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.)
I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always “ya but what is intelligence” or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while I’ve tried to use the example that if these “AI coding” things are tools, why would I use a tool that’s never perfect? For example I wouldn’t reach for a 10mm wrench that wasn’t 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have “it could still be useful” responses.
I’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR:
Age, Sex, Location RandomizationI’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
On a semi-related sidenote, part of me feels that the AI bubble has turned programming into a bit of a cultural punchline.
On one front, the stench of Eau de Tech Asshole that AI creates has definitely rubbed off on the field, and all the programmers who worked at OpenAI et al. have likely painted it as complicit in the bubble’s harms.
On another front, the tech industry’s relentless hype around AI, combined with its myriad failures (both comical and nightmarish) have cast significant doubt on the judgment of tech as a whole (which has rubbed off on programming as well) - for issues of artistic judgment specifically, the slop-nami’s given people an easy way to dismiss their statements out of hand.
sidenote
you have so many of these! it’s amazing! are you going to publish soon? it seems like it might need a whole guide of its own!
moderately barbed jesting aside, a serious question: have you spoken with any programmers/artists/researchers/… ? so many of your comments have “part of me feels” parts hitting pop-concern-direction things and, like, I get it, but. have you spoken with any of them? what were those conversations like? what did you take away from them? what stuck with you that you want to share?
To my eternal sadness, this guy makes a decent point about the horror possibly continuing (yellow site has mixed takes and adds claims about “if we didn’t have to pay for training, we’d be profitable” by sam and dario ).
If this bears out, it might be that the only thing that’ll end this bubble is the vibe shift & backlash against AI
i’d like to see some elaboration from the smiling man himself (when he’s back), since he seems to have some numbers on that
Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah “Let me use Copilot for Notepad”. “I’m going to sign into my account for Notepad”. What the fuck are you talking about. It’s Notepad.
I should never have to open the settings in Notepad. Reason being: it’s Notepad. God fuckin damn I hate the computer.
https://bsky.app/profile/iainnd.bsky.social/post/3lxdvmkua4227
I know everybody here has heard of it, but in the small chance it breaks containment: use notepad++ it is great.
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))
(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.
Good news, everyone! A Wronger has Thoughts about Female Attractiveness
30 karma, 15 comments. Very Rational.
To summarise:
- Author recounts shitty conversations that men have where they objectify women
- 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.
- Author refuses to comment on why men have conversations mentioned in 1. (basically just perpetuating the amirite guys? chauvinism)
- 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.
Enjoy this malicious prompt trying to find crapto secrets after a compromise
Textbook case of anthropomorphisation from The Guardian, trying to posit that AI systems are capable of feeling pain.
You want my unsolicited opinion, machines cannot feel pain/emotion, only imitate it, and the rise of LLMs have made this crystal clear. Much like with being creative or making art, feeling genuine emotion is the exclusive domain of human/animal minds.
It’s so bizarre to see AI get the benefit of a superposition of states where we all admit that these are not machines capable of thought, yet at the same time go through these stupid exercises where we pretend that they are.
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.
Tom is a top chap of generally correct opinions
Hot take: If a text extruder’s winning gold medals at your contest, that’s not a sign the text extruder’s good at something, that’s a sign your contest is worthless for determining skill.
Via, prob posted here already “Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code”, as the article is a month old.
It wasn’t posted yet in lemmy, did search. Yours was the only thing I found. So, I posted it in programming to rile people
Yeah I did a search for “stack overflow” and found zero results so think search was a bit buggy atm. Votes also not showing atm for example. Not sure if by design.
this might be a federation breakage, or the queue catching up
Sorry searched only locally forgot to mention that, but pretty quickly after the server came back up
They need debugging tools specifically designed for AI-generated solutions.
What the hell does that even mean, lmao?
Focus on AI tool literacy: Developers using AI tools daily show 88% favorability compared to 64% for weekly users. This suggests proper training and integration strategies significantly impact outcomes.
What kind of drugs are they on
What the hell does that even mean, lmao?
Feel like people are just reaching for things ‘clearly we need tools to help us with the process, so lets just call them debuggers for AI’
So the normal debuggers that we have for ages, right?
I assume these ‘ai debuggers’ are for looking inside the AI black box when they AI goes ‘yes I’m very sorry I will not do it again’ before doing it again.
but can you grift using these?
AI innovation in this space usually means automatically adding stuff to the model’s context.
It probably started meaning the (failed) build output got added in every iteration, but it’s entirely possible to feed the LLM debugger data from a runtime crash and hope something usable happens.
Second quote is classic “you must be prompting it wrong”. No, it can’t be that people which find a tool less useful will be using it less often.
I regret to inform you all that Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to AI-generated anime porn..
He’re hoping that the more he spends time gooning the more he’ll leave the rest of us alone. crosses fingers
He isnt the only weird fascist attracted to digital porn. And not just the rank and file.
sex weirdo (derogatory)
I’m sorry but this is zero percent surprising like ye of course he is, he was addicted to anime porn before AI generation probably
TIL that “Aris Thorne” is a character name favoured by ChatGPT - which means its presence is a reliable slop tell, lol
like the dumbass-ray version of Ballard calling multiple characters variants on “Traven”
what to do with this information
what to do with this information
If you know any sci-fi/fantasy mags, you should probably tell them about it to help them identify and reject slop more easily.
with a moment’s thought, it should be obvious that they are painfully aware, and with another moment’s thought that that’s where I found this out.
https://awful.systems/post/5168673/8320254 a third name has hit the towers.
Someone tried Adobe’s new Generative Fill “feature” (just the latest development in Adobe’s infatuation with AI) with the prompt “take this elf lady out of the scene”, and the results were…interesting:
There’s also an option to rate whatever the fill gets you, which I can absolutely see being used to sabotage the “feature”.
Please turn the elf girl into elf Grimes
Watch till end the third option made me choke on my drink it was way too funny
@BlueMonday1984 I was experimenting with generative fill and asked it to remove a person from a scene and “make the background yellow”. It made the person Chinese. No fucking joke.
Putting the “manic pixie” in manic pixie dream girl
Lesswronger reads about Orcas the first time in their life. Decided that training them to become smarter than humans is now the next important step.
(I’m very very far from an orca expert - basically everything I know about them I learned today.)
They made several posts [about] it, and just the opening bits are funny. I obv didn’t read any of them an only looked at the opening statements. I will produce a quote from each.
It is currently plausible (
352115%[1]23%) to me that average orcas have at least as high potential for being great scientists as the greatest human scientists, modulo their motivation for doing science[2].Yes, the weird percentage is in the text, the [1] footnote says 15%, no idea why they can’t edit their text normally.
(For speed of writing, I mostly don’t cite references. Feel free to ask me in the comments for references for some claims.)
Context: I think there’s a ~17% chance that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.
And from the last article, two lines as a treat:
TLDR: I now think it’s <1% likely that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.
(I now think the relevant question is rather whether orcas might be >=+4std intelligent, since that might be enough for superhuman wisdom and thinking techniques to accumulate through generations, but I think it’s only 2% probable. (Still decently likely that they are near human level smart though.))
(Nice of the person to think of the orcas btw, just wish it was more preservation than 'how can we make these animals help us out).
E: apparently “An alternative approach to superbabies” is also about orcas, they just no longer stand behind it.
Can someone please look into this?
Ironically I just put down a deposit on a orca tattoo.
Finally, after years of research, we have managed to connect the smartest Orca to a text-to-speech device! What great wisdom will those superinteligent creatures bestow on us? How can we solve our world’s problems?
Eat the rich.
… What?
Like take your billionaires, right, roast them and then eat their flesh. Burn their yachts too. We can help.
Sadly, the orcas go after sailing boats not the big motorized yachts, less eat the rich and more eat the upper middle class.
That’s because we haven’t helped them achieve their full potential
FInally read the wikipedia page on orcas an hour ago, and boy do I have plans, let me start the wiki.
I haven’t clicked on any links here yet, this sounds like a bit, but because it’s LW I have to assume bad faith and that this is real.
E: lol real. Why wouldn’t they go for apes lol
The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me
All I need to know about HDI (human-dolphin interaction) (read: fuckin) is covered in many episodes of my favorite podcast Doughboys
They’re trying to be John Lilly, but with orcas and even more ketamine
That story mentions Carl Sagan but omits the detail that Peter the dolphin propositioned him. (It’s in the William Poundstone biography, IIRC.)
Larry Niven had a fixed idea about cetacean intelligence, and it showed up in mass-audience SF like Star Trek IV.
The story below is another example of really creepy things being done in the name of science in the postwar era.
I have three more examples of sapient marine mammals!
- whales warning the team of an impending solar flare in Stargate Atlantis via echolocation induced hallucinations
- the dolphins in hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy
- whales showing up to help in one book of Animorphs while they are morphed into dolphins
Gotta be trolling.
Somebody on LW also thought so, and they replied they are 100% serious. Which still could be trolling. Lot of effort for no payoff however. Personally I think this person is just very young. I can get a teenager going all in on this. (a teenager being this much into IQ stuff is pretty bad tbh).
I was thinking this also, like it’s the perfect parody of several lesswrong and EA memes: overly concerned with animal suffering/sapience, overly concerned with IQ stats, openly admitting to no expertise or even relevant domain knowledge but driven to pontificate anyway, and inspired by existing science fiction… I think the last one explains it and it isn’t a parody. As cinnasverses points out, Cetacean intelligence shows up occasionally in sci-fi. to add to the examples… sapient whales warning the team of an impending solar flare in Stargate Atlantis via echolocation induced hallucinations, the dolphins in hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, and the whales showing up to help in one book of Animorphs.
there’s having a favourite animal, then there’s whatever this is
what have the orcas done to deserve this
Dolphins tend to be pretty good hackers.
So perhaps orcas can be too.
Image description.
Still from the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995), on the left is Keanu Reeves playing Johnny Mnemonic in a black and white suit sitting in a chair with a large cyberpunk helmet on his face. He is gripping the chair tightly. On the right there is Jones the Dolphin, a model of a diseased looking dolphin swimming in a dirty small tank with a large cyberpunk implant on his face.
Ethan Marcotte’s given his thoughts on the new “America by Design” web page, noting how its shittiness aligns perfectly with the Trump administration’s values.
