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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    19 days ago

    saw this via a friend earlier, forgot to link. xcancel

    socmed administrator for a conf rolls with liarsynth to “expand” a cropped image, and the autoplag machine shits out a more sex-coded image of the speaker

    the mindset of “just make some shit to pass muster” obviously shines through in a lot of promptfans and promptfondlers, and while that’s fucked up I don’t want to get too stuck on that now. one of the things I’ve been mulling over for a while is pondering what a world (and digital landscape) with a richer capability for enthusiastic consent could look like. and by that I mean, not just more granular (a la apple photo/phonebook acl) than this current y/n bullshit where a platform makes a landgrab for a pile of shit, but something else entirely. “yeah, on my gamer profile you can make shitposts, but on academic stuff please keep it formal” expressed and traceable

    even if just as a thought experiment (because of course there’s lots of funky practical problems, combined with the “humans just don’t really exist that way” effort-tax overhead that this may require), it might inform about some avenues of how to to go about some useful avenues on how to go about handling this extremely overt bullshit, and informing/shaping impending norms

    (e: apologies for semi stream of thought, it’s late and i’m tired)

    • MBM@lemmings.worldEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      I don’t know what’s worse, that or some of the weird twitter responses it’s getting

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        I can also hear Timnit Gebru wailing in despair all the way from my house, because this is exactly the kind of AI-reinforced bias that she was talking about while everyone was arguing about whether to listen to the doom cult. These are not theoretical problems with the technology; they are fully extant and easily demonstrable. The more these systems are integrated into processes that effect actual people the more often we’ll see this kind of thing happen.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.

    And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this one’s thankfully unrelated to the article’s main point):

    The idea that “[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitabletm” (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.

    That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valley’s failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      Really appreciate that link to Unserious Academic! This piece underlines something very important about the forces (by forces I mean weirdos) we struggle against.

      Also, this bit:

      This technology was pre-ordained by the universe

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    0·
    16 days ago

    i am hearing that ProQuest has been quietly contacting small publishers to see if it can ingest their published output for AI training.

    ProQuest has an AI thing now, but it’s denied it’s training on hosted content … yet.

    if you are, or know, an author who’s had a letter of this sort recently, mentioning ProQuest or no, i’d love to know and please tell your friends - email is [email protected]

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    As Nina Power was mentioned before, here is an article on a Welsh ‘druid’/forger which touches that subject (and Marx) a bit. People might find it an interesting read.

    Anti-Woke Druids and Radical Bards - ‘What links Welsh 18th century romantic Druid-Bards, gathering around a circle of pebbles in North London, and the contemporary online right?’

    • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Then there is John Michael Greer…

      Wow, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.

      A regular contributor at UnHerd…

      I did not know that, and I hate that it doesn’t surprise me. I tended to dismiss his peak oil doomerism as wishing for some imagined “harmony with nature”. This doesn’t help with that bias.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    NYT: “Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html)

    Archive: https://archive.ph/Bas23

    HN link from whence I got this, have not mined this for sneers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41878281

    edit oh wait found one

    OpenAI’s revenue isn’t from advertising, it should be slightly easier for them to resist the call of enshittification this early in the company history.

    Can’t enshittify that which is already shit

    Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership) and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates. Both times I turned to ChatGPT and it gave me an answer immediately

    Just a normal hackernews, testing if the models they use are racist

    Well, at this point most new data being created is conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation logs are their moat.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)

      The unspecificity is damning. “Facts about their membership” might range from “what racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member of” to “am I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculate”.

      and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.

      That’s an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      tl;dr of the article: ever since the ousting of altman, microsoft, which virtually owns openai, has been suspicious of openai’s actual worth. therefore MS has cut down on the infinite resource flow. openai employees are whining about this.

      there is one additional point in three of the near final paragraphs, which I’ll quote in full because they are so amusing to me

      Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of A.I. that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

      Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

      The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.

      • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        The first paragraph surprised me. I didn’t know there were still some true believers left.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        I think I see a possible future here. Just as the promptfondlers are now trying to talk down human accomplishments to make the LLMs sound more impressive (‘it learns just like a child!’ (no, it doesn’t)). As when you are trying to reach a deal on a car, you either need the buyer to raise the price, or the seller to lower theirs. This will lead to a lawsuit where they are going to drop down the theoretical capabilities of an AGI just to trigger this clause.

        And as the judge thinks that emoji’s are a form of novelty pasta, any potential jury can’t spell stattistical, there is a 50% chance that they will be convinced it is AGI because humans like the AGI also make mistakes.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          16 days ago

          Still unclear how OpenAI declaring they’ve created an AGI (and getting this adjudicated as “true”) and thus being released from their MSFT partnership helps OpenAI. They’re just lost all their compute, and will have a worse negotiating position from which to get more compute. What’s the upside?

          • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            16 days ago

            They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Thank for letting me know there are other people indifferent to dark mode. Sometimes I feel I am the only one.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        i have already had whiny shits demand that I (a) set dark mode default (b) remove the switch

        default is currently set to whatever your browser thinks is the default and you can switch it otherwise

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          16 days ago

          this is the best default imo

          the only times I dislike it are when the site’s dark mode implementation is trash. I occasionally get to notice these, because their implementation is such way that dark reader activates (time trigger), I suddenly get flashblind on some site because dark reader flips their thing to eye-stabbing light colours

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          16 days ago

          God forbid you go out of your way to do something nice without some most entitled asshole in the world giving you shit for it.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        Did Sam anticipate the easily foreseeable avalanche of AI slop, decide that proof of humanity was a worthwhile investment, and only then notice that all the suggested search completions for “proof of” were crypto?

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      Kinda surprised World(Coin) was still ongoing, thought saltman would have quietly buried the project now he’s busy shilling ChatGPT

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        The 0.000001% chance that this thing morphs into the new global reserve currency is enough for a proper rationalist to keep it trundling along, don’t you think?

        Also don’t underestimate the value of having someplace to park useful cronies you don’t currently have any other job for

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we’ll see

      I suspect we’ll see a fair amount. Giving some specifics:

      1. I suspect we’ll see Sammy accused of endangering all of humanity for a quick buck - taking Altman at his word, OpenAI is attempting to create something which they themselves believe could wipe out humanity if they screw things up.

      2. I expect calls to regulate the AI industry will louden in response to this - what Sammy’s doing here is giving the true believers more ammo to argue Silicon Valley’s may potentially trigger the robot apocalypse that Silicon Valley themselves have claimed AI is capable of unleashing.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        perhaps saltman will have enough audacity to promote this as a way to ensure that some account is owned by a human, after flooding every corner of internet with ai slop and fake accounts

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          that’s almost certainly the plan — I remember there was some horrific “proof of humanity” shit tied in with this, supposedly so that you could tell if you’re interacting with a human rather than a chatbot. there’s so many problems with that technically of course, not least of which is the chatbot guy also owning the proof of not-bot, but there’s deeper horrifying implications: this is the technology conservatives have been begging for to block access to “adult sites” (see: LGBTQ+ spaces and associates) and “protect voting” (see: purge voter registries). that the technology is fucking stupid and doesn’t work doesn’t matter to them — as always with technofascism, that’s a feature.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      That’s amazing, I wish I had that kind of discipline to learn!

      I can’t decide what’s worse: the fucking insulting tone that sounds like I’m about to get a pamphlet about Joseph Smith or GameStop or some shit, or that the suggestions just make up opinions you don’t have and events that didn’t happen

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      But users like engagement! Which means seeing that the person wrote a thing and not reading the thing and making a human connection with someone who is, y’know, engaged in conversation.

      I know chatbots don’t track meaning, but I’m pretty sure words still mean things.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        I know you probably had no intention behind the number, but I just had to check. 2686 days ago was 12 June 2017. Pretty sure we’ve known about how google fumbles shit from way before then!

        • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          That was the day when the transformer paper was released that kicked off this whole LLM shitshow. So my intention was just a little nod towards that. ;)

          But yeah, the real number is probably quite a bit larger than that.

          • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            17 days ago

            somone could make a command-line utility like sdate, but for blarney engines!

            what would be a good name for it, do you reckon? The first thing to pop into my head was shitdate but that’s too close to the original and distro maintainers might get prissy about packages with swears in them

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            17 days ago

            According to an interview with the ceo of signal, when she worked at google the new ai wave shit was started by a paper in 2012, the authors of which were hired by google. So they saw the writing on the wall a bit sooner. When did they remove their dont be evil thing?

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          16 days ago

          “O Cent O Pence (R)” is an anagram for “Necropotence”

          Trump is clearly campaigning on the critically overlooked black draw engine platform, possibly to spite blue voters.

          Edit: “One Percent Co.” was right there! It’s all coming together now!

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    here’s the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:

    New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That’s water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here’s a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don’t have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.

    there’s a (mid) joke here about how a boy who’s obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics

    and who wouldn’t trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:

    After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”