this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilor, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.

PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and I'm bricking it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3595687/googles-flutter-framework-has-been-forked.html/

I’m currently using Flutter. It’s good! And useful! Much better than AI. It being mostly developed by Google has been a bit of a worry since Google is known to shoot itself in the foot by killing off its own products.

So while it’s no big deal to have an open source codebase forked, just wanted to highlight this part of the article:

Carroll also claimed that Google’s focus on AI caused the Flutter team to deprioritize desktop platforms, and he stressed the difficulty of working with the current Flutter team

Described as “Flutter+” by Carroll, Flock “will remain constantly up to date with Flutter, he said. Flock will add important bug fixes, and popular community features, which the Flutter team either can’t, or won’t implement.”

I hope this goes well!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

I know it's Halloween, but this popped up in my feed and was too spooky even for me 😱

As a side note, what are peoples feelings about Wolfram? Smart dude for sho, but some of the shit he says just comes across as straight up pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But can he out guru Big Yud in a 1v1 on Final Destination (fox only, no items) ? 🤔

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

The big difference is that Yud is unrigorous while Wolfram is a plagiarist. Or maybe putting it another way, Yud can't write proofs and Wolfram can't write bibliographies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

on a side note, I notice this passage in the review:

Wolfram refers incessantly to his "discovery" that simple rules can produce complex results. Now, the word "discovery" here is legitimate, but only in a special sense. When I took pre-calculus in high school, I came up with a method for solving systems of linear equations, independent of my textbook and my teacher: I discovered it. My teacher, more patient than I would be with adolescent arrogance, gently informed me that it was a standard technique, in any book on linear algebra, called "reduction to Jordan normal form", after the man who discovered it in the 1800s. Wolfram discovered simple rules producing complexity in just the same way that I discovered Jordan normal form.

this is certainly mistaken. I think the author or teacher must have meant RREF or something to that effect, not Jordan normal form

[–] [email protected] 1 points 30 minutes ago

Gauss–Jordan elimination, maybe?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

I mean yud is only really a guru on his own farts

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Microsoft found a fitting way to punish AI for collaborating with SEO spammers in generating slop: make it use the GitHub code review tools. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-refine-and-validate-code-review-suggestions-with-copilot-workspace-public-preview/

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

we really shouldn’t have let Microsoft both fork an editor and buy GitHub, of course they were gonna turn one into a really shitty version of the other

anyway check this extremely valuable suggestion from Copilot in one of their screenshots:

The error message 'userld and score are required' is unclear. It should be more specific, such as 'Missing userld or score in the request body'.

aren’t you salivating for a Copilot subscription? it turns a lazy error message into… no that’s still lazy as shit actually, who is this for?

  • a human reading this still needs to consult external documentation to know what userId and score are
  • a machine can’t read this
  • if you’re going for consistent error messages or you’re looking to match the docs (extremely likely in a project that’s in production), arbitrarily changing that error so it doesn’t match anything else in the project probably isn’t a great idea, and we know LLMs don’t do consistency
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

I want someone to fork the Linux kernel and then unleash like 10 Copilots to make PRs and review each other. No human intervention. Then plot the number of critical security vulnerabilities introduced over time, assuming they can even keep it compilable for long enough.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

@self did somebody make an extension that replaces github copilot with ELIZA yet

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Cursed .gov link:

https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-the-advancing-sustainable-development-through-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-ai-event/

TL;DR: Our main characters have bilked a very credulous US State Department. 100 Million tax dollars will now be converted into entropy. There will also be committees.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Go home Coursera, you're drunk.

Want to get even better results with GenAI? The new Google Prompting Essentials course will teach you 5 easy steps to write effective prompts for consistent, useful results.

Note: Got an email ad from Coursera. I had to highlight the message because the email's text was white-on-white.

How the chicken fried fuck does anyone make a course about "prompt engineering"? It's like seeing a weird sports guy systematize his pregame rituals and then sell a course on it.

Step 1: Grow a beard, preferably one like that Leonidas guy in 300.

Step 2: If your team wins, never wash those clothes, and be sure to wear those clothes every game day. That's not stank, that's the luck diffusing out into the universe.

Step 3: Use the force to make the ball go where it needs to go. Also use it to scatter and confuse the opposition.

Step 4: Ask God(s) to intervene, he/she/they love(s) your team more!

Step 5: Change allegiance to a better team if things go downhill, because that means your current team has lost the Mandate of Heaven.

That will be $200 please.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

Thanks, Google. You know, I used to be pretty good at getting consistent, useful results from your search engine, but the improvements you've made to it since the make me feel like I really might need a fucking prompt engineering course to find things on the internet these days. By which I mean something that'll help you promptly engineer the internet back into a form where search engines work correctly.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:

In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.

Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people's livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (3 children)

I thought the Raytheon ads for tanks and knife missiles in the Huntsville, AL airport were bad, but this takes the whole goddamn cake.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 26 minutes ago

Ah, Huntsville. Where the downtown convention hall is the Werner von Braun Center.

🎶 the man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience 🎶

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

You don't get it, this is a likely bribe

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

yikes, good call! I couldn't get past the Borderlands 2 vibes, but you're right.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago

it's like generalized manufacturing consent

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Raytheon can at least claim they're helping kill terrorists or some shit like that, Artisan's just going out and saying "We ruin good people's lives for money, and we can help you do that too"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago

Grift tech that claims to do awful shit that ruins everyone's lives, but really just makes Stanford grads sit around pretending to invent something while funneling VC money directly in their bloodstreams.

You'd think these would overflow the evil scale and end up back into being ethical but really they're just doing the same thing as the non-vaporware evil companies with just some extra steps.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Right? At least it the knife missile does what it says on the tin.

Apologies in advance for the Rick and Morty reference, but Artisan seems to be roughly congruent to "Simple Rick" candy bars.

The (poorly executed) distillation of the life's work of actually talented and interesting people, sold as a direct replacement, to fill a void that the customer doesn't even know exists.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Is there a group that more consistently makes category errors than computer scientists? Can we mandate Philosophy 101 as a pre-req to shitting out research papers?

Edit: maybe I need to take a break from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

Chat-GPT-TFSD-21guns can have a little anthropomorphism, as a treat.

  • Sam Altman, probably
[–] [email protected] 11 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Zuck says lots more slop coming your way soon

"I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” the Meta CEO said. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time."

Facebook is already one Meta platform where AI generated content, sometimes referred to as “AI slop,” is increasingly common.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago

mm I wonder what kind of content they'll want to use that for

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

russian dude generates botslop on dating apps, makes 5000+ girls talk to bot, chooses the one that stayed with chatgpt: https://xcancel.com/biblikz/status/1752335415812501757#m

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Ok so I read the thread as translated by google. Some notes:

  1. System was set up to also use some image recognition so it could filter for some classic incel-type shit, like:
  • believers
  • zodiac sign written
  • doesn’t work
  • show breasts in photos
  • photos with flowers
  1. His entire correspondence with these women was done by chatgpt. including making dates and promising gifts for those dates. He later gives gpt calendar access to avoid a two dates to the prom situation.
  2. Did he continue using gpt to talk to his fiance? yes. Did he feign responsiveness in his texting with gpt? also yes. When she started talking about going to weddings, did it generate a marriage proposal out of the blue, and prompt him as to whether or not the message should be sent? also yes.

just... fuck.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago

bet tesla didn't mean that when he said "man made horrors beyond comprehension"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago

The entire motivation of AI dev afaict is to have a new mommy to take care of you, I guess this is one way to do it. 🙄🙄🙄

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fortune magazine reports:

In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Wait we created a market and people are manipulating it in order to profit because it turns out market manipulation pays the same or more than being a ~~banker~~ ~~investor~~ "superpredictor" but is much easier?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Amazon used an AI-generated image as a cover for 1922's Nosferatu, and it got publicly torn apart on Twitter:

On a personal note, it feels to me like any use of AI, regardless of context, is gonna be treated as a public slight against artists, if not art as a concept going forward. Arguably, it already has been treated that way for a while.

You want me to point to a high-profile example of this kinda thing, I'd say Eagan Tilghman provided a textbook example a year ago, after his Scooby Doo/FNAF fan crossover (a VA redub came out a year later BTW) accidentally ignited a major controversy over AI and nearly got him blacklisted from animation.

I specifically bring this up because Tilghman wasn't some random CEO or big-name animator - he was just some random college student making a non-profit passion project with basically zero budget or connections. It speaks volumes about how artists view AI that even someone like him got raked over the coals for using it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Unfortunately it's the small artists who are most open and vulnerable to criticism. Amazon can probably impose this kind of shit on everyone through sheer persistence

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

ffs it's in public domain just use a still from the staircase silhouette like everyone else

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

What do they mean by "in color"? If it's just various tints throughout the film that's normal and cool. If they mean full on colourised that's messed up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Posting not for the content but for the stunningly inept AI slop illustrations:

https://datastream.substack.com/p/mistakes-from-my-failed-startup-in

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