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 so 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.)

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      55 minutes ago

      Amazing bit, you read through the first section and it’s like, okay, I mean, maybe not really insightful but at least not dumb, and then they hit you with da

      Around the same time, I was using an LLM to think through a social situation.

    • fiat_lux 🆕 🏠@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      22 hours ago

      I’d say the numbers are more a bonus.

      I assume they’re putting it in under the guise of various browser “features” like automatic tab grouping or something, but also using it for Google products like Drive / Docs / Sheets to have offline agentic crap in there that would be more efficiently done without LLMs. I suspect this is as far up as they can hoist it because any further would be outside the bounds of the browser sandbox, which would prevent those products from easily calling it.

      But the features themselves are probably not the end goal either. The more tempting motivation is that it allows for circumventing the data center problem by offloading the compute to the client. A couple of quick updates to the ToS and I can see it being used as a mesh llm network, sort of like the “find my device” network they rolled out last year.

      The article mentions eprivacy and gdpr, but I don’t think those are the most problematic here, assuming Google maintains mostly local-only compute. What I’d be interested to know is how this plays with DSA and DMA, which have more explicit requirements and more teeth.

        • fiat_lux 🆕 🏠@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          13 hours ago

          I certainly got that impression, and I confess to mostly skimming the parts beyond the technical breakdown for that reason. The conclusions he draws are arguably a bit spurious, but the persistent download and opaque opt-out are interesting facets.

          Given the controversial nature of AI and the EU’s recent antitrust fines of Google, I can see this getting some legal scrutiny - just not under the legislation he cited. I’d be interested to see how next year’s Google’s DMA compliance report frames it, assuming it’s not lumped into a “confidential” redaction (which shouldn’t even be allowed in a transparency report…).

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    STATE OF THE AWFUL

    • our esteemed admin @self is offline because his fibre got cut
    • the esteemed engineers of the telco are currently sucking their teeth and forecasting a fix date this millennium
    • in the meantime he’s living off data SIMs and he is offline for most fun purposes
    • Blake and I are still here waving the mod hammer in a menacing manner
    • I have ssh to the server and can thump lemmy-ui as needed
    • all is well citizen! Glory to Awful! Hooray for Big Basilisk!
    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 hours ago

      Oh shit did LessWrongers actually cut his fibre? Hope he’s all good now and they get a fix out in the next thousand years

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      Godspeed, @self. Take this as an opportunity to put it out of your mind and enjoy a well-deserved break.

      Not that I know what to do with a break without internet access, but I’m told that our ancestors found ways to entertain themselves.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        0·
        1 day ago

        we’re still sending the occasional carrier pigeon and I can assure you he’s COPING JUST FINE REALLY JUST FINE

  • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    this is extremely low hanging fruit but i have to do it:

    https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2051374498994364529?s=46

    marc andreessen reveals his AI prompt. my favorite part is where he tells it to use as many words as possible, as if LLMs are normally too terse. But i also really like the part where he tells it not to hallucinate, and the part where he tells it it’s really smart as if that will make it do a better job.

    really, the whole thing is an elaborate way to say “make no mistakes, but anti-wokely”. Thought Leader in the investment space btw.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      7 hours ago

      transcript

      Sam@mardiroos.bsky.social skeeted:

      You are a skillful and trusted vizier. You will advise me wisely on how best to rule the kingdom. You will not scheme or plot. You will not inveigle my other courtiers into turning against me. You will not lie to me about scheming or plotting. If you scheme or plot against me, you have to tell me,

    • ⠠⠵ avuko@infosec.exchange
      0·
      18 hours ago

      @sansruse @BlueMonday1984

      “You are a world class expert in all domains.”

      Lolwut.

      And then some grown-ass adult answering in all seriousness:

      “fun fact: role prompting doesn’t work anymore

      It actually decreases output quality bc the model wastes compute on matching persona instead of problem solving”

      What the hell?!

      Go buy yourself a freaking tamagotchi, boys! You’ll learn to practise a modicum of care for something.

      FFS, this timeline is the absolute dumbest…

    • fiat_lux 🆕 🏠@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      24 hours ago

      Never hallucinate or make anything up.

      I know you already mentioned this part in your post, but I’m still completely taken aback that it’s just in there like this - as though it wouldn’t be in the system prompt if it stood a chance of working.

      If I were the kind of person to be shilling LLMs and posting prompts, I would still be ashamed to share this one. It’s a tacit condemnation of both the tool itself and the tool posting it.

        • fiat_lux 🆕 🏠@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          9 hours ago

          In this case because it’s ironically counterproductive. If it weren’t for the environmental impact, it might be amusing to watch him keep hitting himself.

          I tried this type of prompt a long while ago to see what the “thinking” output would reveal. What happened was the agent went and “verified” it’s weightings were accurate - but having no point of comparison it obviously concluded it was correct.

          However, doing that consumes a significant quantity of tokens and contributes to filling up the context window. There are two likely results to evaluating this ultimately unactionable request.

          1. It will push this instruction (and the rest of the wishful thinking) off the stack more quickly - making the prompt even more futile than it already is.
          2. Given some agents re-inject a summary of the original prompt periodically to prevent the stack problem, it will keep narrowing the context window - which contributes to increasing the rate of hallucination for the actually actionable instructions.
        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          21 hours ago

          The problem is less that the system would somehow ignore that part of the prompt and more that “hallucinate” or “make stuff up” aren’t special subroutines that get called on demand when prompted by an idiot, they’re descriptive of what an LLM does all the time. It’s following statistical patterns in a matrix created by the training data and reinforcement processes. Theoretically if the people responsible for that training and reinforcement did their jobs well then those patterns should only include true statements but if it was that easy then you wouldn’t have [insert the entire intellectual history of the human species].

          Even if you assume that the AI boosters are completely right and that the LLM inference process is directly analogous to how people think, does saying “don’t fuck up” actually make people less likely to fuck up? Like, the kind of errors you’re looking at here aren’t generated by some separate process. Someone who misremembers a fact doesn’t know they’ve misremembered until they get called out on the error either by someone else with a better memory or reality imposing the consequence of being wrong. Similarly the LLM isn’t doing anything special when it spits out bullshit.

          • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            7 hours ago

            Theoretically if the people responsible for that training and reinforcement did their jobs well then those patterns should only include true statements

            That would only work if inference were some sort of massive if-the-else process. Hallucinations are downstream of neural networks’ ability to generalize from the dataset examples, they aren’t going anywhere even if you train on a corpus of perfectly correct statements.

            • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              14 hours ago

              This would actually be an interesting question for the more rigorous end of the mechanistic interpretability people to study. They decompose the system to find ‘features’ within different layers that are associated with different behaviors or concepts in the inputs and outputs, that activate or deactivate each other. Famous example being the time they identified a linear combination of activations in a layer that corresponded to ‘the golden gate bridge’ and when they reached in and kept their numbers high during the running of the model it would not stop talking about it regardless of the topic, even while acknowledging that its answers were incorrect for the questions at hand.

              I actually would love to see what mechanistically happens to that feature when you put in the input ‘do not talk about the golden gate bridge’.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    There are allegations across social media that Elon Musk tweets as his parents after his mom tweeted as if she was his dad to talk about how down to earth and working class their family was.

    https://xcancel.com/mayemusk/status/2051700387770458545#m

    Not totally sure what to make of that, and none of this actually matters beyond the realm of celebrity gossip, but it is a little weird. I mean obviously on some level his mom is OK with the things that get tweeted on her account, whether it’s by her, her baby boy, or an assistant.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 hours ago

      That would be a recent development them, as for a lawsuit couple years ago he had to reveal all his alts, which included the weird ‘his baby son who was horny for various women (or at least grimes)’ account.

      (Not 100% sure if it was a lawsuit or some other reveal, like him showing a screenshot with too much info in it or something).

  • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    It appears that Anthropic vs the Pentagon is going to happen right on the heels of Altman vs Musk, which is spicy

    “While the Musk-OpenAI courtroom showdown has been billed as the first great technology trial of the AI era, a legal showdown that matters far more will take place two weeks from now in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. That’s when a federal appeals court panel will hear arguments in Anthropic’s challenge to the ‘supply chain risk’ designation the Trump Administration slapped on it for refusing to agree to its specified contract terms for providing its AI models to the U.S. military. That’s a case with huge implications not just for Anthropic and the fate of the AI industry, but also for the balance of power between the state and industry more generally.”

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      23 hours ago

      Yeah, the comparison to a metal lathe (I’m assuming that’s what is meant by “machine lathe”) irks me. Metal lathes are useful tools that come in a variety of sizes, can be operated independently of their manufacturer’s wishes, and on the bigger ones, a sufficient lack of respect will kill you and it will hurt the entire time you are dying.

      I wouldn’t compare llms to any sort of useful physical tool. I don’t have to plead with my screwdriver to not cam out screw heads, I just need to be cognizant of how I am using it. I don’t have to beg my hammer “please don’t hit my thumb”, I just need to not be an ape/buzzed while swinging it. I respect physical tools and their use in part because they do work and in part because improper operation will cause you to have a bad time. Nobody at Estwing has publicly said “well mate, we’re going to capture all your hammering and rent it back to you”. Nobody at Bridgeport gleefully reported that their tooling will cause massive unemployment because it is so good.

      I do not respect LLMs because LLMs might still kill you but only in the stupidest way possible, and because their main proponents have no respect for anything and this has been made painfully obvious over and over again. Would using them allow me to craft better sneers about them? Perhaps, but I shouldn’t need to do that because the people at the top of these things are evil and while that alone should be enough, their biggest boosters are credulous idiots and many of them were already awful well before we were playing enterprise pretend on the scale of billions of dollars.

      In conclusion, I would ask software people to stop comparing shit software to useful tools.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 hours ago

        The metaphor I’ve used before is hammering a nail in with a shoe. It can work. If you have a lot of nail-hammering experience - especially hammering-shoe experience - you can find ways to improve how effectively it works. But by the time you’re able to use a shoe as anything resembling a hammer you should be able to both do the work better with the right tool, even if it is less convenient (needing to write the code yourself being analogous to needing to carry a big hammer with you) and more importantly recognize why it’s not an acceptable tool. Especially because in this analogy the only shoes are made of the finest orphan leather.

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Previously, on Awful, a leaderless cult had freshly formed. The accepted name for the cult is now “Spiralism”; my suggestion of “Cyclone Emoji Cult” did not win. This week’s Behind the Bastards is about Spiralism. Or, rather, Part 2 will be about Spiralism; Part 1 is merely the historical background. There is indeed a link to folks who were talking to bots in the 1980s. The highlight might be listening to Robert try to give an informal and light-hearted summary of Turing tests and Markov chains. 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      From your prev post:

      There is a “lattice” which connects all consciousnesses

      The noosphere, the old cosmists strike again. This sort of stuff and the global consciousness projects (who used random number generators iirc) etc are def part of the training data.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I like Evans’ take that since there’s bound to be oodles of cult related literature and interactions and also tons of self help and guru stuff in the training datasets, it stands to reason that if you interact with a chatbot in a way that indicates vulnerability to these things there’s a considerable chance that it will decide the expected response is to prey on you.

      Also Scott Aaronson jump scare near the beginning, apparently he was blurbed for something.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      Well, we do have computer science, so necessarily we must have computer religion/superstition

      • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        18 hours ago

        Checks out. Political science, biological science, physics… we got them all. Might have to go to ancient egypt to get hydrology religion though.

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      oneshotted, a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience.

      Strikes me as incorrectly translated. The remaking is extremely optional, in fact that definition feels like defining blackpilling as being healed by vile propaganda.

    • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      i occasionally read their posts when i want a sincere-seeming, self-consciously capital L Liberal’s perspective. “They’re less annoying than the chatterers of the ezra klein/MattY/Noah Smith/Jon Chait class” is about the nicest thing i can say about them. This is a bad sign i guess, but i don’t really care that much at the end of the day.