Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like “OpenAI” and “google deepmind,” their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.
also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”
finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics
it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics
hell of a stinger there at the end
Not a cult.
from r/EnoughMuskSpam
Amazing claim considering there are I think about 10k cybertrucks in the world right now, and all of them are broken. Ok I admit, that is due to the wiper recall, but even if you ignore the wiper recall the amount of broken cybertrucks is massive.
Lol. What, are we going to be installing Candy Crush on our robots? Expecting to be able to project recurring revenue from a humanoid robot based on smartphone numbers is a new kind of ignorance.
I’m sure Candy Crush will come pre-installed.
“Hello helpdesk? My fleet of humanoid workers I paid 500k for apiece aren’t at their workstations churning out fabric piecework, they’re all playing Candy Crush on their iPhones…”
I like the wet your finger and stick it up in the air forecasting model. OK - there’s 1.5 billion pocket-sized iPhones - so let’s say 2 billion person-sized robots, you know,
I’m wondering about the supply chain issues just making the extra half billion robots, might be kind of a big deal. Are there enough rare minerals in the whole world to do this? Lithium batteries? Computer chips?
Also, yeah, valuation based on revenue and not EBITA / profit margins, but whatever.
Haha this reminds me of humanoid robots belong in the trash
Thank you —she and this video are new to me - very good!
heck yeah I love
Physics Jenny NicholsonAngela Collierindeed! I rarely get to watch them because of the length, but they’re always so good, thoughtful and thorough. one of best talking heads on yt I know of
format/delivery is technically more than just talking head, I guess, but ykwim
seemingly yet more chatgpt jailbreaks just by providing input that barrierbreaks some n times, and then readily provides details
y’know, if I were the one making safety nets for these systems, I’d make them return such kind of results (or other typical honeypot type behaviour). and it’s possible that that’s what oai did. but it seems extremely unlikely that that’s what they did, because it goes again the bayfucker gottagofast philosophy (and, frankly, against the level of competence I’ve seen displayed in the genml space overall)
It turns out the ‘I’ in “AI” stood for “Linux” all along!
User friendliness aside (who in their right mind would want arbitrary code execution except shitty and indeterministic?), I sandbox stuff at my job* and it’s hard to evaluate how secure / privacy preserving this is without more details.
If they’re running a full fledged VM and super extra careful around the sandbox boundary** it’s probably fine; otherwise it seems perhaps a bit loosey-goosey.
Someone will eventually try to run a Monero cryptocurrency miner in it if they haven’t already. So I hope they have their timeouts and resource limits in order (actually I hope they don’t, for the lols).
* But like no one told me how to do it or gave me a certificate or anything I just had to do my best
** This is often way scarier than programmers are used to, unless they’ve written a secure parser before. I wrote a vulnerability into my code a few years back when I was younger and foolish, by trusting an array length from inside the sandbox. My coworker found it while fuzzing the code.
I only visit twitter when I run out of lemmy and mastodon and I’m still not sleepy enough but can’t be arsed to read a book.
You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the “New” button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it’s a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.
I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.
I use it, but at least on my browser the
nextbutton is disabled so I can only see the most recent page of updates. I treat that as a the jank is a feature moment, though; if there’s more than one page of new comments, I’m forced to stop reading.
yeah, it’s a Lemmy breakage
I also use the new comments page, and when lemmy default frontend broke the next page, I looked around and found https://alexandrite.app, which fixes this page. EG https://alexandrite.app/awful.systems/c/techtakes?type=Comments&sort=New
The downside is that, in implementing an infinite scroll, it unloads comments that you’re not looking at, so ctrl-f will be unreliable.
The Death of the Junior Developer
Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there’s no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we’ll have AGI by then and it’ll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer’s time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.
Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they don’t alter the deal further).
Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.
I’m oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didn’t know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).
“DevOps” is a word meaning “sysadmin who can still use the command line”
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was “Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren’t software engineers and hell, they don’t even call themselves engineers”.
a euphemism treadmill of “keeping shit working”
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who’s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with “Venereal Disease” and passing through “Special Clinic” on the way to “Sexual Health Clinic”. Same thankless job, just different labels.
Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.
I don’t feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before
Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, don’t answer that please.
There are “sysadmins” who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to using the command line.
…what… What would they use instead?
having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux
How do they sysadmin a server that doesn’t have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?
I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted
then there are others
i’m at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes it’s just not enough, cos it’s Babby’s First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath
this is such a sad slop. i wouldn’t guess it’s yegge, it’s so far from his style when he used to write himself.
If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.
As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.
Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.
no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:
Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.
Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.
I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature
this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)
thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?
The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool “to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge” is so fucking galling.
It’s also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to “opt-in” could simply install a plugin.
according to Mozilla’s track record, they’re making it a core feature so it’s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and they’ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit
we’ve also only got mozilla’s word that this shit can be disabled once it’s in production Firefox at all, and we’ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozilla’s AI team does with consent — they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it
In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. […] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.
It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this garbage approach.
Of course here at awful.systems we’ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.
… the Hell?
Yeah it’s wild. Even most AI grifters don’t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we’d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.
ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone
where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into
about:configto kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymoresigh
also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, …
go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share
Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if they’re useful to anyone:
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket false extensions.pocket.api 0.0.0.0 extensions.pocket.enabled false extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs false extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp v1 extensions.pocket.showHome false extensions.pocket.site 0.0.0.0 services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket falseah, handy
iirc I nuked a few more things, api keys and such
@self @froztbyte “We think you should have the freedom to…” 🤮
we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs
Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!
But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what’s best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there’s been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is better than some but not at all innocent.
Pour one out for opera presto, which I will always mourn.
Mozilla: Hey, we’re going to take you out to a restaurant and get you a burger, as a treat!
The restaurant:
surprise lemmy feature discovered:
oh good lord. we went live a year ago
oh hell. we’re beating all my initial survivability projections by a lot
do we throw an instance birthday party thread? will there be cocktails? will the deployment get mopey if I don’t buy it more disk space? (yes, eventually)
Before: searching in Internet Explorer “how to install Chrome”
Now:
This display of a man hoping AI reclaims the awe in technology he once felt as a 17 year-old:
Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/06/25/opinion-ai-altman-silicon-valley-revival/
I’ve had this open in a background tab, reading it in pieces as time allows, and I only just noticed one of it exhibits one of the things I like noticing about various publishers’ system fucking up: a lurking page title before a post-publish edit
the page title as it is in my browser right now:
Opinion | AI boom led by antihero Altman is reviving Valley dreams. the page title as it displays in the content area:Opinion \n Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory.the url slug also seems to be mostly the former - most of these renames on various publishing platforms seem to do that (keep the original slug instead of a rewrite+redirect)
can’t make direct guesses as to the exact reason why this one was updated whenever it was, but I expect public perception/reception might’ve been part of that?
it is also something that’s been of passive interest to me over some years: things as published often shift underfoot, and the time at which someone reads something then shares on and then someone else reads … there might be quite a substantive difference in the contents of such things at the times. this ranges from the benign (inserting late-received comments, errata, etc), to a complete contextual/content rework. I’ve often thought that there’s a possibly for a really interesting part project there…
Its former* superfund glory.
*Oh wait https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232/
One last hurrah for the EPA and the clean air act before the scotus shanks the administrative state in a day or two.
unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice
also
God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better
idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical
Zuckerberg Accuses Rivals of Trying to Create AI-Powered God
Title says it all
okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I’m featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt
… which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast
According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value
tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren’t foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it
A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is “Who is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,” or “what are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”
Questions asked by the terminally deranged.
Or somebody looking for ‘the worst posts online’ cringe compilation. Musks CEOs must be able to build their companies products not be able to read spreadsheets was a good example.
How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking “I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this”.
Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.
Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.
I’ve thought about this a bunch in the past, and tbh the only answer I’ve come to over many forms of it “fuck the fucking USA”
it’s a place that is structurally built to allow for that kind of evasion and abuse to happen
As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.
And if you don’t know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?
Microsoft’s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware
With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding,"
Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it
Ew… stay away from my content, you creep!
see it was wrong when those dirty pirate hippies tried to do it but it’s totally fine when microsoft does it because microsoft can’t be wrong, see? easy
Never thought I’d see Microsoft suggest downloading a car, but I should have seen it coming.
I think even wilder is that he thinks content which has explicitly been labeled “do not scrape except for search engine indexing” is a “gray area” with regards to scraping for AI. Like, that’s exactly what it says not to do!
He isn’t totally wrong re the unspoken rule, but he forgets the second unspoken rule, that the first rule only applies to human being doing entertainment not corporations trying to make money.
Here’s the whole thing from that great quote. Sorkin is not a hard-hitting interviewer, but he just asks the incredibly obvious questions and Suleyman swerves and dodges like a MF while pronouncing at him in an English listen-to-me-you-pleb voice.
I might have been wrong on the capabilities of ML, this is very impressive. (twitter link), was I wrong and Yud right?
And be careful that you don’t lose yourself in the eyes of a pig.
Don’t worry a heavily edited 3 minute video filled with inconsistencies promised me that AI movies were right around the corner. No matter that the unearthly writhing of the backgrounds makes me simultaneously motion sick and stressed out, I’m sure they’ll work that out.
