srsly Wrong [unrelated to the similarly named thing]
- The Iron Dice
- Bad Hasbara
- Frontline Herbalism if you like plants
Most everything from Cool Zone Media is going to be pretty decent. Havenāt listened to the whole catalogue, but Ed Zitron of Better Offline is an established nonmember (as far as I know) friend of the sneer and Behind the Bastards is truly excellent.
Maintenance Phase is an excellent examination of diet and health grifters, and Mikeās others (Youāre Wrong About and If Books Could Kill) are also pretty excellent.
I also want to spotlight Wittenburg to Westphalia, a history podcast ostensibly about the wars of the reformation and the social and economic chamges of the early modern period. But in order to really give a sense of how dramatic those changes are, he has so far provided only an incredibly thorough examination of medieval European society from the politics to economics and social structures. He has an episode about unfree labor that I found particularly interesting.
Second on Maintenance Phase! I marathonned it on a road trip a couple of days ago, and not only is it a well-researched and a fun listen, youāll discover that so much of the stuff Aubrey and Michael discuss is directly congruent to our typical subjects. Canāt recommend it enough.
Theyāve inspired me to work on an effort post for MoreWrite, tentatively titled, āA Unified Theory of Bullshitter-Driven Social Diseases.ā
Which isnāt going to be as pompous as it sounds, I promise!
Sounds great! Looking forward to reading it
Behind the Bastards is very easy to listen to and usually focuses on documenting the bad shit that various reactionary and fascist figures have done (in a humorous manner ā the host was a writer for Cracked during its peak). a couple of the most recent episodes have covered some of the same topics we talk about in SneerClub and TechTakes, and theyāre well worth a listen even if you know the subject matter well. I havenāt checked it out yet, but I think It Could Happen Here is a spin-off with the same main host thatās also broadly anti-fascist.
e: also, and I had to look this up cause I keep switching podcast apps: I Donāt Speak German is also good, and my co-admin David was on it (episode 82? I swear it was more recent than thatā¦ David were you on more than once?)
i was! ep 82 and 85
IDSG has slowed down a lot cos Danielās got shit going on right now, but they try to do one when they can
itās time for our weekly what in the fuck is wrong with you Proton
Iāve definitely seen this kind of meme format, to be fair. But generally speaking I think we should make a rule that in order to be considered satire or joking something should need to actually be funny.
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says in-depth Marxist economic analysis? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster breaks down historical context of Game of Thrones? Funny
Viral internet celebrity podcaster says the same VPN marketing schpiel as every other podcaster? Not. Funny.
the various full-tilt levels of corporate insanity from the last 10y or so are going to make remarkable case studies in the coming years
I didnāt realize I was still signed up to emails from NanoWrimo (I tried to do the challenge a few years ago) and received this āweāre sorryā email from them today. I canāt really bring myself to read and sneer at the whole thing, but Iām pasting the full text below because Iām not sure if this is public anywhere else.
spoiler
Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of this organization. One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size.
National Novel Writing Month To Our NaNoWriMo Community:
There is no way to begin this letter other than to apologize for the harm and confusion we caused last month with our comments about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We failed to contextualize our reasons for making this statement, we chose poor wording to explain some of our thinking, and we failed to acknowledge the harm done to some writers by bad actors in the generative AI space. Our goal at the time was not to broadcast a comprehensive statement that reflected our full sentiments about AI, and we didnāt anticipate that our post would be treated as such. Earlier posts about AI in our FAQs from more than a year ago spoke similarly to our neutrality and garnered little attention.
We donāt want to use this space to repeat the content of the full apology we posted in the wake of our original statements. But we do want to raise why this position is critical to the spiritāand to the futureāof NaNoWriMo.
Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of what we do. Our stated mission is āto provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worldsāon and off the pageā. Our comments last month were prompted by intense harassment and bullying we were seeing on our social media channels, which specifically involved AI. When our spaces become overwhelmed with issues that donāt relate to our core offering, and that are venomous in tone, our ability to cheer on writers is seriously derailed.
One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size. A year ago, we were attempting to do too much, and we were doing some of it poorly. Though we admire the many writersā advocacy groups that function as guilds and that take on industry issues, that isnāt part of our mission. Reshaping our core programs in ways that are safe for all community members, that are operationally sound, that are legally compliant, and that are mission-aligned, is our focus.
So, what have we done this year to draw boundaries around our scope, promote community safety, and return to our core purpose?
We ended our practice of hosting unrestricted, all-ages spaces on NaNoWriMo.org and made major website changes. Such safety measures to protect young Wrimos were long overdue.
We stopped the practice of allowing anyone to self-identify as an educator on our YWP website and contracted an outside vendor to certify educators. We placed controls on social features for young writers and weāre on the brink of relaunch.
We redesigned our volunteer program and brought it into legal compliance. Previously, none of our ~800 global volunteers had undergone identity verification, background checks, or training that meets nonprofit standards and that complies with California law. We are gradually reinstating volunteers.
We admitted there are spaces that we canāt moderate. We ended our policy of endorsing Discord servers and local Facebook groups that our staff had no purview over. We paused the NaNoWriMo forums pending serious overhaul. We redesigned our training to better-prepare returning moderators to support our community standards.
We revised our Codes of Conduct to clarify our guidelines and to improve our culture. This was in direct response to a November 2023 board investigation of moderation complaints.
We proactively made staffing changes. We took seriously last yearās allegations of child endangerment and other complaints and inspected the conditions that allowed such breaches to occur. No employee who played a role in the staff misconduct the Board investigated remains with the organization.
Beyond this, weāre planning more broadly for NaNoWriMoās future. Since 2022, the Board has been in conversation about our 25th Anniversary (which we kick off this year) and what that should mean. The joy, magic, and community that NaNoWriMo has created over the years is nothing short of miraculous. And yet, we are not delivering the website experience and tools that most writers need and expect; weāve had much work to do around safety and compliance; and the organization has operated at a budget deficit for four of the past six years.
What we want you to know is that weāre fighting hard for the organization, and that providing a safer environment, with a better user interface, that delivers on our mission and lives up to our values is our goal. We also want you to know that we are a small, imperfect team that is doing our best to communicate well and proactively. Since last November, weāve issued twelve official communications and created 40+ FAQs. A visit to that page will underscore that we donāt harvest your data, that no member of our Board of Directors said we did, and that there are plenty of ways to participate, even if your region is still without an ML.
With all that said, weāre one month away! Thousands of Wrimos have already officially registered and you can, too! Our team is heads-down, updating resources for this yearās challenge and getting a lot of exciting programming staged and ready. If youāre writing this season, weāre here for you and are dedicated, as ever, to helping you meet your creative goals!
In community,
The NaNoWriMo Team
I was not prepared for how many words the spoiler unlocked
I donāt have the broader context to comment on the changes they discussed regarding child endangerment and community standards apart from āWaitā¦ oh my God you werenāt already doing that???ā
But itās such a huge pull back to go from āhating AI is ableist and basically Hilterā to āuhhhh guys weāve had our plates full cleaning up the mess and the most weāll say about AI is to stop being assholes about it on our forums.ā Clearly thereās still a lot of cleaning up to do at some level.
God thatās exhausting. Wasnāt Nanowrimo supposed to be a fun thing at some point? Is there anyone in the world who thinks this sort of scummy PR language is attractive?
The Aristocrats!
via friend:
I need an early-2000ās style web video where a cutout of that Musk picture moves up and down to a sproingy-sproingy sound.
the loser energy radiating off musk at all times is incredible
Iām thoroughly convinced Musk is an AI generated person and his lifeās goal is simply to find the AI that generated him.
The world is a simulation and Musk has a green jewel above his head.
