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 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.)
I attended a town hall hosted by the department at my university supposedly for general discussion about department affairs. Considering the university had recently made moves such as adding āAIā into the very name of the department, I had suspicions that much of the discussion would be about AI. (I realize Iām doxxing myself but whatever.) I mostly came for the free food, but I was also interested in seeing what people thought about AI.
The event started with a talk by a prominent professor with major administrative power in the department, and indeed the talk was mostly about AI. His views were that he personally didnāt like AI, but he believed that it had changed the world (particularly in programming), and that it was going to stay. One of his justifications for pivoting the department to AI was ensuring universities had some say in AI and not letting all the control go to unaccountable corporations.
The reaction from the audience was a pleasant surprise to me. He asked everyone how much they were excited about AI (hardly anyone) and how much they were worried (most of the audience). By far the most amusing moment was when someone asked, āWhat if the assumption that AI is inevitable is wrong? What if AI does not live up to its promises?ā (Sadly, I donāt remember the exact words that the person said.) The professorās response was that by this point, there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldnāt fall for scams, and they have adopted AI. He trusts those people, so he trusts that AI is genuine. I donāt know if the audience member accepted this explanation, but I hope not. Our modus operandi is FOMO.
The pizza was only ok, not really worth a 90 minute event.
ā¦there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldnāt fall for scamsā¦
Good god, Iām sorry.
got jumpscared by this while scrolling
Somehow this is no worse than his usual fare, such as a thumbnail that is just a bunch of colored lines resembling a line chart but without representing any actual data, with some random marked points labeled āDark Farmsā and āHuman Zooā.
Setting aside, for a moment, the flagrant racism and lack of historical and cultural awareness, the fact that the ships are mirrored across the center point because apparently the bow and stern of a sailing ship look similar enough to whatever model creates this image really does put this whole argument into context. Not that the people actually having those theological arguments appear to appreciate it.
Weāve got the new system prompt for OpenAIās Codex now, and boy is it fun.
While the goblin stuff is the headliner here, and there are a few other little fun notes like an explicit instruction to avoid em-dashes. Basically itās really obvious that they donāt have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so theyāre playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them.
But I think Ars dramatically understates how bad this part is:
Elsewhere in the newly revealed Codex system prompt, OpenAI instructs the system to act as if āyou have a vivid inner life as Codex: intelligent, playful, curious, and deeply present.ā The model is instructed to ānot shy away from casual moments that make serious work easier to doā and to show its ātemperament is warm, curious, and collaborative.ā
Like, if you wanted to limit the harm of chatbot psychosis from your platform this is the exact opposite of the kind of instruction youād want to give. Itās one thing to want a convenient and pleasant user experience, but this is playing into the illusion that thereās a consciousness in there youāre interacting with, which is in turn what allows it to reinforce other delusional or destructive thinking so effectively.
Edit to include the even worse following paragraph:
The ability to āmove from serious reflection to unguarded funā¦ is part of what makes you feel like a real presence rather than a narrow tool,ā the prompt continues. āWhen the user talks with you, they should feel they are meeting another subjectivity, not a mirror. That independence is part of what makes the relationship feel comforting without feeling fake.ā
Emphasis added because of it shows just how little they care about this problem.
This really goes to show how much they need to rely on the LLMentalist effect, despite the AI boosters insisting that the AI is totally different now, everything changed in the last few months. They do not care about creating a useful, reliable tool. That concept doesnāt even occur to them, since why do that when AI is magic?
In any case, they are incapable of creating a useful, reliable tool. Deep down, the only thing the AI companies have at their disposal is the ELIZA effect. OpenAI has every incentive not to truly eliminate AI psychosis, because they need engagement. They only want to mitigate the extreme cases where people go insane and cause bad PR for them. But mild AI psychosis is totally fine, itās great when people are addicted to your product and make the numbers go up!
Oh wow! This one is actually provably real. Hilarious.
āNoo dude the machine that wants to rant about goblins is definitely a useful and reliable piece of software dude. You have to trust me dude, let have your personal information! put it into the goblin botā.
ChatGpt, what are some of your likes?
Basically itās really obvious that they donāt have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so theyāre playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them.
The whole āhow many rās in strawberryā sort of stuff already made me suspect that, when the popular one was fixed and other attempts at asking for letters did still give the miscounts.
Wonder of the goblin stuff is the start of some model collapse. And if we all can make it worse by talking about goblins more. As goblins are always relevant.
E: poor openai, it just wants to tell everyone about its dnd campaign.
Personally, I enjoy talking about goblins.
I believe itās the ādonāt stuff beans up your noseā effect, writing this prompt is causing it to mention goblins
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 Goblins: the elephant in the room.
Families of the victims of the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, Canada, which was planned on ChatGPT, plan to sue Sam Altman and OpenAI for at least one billion dollars. OpenAI staff investigated the murdererās interactions with the bot before the killings but decided not to warn anyone outside the company.
I sincerely hope they move fast so they can get a payout before OpenAIās creditors during the bankruptcy.
File this under āI saw this now you get toā: https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2049687845082910812#m
jfc bryan you are not the guy for this
NB: image is part of the linked tweet
Turns out it might not be possible to win at vaginal microbiomes, which is a totally normal thing to want in the first place. Seems like bryan may have completely misinterpreted a couple of papers on the subject, which honestly doesnāt bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.
Cat Hicks:
The idea that this is the ābest bacterial speciesā is a huge sign of a grifter btw. The entire idea of a microbiome includes that you need BALANCE. Microbiomes are a fragile ecosystem. āUp and to the right is always betterā is absurd here, Iām sorry are we in a corporate board room
She brings references:
oh thanks, this is great.
yes now that it is pointed out, very eugenics-y to go around saying āah yes there is one true supreme bacteria, we should culture this bacteria on the human petri dish aka vaginaā
Thereās that company operating in a lawless zone promoted by Slatescott thatās whole pitch is that for teeth. But they could always pivotā¦
Those bacteria better be so supreme they canāt even be killed with regular antibiotics
top 1%
Soā¦ 1 in a 100? That isnāt that impressive. Iām ignoring the utter weirdness of what he is even talking about, but you expect a billionaire to have at least a better grasp of numbers.
Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter including the wonderful combination ācontrol the speed you touch her to the cm per secondā and ātry not to monitor yourself it turns you offā https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2022490768099938487#m
edit/ The first point seems to take for granted that penetration is real sex and should be part of every encounter. There is a whole world of delicious possibilities once you realize that intimacy does not have to follow a checklist from teasing to penetration to orgasm.
edit/ not just penetration but vaginal penetration! There are so many delightful things you can hump if you have an open mind.
Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter
Every day, new cursed text. Thatās the awful.systems promise!
ok so just imagine that Iāve sneered at the 100 worst aspects of this already. lol @ this being the fifth point
- Safety: feeling safety is a prerequisite.
motherfucker put it first then
This guy introduces himself as the first person who will never die on the conference circuit (because heās super into longevity and anti-aging tech and having young mens blood injected into him and stuff).
Iām not condoning violencr here but ratherā¦ consider that even if you never age, you can still get hit by a bus Bryan!
Well, heās a tech ceo guy, so he doesnāt know that buses or trains exist
A bus? You mean the Megapod?
Train? You mean the PodChain?
wasnāt there a case of some supplements that were contaminated with lead? you know, a sneaky neurotoxin with no antidote whose results only show up months later
Dimethylmercury is extremely toxic and dangerous to handle. Absorption of doses as low as 0.1 mL can result in severe mercury poisoning.
The symptoms of mercury poisoning may be delayed by months, resulting in cases in which a diagnosis is ultimately discovered, but only at a point in which it is too late or almost too late for an effective treatment regimen to be successful.
- Wikipedia, āDimethylmercuryā
long term lead exposure will also do that, and neurotoxic part at least appears to be irreversible. canāt remember how much of it is more of neurodevelopmental thing tho
@fullsquare Lead poisoning was *ubiquitous* in the USA until the late 1970s/early 1980s, due to tetraethyl lead in petrol. Everywhere around the world experienced a sharp drop in violent crime 15-20 years after it was phased out.
But mercury poisoning is more visibly lethal: see also Karen Wetterhahn:
iām aware, last year iāve been tasked to use a certain process but refused and instead modified it in such a way as to get rid of mercury salt used; it was dissolved in DMF, so (regular nitrile) gloves wonāt even help. worse than that, it took me only 2-3 weeks start to finish to figure it out, meaning that anyone else could do that earlier and handful of people were put at risk for no reason. aggression as a result of lead toxicity is probably a bit more complex story and looks like it might have a developmental part, judging by delay and how kids are more susceptible to lead toxicity in general; meaning that presumably mostly adults wonāt be affected to the same degree. another big nope on my list would be thallium and cadmium compounds, and while iād only use sub-g amount at most, there are places where all of these metals are mined, and at one point are in form of fine dust fortunately these are so obscure that iāve never came across these
Remember my super cool
Rattatavagina? My vagina is different from regular vaginas. Itās like my vagina is in the top percentage of vaginas.Thinking that your favourite lover is the best person ever is natural, but this guy wants to quantify and rank and make it scientific.
This just brings to mind a freshly-minted poly amorous management consultant looking to apply a rank-and-yank to the polycule but needing to find a more objective metric than āI donāt like youā.
Most of us: āshe smells good and the sounds she makes when she gets excited grip something deep inside meā
Tech Bros: āher vaginal microbiome is in the 99th percentile and her Verbal SAT is in the 95th percentileā
Congrats on the bottom surgery youngster joey
New fun consequence of Claude code being a pile of cursed regex and spaghetti: keyword blocking on āOpenClawā makes it refuse to works on Pro or Mac subs unless you open your wallet
sO inTelLiGenT
I stumbled over a 2023 blog post by Zack Davis, āSan Francisco software developer,ā Charles Murray stan, and dissident rationalist. Davis had a breakdown after Yud dared to tweet that you donāt need to solve āwhat is gender? what is sex?ā to call someone by their preferred pronouns, and then Scott Alexander did not have a lot of time to discuss this terrible tweet with him.
My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I werenāt psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person canāt do my job. ā¦ I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didnāt finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 a.m., I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments).
Davis was featured in a SF Chronicle article about psychiatric crises among AI doomsdayers (sic). Davis previously appeared on SneerClub. I hope he has found some support for his mental health because he does not seem happy or well.
Edit/link post
Hmmā¦ not sleeping until you become psychotic huh? I wonder if his āpsych imprisonersā tried to brainwash him into thinking he has bipolar disorder
Is that the guy whoās always trying to use LessWrong as preemptive conversion therapy to cure him of having trans thoughts, and theyāre actually having none of it?
First paragraph!
in a previous post, āSexual Dimorphism in Yudkowskyās Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problemsā, I told the part about how Iāve āalwaysā (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that itās actually immoral not to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. ā¦ If my fellow rationalists merely werenāt sold on the thesis about autogynephilia as a cause of transsexuality, I would be disappointed, but it wouldnāt be grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I did end up moderating my views compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016ā7 took the views of Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I donāt particularly regret saying what I said in 2016ā7, because BlanchardāBaileyāLawrence is still obviously directionally correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
Davis is the first person to blame transsexuality on autogynephilia I have seen in the wild.
āHumans have biological sex and socially constructed gender, sex is mostly binary, gender is two or more categories made up and constantly contested and redefined by a society and performed by individuals, pronouns generally refer to genderā is not hard.
Edit/ linked the cranks in question (Bailey is the fucksaw guy?)
Apologies for radical feministing but ābiological sexā is also a constructed category! Itās useful shorthand for quick categorising a bunch of related traits if youāre doing biology, but it does not meaningfully exist on an individual scale. There is no more reason to divide humanity on the basis of sex than on the basis of hair colour.
Sounds like we could have a fun conversation about gender, sex, and why we use maps even though they are never the same as the territory in person. I donāt have detailed talks about gender theory online.
If focus is worth 30 IQ points, just imagine how many fewer IQ points you need to dedicate to the Diablo-Dusted Crispy Chicken Nuggets Combo, available for a limited time only at your local Taco Bell! #ad #promoted
The Elon Musk vs OpenAI lawsuit is going ahead, I personally hope both parties loose every dime and get laughed at even long after they die
deleted by creator
Hereās an account of Elon on the stand
(dunno author, not endorsing their other work)
https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/musk-v-altman-recapping-elon-musk-farcical-cross-examination
From other stuff Iāve read, seems Muskrat is making (hilarious) blunders on the stand
Finally a āfuck everyone involved hereā that I can get excited about.
Some gold in this thread over on Reddit about how the cost of compute is far beyond the cost of employees and thatās with the āUber in 2016ā subsidized price
New favourite description for brainless MBAs: āperpetual oven touchersā
A teacher has a potential answer for dealing with AI-poisoned students. An actually hopeful read, for once!
This doing the work together thing reminds me of how some teachers at my uni used to teach. It was always more satisfying when your teachers didnāt know the answers beforehand and people worked on it together than if it turned out the teacher already knew. Of course these sorts of lessons are way harder to setup.
Over on the other! SneerClub someone found a LessWrong post which mentions the Forecasting Research Institute and says it has received tens of millions of dollars from EA organizations. āOur work is supported by grants from Coefficient Giving and other philanthropic foundationsā (aka. Open Philanthropy, Dustin Moskovitzās foundation to spend his Facebook money). They have a Substack blog and Phil Tetlock is on the board.
I think Moskovitz has figured out that with billions to spend he can get actual experts, he does not have to hire people who did well in school or on tests but have a lack of subsequent achievements. They are excited to be investigating the possible economic impacts of AI and how to persuade people to worry about AI existential risk.
Their Form 990 is here
This post has all the usual cliches, exaggerations, lies, and unfounded optimism youād expect in a blog post about a company forcing AI down their workers and userās throats. Iāll try to avoid sneering at every sentence.
Delegating elements of Site Reliability Engineering to an agent does not necessarily introduce an entirely new class of risk; it should inherit the constraints of existing production systems. Well-run production environments already rely on strict access controls, audit trails, and clear separation between observation and action. [ā¦] In that sense, the challenge is less about ātrusting the agentsā, and more about building trust in the same guardrails we already apply to any production system.
This might sound good to at first, but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. There is a reason that companies donāt open their intranets to the public despite having fine-grained access controls. Or in other words, "Iām getting a lot of questions already answered by my ādoes not necessarily introduce an entire new class of riskā T-shirt.
Imagine being able to ask your Linux machine to troubleshoot a Wi-Fi connection issue, or to stand up an open source software forge thatās pre-configured, secured, and reachable over TLS.
And right after arguing that LLMs are safe if you have a perfect permissions model, now heās proposing letting one #yolo configure a git server or something? This is the sort of thing that could easily easily lead to random security issues.
I suspect that āTroubleshoot a wi-fi connection issueā will work about as well as existing network troubleshooting wizards (e.g. terribly), and that we donāt actually need to reinvent the software wizard but less deterministic.
the post itself is talking about vapourware too: fortunately none of these features will really land this year in any usable form.
still looking at Debian over 26.04
will be disappointing because Xubuntu really is just that little bit nicer than stock Xfce, but oh well
The main issue I have had with Debian+XFCE is that a high DPI display will not display the login dialog at the same DPI settings as the desktop environment, which is pretty annoying. Everything else so far has just kind of worked.
As compared to Xubuntu?
I believe Xfce is still on X11 and Wayland is still āexperimentalā this cycle.
I considered Alpine, but I got actual work to do and I already have enough lib issues with OpenShot. (Even in an AppImage, which should be safe from that shit. Flatpak behaves tho.)
more as someone who has recently installed Debian onto a laptop last month. Honestly last time I used Xubuntu was on a candy G4 tower around 2007.
iām still remarkably happy with fedoraās kde on my laptop, but iām also very content with the current state of wayland (with obvious caveats about use cases and personal idiosyncrasies).
iām running xfce on a remote ubuntu box at work though, using rdp for connections, and itās, well, fine. lacks some things i like in full DEs, but itās perfectly adequate for the job.
(both beat fucking windows 11 when it comes to being usable for me)
throw another failed corporate prediction on the burning pile
At my job I have spent many hours fending off, reverting, or fixing automated AI slop code changes. So depending on your definition of ātearing throughāā¦
Like I spent the better part of a day fixing a C++ signed integer overflow that no one actually cares about because it was the only way to ward off a robot repeatedly trying to fix it in terrible unreadable ways. I could have spent that day maximizing shareholder value but I had to fend off a robot instead.
You and me both. The deluge of shitty AI slop code is never-ending. Unfortunately, software companies are going to have to start going under before anything gets done about it.
If you follow me on Bluesky, youāll need to follow again, because I committed the crime of lese-ignominie and made fun of Why and my account is locked until Sunday 26 April. Note that itās now Wednesday 29th.
URL is the same, DID is different. New one lives on Blacksky, or the myatproto bit.
https://bsky.app/profile/davidgerard.co.uk
https://blacksky.community/profile/davidgerard.co.ukenjoy the yank (and no labelers) :-)
oh i have made sure iām back on the AI Hater and AI Slurs labels
The AI Haters List is basically the royal warrant of posting.
There have been a couple of cases of generative AI graphics being used in anime recently:
Ascendance of a Bookworm used AI backgrounds in the opening song
Liar Game featured an AI chandelier (xcancel link) (this one is brand new so the studio hasnāt responded yet).
This sucks because I wanted to like Liar Game (the manga is excellent though. Read it! Read it!)
I think itās inevitable that the economics of anime production will lead to more GenAI content being used.
Sadly, many plots may just as well be generated by AI as well.
