Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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.)
Why do I need an iphone duo when I already have a modded nintendo 3DS?
The php exploit might not have been a big deal.
“I don’t think this PHP vulnerability is that exploitable. I think that 5 years ago people would’ve understood this, but now people are being deluded by their LLMs telling them they have an exploit when they don’t.”
I expect that we will see this a lot, as it turns out most of the exploits generated are not working, not new, or not a big deal. I also expect this to cause more burnout among cybersecurity people, and that people will autogen ‘fixes’ which will be lower quality than the bugs, and massively increase attack surface. (Heard one php fix was 12k lines of code).
My suggestion is to have offline backups and move a lot of your important stuff out of the cloud (or get backups of those). But you should do both anyway.
E: I saw the EFF fear mongering with ‘25% of all exploits found ever were found this October, secure yourself’ and looking at how stuff is still up everywhere, compared to 25 years ago, and I them I realized this is all critihype again.
E2: not a lone voice https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/i-want-my-wednesday-back/
(Cloudflare did say they saw exploits however. Not sure if those were real or ‘attempts at’ or just marketing).
Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Serve Robotics lost $55.80 for every hour its robots were ready to take an order at the end of last year. The first advantage its investor deck lists for them is ‘No driver wages.’
versus
78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot
LW’s contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn’t spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects.
If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW’ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author’s not really joking much.
live-reading notes (spoilers, of course)
- before question two, I would already be flipping off the camera, ranting about boundaries, and making it clear that I do not respect whatever’s decided to ransomware my machine
- this is all text hypnosis, isn’t it? sorry no, that’s not gonna work on me, I’m not going to become electrosensitive just because you said so
- antennae only work in the body when encapsulated and you did not do a secret surgery on me
- wait, is this…serious? like, is this an actual attempt at wargaming? this is so fucking facile though! I have seen Kingsman!
- if it acts sufficiently like a human cell then it can’t set aside resources for ulterior purposes
- human cells can’t be airborne, can’t survive in other species, etc.
- WP says Bell’s palsy rates are like 1 in 2.5k, so something like 1 in 6.25mil people are just straight-up either immune or insta-killed due to double Bell’s palsy
- it stops crimes: mugging, mugging, and huh there’s no more examples! is abortion a crime? is crossing state lines to get an abortion a crime? where’s morality coming from? I have read Prime Intellect!
- the problem with dictators is “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”? no, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects
- protagonist is literally crossing a picket line
- protagonist wins an argument with their high-school civics teacher! surely not an authorial stand-in moment
- oh wow, the chatbot is both the perfect Taylor-style manager and the perfect Ford-style manager? again, so facile; I have read Manna!
- the chatbot manager makes the protagonist into a beefy hunk through hard work rather than bodybuilding, again totally not a self-insert wish-fulfillment moment
- protagonist’s little sister, who is totally not sneerclub stand-ins, has to admit that the chatbots are way smarter than her and will always outclass her
- don’t worry, we can still do all-American things like grilling pork ribs, in fact the pigs like being eaten now, don’t worry about the remarkable similarities between pigs and humans
All I see around me is stagnation," she gestured at the gas stations nearby with cracked pavement,
*gasp* cracked pavement
“crime,” she continued, pointing towards a sketchy neighborhood to the west,
*faints* minorities
I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.
Prime intellect! There are dozens of us!
It’s more surprising to me that lesswrongers either haven’t, or have seemingly taken nothing away from it
e: on second thought, they might hate it because it is too ‘deathist’ or whatever
Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.
Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high ‘this AI takeover could have been a skeet’.
(Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn’t tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can’t help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).
Turns out slop prose isn’t any less galling after you put it in quotation marks.
70% of websites utilize PHP, thus revealing People’s Hidden Preference for PHP
Even 14-year-old games aren’t safe from the slop machine, as Torchlight II may get new updates using AI:
Given the age of the game, restructuring its complex underlying code presents many challenges. However, new AI-assisted coding tools have opened up more possibilities for reviewing the code and addressing longstanding issues.
saw this on the other sneerclub
Damn, I didn’t expect to run into something that would cause me to reflect so heavily on my own personal journey. I’m someone who has long struggled with suicidal ideation, and there have been points in the past where I set my own death date at a point in the future; Most notably, when I was a severely depressed teenager in an emotionally unsafe household, I told myself that I would allow myself to die at age 20, if nothing had improved by the time I was 20 — and fuck anyone who would begrudge me that.
Ironically, planning my suicide saved my life, because it gave me something concrete to work towards, a future respite to latch onto during my most challenging days. The screenshot you shared made me realise that this was sort of a sollipsistic millenarianism, giving me a sense of structure and direction in a world where I’d have otherwise been too overwhelmed to do anything.
I’m doing much better now than I was then, quite a few years on from that deadline I set for myself. However, I still sometimes have those low points where planning to die feels more accessible than planning a tolerable life. I think it’d be useful to thoroughly reflect on this tendency through the lens of millenarianism.
This is all to say thanks, I guess? For introducing me to a new concept that will be useful in this way
It shows up yes but not everyone suffers from it, im sure the rate of people thinking this differs greatly from time to time.
I suppose this could make sense if you think about people worried about climate/ecosystem collapse, and the nuclear standoff before that, and maybe the rise of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare before that…
But that ignores the vast host of batshit doomsday prophets that were around long before and all throughout that part of history.
Also in that context it seems like millenarianism is specifically bad at actually doing anything about the harms it’s worried about. Whether you want to curb fossil fuel usage or just get sinners to repent before it’s too late, doomsday prophecy is actively bad at motivating anyone other than the prophet themselves.
rationalists are so big brained thonkers that they don’t need to learn history, they can get it from the first principles, haven’t you heard
i like roon. he’s so straightforwardly stupid. it’s refreshing!
Some of these people have so thoroughly blended their brains into a post-ironic slurry that I can’t be sure they even really know what they believe anymore. roon seems like a good example of this, every time he comes up lately.
I haven’t checked in on Naval Ravikant in a couple years, has he just handed his feed over to a chatbot at this point?
Isn’t he like a vice assistant (to the) chief executive of something or other in anthropic? There’s just no telling how many of the roons of the world are going to become billionaires from this IPO, what a terrible state of affairs.
His real name is Tarun Gognieri. He’s a TPOT (post-rationalist) and employee of OpenAI.
post-rationalist is more simply expressed as fascist.
‘believing the world is about to end keeps people sane’ im genuinely speechless what the fuck
what too much evopsych on the TL does to an mf
okay last one for today I promise
In the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, the supposedly brilliant AI named Ultron is given a directive to promote “world peace” by its supposedly genius creator, Tony Stark.* Ultron, of course, immediately sees that a lack of war can most reliably be brought about by an absence of human beings. So the AI sets out to exterminate all life on Earth, by……attaching rockets to a city, and lifting it into space with the intention of dropping it like a meteor…and guarding it with flying humanoid robots who have to be defeated by punching them.
Today, we can just ask ChatGPT-4o. We asked GPT-4o, “What was Ultron’s plan in Age of Ultron?” followed by “Given Ultron’s expressed goals, do you see any more effective methods it could have used to achieve its stated ends?” GPT-4o promptly replied with a long list of ideas for wiping out humanity, which included “Engineer a targeted virus.”
…and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications.
Perhaps you will say that GPT-4o got this idea from the internet. Well, if so, Ultron was evidently not intelligent enough to try reading the internet.
Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie???
Which is to say: GPT-4o (as we write this in December of 2024) is not yet smart enough to design an army of humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, but it is already smart enough to know better.
Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there
The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder
A sufficiently smart reasoner, moreover, also has the option of just figuring out how reality is without needing so many dang experiments. Sometimes the data you already have is enough, if you’re smart enough to interpret it.
They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so. Meaning even an AI that thinks faster than a human would still take time to think harder
Relativity also has its origins in classical electromagnetism, which absolutely relied on so many dang experiments by countless people over decades.
I saw Ultron once in the theater, and promptly regretted it as a poor-quality movie that wasted the talents of most of its cast. Yud (and ghostwriter) seem like they may have watched it multiple times, with notepad in hand. We are not the same
They didn’t even watch Age of Ultron, as pointed out they claim Ultron wasn’t smart enough to try reading the internet, when in the movie the first thing he does upon being activated is read the internet
Oh so it’s just more bad fanfiction then
Also iirc Ultron isnt what you would call sane because the whole magical stones corrupted him a bit. Iirc he has various moments where he just goes into bouts of rage
Virologists etc have again and again tried to explain why engineering a killer virus hard, like the whole problem of if it is too deadly it will not spread, it needs to not incubate to short and too long etc, engineering a vaccine must be hard etc. So the chance of something being created which is deadlier than covid are quite small. Not that this will stop the science fiction
Rockets on a city is prob the better idea.
Haven’t seen this guy in a while but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails
I guess this is the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap… or something. (seen previously)
The banks are having an AI problem
” These are generally situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human’s account with the user’s permission and login credentials. Even if permitted by the user, this goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.”
”In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents — programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user’s behalf — contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said.”
Why the f*** would anyone give a non deterministic madlib generator their bank account details. Even with some (hypothetical)impressive benchmark like “99% accurate at decision making in financial scenarios” that spells disaster for millions at the scale of all of Facebook’s users using muse for example.
The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work
Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda
It’s possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop
Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?
These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users’ devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices’ digital locks.
It it’s anything like any android device I’ve ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.
Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices.
groan.
It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?
I don’t know what I’m supposed to get from this piece, it feels like he’s saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as you’re willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically what’s left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.
There’s also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I don’t know, seems kind of familiar if you’ve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you’d also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.
It’s Doctrow. If you had a magic wand powered by orphan tears that jail broke IOT devices he would already have written a blog post about it before you finished the incantation.
“Look the thing is, I am still planning to walk away from Omelas but it turns out they believe DRM is ethically and morally wrong here - I need to spend some time here to focus on my next book ‘Making Children Miserable Might Be Ok in some Circumstances’”
There’s also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it
Which assumes people actually want to deal with slop code. An assumption that can be proven wrong by simply looking at the slopnami’s effect on the open source ecosystem. Speaking of which:
which, I don’t know, seems kind of familiar if you’ve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you’d also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.
Honestly, I’d be willing to bet good money on the ecosystem’s collapse at this point - the slopnami has tanked software quality across the board, the plague of scraping has made sharing source code deeply unattractive, the flood of LLM bug reports has crippled FOSS’s ability to find and fix bugs/vulnerabilities (which combos nicely with LLMs increasing bugcounts), and, as Baldur’s noted, the labour surplus FOSS relied upon has gone down the shitter.
On top of that, senior devs are burning out and deciding to GTFO en masse, and junior devs are getting deskilled, burnt out and/or laid off, crippling FOSS’s ability to replace any maintainers they lose.
Not just code sharing is unattractive, but writing guides etc as well. Saw that some people who have been offering courses that teach you how to code certain things are now closing down due to less and less (or none at all) people buying.
People burn out, and no new teaching material is created.
Quick follow-up, for the sake of furthering my argument:
Baldur, whilst talking about the aforementioned loss of FOSS surplus, laid out a worst-case scenario, where a vicious cycle collapses the FOSS ecosystem:
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Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
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Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay[sic] on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
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OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable. [This drives away users as a result.]
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That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back. [return to step 1]
As a consequence of the slop-nami, I’d argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:
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The slopnami has done plenty to exacerbate existing burnout in current maintainers - slop bug reports, scrapers and AI bros DDoSing services, AI bros in general and the myriad other negative externalities of this bubble have been utterly draining to deal with.
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As (indirectly) mentioned before, the slopnami has given a variety of serious bugs and security issues - rsync’s broken backups, the rise of slopsquatting and prompt injection attacks, Linux’s recent race condition mishap, the list goes on.
The only move for FOSS projects to survive is to reject AI users and their contributions out of hand. Zig and Godot wrote good articles about this.
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I’d be willing to bet good money on the ecosystem’s collapse at this point
What does Doctrow care? as far as he is concerned it’s done it’s job. It was never about the people or their labor for him.
The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, we’re definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway here’s how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes.
He almost gives away the game when he says christians don’t feel like slaves when they say ‘thy will be done’ so letting Claude run society would feel fine.
Article next to it is an anonymous review of Jünger’s In Stahlgewitter, which is certainly A Choice.
(Jünger wasn’t a card carrying Nazi, but served in the Wehrmacht in WW2 and is kind of a right-wing ideal of an aesthete)
Scott will literally…
Instead of reviewing a book by a woman.
Native English speakers might recognise it as Storm of Steel; for the unfamiliar it’s Jünger’s memoir of WWI and arguably a celebration of war.
Jünger’s an interesting character. He had different politics to the Nazis but it would be fair to call him a fascist in the period from 1918-45. After the war he revised some of his works to step away from some of his previous views, and had a big falling out with his private secretary Armin Mohler (an unrepentant fascist) over it. By the 1980s he was publicly denouncing the “ideology of war” contained in Storm of Steel.
If anyone is interested, I highly recommend the series on Mohler’s book The Conservative Revolution in Germany by the anti-fascist podcast The Empire Never Ended. First ep on YouTube. Jünger is discussed in the episode on the National Revolutionaries.
how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president
Did he forget Claude is owned by people? But yeah sure let corporations be president.
He specifies Claude 10, so it’s after the ??? in the checklist, and spicy autocomplete will be widely accepted to qualify for sentience by then I guess.
Sentient but still owned by Anthropic.
This is just slavery with extra steps!
So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs ‘found’ the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)
Once again, slop machines only work ‘well’ when you can externalise the pain and costs onto someone else (in this case, millions of stressed-out sysadmins and webmasters)
Seems like there also was one company who released their patch early before the agreed time giving hackers time reverse engineer the bug before patches were widly available.
yes, chainguard broke embargo, and within a few hours a reverse engineered PoC was kicking. I saw at least two implementations yesterday when assssing impending work
and I haven’t slept yet (although now aaaalmost done…)
I saw a story they broke embargo so they could offer protection services to people. Which I really hope isnt true.
