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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I told one of my college professors I’d been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said “can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it” and without thinking I said “why would I use chat-gpt? It’s rubbish” and his face dropped. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.
This was after he’d said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.
this isn’t surprising, but now it’s confirmed: in addition to the environmental damage generative AI does by operating, and in spite of all attempts to greenwash it and present it as somehow a solution to climate change, of course Microsoft’s been pushing very hard for the oil and gas industry to use generative AI to maximize resource exploitation and production (via Timnit Gebru)
tbh i don’t see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works it’s gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesn’t care, because they’re selling shovels so it doesn’t matter if their shit doesn’t work as long as someone’s buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where there’s already some money
I was reading David and Amy’s stuff on energy costs of AI and ended up skimming the MSFT “environment sustainability report” and… god
Like I don’t even know how to satirise this. Help me sneer pros, for I am too depressed to make fun of this.
Like a century of science: yeah we’re pretty sure where carbon emissions come from. Everyone needs to slow the fuck down. There’s no need to pontificate about the specifics, especially if that somehow produces even more emissions. That would be catastrophic, you see.
MSFT: hold my beer
Google also said something similar in one of their reports. Something along the lines of sure AI wrecked their sustainability report this year, but just you wait until it optimizes the data centers! As if the robots could find holes in thermodynamics or something.
Anyway it’s not that great but here’s my attempt at the sneer you asked for:
“Additionally, we are exploring how attaching flame-throwers to the bottom of private jets and flying over the tree-tops of forests can further increase the accountability and traceability for our Scope 3 carbon emissions.”
Appreciate, but flamethrowers on jets still sounds somehow less idiotic than tracking CO2 emissions with BLOCKCHAIN
Additionally, we are exploring how technology, like savory vapes and cocaine, can help me kick my meth habit.
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its ‘reasoning’ when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, it’s not really clear.
Can’t wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don’t exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.
Would there ever be a way to tell that they didn’t just feed the answers into the training data?
Some of my favorite reactions to this paradigm shift in machine intelligence we are witnessing:
bless you Melanie.
Mine olde friend, the log scale, still as beautiful the day I met you
Weird, the AI that has read every chess book in existence and been trained on more synthetic games than any one human has seen in a lifetime still doesn’t understand the rules of chess
^(just an interesting data point from Ernie, + he upvotes pictures of my dogs on FB so I gotta include him)
Dog tax
Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.
The most black mirror part for me is where he’s selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future “AI”, represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn’t a parody, they’re literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.
Another fine AI lawmaker for our collection.
-
Virtual Integrated Citizen: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/tech/openai-shuts-down-ai-mayor/index.html
-
Det Syntetiske Parti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)
-
AI party (performance art, unclear how much of this was actually serious): https://www.centerforeverything.com/history/constitutive-meeting-of-the-ai-party-fi/
-
AI Mayor / AI Party: https://www.ai-mayor.com/, https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI党 (their(?) earlier iteration also had a lady robot because AI Mayor AIn’t sexist yo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KomiEpEik-Q)
Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.
A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) “if you think that’s bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱”.
Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
a new source of anxiety has formed
in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I don’t think Lemmy’s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but it’s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed
awful’s probably okay, .systems is run by Donuts and they’re not one of the bigger operations around
pro-tip: do not learn things about how TLDs work (and I mean the bit beyond dns architecture), it is cursed knowledge you can’t unlearn
and with that warning delivered, y’all may freely run to hyperfocus on this, and realize too late it’s a gateway drug
regarding backup domain: yeah always handy to have something, but nfi how to port it. AP’s identity design there really leaves something to be desired :/
quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isn’t doing it:
Do you have any references/examples of this?
tons
rapid7 for example use LLMs to analyze code and identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.
Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this.
must’ve been another company then which i got confused with the name
Good thing you have tons of examples.
Right?
I wonder if he got standard ML and LLM confused. (I did hear there was some usage of LLM/ML to help with some documentation stuff I think on a riskybusiness podcast, but I would have to relisten for the details. It could also just have been promotional stuff, while they are not actually using it).
Poor DeiSteve, it always sucks when you have a decades old username which suddenly takes up political meaning.
“created: 51 days ago”
Oh no.
Standard ML the programming language or standard as in conventional and ML as in machine learning?
Machine learning.
E: Turns out the DEI guy might have been right btw. https://www.rapid7.com/about/press-releases/rapid7s-ai-engine-supercharges-security-operations-with-generative-ai/ if by generative AI they mean a LLM.
the original post is fucking amazing
here in the future, nothing fucking works
.mobi? They became the admins of the file format? And they paid for it? Good luck with that. ;)
I liked this comment on the HN post:
Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.
Fuck it, we’re going back to bang paths. ficix!hetzner!awful!self please add support for this.
you have no idea how much I’ve been tempted to do UUCP
holy fuck awful.systems works on servo
so for posting it’s definitely less than ideal (not pictured: the 15 second delay before typing and the comment text being filled in), but it actually renders lemmy with shockingly few issues
image descriptions
screenshots of awful.systems rendering in Servo. it looks both janky and weirdly normal. for some reason, servo seems to be running inside of the emacs text editor.
One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.
Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.
This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.
A new substack about AI: Ludd. “Citizen Journalism on AI, Publishing, and the new Tech Landscape”. First post is about Repeater Books, Israel and AI: second is about AI and climate change.
Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)
2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling
- Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously
- Development of “Schrödinger’s Ledger” prototype, allowing superposition of financial states
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution
- Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
- Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
- Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements
ah good, we’re still on schedule for that I guess
I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting LinkedIn to become a wretched hive of “quantum” bullshit, but hey, here we are.
Tangentially: Schrödinger is a one-man argument for not naming ideas after people.
Somebody played cookie clicker.
you left the best one:
First successful experiments in “temporal arbitrage” using quantum prediction models
not only they know about “temporal arbitrage experiments” but they also already know that these were successful. that kinda defeats purpose of experiment
Frankly, it just didn’t stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.
found a quality sneer in the wild https://mander.xyz/post/17910623
From the reactions:
“With enough garbage the model will become sentient”
“I mean thats how humans are raised tho”
AAAAAAAAAAAA
(There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).
As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. “Holy shit, I think therefore I am!”
diminish humans and humanity
AKA tell on themselves
saw this ridiculous shit on the side of a jag on the highway a little bit ago
best guess is rental-contract jag by a hustler, but the half-hearted AI non-mention is why I thought to post it here. we’re rapidly evolving in the grift cycle!
quantum finance
This reminded me of a gag from Pyramids (discworld novel) where quantum accounting is invented to manage a reality-warping pyramid building business. So I was trying to get a quote…
…only to discover that Quantum Accounting is an actual grifting term in recent use. Please marvel at this LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
yeah, the whole site’s a journey
I was hoping it’d have some content along with the buzzword headings, alas
It looks like a media prop making a soft parody of buzzword laced sites that don’t actually say anything. ‘we provide business solutions and services’ lol
And of course, due to my browser being slightly locked down (or the whole site being broken) the whole ‘check it out’ button does nothing.
The animated button that looks like it might direct you to a chat option (but actually just scrolls you back up to the start of the page for some unknown reason) is also great. (This is isn’t really their fault btw, it is that wordpress themes one)
Taylor Swift is on the side of humans* in the battle against the AIs (instagram).
Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.
I’m sure everyone remembers what this is referring to, y’know with the rest of the US election being so low-key and boring, but just in case here’s an article with screenshots (Guardian).
Anyway I’m not here to talk politics. SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift) thinks Taylor Swift will be a “cultural linchpin” against deepfakes.
As I’ve said before, Taylor Swift may be the cultural lynchpin for addressing abusive AI imitation and I think this was her personal opening salvo. Taylor Swift was previously driven to political advocacy partly by right-wing memes of her aping Hilter on genetic purity. I think she takes INCREDIBLE personal exception to herself being used as a puppet and this directly aligns with it. Directly addressed to political leaders.
Indeed that Donald Trump post isn’t the first time she’s been targeted. There was Deepfake Swift Porn in January that prompted Microsoft to add more safeguards**. A scam involving fake Le Creuset cookware (nytimes), and on a lighter note: fake Taylor Swift teaching Math on TikTok (Petapixel, whatever the heck a petapixel is).
The January incident prompted some legislatures to introduce the No AI Fraud Act, though looking at it it looks like it hasn’t made it far through congress.
* Maybe not on the side of humans against climate change. With the private jet and all. God the US needs trains then at least all the celebrities could ride in luxurious rail cars like the olden days.
** Not sure about Microsoft but these safeguards aren’t effective in general, I found a subreddit of people sharing AI image generator prompt tips to get around filters and it was pretty disturbing. But that’s another story.
Tennessee has a new law against making LLM clones of performers without permission. It would be great to see our bullshit strike a blow for the side of righteousness, for once!
Yes, it is called the ELVIS Act. I’m sorry.
https://www.tn.gov/governor/news/2024/3/21/photos--gov--lee-signs-elvis-act-into-law.html
SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift)
it’s some US infosec guy working at a corp, identity was figured out a couple years ago
Yeah I was being a bit tongue in cheek there. I follow them and a bunch of accounts on ActivityPub because it’s the only way to keep the feed from drying up when running my own instance.
It is still real to me damnit!
no, it’s Taylor Swift
this is like claiming dril was identified. no he wasn’t. that’s not true.
I find swiftonsec a tedious poster at best, so /shrug from me on this
Wait, why would he be Taylor Swift?
I always thought it’s swift as in fast, there’s nothing about his posts that would attempt a satirical impersonation even.
the original gag was that it was Taylor Swift moonlighting as an infosec advisor
Yeah, that. From the era of horse_ebooks, Riker Googling, etc
they used to run the account with a Swift avi for the first while, then switched to Cortana (iirc?) for a bit (can’t remember if this coincided with twitter having its “impersonating accounts” panic), and dunno after that because I stopped seeing it
With the private jet and all.
A story I heard, one of the problems with private jets (and private jet trackers) is that often private jets cannot be stored at normal airports. So after delivering the rich people to the airport it needs to take off again, and go to a smaller airport to stay there. This drives up the environmental costs to insane levels (now each trip is 3 takeoffs), but this also causes weirdness with the people tracking the planes of celebs, as they now overinflate the actual flights they are in, which annoys weird pedants (like me). I wonder if the celebs taking these flights are even aware of it. Anyway, remember this if you hear a story of ‘celeb X took their private plane to skip traffic’ stories, there is a chance they were not actually in this plane. (So put down those surface to air launchers you lunatics).
Not that the usage of private planes isn’t insane and should be banned/heavily regulated.
via mastodon
image description
a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:
lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :
are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.
but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.
but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.
maybe you’re not being negative enough
I extremely briefly looked into it earlier when I saw the headline drift by on lobsters or something, and found a venturebeat presser
so it seems we’re at that stage of the LLM grift cycle
OK Venturebeat have hastily beaten a venture-retreat and are decrying fraud complete with an AI generated header image that really screams “promptfondler caught red-handed fondling”.
Contains such choice quotes are “fraud in the AI research community”, which are very reminiscent of Capt. Renault’s reaction in the casino in Casablanca.
I should be trying to sleep, given I need to be on the road by 0630 tomorrow (it is 22h22), but this rapid fire set of events has greatly improved how happy I’ll feel about shit sleep by morning
now do chatgpt4ahegao, cowards
“eagerly waiting for them to upload their weights to Hugging Face” really is the same vibe as “eagerly waiting for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange to give me my coins back”
just turned it into today’s post lol
“Hey if the R1 could do it with a shipped physical product, why couldn’t one just do it with software alone?” - genius bayfucker, 2024
