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.)
(e: wrong. damn. tab.)
(e2)
the students in my cs department are overwhelmingly promptfondlers and even my strong students are doing the “qualified praise” thing.
fuck me why did i go into computer science
fuck me why did i go into computer science
That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”. Fuck it, I’m going to write out a sidenote:
On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming’s public image after it bursts.
On one front, there’s the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.
On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble’s dealt to artists, and AI’s continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers’ failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.
The reason I do CS is because a professor of computer science lied to me about the kind of work I’d be doing to get me to enroll in the CS PhD program instead of math. Guy later physically threatened me in his office and plagiarized my work, but I’m not sure if this reflects poorly on computer scientists, academics, or CS professors.
Anyway I have a chip on my shoulder.
I’m sorry, that’s messed up.
Thank you for the expression of sympathy. The good news is I actually love computer science, it fucking rules.
Also, I recorded this professor screaming at me and have documented all the plagiarism. I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint. He may not get in any real trouble (universities will always go to bat for abusive researchers as long as they bring in grant money), but news will get out eventually.
I hope you whoop his ass (legally speaking)
I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint
I am internally screaming
not that I blame you for this choice (in fact I get it), but it fucking suuuuuuuucks how many places and structures are overly protecting abusers. and it sucks even more how many people are being harmed out of that path as a result.
echoing what o7 said: sorry, this is messed up, it shouldn’t be this way
<3
That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”.
I studied computer science because I was a huge computer nerd growing up. I always loved programming and learning everything I could about how computers worked. Learning new programming languages felt like uncovering a new universe of knowledge – knowledge I could use to create things. I spent endless hours studying computers and learning to do amazing things with them. It was fun. It still is.
So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.
Very similar situation to mine, but i went into electronics engineering instead of CS because i didn’t think i would like to write software for a living. I now write software for a living, go figure.
Also agreed on the “doing it” thing. I hear people around the office talk about letting AI write things for them and i’m like no, i want to write it myself. i like doing things.
So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.
I have a theory (similar to that “it’s been vibe coding all along” post) that it’s a combination of wishful thinking, lack of knowledge of real science, and a lack of any liberal arts skills, that altogether produces this farce.
I think it’s a good explanation for “the code has been battle tested because it’s so old and widely used, if it had bugs/security issues, we would have discovered them by now”, as well as the widespread “we invented a tech solution that is just a worse engineering solution”. Looking at you, chain of self-driving cars.
Remember FizzBuzz? That was originally a simple filter exercise some person recruiting programmers came up with to weed out everyone with multi-year CS degrees but zero actual programming experience.
Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard’s Bluesky):
You want my take, Kathryn’s on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.
kinda related but wouldn’t it be fun to believe that LLMs were invented by Big Em Dash as a conspiracy
I fucking hate them for ruining the em dash, I liked to use it from time to time
somewhere out there, there’s a writer who really likes the em dash, the word “delve,” and answering questions with a one-word hyper-chipper affirmative, followed by three sentences of people pleasing. He can’t get a job because he keeps being accused of using AI
It’s not just blank, it’s blank
Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.
More people should have read Zima Blue.
Zima Blue
Didn’t know it was something readable! I just know it as an episode of Love Death + Robots. It was a standout episode in an otherwise pretty boring first two seasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zima_Blue_and_Other_Stories it is, I still have not watched love death + robots, so I only knew it from the story collection.
Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.
Finally, a slur my British ass can sling at people guilt-free
Copilot will be given a little avatar with a “room” and will “age”. In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.
Fuck you Microsoft, I’m gonna have to pretend to be autoplag’s dad now, at least have the courtesy not to make it look like a cum blob.
This sounds like the plot of an oglaf comic
@o7___o7 @bitofhope it is the cum sprite!
“Splash on your tits?”
This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse
EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi
Those who do not study history are doomed to recreate neopets.
Neopets but it’s an animated blob of cum with a smiley face.
They wanted a sexy avatar, turns out Oglaf.com is in the training set. “Mistress!”
Neopets at least brought joy to a generation of nascent furries. Copilot is fixing to have the exact opposite impact on internet infrastructure.
Of course, it is now funded by growth at all cost VC people, they do not understand fun or joy, all they want to see is n = n+1
At least Microsoft Bob gave us comic sans.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten lol but good for lore:
The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’
(in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system)
That’s an ML model. Like I searched and
toxic-bertis just a github repo.“objective” go fuck a cow
Sidenote: I almost ended up working for the company almost a decade ago now lmao. The board was full of other characters we all know and love here. The €€€ offer was high for EU, but I still laugh at the growth potential of my 10000 dollars yearly equivalent in their tokens. The website was unique in that it scrolled… up. I think it’s still on archive dot org
@nfultz @BlueMonday1984 the fucking Hexayurt Guy?
this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room
If your system flagged that as toxic, makes me wonder about the system. Also check your bias against people saying this because it def comes off as true. (And hey if this truth hurts, remember that he didnt claim yall are not the smartest people, yall have 130+ iqs remember).
Just because it’s true, that doesn’t mean it’s not rude. Now I might condone being rude on ACX but I’m also not claiming to have reached enlightenment.
Buddha, just seconds before enlightenment:
-you know what actually fuck those guys heavenly light
Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite, if it is true, it can’t be rude. ;)
(E: im just joking btw, I agree with you it can be rude, and tbh this does come off a bit rude, but not the worst, no idea why this would score high on their scoring system, it def isn’t nice, but it is also not that bad in regards to comments).
Damn you, Scott! Stop making me agree with people who created blockchain-based dating apps!
I’ve met Vinay, he’s great in person. But should not post.
I try to talk to ChatGPT for 2 straight hours but go crazy and have to stop | Daniel Hentschel
I’m here to help in whatever way I can. Just let me know what you’d like to do next.
What I’d like to do next is fucking hang myself. Oh shit I shouldn’t have said that. No, I’m joking. That was a joke. I was joking about that. Joking.
I’m sorry he feels that way. I’m here for him if he wants to talk about anything, just let me know.
I didn’t see this article here yet, but I just saw it elsewhere and it’s pretty good: Potemkin Understanding in Large Language Models
The guy who thinks it’s important to communicate clearly (https://awful.systems/comment/7904956) wants to flip the number order around
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXr8ys8PYppKXgGWj/english-writes-numbers-backwards
I’ll consider that when the Yanks abandon middle-endian date formatting.
Edit it’s now tagged as “Humor” on LW. Cowards. Own your cranks.
Likewise, flipped-number (“little endian”) algorithms are slightly more efficient at e.g. long addition.
What? What are you talking about? Citation? Efficient wrt. what? Microbenchmarks? It’s certainly not actual computational complexity. Do you think going forward in an array is different computationally from going backward?
Okay what the fuck, this is completely deranged. How can anyone’s intuitions about reading be this wrong? Is he secretly illiterate, did he dictate the article?
damn, a clanker pretending to be a human. humans read entire words at once, and this includes numbers, length and first digit already give some indication of magnitude
i like how on lw there’s a comment saying exactly the same thing but 5x more verbose
Yes, and largest place value is literally called the most significant digit. It makes perfect sense that it comes first.
Computers use both big endian and little endian and it doesn’t seem to matter much. Yet humans should switch their entire number system?
E: this guy can’t grasp the concept that left-to-right is arbitrary, which is really ironic given his point. Ok so in arabic it’s exactly how this guy wants it, except no, the universally correct reading direction is left-to-right and arabic does it backwards just to be quirky🙄, and humans, just like programs, flip a bit to read it left-to-right, where it’s the opposite of how you should be reading it! of course.
Ok so in arabic it’s exactly how this guy wants it
reminded me of this
text of image/tweet
@amasad. Apr 22
Silicon Valley will rediscover Islam:
- fasting for clarity and focus
- mindfulness 5 times a day
- no alcohol that ruins the soul & body
- long-term faithful relationships for a fulfilling happy family life
- effective altruism by giving zakat directly to the poor
The argument would be stronger (not strong, but stronger) if he could point to an existing numbering system that is little-endian and somehow show it’s better
Starting this fight and not ‘stop counting at zero you damn computer nerds!’ is a choice. DIJKSTRAAAAAAAA shakes fist
(There is more to it in a way, as he is trying to be a Dijkstra, and changing an ingrained system which would confuse everybody and cause so many problems down the line. See all the off by one errors made by programmers. Damn DIJKSTRAAAAAA!).
i needed this giggle, gods bless our dubbers
Sometimes while browsing a website I catch a glimpse of the cute jackal girl and it makes me smile. Anubis isn’t a perfect thing by any means, but it’s what the web deserves for its sins.
Even some pretty big name sites seem to use it as-is, down to the mascot. You’d think the software is pretty simple to customize into something more corporate and soulless, but I’m happy to see the animal eared cartoon girl on otherwise quite sterile sites.
certainly better than seeing the damned cloudflare Click Here To Human box, although I suspect a number of these deployments still don’t sponsor Xe or the project development :/
Xe has talked a bit about the mascot in question before - by her own testimony, its there to act as a shopping cart test to see who’s willing to support the project. Reportedly, she’s planning to exploit it to make some more elaborate checks as well.
Huh, interesting approach. So the idea is that you either use the free version and (preferably) retain the anime girl mascot to promote Anubis itself, or you pay for a commercial license to remove animu in a way that is officially supported.
Basically. Its to explicitly prevent Xe from becoming the load-bearing peg for a massive portion of the Internet, thus ensuring this project doesn’t send her health down the shitter.
You want my prediction, I suspect future FOSS projects may decide to adopt mascots of their own, to avoid the “load-bearing maintainer” issue in a similar manner.
Seems a bit early to say whether others are going to do that. This experiment hasn’t had much time to prove itself and so far I haven’t recognized anyone using a corporate branded BotStopper instance, only the jackal girl version.
Responsibility manahement through branding is an interrsting idea and I wouldn’t mind seeing it working, but a prediction like that seems like jumping to conclusions prematurely. Then again, I guess that’s kinda what “prediction” means in general.
Should we give up on all altruist causes because the AGI God is nearly here? the answer may surprise you!
tldr; actually you shouldn’t give because the AGI God might not be quite omnipotent and thus would still benefit from your help and maybe there will be multiple Gods, some used for Good and some for Evil so your efforts are still needed. Shrimp are getting their eyeballs cut off right now!
Stomatopodcasting
Alex O’Connor platformed Sabine on his philosophy podcast. I’m irritated that he is turning into Lex Friedman simply by being completely uncritical. Well, no, wait, he was critical of Bell’s theorem, and even Sabine had to tell him that Bell’s work is mathematically proven. This is what a philosophy degree does to your epistemology, I guess.
My main sneer here is just some links. See, Mary’s Room is answered by neuroscience; Mary does experience something new when color vision is restored. In particular, check out the testimonials from this 2021 Oregon experiment that restored color vision to some folks born without it. Focusing on physics, I’d like to introduce you all to Richard Behiel, particularly his explanations of electromagnetism and the Anderson-Higgs mechanism; there are deeper explanations for electricity and magnets, my dude. Also, if you haven’t yet, go read Alex’s Wikipedia article, linked at the top of the sneer.
In the case of O’Connor and people like him, I think it’s about much more than his philosophy background. He’s a YouTube creator who creates content on a regular schedule and makes a living off it. Once you start doing that, you’re exposed to all the horrible incentives of the YouTube engagement algorithm, which inevitably leads you to start seeking out other controversial YouTubers to platform and become friendly with. It’s an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” situation dialed up to 11.
The same thing has happened to Sabine herself. She’s been captured by the algorithm, which has naturally shifted her audience to the right, and now she’s been fully captured by that new audience.
I fully expect Alex O’Connor to remain on this treadmill. <remind me in 12months>
What getting c*cked by Mikhaila Peterson does to a mfer.
It’s hard to come up with analogies for AI because it’s so goddamn stupid. It’s like if asbestos was flammable.
it’s like leaded gasoline for internet - it makes people stupid and aggressive, kids are hit the worst by it, fallout will be felt for decades, cleanup might be hard to impossible, and ultimately it’s a product of corporate greed. except even leaded gasoline solved some problem
it’s also like gambling as in hook model. it’s like cocaine in that it has been marketed to managerial class as a status symbol of sorts
Or like the radium craze of the early 20th century (even if radium may have a lot more legitimate use cases than current-day LLM).
One of the products was removal of unwanted hair. You radiated and the hair just fell off! How practical!
To be fair to the radium people, I don’t think the correlation between radiation and cancer was established until the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still one could see hair falling of as a warning sign of sorts.
Someone I know called AI “a non-invasive procedure to lobotomise people” after I mentioned this Pivot to AI, and its stuck with me ever since
New piece from Brian Merchant, and a new edition of AI Killed My Job just dropped
