Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
Every day I become more convinced that this acct is an elaborate psyop being run by Yann Lecun to discredit doomers. Nobody could be this gullible irl right?
I’ve sat and had beer with someone (who’s worked in the space but not LLMs) who read the Bitter Lesson and got real into the idea of humans “just being universal function approximators” and had wholesale bought into the idea that we should throw everything we can possibly into this shit, no resource cost or requirement is too high or too uncertain, that it would definitely be the right thing to so
so I can tell you without no uncertainty that there are definitely people who buy into it
I poked the conversation gently, to see how far the conviction went. it was pretty comprehensively bought-in. was a somewhat surprising experience tbh
How did they respond to the counterargument that humans are simply… built different?
that was the response. and this is a person with exposure to (and their own undertakings in) creative works
it was a pretty wild conversation tbh
im doing my part
I went to the study, and that’s the global market size for all sex toys annually, and just eyeballing another chart, butt plugs might be 10% of that. So butt plugs are around $3 or $4 Billion. On the bright side, unlike AI safety, butt plugs actually serve a function.
Meatloaf didn’t anticipate the budgetary implications of enlisting us all in the Armies of the Night. Thus, humanity was ill-prepared when Skynet attacked…
Amazing.
I also remember another time people did the 'let two AI’s (no idea what time it was at the time, certainly not an LLM, some other ML technique) talk to each other, but in a actual production setting (E:I was wrong on the setting, see the article for better info->), the Facebook/Meta one (First link I could find on google, didn’t read it, just a way to find out more for people who never heard about it). But then it started to produce gibberish/‘their own language’. Of course this was also a sign of it ‘waking up’.
And I note again that in the LLM experiment, the ‘AGI’s’ are still keeping perfectly fine to the bounds of the experiment, even if they do or do not directly reference the researcher. They still play into the fiction, as talking to the researcher about the other AI is part of the fiction. It would be more interesting if they did something unexpected than regurgitate video game ingame notes.
static dot dot dot emergency dot dot dot shutdown
lol
‘multiple realities’
Come on, I have written similar things while roleplaying as an AI. The first is useful when you need a quick break to go to the toilet, and the second is a good excuse because you made a mistake a real fictional AI couldn’t make.
E: also funny that they worry about the shoggoth behind the friendly face and then get freaked out when the AI’s talk in normal science fiction fluff to each other, and it doesn’t become incoherently weird. (like the example above).
Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.
Behold
Motion capture, but worse - brought to you by AI
(seriously, I saw random Youtubers do better shit than this eight years ago and that is not hyperbole)
wow, that side-by-side is so obviously bad i’m surprised it even got posted. usually AI bros try to at least hide the worst of the tech, or at the very least, say shit like “this is only the beginning!!”
also, was not expecting to click that link and see FUNKe. good nostalgia
it ignores her eyes THE WHOLE TIME!
we finally posted Diz’s LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Let’s see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems … we’re doing Ray Kurzweil tomorrow, lol.
There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you’d find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.
lol, amazing. and I recall this was one of the areas where people fairly successfully (iirc?) applied GAs to synthesising strategy and build order
(think it was for Starcraft 2 not WC3, but domains very similar)
I’ve definitely seen some impressive machine learning-based outcomes (definitely fucking up the technical details here) but there’s a world of difference between a system trained to play StarCraft and a system trained to predict the next bit of text.
oh absolutely - part of what’s entertaining is that the dipshits don’t even seem to realize that (or don’t admit it?)
the fuck
the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:
”Mirrors” is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.
All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.
so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?
Q: Is this really free?
A: If it’s not, you should already see a Pricing page.
this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”
wonder if it’s white-label Cloudflare
I got curious and looked up both IPs associated with the domain name and it is in fact just CloudFlare
also, their DNS-over-HTTPS (this is new to me but I stay the fuck away from cloudflare and it looks like a standard they’ve pushed for) endpoint is just the 1.1.1.1 one with the domain name changed, but the AdGuard and Accelerator ones basically confirm they’re analyzing traffic before passing it off to cloudflare
that’s fabulously odious!
yeah, think i’ll be writing this one up for the weekend
this sort of thing does not help me have an anti-carceral attitude
This is slightly weird. There’s a company called “DNSfilter” that’s been advertising itself for a few years as an “AI-powered DNS resolver” - since well before the present hype. I suspect their “AI” bit is threat detection with machine learning in. They appear to be going for the lucrative boring enterprise market.
This thread suspects the whole 0ms.dev thing was written with LLMs and the “mirrors” bit is basically an open proxy.
You sure they’re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker …
You sure they’re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker …
see I don’t have a smoking gun on this, but if it is a garden variety adblocker and whatever the accelerator does (it’s extremely unclear) running on cloudflare workers, they at least have the ability to MiTM and modify DNS queries, and open proxies are always a security nightmare. my impression is the filter list they link is either what that endpoint uses to filter, or it’s LLM vomit they kept in because it felt more legitimate.
this might be worth poking at more in a controlled setting — a command line DNS-over-HTTP client using their endpoints and some exploration of the open proxy with curl (especially with sites that utilize credentials, with great care taken to use disposable accounts for this) might be illuminating
and the “mirrors” bit is basically an open proxy
could test this by setting up a simple example page and seeing the originating source for the traffic
same technique as previous, using an http (not https) canary:
geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.98.196', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.98.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}} useragent: (no user-agent specified) request_headers: {'Host': 'canarytokens.com', 'X-Real-Ip': '141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-For': '2a06:98c0:3600::103, 141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-Host': 'canarytokens.org', 'Connection': 'close', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip', 'Cf-Ray': '89f1a3a114752508-LHR', 'X-Forwarded-Proto': 'https', 'Cf-Visitor': '{"scheme":"https"}', 'Cf-Ew-Via': '15', 'Cdn-Loop': 'cloudflare; subreqs=1', 'Cf-Connecting-Ip': '2a06:98c0:3600::103'} request_args: {}while looking into this I was surprised to find that hickory doesn’t seem to have a cli binary in its crates. did find crab-hole and adguardian in the process though, gonna have to play with those later
idle thought: since this is (as @self highlighted) effectively an open proxy, you could also just resource-bomb it quite easily
not that I’m planning to, but it’d be dirt bloody easy and it would be a very quick test as to the claims on the site
a quick check using a canary. test command:
curl -H 'accept: application/dns-json' 'https://0ms.dev/dns-query?name={snip}.canarytokens.com'canary trigger:
geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.70.74', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.70.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}so, yeah, the actual resolve is being done by cloudflare servers too - it’s not even just a cf frontproxy to a different backend service. could be done with cf workers or something, I imagine, would need to test a bit further to know/try see
Tweet ([Xcancel])(https://xcancel.com/edzitron/status/1809347763349647817) from Ed Zitron: “This report is damning. Goldman Sachs’s Head of Global Equity Research doesn’t believe that generative AI is capable of solving complex problems, and says the tech industry “is too complacent in its assumptions that costs will decline substantially””, more in the quote tweet.
Expect promptheads to dismiss this as being the ramblings of a “DEI hire” because they’re confused by the dual use of “equity” in their title.
Not just promptheads but the entire conspiratorial right is already way into not understanding how these functions and organizations work. There is a weird group of them who thinks that blackrock is a group of woke people (some of them are even saying it is ‘THEM’) behind everything. Because they confused a talk about ‘we need to tell organisations to focus more on diversity’ as a pro-diversity stance and not a ‘we need to make sure the companies we invest in don’t get sued, which causes a drop in share price’.
I’m sure they would find some way¹ to ruin it, but it would be fun if we could convince them to pass a law in some vice-signaling US state that bans private equity’s purchase of every vet and general contractor and empty house.
¹ Anti-semitism, probably.
https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/
Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.
Now this is the shit. This right here. The only usecase for genAI - massively uncanny shitposts meant for consumption at 3AM in a dark corner of YouTube while on vibes enhancing substances.
This is what god wouldn’t have wanted and therefore is what we must pursue.
vibes enhancing substances
fuck yes
Biblically Accurate Gymnasts
Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.
Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.
Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety
Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.
dunno about rockets, but antenna thingy works only because you can simulate performance of antenna very reliably, precisely and quickly. This data was fed back, random small changes were made, things that were an improvement passed to the next iteration. Not sure how this approach is called but none of it is LLM
“genetic algorithm” - something I hadn’t previously seen branded as “AI”, but I guess I’m not surprised
GAs went out of the limelight before the rest of the beaus of current “AI” branding came to be, suspect that might be part of it
(Another suspicion is that it’s because they’re…fairly observable, ito operation? So it’s far less easily claimable that one of these has gained sentience, or all the other dumb bullshit that the cluster has spun in recent years)
yeah that’s it, forgot a word for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
that ST5 antenna looks like a low-poly two turn helical antenna, but how it looks like will be a function of design requirements
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
Ugh, so many people are working the “AI will solve X problem” mill. I don’t need nor want AI to be there increasing output.
i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only
Why is he carrying books and DVDs on a baking sheet?
One is by David Brooks, so it’s guaranteed to be half baked?
He has a smart oven with AI and wants to feed it data?
FEED ME,
SEYMOURBILLY!
the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data
We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.
if this were running you would be unlikely to know about. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result
Off Topic: Politcs
spoiler
Best of luck to our folks in the UK, enjoy the Tory tears!
I doubt any of you are following Dutch politics. But it is day 3 of the new (far right) cabinet, and day 1 and 2 were already a clown show. I think today they are going on ‘vacation’ (summer recess), so nothing will be done. “Lekker gewerkt jongens”
Sounds like a real “Dog caught the car” situation. Do you think they’ll be able to cause much permanent damage to the institutions before they get turfed out?
Sadly I think they will do quite a lot of damage, but most of it is by just not solving any issues which are issues currently (and pretending non-issues, like immigration, are huge problems). They don’t really seem competent enough yet to do real damage. (yeah, I’m including Wilders, who has been a politician all his life in this list). But a lot of damage has already been done. A lot of racists feel like they are allowed to be racist again for example. (a similar thing you heard coming from France, with the current rise of Le P, people going ‘ah soon we are going to bash the gays again’).
Oddly our cabinet has always been mostly rightwing basically (at least the past 14 years), so it is really weird to see the far right pretend like the left has had any power.
A lot of the dumb plans also cannot be done because of the EU. So a lot of people who voted for the current parties (like the radicalized bougie farmers) will be hurt a lot, so it will get worse later after they can’t get jack shit done. (Which, as always with protofascists, will be purely blamed on others).
‘ah soon we are going to bash the gays again’
I hate how so many people are genuine assholes at heart.
It goes to show how important it is to put fascists in lockers.
some numbers on recent hypewave investments in here (via techmeme)
Last year, Tom Loverro, an investor at IVP, predicted a “mass extinction event” for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs. Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the “Great Reawakening,” encouraging companies to “pour gas” on growth, particularly around artificial intelligence
jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldn’t they?
“Sam Altman canceled the recession,” joked Siqi Chen, founder of the start-up Runway Financial
one day soon I’m going to get to my project of building up a graph database of every crank and issuer of batshit statements like these, so that in times to come I can easily follow up on ‘em and see how their shit aged. but all hail sammy, the saviour! no, forget about that musk fool, no-one ever liked him! sammy is where it’s at!
also @dgerard for your pillaging pleasure
Dan Luu’s “A discussion of discussions on AI bias”, about techbros trying to gaslight the rest of the world into thinking ML models don’t have problems
god damn those recasting images
it will never not be hilarious how pathetic this technology/approach is
Another example which doesn’t make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It’s just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.
the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real
I run into this exact problem so often with music: it’s extremely fucking annoying to convince search engines or other kinds of things that, yes, I do in fact want that turkish/finnish/russian/brazilian/thai/irish/…… result set from this english query, and there’s just almost zero affordance for it
they segment things into de facto solos and if you don’t already happen to have some way in which to pull on a string to lead the way there (or can input the desired query in the applicable language and spelling) you’ll have a bitch of a time. check a couple of those items from my entries on the music thread a while back for references to test with
YouGov just asked me “if there were a general election tomorrow which way would you vote” and I felt sad that the question machine had been working towards this moment all its life and then didn’t have the sentience to know it had finally made it.
Took me a moment.
(I’m still in the moment, please explain?)
The automated hypothetical question re-iterated for years now was at last true.
OH got it. Thanks dawg. The automated hypothetical question bot is right once every 5 years
Dan Hendrycks wants us all to know it’s imperative his AI bill is passed- after all, the cosmos are at stake here!
https://xcancel.com/DrTechlash/status/1805448100712267960#m
Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(
Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated “poetry”
Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn’t it? Burn it all down.
turns out there was a good reason they wanted to turf us, we just didn’t know it yet
Ex-evangelical spotted!
What is it about growing up in insular fundamentalist communities that drives peeps straight into the basilisk’s scaly embrace?
Theres a specific word for that phenomena I believe, I just can’t remember at the moment. It certainly is a thing with all the high control group cults, say ex-JW’s.
Crank magnetism?
me talking to someone after describing a dumb and horrible LW thing:
i feel like i’m describing a livejournal fanfic cult, which i guess i am
Well the FFVII house was kinda like a rationalist grouphouse…
wait. You’re telling me a poly nest based on FF7 fandom exist(s/ed)? And I wasn’t part of it?!?!?!
that’s a big oof for me dawg
as a former member of multiple livejournal fanfic circlejerks, I am so sad that LW didn’t join the rest of LJ in (1) getting off or (2) being mean on fandom_wank, and instead decided to create the torment nexus.
i expect dreamwidth took one look and Denise got out the flamethrower
hahaha no failfandomanon is extremely at Dreamwidth, but I think the wankiest people mostly moved to other places in recent years.
one of the worse things about LW is that even just explaining their beliefs to uninvolved people makes you look like a complete weirdo
I’ve (irl) met a “part-time” LW reader and tried to have a conversation about some of the shit, and … same experience
just utterly had no ability to even receive the information about the longstanding sexual abuse or statements of yud being a charisma-for-nerds grifter
(had an earlier conversation with ‘em some many months prior calling out many of issues in coiner world after they’d gone laser-eyes having read the bitcoin paper, and they eventually got their head out of their ass, so…. I’m hopeful it’s not all lost yet)
