Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      In French, ChatGPT sounds like « Chatte, j’ai pété » meaning “Pussy, I farted”.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      This bounced off of the earlier stub about LLM recipes to create a new cooking show: Chef Jippity. The contestants are all sous chefs at a new restaurant, with the head of the kitchen being some dumbass who blindly follows the instructions of an LLM. Can you work around the robot to create edible food or will Chef Jippity run this whole thing into the ground and lose everyone their jobs? Find out Thursday on Food Network!

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Ziz was arraigned on Monday, according to The Baltimore Banner. She apparently was not very cooperative:

    As the judge asked basic questions such as whether she had read the indictment and understood the maximum possible penalties, [Ziz] LaSota chided the “mock proceedings” and said [US Magistrate Douglas R.] Miller was a “participant in an organized crime ring” led by the “states united in slavery.”

    She pulled the Old Man from Scene 24 gag:

    Please state your name for the record, the court clerk said. “Justice,” she replied. What is your age? “Timeless.” What year were you born? “I have been born many times.”

    The lawyers have accepted that sometimes a defendant is uncooperative:

    Prosecutors said the federal case would take about three days to try. Defense attorney Gary Proctor, in an apparent nod to how long what should have been a perfunctory appearance on Monday ended up taking, called the estimate “overly optimistic.”

    Folks outside the USA should be reassured that this isn’t the first time that we’ve tried somebody with a loose grasp of reality and a found family of young violent women who constantly disrupt the trial; Ziz isn’t likely to walk away.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      She wants to be a martyr so bad, doesn’t she? She desperately needs to be punished for the sake of her beliefs (and the things she did made others do). All for the great cause of… uh… y’know, the important thing she’s being silenced for. Things like that.

    • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I have some thoughts about this goober (Simon Willison) that I need to get out of my head:

      First the positives:

      • I think he’s actually an experienced software engineer.
      • I think he care to check and test the LLM output.

      But, by his own admission:

      • He uses LLM for tasks he knows well (So easier to check and little negative impact on learning)
      • He works mostly on hobby projects (so no obligation to actually maintain the stuff)
      • He can choose to not use new libraries (which in a professional setting is not always a luxury you can afford)

      Tl;dr: an experienced dev who uses clankers to churn out tons of technically functional hobby software and thinks this gives him right to speak for all software engineers.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        He’s also found a lucrative niche being the “serious” AI booster. No doubt he gets something from it, if nothing else consulting work.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        i haven’t tried to spend thought on the why of his posting (I have better thoughts I can waste time on), but if you’re right about the points you guess on then I argue his position and actions are even more fucking dangerous (because those won’t shine through easily to those of lesser experience unless very specifically be made to show with care and forethought)

        either way, he remains muted in my feed. for being interminably tiresome and annoying as fuck.

        • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I have better thoughts I can waste time on

          Me too. Unfortunately I don’t get to pick my intrusive thoughts.

          • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Me too. Unfortunately I don’t get to pick my intrusive thoughts.

            Heh

            there’s one for the comeback vault

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      So I’m not double checking their work because that’s more of a time and energy investment than I’m prepared for here. I also do not have the perspective of someone who has actually had to make the relevant top-level decisions. But caveats aside I think there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn here:

      • It’s actually heartening to see that even the LW comments open by bringing up how optimistic this analysis is about the capabilities of LLM-based systems. “Our chatbot fucked up” has some significant fiscal downsides that need to be accounted for.

      • The initial comparison of direct API costs is interesting because the work of setting up and running this hypothetical replacement system is not trivial and cannot reasonably be outsourced to whoever has the lowest cost of labor due. I would assume that the additional requirements of setting up and running your own foundation model similarly eats through most of the benefits of vertical integration, even before we get into how radically (and therefore disastrously) that would expand the capabilities of most companies. Most organizations that aren’t already tech companies couldn’t do it, and those that could will likely not see the advertised returns.

      • I’m not sure how much of the AI bubble we’re in is driven even by an expectation of actual financial returns at this point. To what extent are we looking at an investor and managerial class that is excited to put “AI” somewhere on their reports because that’s the current Cutting Edge of Disruptive Digital Transformation into New Paradigms of Technology and Innovation and whatever else all these business idiots think they’re supposed to do all day.

      I’m actually going to ignore the question of what happens to the displaced workers here because the idea that this job is something that earns a decent living wage is still just as dead if it’s replaced by AI or outsourced to whoever has the fewest worker protections. That said, I will pour one out for my frontline IT comrades in South Africa and beyond. Whenever this question is asked the answer is bad for us.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I’ve worked in an adjacent field (workforce planning) and I deliver B2B software support for a living, so I too have Thoughts.

        At least here in Schwedenland, contact centers have been filed down by relentless cost and tech pressure to be about as automated as can be. You have websites with FAQs, simple chatbots that basically repeat the FAQ for those for whom reading more than a sentence of text is too hard, phone trees to gatekeep you from the Inner Sanctum, etc. etc. The end result is that the actual people taking the calls are gonna be the ones who can make human decisions - troubleshoot a complex issue, handle insurance claims, upsell your mortgage.

        Trying to att LLM voice tech to that is just going to add another filter between the customer and the center, with the additional reputational risk of the robot fucking up and losing the customer.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    just found out about the incredibly dystopian US prison “ADX”

    Inside the federal supermax tucked away in Colorado’s high desert, prisoners spend 22 to 24 hours a day locked alone inside concrete cells that are smaller than a standard parking space. The prison, formally called United States Penitentiary Florence Administrative Maximum Facility but better known as ADX, has earned the nickname “The Alcatraz of the Rockies” because of its harsh conditions.

    Contact with others is extremely limited; programming, such as anger management or religious services, is broadcast over televisions in the cells, while psychological evaluations happen through the steel doors. Belongings are also strictly limited and prisoners aren’t allowed to hang photographs or drawings on their walls. Exercise time out the cell happens alone inside large cages called “dog runs”, where prisoners can only walk a few paces each direction. Prisoners are given virtual reality goggles to simulate the outdoors or community. A former warden once called ADX a “clean version of hell,” and said that living there was “far much worse than death.” Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are both incarcerated at ADX.

    https://boltsmag.org/death-row-clemency-adx-supermax/

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    New York Times asks the question on everyone’s minds: Is ChatGPT Conscious?

    The piece is, unsurprisingly, a complete pile of hot garbage, openly refusing to recognise the difference between lying machines and human beings. This is probably Pivot material.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    From the r/SunoAI subreddit: “Sick of having to come up with prompts”.

    Hey y’all, looking for some tips here. I like what I’ve made so far with Suno but now I’m kind of hitting a wall with ideas for prompts. Why doesn’t Suno also have a feature to write prompts for you? Like just hit a button the says “new prompt” and then hit make song when it comes up with something that sounds interesting! Thoughts?

    (Via Dan of the Year.)

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Next step: “I’m sick of having to press the ‘new prompt’ button, why doesn’t …”

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      FFS so many promptfondlers and gish-gallopers in there. Echoes of pro-crapto (can’t criticize if you don’t buy in, use case is coming bro, it’s actually decentralized)

      Edit the worst thing isnt’t the number of fondlers, it’s the upvotes they’re getting.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    back on my posting sorta off topic shit: well, we’ve talked a bit about anti-academia nutters, so here’s a developing story about (western) academia having a normal one.

    Headline: Oxford’s Rafflesia Messaging Sparks Debate Over Representation, Scientific Credit, and Global South Visibility

    My summary: in an announcement, oxford performs erasure by only really naming researchers from oxford amongst a team where most of the contributions were from southeast asian researchers.

    Pastor Malabrigo Jr. and Adriane B. Tobias are listed as the first and second authors, while other authors are from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Bogor Botanical Gardens, University of Bengkulu, and Forest Research Institute Malaysia. The Author Contributions section also shows that Southeast Asian researchers wrote most of the country-specific content, compiled distribution data, and produced scientific figures. Yet none of these appear in the Oxford press release as scientific authorities.

    This article is by “scientific watchdog” with a “.id” domain, which is Indonesian. Seems a little bespoke for the article, but, hey, all the facts are verifiable.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’m going to laugh if they try to spin it as “we’re not being racist, we just wanted to get as much institutional clout as possible and avoided prominently featuringanyone from other institutions!”

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Best part is the footnote:

      About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.

        “Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.”

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends

      (His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is… of its time

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          We were reading through various classics for bookclub and we noticed how many books had a ~14 year old girl has romantic/sexual relationship/gets abused by 30+ year old man. Snow Crash was one of those. I know popular thinking on this has changed a lot the past 20+ years but still always a shock, esp when you realize how much you didnt notice it.

          Also a reason why the first evil dead aged very badly. Dont show that to people without warning them unless you want them to leaf.

        • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Yup that’s one of them. The cryptonomicon protagonist no-nut-Novembering all the way to the ww2 treasure is another special fave

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Years ago, I said, “I’ve never finished a Stephenson novel.” Someone replied, “Neither has he.”

    • aspragg@ohai.social
      0·
      2 months ago

      @gerikson @BlueMonday1984

      Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, “literally” has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means “figuratively”.

      …sorry, I meant it literally also means “figuratively”.

      …no, wait, that’s just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means “figuratively”.

      (Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        (Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)

        Bit late to tilt at this windmill tbh. Prescriptivist pedantry is prohibited past puberty. This was decreed by Maximilian D. English (the D stands for dictionary) in 1727. I don’t make the rules (MDE does)

      • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth

        but he never helps huck finn out financially?

        pretty shit story, mark

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word “really” as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. “Very” had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant “truthfully” (as in “verify” or “verity”). If I say something is “truly massive”, am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of “massive”? Is a “proper banger” of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now?

        “Literally, not figuratively”, said in a Sterling Archer voice.

        The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”

        — Merriam-Webster

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Bloomberg covers the disastrous impact of AI upon food recipes, while still putting an “AI overview” on the top of the page…

    In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.

    Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.

    All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. “No matter how clever the AI is,” she said in a recent interview, “it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.”

    […]

    For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

    This holiday season is on track to be Forrest’s slowest in years. She fears that if more content creators give up, the AI won’t have new content to draw from — except content generated by AI. It may get to a point where “AI is just talking to itself,” and home cooks are gambling with the results, she said.