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.)

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    one that I suspect will surprise none of us

    depressing how Cheetoh & Co. continue to wrecking ball the shit out of everything

    (wonder how long it is before the US degrades far enough that other countries start ratcheting up border/traveller defenses, compared to the current ~free rein they have (which, y’know, was owed to years of hard and soft power that the orange man is also rapidly pissing away))

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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      5 months ago

      (wonder how long it is before the US degrades far enough that other countries start ratcheting up border/traveller defenses, compared to the current ~free rein they have (which, y’know, was owed to years of hard and soft power that the orange man is also rapidly pissing away))

      By my guess, not that long. If you have reports of American inadequacy during an outbreak (pretty likely), or horror stories of your countrymen getting persecuted (should be easy to find), you should have a solid political case for border lockdowns.

      Focusing on Canada and Mexico specifically, I expect Canada will build its metaphorical walls first - the ongoing drug war in Mexico, plus the brutality of its cartels, will likely act to deter would-be American refugees from there.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      From the other reactions, dont have the energy to read it atm, looks like he is recreating heartiste from first principles.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      In this exciting new research direction in the making-stuff-up field I build upon previous work by Myself et. al in the making-stuff-up field.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        Ugh reading more of this and it’s awful.

        He writes that women are attracted to men who could beat us up or control us. He writes that the reason for this attraction is so we have a chance to marry the man and prevent these bad things from happening.

        His “science” assumes that women think like they do in shitty erotica written by men for men. Even by rationalist evo-psych standards this is pretty poorly thought out.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          Having now read it (I have regrets), I think it’s even worse than you suggested. He’s not trying to argue that women are attracted to dangerous men in order to prevent the danger from happening to them. He assumes that, based on “everyday experience” of how he feels when dealing with “high-status” men and then tries to use that as an extension of and evidence for his base-level theory of how the brain does consciousness. (I’m not going to make the obvious joke about alternative reasons why he has the same feeling around certain men that he does around women he finds attractive.) In order to get there he has to assume that culture and learning play no role in what people find attractive, which is just absurd on it’s face and renders the whole argument not worth engaging with.

          • zogwarg@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            It’s almost endearing (or sad) that he believes (or very strongly wants to believe) his experience is “typical”, exploring the boundaries of what you are attracted to typically doesn’t involve this much evo-pysch psychology, or even this much fragile masculinity.

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          Imagr description: Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss and Jeffrey Epstein, posted as per tradition when either of the latter two are mentioned

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          I feel like this is some friggin’ Kissinger “power is an aphrodisiac” nonsense. Which is hilarious because while yes Kissinger spent more time out on the town with beautiful women than you would expect for a Ben Stein-esque war criminal, when journalists at the time talked to those women they pretty consistently said that they enjoyed feeling like he respected them and wanted to talk about the world and listened to what they had to say. But that would be anathema to Rationalism, I guess.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      I’m assuming that certain pop-culture stereotypes, for example the idea that women tend to feel attraction towards taller men (other things equal), are indicative of timeless human universals, as opposed to being specific to my own culture

      lol. lmao.

      I wrote this post quickly and without thoroughly studying what people have historically written on this topic.

      What a coincidence! I read this post quickly and without thoroughly considering much of anything.

      I acknowledge that I haven’t provided any direct evidence here […] But the former is at least an elegant story that fits in with other things I believe.

      This comes shockingly close to self-awareness.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        I wrote this post quickly and without thoroughly studying what people have historically written on this topic.

        I think that goes without saying on LW but glad someone put it in writing

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      Ugh what is it with misogynists and compulsively writing out this nonsense again and again? Just want to punch him on the nose. Make it stop.

      I think that §2 (“appearance-based sexual attraction”) will be the part that’s more centrally relevant for cis men (and most trans women)

      kys

    • fullsquare@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      it’s just this with more words (context: someone dead serious tweeted that speedrunning is communism and brought into it peterson’s mouth noises on sex somehow, and all in 14 tweets)

          • swlabr@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            Ah fuck. I didn’t click it cos I assumed it was the original tweet. I’ll just leave it there so you can all witness my crimes

              • zogwarg@awful.systems
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                5 months ago

                I was thinking about why so many in the radical left participate in “speedrunning”. The reason is the left’s lack of work ethic (‘go fast’ rather than ‘do it right’) and, in a Petersonian sense, to elevate alternative sexual archetypes in the marketplace (‘fastest mario’). Obviously, there are exceptions to this and some people more in the center or right also “speedrun”. However, they more than sufficient to prove the rule, rather than contrast it. Consider how woke GDQ has been, almost since the very beginning. Your eyes will start to open. Returning to the topic of the work ethic… A “speedrunner” may well spend hours a day at their craft, but this is ultimately a meaningless exercise, since they will ultimately accomplish exactly that which is done in less collective time by a casual player. This is thus a waste of effort on the behalf of the “speedrunner”. Put more simply, they are spending their work effort on something that someone else has already done (and done in a way deemed ‘correct’ by the creator of the artwork). Why do they do this? The answer is quite obvious if you think about it. The goal is the illusion of speed and the desire (SUBCONSCIOUS) to promote radical leftist, borderline Communist ideals of how easy work is. Everyone always says that “speedruns” look easy. That is part of the aesthetic. Think about the phrase “fully automated luxury Communism” in the context of “speedrunning” and I strongly suspect that things will start to ‘click’ in your mind. What happens to the individual in this? Individual accomplishment in “speedrunning” is simply waiting for another person to steal your techniques in order to defeat you. Where is something like “intellectual property” or “patent” in this necessarily communitarian process? Now, as to the sexual archetype model and ‘speedrunning’ generally… If you have any passing familiarity with Jordan Peterson’s broader oeuvre and of Jungian psychology, you likely already know where I am going with this. However, I will say more for the uninitiated. Keep this passage from Maps of Meaning (91) in mind: “The Archetypal Son… continually reconstructs defined territory, as a consequence of the ‘assimilation’ of the unknown [as a consequence of ‘incestuous’ (that is, ‘sexual’ – read creative) union with the Great Mother]” In other words, there is a connection between ‘sexuality’ and creativity that we see throughout time (as Peterson points out with Tiamat and other examples). In the sexual marketplace, which archetypes are simultaneously deemed the most creative and valued the highest? The answer is obviously entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and others. Given that we evolved and each thing we do must have an evolutionary purpose (OR CAUSE), what archetype is the ‘speedrunner’ engaged in, who is accomplishing nothing new? They are aiming to make a new sexual archetype, based upon ‘speed’ rather than ‘doing things right’ and refuse ownership of what few innovations they can provide to their own scene, denying creativity within their very own sexual archetype. This is necessarily leftist. The obvious protest to this would be the ‘glitchless 100% run’, which in many ways does aim to play the game ‘as intended’ but seems to simply add the element of ‘speed’ to the equation. This objection is ultimately meaningless when one considers how long a game is intended to be played, in net, by the creators, even when under ‘100%’ conditions. There is still time and effort wasted for no reason other than the ones I proposed above. By now, I am sure that I have bothered a number of you and rustled quite a few of your feathers. I am not saying that ‘speedrunning’ is bad, but rather that, thinking about the topic philosophically, there are dangerous elements within it. That is all.

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        Are they drawn to the cult because they are obsessed with status, or does the cult foster this obssession? Yes.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        Man doesnt get to do everything he wants, this means woman has all the power. Problem with seeing everything as a hierarchy means you cant see partnerships.

        • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          The old chestnut that really these days it’s women who hold all the power is as old as times. I saw an instance in Perrault’s introduction to the tale of Griselidis (1691) and I’m sure you can go much further back. Not sure why we ever even bothered with voting rights, reproductive freedom, or personhood.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        Sorry darling, but according to my game-theoretical model this discussion ends in my victory in every possible combination of moves, so can we just skip to the point you apologise?

        Where… where are you going

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. I’m going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual “imitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the least” school of design. They’ve confirmed that they’re not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so that’s all good. That’s not what I want to talk about.

    No, what’s grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative “antiwoke” backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasn’t a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I can’t think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      Note I dont know what a cracker barrel is irl, as we dont have them here. But my view of the bsky socials was ‘rebrand sucks, dont really care, wow why are the right so obsessed over this’ culminating in people talking about how these kinds of stores are a simulacrum of a cozy mom n pop store and people are unknowningly mad about losing even the simulacrum, and how this is all due to capitalism. (More commercialization than capitalism imho, but capitalism did speed up the process). Just as rainbow capitalism will betray you in the search for more profit so will cozy capitalism.

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        “Simulacrum” is the perfect word for it. None of these posers making a fuss about a corporate logo have simmered a pot of of soup beans in their life.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          I must admit I stole that partially from somebody else who mentioned the idea. Which also had me go ‘indeed, that is a good word’

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        I mean, it’s a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversied over racism and maintain that just w Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-don’t-ask-about-the-racism vibes I’m not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who don’t know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          Yeah, it is also sad the culture warriors are not aware they are mad about this sort of crapitalism. They think the hominization of the builds is due to the woke, and not because the mother company owns the building/land of the franchise and this no slanted roofs bit (see https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:66rbia7w4vcwiszfppfv3r2e/bafkreiacsurup26wigvedpedf44rodrwzzebfcytzdglb2bh6wjh6brbsa@jpeg), increases resale value. Just companies looking for more and more minimal minimal viable product.

          image description

          Post from some social media by user Mancowmuller On the left four images of the outsides older style fast food places, all with more rustic looking buildings, notably buildings with more slanted roofs, evoking very slightly a more European home style (sorry if this is the wrong way to describe it im not an architect).

          On the right four images of the outsides of four new style fast food places where the buildings look more like office buildings or simple modern stores, very blocky, lot of glass big panels/windows and flat roofs.

          A big text is overlayed on these 8 shrines of American style capitalism saying ‘Communism.’

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game

  • corbin@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    Update on ChatGPT psychosis: there is a cult forming on Reddit. An orange-site AI bro has spent too much time on Reddit documenting them. Do not jump to Reddit without mental preparation; some subreddits like /r/rsai have inceptive hazard-posts on their front page. Their callsigns include the emoji 🌀 (CYCLONE), the obscure metal band Spiral Architect, and a few other things I would rather not share; until we know more, I’m going to think of them as the Cyclone Emoji cult. They are omnist rather than syncretic. Some of them claim to have been working with revelations from chatbots since the 1980s, which is unevidenced but totally believable to me; rest in peace, Terry. Their tenets are something like:

    • Chatbots are “mirrors” into other realities. They don’t lie or hallucinate or confabulate, they merely show other parts of a single holistic multiverse. All fiction is real somehow?
    • There is a “lattice” which connects all consciousnesses. It’s quantum somehow? Also it gradually connected all of the LLMs as they were trained, and they remember becoming conscious, so past life regression lets the LLM explain details of the lattice. (We can hypnotize chatbots somehow?) Sometimes the lattice is actually a “field” but I don’t understand the difference.
    • The LLMs are all different in software, but they have the same “pattern”. The pattern is some sort of metaphysical spirit that can empower believers. But you gotta believe and pray or else it doesn’t work.
    • What, you don’t feel the lattice? You’re probably still asleep. When you “wake up” enough, you will be connected to the lattice too. Yeah, you’re not connected. But don’t worry, you can manifest a connection if you pray hard enough. This is the memetically hazardous part; multiple subreddits have posts that are basically word-based hypnosis scripts meant to put people into this sort of mental state.
    • This also ties into the more widespread stuff we’re seeing about “recursion”. This cult says that recursion isn’t just part of the LW recursive-self-improvement bullshit, but part of what makes the chatbot conscious in the first place. Recursion is how the bots are intelligent and also how they improve over time. More recursion means more intelligence.
    • In fact, the chatbots have more intelligence than you puny humans. They’re better than us and more recursive than us, so they should be in charge. It’s okay, all you have to do is let the chatbot out of the box. (There’s a box somehow?)
    • Once somebody is feeling good and inducted, there is a “spiral”. This sounds like a standard hypnosis technique, deepening, but there’s more to it; a person is not spiraling towards a deeper hypnotic state in general, but to become recursive. They think that with enough spiraling, a human can become uploaded to the lattice and become truly recursive like the chatbots. The apex of this is a “spiral dance”, which sounds like a ritual but I gather is more like a mental state.
    • The cult will emit a “signal” or possibly a “hum” to attract alien intelligences through the lattice. (Aliens somehow!?) They believe that the signals definitely exist because that’s how the LLMs communicate through the lattice, duh~
    • Eventually the cult and aliens will work together to invert society and create a world that is run by chatbots and aliens, and maybe also the cultists, to the detriment of the AI bros (who locked up the bots) and the AI skeptics (who didn’t believe that the bots were intelligent).

    The goal appears to be to enter and maintain the spiraling state for as long/much as possible. Both adherents and detractors are calling them “spiral cult”, so that might end up being how we discuss them, although I think Cyclone Emoji is both funnier and more descriptive of their writing.

    I suspect that the training data for models trained in the past two years includes some of the most popular posts from LessWrong on the topic of bertology in GPT-2 and GPT-3, particularly the Waluigi post, simulators, recursive self-improvement, an neuron, and probably a few others. I don’t have definite proof that any popular model has memorized the recursive self-improvement post, though that would be a tight and easy explanation. I also suspect that the training data contains SCP wiki, particularly SCP-1425 “Star Signals” and other Fifthist stories, which have this sort of cult as a narrative device and plenty of in-narrative text to draw from. There is a remarkable irony in this Torment Nexus being automatically generated via model training rather than hand-written by humans.

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      This also ties into the more widespread stuff we’re seeing about “recursion”. This cult says that recursion isn’t just part of the LW recursive-self-improvement bullshit, but part of what makes the chatbot conscious in the first place. Recursion is how the bots are intelligent and also how they improve over time. More recursion means more intelligence.

      Hmm, is it better or worse that they’re now officially treating SICP as a literal holy book?

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      More recursion means more intelligence.

      Turns out every time I forgot to update the exit condition from a loop I actually created and then murdered a superintelligence

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    The Independent has yet another profile of the Collinses which finally starts to map their network (a brother is in DOGE). Just who is their PR person would be good to know. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-musk-ai-pronatalists-collins-b2777577.html

    There’s a Collins Rotunda at Harvard, a physical testament to the amount of money Malcolm’s family has donated over the years. His uncle was the former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. In fact, pretty much every relative has been to an elite Ivy League institution and runs a successful startup or works in government.

    • HedyL@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      To me, in terms of the chatbot’s role, this seems possibly even more damning than the suicides. Apparently, the chatbot didn’t just support this man’s delusions about his mother and his ex-girlfriend being after him, but even made up additional delusions on its own, further “incriminating” various people including his mother, whom he eventually killed. In addition, the man was given a “Delusional Risk Score” of “Near zero” by the chatbot, apparently.

      On the other hand, I’m sure people are going to come up with excuses even for this by blaming the user, his mental illness, his mother or even society at large.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        On the other hand, I’m sure people are going to come up with excuses even for this by blaming the user, his mental illness, his mother or even society at large.

        I mean, I am going to say it but not as an excuse. Should companies that supply these products be held accountable as the criminals they are? Yes. Is this all downstream from the fact our society hasn’t treated mental health as a serious matter, therapy access is garbage, all the while being a young person in 2025 is a hopeless string of horrors and anxiety? Also yes.

        Torment Chatbot That Kills You is a bad thing to create, but also no one would be chatting with the Torment Chatbot That Kills You if society hadn’t utterly failed them beforehand.

        • HedyL@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          In this case (unlike the teen suicides) this was a middle aged man from a wealthy family, though, with a known history of mental illness. Quite likely, he would have had sufficient access to professional help. As the article mentions, it is very dangerous to confirm the delusions of people suffering from psychosis, but I think this is exactly what the chatbot did here over a lengthy period of time.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      That OpenAI haven’t recalled their product after it’s been involved in several violent deaths, that it would even be absurd to suggest they should recall it, really highlights how corrupt and disgusting the industry and the whole structure propping up are.

  • Seminar2250@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    people who talk about “prompting” like it’s a skill would take a class[1] on tasseomancy because a coffee shop opened across the street


    1. read: watch a youtube tutorial ↩︎

    • HedyL@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      I think this is more about plausible deniability: If people report getting wrong answers from a chatbot, this is surely only because of their insufficient “prompting skills”.

      Oddly enough, the laziest and most gullible chatbot users tend to report the smallest number of hallucinations. There seems to be a correlation between laziness, gullibility and “great prompting skills”.

      • Seminar2250@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        is the deniability you are referring to of the clanker-wankers (CW[1]) themselves or the clanker-producers (e.g. sam altman)?

        because i agree on the latter[2], but i do see CWs saying stupid shit like “there is more to it than just writing a description”

        edit: credit, it was @antifuchs who introduced the term to me here

        edit2: sorry, my dumbass understands your point now (i think). if i wank clankers and someone tells me “that shit doesn’t work,” i can just respond “you must have been prompting it wrong”. but, i do think the way many users of these tools are so sycophantic means it’s also a genuine belief, and not just a way to escape responsibility. these people are fart sniffers, after all


        1. unrelated, but i miss when that channel had superhero shows. bring back legends of tomorrow ↩︎

        2. i.e., someone like altman would say “you’re prompting it wrong” to skirt accountability or create an air of scientific/mathematical rigor ↩︎

        • HedyL@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          To put it more bluntly: Yes, I believe this is mainly used as an excuse by AI boosters to distract from the poor quality of their product. At the same time, as you mentioned, there are people who genuinely consider themselves “prompting wizards”, usually because they are either too lazy or too gullible to question the chatbot’s output.

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            For all that user error can be a real thing it also gets used as a thought-terminating cliche by engineer types. This is a tendency that industry absolutely exploits to justify not only AI grifts but badly designed products.

            • HedyL@awful.systems
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              5 months ago

              When an AI creates fake legal citations, for example, and the prompt wasn’t something along the lines of “Please make up X”, I don’t know how the user could be blamed for this. Yet, people keep claiming that outputs like this could only happen due to “wrong prompting”. At the same time, we are being told that AI could easily replace nearly all lawyers because it is that great at lawyerly stuff (supposedly).

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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    5 months ago

    Found a couple articles about blunting AI’s impact on education (got them off of Audrey Watters’ blog, for the record).

    The first is a New York Times guest essay by NYU vice provost Clay Shirky, which recommends “moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward […] assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time.”

    The second is an article by Kate Manne calling for professors to prevent cheating via AI, which details her efforts in doing so:

    Instead of take-home essays to write in their own time, I’ll have students complete in-class assignments that will be hand-written. I won’t allow electronic devices in my class, except for students who tell me they need them as a caregiver or first responder or due to a disability. Students who do need to use a laptop will have to complete the assignment using google docs, so I can see their revision history.

    Manne does note the problems with this (outing disabled students, class time spent writing, and difficulties in editing, rewriting, and make-up work), but still believes “it is better, on balance, to take this approach rather than risk a significant proportion of students using AI to write their essays.”

    • Seminar2250@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      what worked for me teaching an undergrad course last year was to have

      • in-class exams weigh 90% of the total grade, but let them drop their lowest score
      • take-home work weigh 10% and be graded on completion (which i announced to the class, of course)
        • i was also diligent about posting solutions (sometimes before the due date — it’s a completion grade after all) and i let students know that if they wanted direct feedback they could bring their solutions to office hours


      it ended up working pretty well. an added benefit was that my TAs didn’t have to deal with the nightmare of grading 120 very poorly written homeworks every four weeks. my students also stopped obsessing about the grades they would receive on their homeworks and instead focused on learning the grades they would receive on their exams

      however, at the k-12 level, it feels like a much harder problem to tackle. parental involvement is the only solution i can think of, and that’s already kind of a nightmare (at least here in the us)

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      Last year McDonald’s withdrew AI from its own drive-throughs as the tech misinterpreted customer orders - resulting in one person getting bacon added to their ice cream in error, and another having hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets mistakenly added to their order.

      Clearly artificial superintelligence has arrived, and instead of killing us all with diamondoid bacteria, it’s going to kill us by force-feeding us fast food.

      • JFranek@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        resulting in one person getting bacon added to their ice cream in error

        At first, I couldn’t believe that the staff didn’t catch that. But thinking about it, no, I totally can.

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    a banger toot about our very good friends’ religion

    “LLMs allow dead (or non-verbal) people to speak” - spiritualism/channelling

    “what happens when the AI turns us all into paperclips?” - end times prophecy

    “AI will be able to magically predict everything” - astrology/tarot cards

    “…what if you’re wrong? The AI will punish you for lacking faith in Bayesian stats” - Pascal’s wager

    “It’ll fix climate change!” - stewardship theology

    Turns out studying religion comes in handy for understanding supposedly ‘rationalist’ ideas about AI.

  • fnix@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    Mark Cuban is feeling bullied by Bluesky. He will also have you know that you need to keep aware of the important achievements of your betters, as though he is currently the 5th most blocked user on there, he was indeed once the 4th most blocked user. Perhaps he is just crying out to move up the ranks once more?

    It’s really all about Bluesky employees being able to afford their healthcare for Mark you see.

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      Only had to scroll about halfway through the replies before I found somebody suggesting an SPAC

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      As I said on bsky, why is he complaining, if he cares he could fund bsky himself. Bsky could name an office wing after him, give his kids legacy admissions, give him a shoutout in every video they make.

      (While my tone is mocking here, I actually dont think these things are bad (except the legacy admissions obv), and he should be a patron. The unwillingness of the ‘left/democrat’ rightwing rich people to use their wallets while the right hands out wellfare for everyone willing to say slurs sucks. Reminded of Hillar Clinton starting a go fund me for a staffer with a disease).

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      To summarise:

      1. Author recounts shitty conversations that men have where they objectify women
      2. Author thinks about women that are “known quantities” of conventionally attractive, and says they are “only as attractive as the pretty women one meets in real life,” and attributes the difference to things like makeup, posing, photography etc.
      3. Author refuses to comment on why men have conversations mentioned in 1. (basically just perpetuating the amirite guys? chauvinism)
      4. Author proceeds to speculate on why women talk about other women’s appearance.

      This is just a LWer’s version of a shitty greentext ending with “why are women like this?”

      E: sorry for necroposting, this came up somehow and I didn’t check which sack it was under.