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 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 soo 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…)
don’t want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.
My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.
Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).
Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!
It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a “simple” plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.
Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.
Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don’t forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can’t shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn’t make things worse mentally btw.
It’s a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can’t imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.
I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.
Solidarity from TN
Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. You’re doing fine don’t even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: ‘Why are high fertility people always so weird?’ A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
Word of advice to the press: Stop 👏 giving 👏 natalists 👏 free 👏 platforms 👏
Every 3 months! Every 3 months fucking hell. (I know because last time they came in the news I opened a tab with them in it, and their faces was the last I saw before my monitor exploded, like literally suddenly I sat in darkness.
All I’ve learned from the most recent round of publicity is that herself has a new hat. It looks stupid
A new hat let me check almost clicks wait a minute, I can’t afford a new monitor, you are trying to trick me!
Just close your eyes and imagine a mediaeval yokel who has accused her sister’s girlfriend of being a witch so she can take over her turnip patch. No need for a new monitor
jesus christ:
transcript
Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a “Californian incel” to avoid deportation.
Eminently punchable face
Posting this as a stub because of reasons
- I don’t want to do the research on this
- This was pulled from the front page of reddit
- Connecting these two things is largely tabloid speculation, but funny enough for a stub.
X Is Ditching DMs Hours After News of Musk Messaging Women About Impregnating Them Breaks
previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions
Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you’re forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to ‘mimic human responses’
haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some
Cursor’s cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.
That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.
Edit… looking at the orange site comments… some unironically cited Anthropic
researchmarketing hype, which (correctly) shows “Chain-of-Thought” is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it’s Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).
I got a spam message with a phishing link… Via Github? Seriously? Are we really doing this?
Not a completely unusual comment… From the URL it was very obvious that this was a phishing link though. Curiosity got the better of me. The site shows you a “cloudflare” captcha. OK, let’s click the checkbox. The usual loading animation starts, then this is shown:
Yeah ok, right…
I’m actually a bit impressed with this, these captchas are so common, I didn’t even really think about checking the box. But of course, that interaction means the browser will allow the site to add something to your clipboard.
But like… Why distribute it via Github? I cannot think of a worse audience to try and con into “paste something random into your windows console”. Am I just being naive here? Is this something common I somehow never experienced before?
Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.
Oh god
Although… Do you think VideCodersTM read github issues?
Yeah that copy paste commands that give control over your pc shit is pretty nasty. Also over a year old at least. So it isnt specifically an attack at vibe coders. Not sure what the initial targets were but these usually try to target people not that knowledgeable in computer matters so lol that this now includes vibe coders.
Ah, I had been wondering if this is new, or I had just never noticed it. So it’s the latter, good to know.
It’s kind of genius as well… A single comment will get the attention of potentially dozens of people, sent to a valid email address without having to guess/buy lists, and there’s an air of “trust” around the (completely legit) mail you then get from github, containing the link.
I don’t know how new it is, but it first dropped on my radar about a year ago due to listening to the Risky Business cybersecurity podcast, not to be confused with the recent (and baffingly named (*)) podcast called ‘Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova’ (**) by dweeb Nate Silver. So I don’t know how long it was going on the wild, and im talking about the windows button + r attack method and not the github comments, no idea how long they used comments as a vector. And yes that part is also good, like the addition of trust of github + quite an effective attack is clever. Shouldn’t work on Real Nerds however.
*: The name means that at least one of they didn’t [know|care|google] about the decades old cybersecurity podcast before naming their podcast that is true. Any of those is odd.
**: addition to above, the tagline of the podcast is ‘a weekly podcast about making better decisions’ Look inwards Nate, look inwards.
Github only catches strays, it’s much more widely deployed
Yeah, that this happens elsewhere I have no doubt, I just never noticed on GH before.
LessWronger puts in the work and determines that LLMs can’t spacially vizualize for shit, comments are like “well you’re prompting it wrong” (paraphrased) as well as “why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
The article itself is worth reading for some insights in the challenges of using current “AI” (LLMs) to work in the real world.
“why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”
none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it’s called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot
e: ok at least op is a machinist
Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn’t correlate with real world usefulness.
benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!
My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.
with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these
The fact this commenter doesn’t mention the absolute fuckton of machining videos on Youtube tells me they’re just talking out of their ass.
(not that forcing those into LLM slop would help but a hypothetical AGI would learn a lot)
Also
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone “in the same boat.”
Dario is delusional. We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
I feel like there was time when nerds who hung out on blogs didn’t automatically believe everything a CEO said.
take us back!
@gerikson I’d like to see him automating bed-turning a frail 90 year old in a nursing home so she doesn’t get bed sores (ulcers—open wounds from lying on a creased sheet or just in the same position for too long). A 90yo with cognitive impairment who’s scared of robots.
@cstross @gerikson This doesn’t sound promising: “A growing body of evidence is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/
In each case, existing social and communication-oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.
That’s legitimately chilling. I guess just like quality of art and writing is too hard to quantify against “efficiency” and “productivity” so is quality of care. The slow AIs are literally optimizing humans out of the economy before our eyes and the people who were most afraid of being turned into paperclips are the ones leading the goddamn charge.
amazement at chatbots comes from demographic that did not binge watch how it’s made in middle school
We don’t even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF
at 1.5 totally-not-drivers per car, we don’t have them there eithe
I’ve got to acknowledge the sheer guts it takes to look at arguably the most predictable consequence of the cyberpunk dystopia you’re building and say “nah that won’t happen because reasons.”
Clearly self-driving teslas just need to mill their path through pedestrians
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered
It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.
Finally a use case for “AI”: defrauding community colleges.
sigh
“In hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, “we were creating conditions for a cult.””, if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didn’t exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.
Source “Two Vegan Lovers, an AI ‘Cult,’ and a Trail of Dead Bodies”, Archive
Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.
No, he didn’t. His “explanations” are turgid and useless even when they’re not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers — those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kids’ table, and who aren’t actually tested on how much they’ve learned.
Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.
No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.
Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance
OK, zero notes there.
you will never guess which company hired oswald mosely’s grandson
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/palantir-boss-interview-keir-starmer-gets-ai
If Palantir represents a veritable unknown for the public, so too could its UK chief, the grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of former F1 president Max Mosley.
Ah, yes, noted grandfather and nothing else, Oswald Mosley. Definitely not the founder of British Union of Fascists, please don’t look into that. His son was in the racecar business, isn’t that lovely?
And Max Mosley definitely didn’t share his father’s views
Ok that is it, im changing my mind. All the rationalist genetics stuff is real and true as there is a fascism gene.
YIL there was a right-wing antisemitic US general called Moseley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Van_Horn_Moseley
Nominative determinism?
Noted sex pest Andrew Cuomo wants to run for Mayor in New York, and he might actually have a chance given the incumbent Democratic candidate is corruption magnet Eric Adams. Housing is a big issue in New York, so what’s Cuomo’s plan? Well, his plan is to use chat gpt to write his plan.
Angry New York Democrats were using the slogan DREAM meaning Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor. It was then amended to Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor, and amended again to Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.
eric adams should change his platform to “I’m not cuomo”
I dunno, how’s the “I’m not Donald Trump” platform been working out so far?
Well. I don’t want adams to win
Update: another acronym.
I encourage NYC neighbors to spread the idea of deranking. It worked in Portland. We had an exceptionally shitty candidate:
Once touted as the law and order candidate, Gonzalez was the only mayoral candidate cited for breaking the law during the 2024 election cycle.
We pushed to derank him. And the result:
… Gonzalez was the subject of an effort to convince voters not to rank him regardless of the voter’s other preferred candidates. Gonzalez earned 20% of first ranked choices but ultimately finished the election in third place …
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
that “immersion” line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)
nice to see it hasn’t at least gotten worse
it’s gotten worse
Infamous Dr Who “big name fan” Ian Levine is using generative AI to recreate lost episodes of the show. This got some mainstream press coverage and fans seem miffed.
christ. can’t he go back to disco, he was good at that
I think Ian Levine loves Doctor Who more than he loves disco. That’s the only explanation for Doctor In Distress.
It really sucks so much how many coders embrace it. At my work, there is the looming introduction of code LLMs very soon, and I’m anxious to learn how many of my colleagues will happily use it, and the consequences it will have for me to deal with the results (and generally, how it will make me feel to work in an environment where these tools are embraced). I was hoping that the corporate bureaucracy would be slow enough that the AI bubble collapses before it’s allowed to use the tools, but unfortunately management put a lot of pressure behind it and it all went faster than expected :(
not every programmer posts to social media…
Id say a lot of the better ones dont at least not regularly (in my exp), did hear from one of those that they had a problem with new hires, some lf them have very random output quality wise, until they get fired for using llms for everything.
Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and we’ve interviewed a few so far. I don’t want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.
I normally don’t like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but I’ve been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and there’s a subset of people who will say, “I would ask ChatGPT now” in those scenarios.
I haven’t met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time.
I haven’t worked in industry for a while now but from your accounts it seems like… nothing’s changed?
Sturgeon’s law very much applies to software engineers. I’m sorry but the vast majority of people in my junior cohort I wouldn’t hire to replace my lightbulb. Of course they’re all in on LLMs. They’ll be doing what they were doing best, generating tons of awful code they copied from somewhere else that the adults in the room will have to clean up later, just the generation and copying is now paid at a $100 monthly subscription.
Like seriously, it doesn’t matter even a tiny bit the code got generated by a bullshit machine when the code is Node.JS anyway. If you’re building a giant penis out of cow dung it doesn’t matter who your construction crew is and how good they are. And the industry is like 90% building giant penises than never come to fruition anyway.
Fair points, but I still take cleaning up someone’s own bad Node.JS code over cleaning up LLM Node.JS slop because the optimist in me hopes that the human who wrote bad code can at least learn something and become better over time. After all we all have started with writing garbage, I know that I have.
On the other hand, I guess I should find a job where I don’t have to touch web development with a ten-foot pole because it’s probably not getting better.
