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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Overheard my kids, one of them had some group project in school and the other asked who they had ended up in group with. After hearing the names, the reaction was “they are good, none of them will use AI”.
So as always kids that actually does something in group projects doesn’t want to end up in a group with kids that won’t contribute. Difference is just that instead of just slacking off and doing nothing they will today “contribute” AI slop. And as always the main lesson from group projects in school is avoid ending up in a group with slackers.
Dad hi-five
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud
Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.
More seriously: it’s not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way – “it’s inevitable”, “it’s here to stay”, etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter – what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population
AI’s already destroying people’s cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn’t be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it’ll fuck up human’s capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.
(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Thankfully, I’ve managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:
- AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
- The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
- The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you’d have zero shot of turning a profit.
(That I’m a NEET also helps (can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)
can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P
I’d certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn’t work for a big tech company that’s gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don’t want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.
I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I’d be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don’t quit for complicated reasons. I’m not that far from the breaking point, but I’m going to try to hang in for a few more years.
But yeah, I’m pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.
It’s wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.
Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.
With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn
…and that’s why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.
“Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,”
How about common sense…
“it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”
Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.
If “it’s one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,” he said. “But the computer can.
No, it cannot. It’s a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.
Duolingo’s CFO made similar comments last year, saying, “AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does”
Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life
the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence
Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Ok I stop here now, there’s more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.
Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.
Yeah that jumped out to me. Like human teaching has scaled fine to billions of people. It certainly has a better track record than Duolingo which provides meh study material and leads to ahem mixed learning outcomes despite being around for over a decade.
Of course there’s the subtext of “but also we’ll be able to put all those obsolete teachers out of business and make tons of money!”
Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Being in tech I definitely see misuse of A/B testing sometimes. Sometimes a team will ignore common sense entirely but come up with metrics that measure something irrelevant. The metrics are, intentionally or not, gamed to tell them what they want to hear. They then run the (useless) numbers and use that to justify why their change was good, even in the face of intense user backlash.
One particular example that just came to mind: someone made a bad change, and lots of people complained. Eventually the complaints started to peter out. Then they claimed “see! people just had to get used to it!” (versus the rather more obvious possibility that nobody bothered to complain more than once).
Not really. If schools aren’t spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.
In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:
deleted by creator
A lawyer who depends on a sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a sovereign citizen.
“ChatGPT, does the fringe on the flag mean that this is an Admiralty court? Also, please enlighten me on the finer points of bird law.”
Considering how LLMs are trained, they prob contain a lot of sov cit stuff, wonder if a lawyer/judge can trick a LLM into going full sovcit by just adding a few words/rephrasing a bit.
Absolutely!
The thing about sov cits is that they use legalish words like a magical incantation. The words have no meaning to them, really. It’s a tarted-up glossolalia which reifies their wishes to manifest some outcome in court.
If a lawyer surrenders their craft to a bullshit engine, they’re doing the exact same thing: spouting law-shaped nonsense in the hope of getting the verdict they want, their only differentiator being that they showed up wearing a much nicer suit than the sov cit.
Our subjects here at awful systems can make us angry. They can spend lots of money to make everything worse. They can even make us dead if things go really off the rails, but one thing they can never do is make us take them seriously.
does awful have taglines enabled? this would be nice as one
Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:
On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.
A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.
Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.
Tying this to a previous post of mine, I’m expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, “AI slop” output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.
Just thinking about how I watched “Soylent Green” in high school and thought the idea of a future where technology just doesn’t work anymore was impossible. Then LLMs come and the first thing people want to do with them is to turn working code into garbage, and then the immediate next thing is to kill living knowledge by normalising people relying on LLMs for operational knowledge. Soon, the oceans will boil, agricultural industries will collapse and we’ll be forced to eat recycled human. How the fuck did they get it so right?
Doesnt help that there is a group of people who go ‘using the poor like
biofuelfood what a good idea’.E: Really influential movie btw. ;)
A real modest
brunch
I like that Soylent Green was set in the far off and implausible year of 2022, which coincidentally was the year of ChatGPT’s debut.
OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I’m linking to this because it’s exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en
I uh… I don’t think it’s going to change anyone’s minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:
EVERYONE LISTEN UP!!! 🚨 - starting from today, we are gonna start ignoring duolingo. We will not like the video it posts, or view it. - BASICALLY WE WILL IGNORE DUO!!💔 💔 ON EVERYBODY SOUL WE IGNORING DUO!! 💔 (copy this and share this to every duo related video)
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Good luck!!
they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
If Duolingo still had their userbase’s goodwill, it would’ve probably worked. They’ve been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.
Good luck with the move. Always sounded like a lot of trouble moving continents. And moving out of the USA seemed worse, dont they have some weird taxation system for people who moved away?
Nah it’s not too bad the IRS guide is only 40 pages! somebody save me
- All US citizens get to file US taxes every year regardless of if they have any US sourced income
- Foreign income is also taxed (but see next two points)
- The first 126k of foreign income earned while living abroad is excluded from taxation (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion)
- Income that went to paying foreign taxes is also not taxed (Foreign Tax Credit)
- Banks hate opening accounts for US citizens since we’re subject to FATCA filing requirements and thus generate extra paperwork
- Also certain foreign mutual funds are taxed heavily (PFICs), requiring care in planning investments.
- There are a bunch of tax treaties with different countries, which may influence the exact details.
- If you do have deferred compensation that was granted in a state but that was vested or exercised while a non-resident of that state you may also have to file state taxes (e.g. FTB Publication 1004 for California)
I haven’t run through this in practice yet and I will probably give up and hire a professional.
Oof im sorry, that sounds horrible. But hey welcome in the modern world, your other taxes will prob not be that much trouble.
Sounds like getting a professional to file it (at least the first time) will in the end cost less.
But congratulations on the move!
I think there’s also some kind of at-time exit tax if you ever decide to give up US citizenship, but I’m not good on the details
I’ve semi-seriously said elsewhere that the US treats its citizens as property (in the “as slaves” sense), and it’s fucked how close to true that is
glad to read you’re making some headway on getting the fuck out though!
Yeah I’ll probably have a big tax bill if I ever renounce citizenship. I haven’t thought about it too much yet since it’s still my only citizenship, and I have a lot of friends and family in the USA. Like being a visitor might be fine in normal times, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it in an emergency today given how visitors are being treated lately.
'Till now I was always able to just do financial planning myself, but I really should hire a professional.
absolutely worth it given your coming plans. sucks because yet more expenditure but your happiness and safety are more important
I’m interested in jetting out as well. Did you get a job first? Or did you do something similar to Germany’s “Opportunity Visa”?
An internal transfer at my job actually. At least for now they need me so helped set that up, though I’m pretty worried on if that will last long enough for permanent residency or not.
I’d be a little nervous on a job seeker’s visa before knowing the language. It is really hard to find a job as a programmer in Europe without living there or being a citizen; because of language barriers, the labor market test, and the difficulty in getting a company to sponsor your visa. I didn’t send out that many job applications but so far my response rate is zero.
Probably if I couldn’t do a transfer I’d have ended up on an investment visa or study visa somewhere; though maybe I could have found a job in Japan since I can read intermediate Japanese.
I expect learning German to the B1 level will open up a lot of doors, so that’s my main goal for the next few years.
Anecdata: if you’re working in IT in Sweden you can get away with just English. I know a guy living in Berlin who hasn’t
botheredgot around to learning German yet, he also manages with English.But it’s a big Community and different parts have different requirements and of course different expectations.
It’s the same taxation system, you have to pay US taxes still, but I think you can deduct taxes paid in the new country from what you owe the US.
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
that’s seriously amazing! I’m glad you were able to get things going relatively quickly.
Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.
Firstly, an update on Grok’s White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok’s prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.
Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:
You want my opinion on the “scab” comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.
Think you are misreading the blog post. They did this after the Grok had its white genocide hyperfocus thing. It shows the process of the xAI public github (their fix (??) for Groks hyperfocus) is bad, not that they started it. (There is also no reason to believe this github is actually what they are using directly (would be pretty foolish of them, which is why I could also believe they could be using it))
If anything I think this is pretty solid evidence that they aren’t actually using it. There was enough of a gap that the nuke of that PR was an edit to the original post and I can’t imagine that if it had actually been used that we wouldn’t have seen another flurry of screenshots of bad output.
I think it also suggests that the engineers at x.ai are treating the whole thing with a level of contempt that I’m having a hard time interpreting. On one hand it’s true that the public GitHub using what is allegedly grok’s actual prompt (at least at time of publishing) is probably a joke in terms of actual transparency and accountability. On the other hand, it feels almost like either a cry for help or a stone-cold denial of how bad things are that the original change that prompted all this could have gone through in the first place.
Yeah indeed, had not even thought of the timegap. And it is such a bit of bullshit misdirection, very Muskian, to pretend that this fake transparency in any way solves the problem. We don’t know what the bad prompt was nor who did it, and as shown here, this fake transparency prevents nothing. Really wished more journalists/commentators were not just free pr.
I know r/singularity is like shooting fish in a barrel but it really pissed me off seeing them misinterpret the significance of a result in matrix multiplication: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1knem3r/i_dont_think_people_realize_just_how_insane_the/
Yeah, the record has stood for “FIFTY-SIX YEARS” if you don’t count all the times the record has been beaten since then. Indeed, “countless brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists have worked on this problem for over half a century without success” if you don’t count all the successes that have happened since then. The really annoying part about all this is that the original announcement didn’t have to lie: if you look at just 4x4 matrices, you could say there technically hasn’t been an improvement since Strassen’s algorithm. Wow! It’s really funny how these promptfans ignore all the enormous number of human achievements in an area when they decide to comment about how AI is totally gonna beat humans there.
How much does this actually improve upon Strassen’s algorithm? The matrix multiplication exponent given by Strassen’s algorithm is log4(49) (i.e. log2(7)), and this result would improve it to log4(48). In other words, it improves from 2.81 to 2.79. Truly revolutionary, AGI is gonna make mathematicians obsolete now. Ignore the handy dandy Wikipedia chart which shows that this exponent was … beaten in 1979.
I know far less about how matrix multiplication is done in practice, but from what I’ve seen, even Strassen’s algorithm isn’t useful in applications because memory locality and parallelism are far more important. This AlphaEvolve result would represent a far smaller improvement (and I hope you enjoy the pain of dealing with a 4x4 block matrix instead of 2x2). If anyone does have knowledge about how this works, I’d be interested to know.
Yes - on the theoretical side, they do have an actual improvement, which is a non-asymptotic reduction in the number of multiplications required for the product of two 4x4 matrices over an arbitrary noncommutative ring. You are correct that the implied improvement to omega is moot since theoretical algorithms have long since reduced the exponent beyond that of Strassen’s algorithm.
From a practical side, almost all applications use some version of the naive O(n^3) algorithm, since the asymptotically better ones tend to be slower in practice. However, occasionally Strassen’s algorithm has been implemented and used - it is still reasonably simple after all. There is possibly some practical value to the 48-multiplications result then, in that it could replace uses of Strassen’s algorithm.
One thing that I couldn’t easily figure out is what is the constant factor. If the constant factor is significantly worse than for Strassen, then it would be much slower than Strassen except for very large matrices.
Let’s say the constant factor is k.
N should be large enough that N^((log(49)-log(48))/log(4)) > k where k is the constant factor. Let’s say the difference in exponents is x, then
N^x > k
log(N)*x > log(k)
N > exp(log(k)/x)
N > k^(1/x)
So lets say x is 0.01487367169 , then we’re talking [constant factor]^67 for how big the matrix has to be?
So, 2^67 sized matrix (2^134 entries in it) if Google’s is 2x greater constant than Strassen.
That don’t even sound right, but I double checked, (k^67) ^ 0.01487367169 is approximately k.
edit: I’m not sure what the cross over points would be if you use Google’s then Strassen’s then O( n^3 )
Also, Strassen’s algorithm works on reals (and of course, on complex numbers), while the new “improvement” reduces by 1 the number of real multiplications required for a product of two 4x4 complex-valued matrices.
Your understanding is correct. It’s worth knowing that the matrix-multiplication exponent actually controls multiple different algorithms. I stubbed a little list a while ago; important examples include several graph-theory algorithms as well as parsing for context-free languages. There’s also a variant of P vs NP for this specific problem, because we can verify that a matrix is a product in quadratic time.
That Reddit discussion contains mostly idiots, though. We expect an iterative sequence of ever-more-complicated algorithms with ever-slightly-better exponents, approaching quadratic time in the infinite limit. We also expected a computer to be required to compute those iterates at some point; personally I think Strassen’s approach only barely fits inside a brain and the larger approaches can’t be managed by humans alone.
I’m not sure what you mean by your last sentence. All of the actual improvements to omega were invented by humans; computers have still not made a contribution to this.
Oh, sorry. We’re in agreement and my sentence was poorly constructed. The computation of a matrix multiplication usually requires at least pencil and paper, if not a computer. I can’t compute anything larger than a 2 × 2. But I’ll readily concede that Strassen’s specific trick is simple enough that a mentalist could use it.
Noted race science proponent and all-around slimeball Cremieux aka J Lasker reveals himself to be a union-hater
Love how all these EdGy DiSsIdEnT tHiNkErS eventually become indistinguishable from big-standard ‘cons
Net number of studies reporting positive or negative effects (excluding wages)
excluding wages! (and probably also benefits, retirement, a cap on working hours per day etc)
Is that whole thing in the comments about unions bad because monopolies bad and unions are just monopolies of labor the latest in bootlicking theory? Hadn’t really heard this take before.
ah yes, it’s that marxist notion, the monopoly of the proletariat
Studies find unions have negative impacts on things unions aren’t concerned with improving. What impact do they have on their actual goal i.e. protecting workers and improving their lot? We didn’t bother asking.
Something something UMWA.
Ben S voice “Look for the sake of the argument, what if we just assume im right, and ignore everything that shows I’m wrong. What then? Checkmate liberal!”
Wow cool numbers, love to put all unions in one big bag regardless of goals, ideology, trade and mode of action.
“You claim to like unions, but seem strangely hostile to police unions. Curious.”
- Turning Point USA
IWW intensifies
Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:
Is that supposed to be an advertisement in favor of AI? (As opposed to stealth satire?) Seeing it makes me want to get off my computer and touch grass.
I’m not sure, considering the massive reduction in social circle im more wondering the person who made this was outed as a sex pest. 2 Parents and one close friend sticking around till the proof, of the sex pestery being really irrefutable dropping, makes sense.
So that article about AI cheating we saw a few weeks back is still doing the rounds. I had missed this Rationalist W in my first read:
I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.
So apparently we’re pretty close to instantiating the voice of God through the hallucination machine, which I’m sure is pretty neat.
Good username/post combo.
Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:
You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent’s off the table right from the get-go.
If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA’s essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that’s their goal here.
They’re making students listen to fabulated pronunciations of their name at the graduation ceremony https://fixupx.com/CollinRugg/status/1925328380742062485
The Magna Cooom Loud thing could absolutely be a sketch https://fixupx.com/stevemur/status/1925350041277145159
absolutely not excusing this soulless garbage, but technically the “coom” pronounciation is the more correct one, compared to what i assume would usually be “cum” (not an english native, but took latin in school)
Yeah, I grew up speaking a language that pronounces Latin closer to Italian than to English too (:
This particular thing is actually doubly funny to me, whose first practical professional program was one that took German text with English words mixed in and used regex to transform the English terms into nonsense words that would get pronounced right by the German-only text-to-speech system. That was 2002.
I can’t tell if Emalee and Subrina are special phonetic spellings for the robot or if this is what names are now…
