David Gerard
the guy who got Elon and Grimes to hook up, destroying Twitter and proceeding to blow up the United States
- 300 Posts
- 489 Comments
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•You can’t feed generative AI on ‘bad’ data then filter it for only ‘good’ dataEnglish4·11 hours agoright right, but we only see these bozos when they show up locally
mind you there’s been more than one illustrious poster I’ve banned preemptively
but frankly life is too short in most cases
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•You can’t feed generative AI on ‘bad’ data then filter it for only ‘good’ dataEnglish15·2 days agoYes, I know, I wrote it. Why do you consider this useful to post here?
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•You can’t feed generative AI on ‘bad’ data then filter it for only ‘good’ dataEnglish12·2 days agowhy did you post literally just the text from the article
yeah, I think that’s enough
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy InsteadEnglish10·3 days agoi love awful systems so much
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy InsteadEnglish9·3 days agoThe Register said in its Builder.AI obit that the company is really into making its devs use AI coding. lol.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slopEnglish29·4 days agoquite amazing that (a) Microsoft basically bought open source with GitHub (b) and are now trying to fuck it up so hard people leave
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English7·5 days agonew Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025English7·5 days agoa shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Does AI make researchers more productive? What? Why would it? Apparently you can just say that and almost get published!English3·6 days agoI mean this post seems largely correct and reasonable, but ehh be a little cautious
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Latest AI-hallucinated legal filing, from AI vendor AnthropicEnglish8·6 days agoword i hear is that too many lawyers fucking love this shit, they see plausible words and think that’s sufficient to
replacesupplement the office peonsthen this happens to them and lol
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Does AI make researchers more productive? What? Why would it? Apparently you can just say that and almost get published!English8·6 days agoIf you’re after streams-crossing - this guy is a rationalist who does Manifold Markets
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Trump announces vaporware AI data centres in the United Arab EmiratesEnglish7·8 days agofinally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South AfricaEnglish4·8 days agosomeone said it was Kendrick and Drake, i thought it was two Drakes pointing at each other
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South AfricaEnglish7·9 days agoit will explain its position with interpretive twerking
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Ai scraping is an effective DDoS on the entire interentEnglish11·9 days agojwz gave the game away, so i’ll reveal:
the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent
so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)
caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.
nginx code:
# block some bot UAs for complex requests # nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable # if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot set $BOT ""; if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) { set $BOT "C"; } if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($BOT = "CO") { return 503;}
you always return “503” not “403”, because 403 says “fuck off” but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they’ve flattened.
I give this trick at least another week.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South AfricaEnglish13·9 days agowhy is this robot not sexy soyweiser
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?English2·10 days agosounds dumb as hell and I’m not surprised they avoided tagging me in then
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?English15·10 days agoThis discussion has made it clear to me that LLM enthusiasts do not value the time or preferences of open-source maintainers, willfully do not understand affirmative consent, and that I should take steps to explicitly ban the use of such tools in the open source projects I maintain.
my god