TechTakes

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.

(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)

"the AI thread in our society now is nothing more or less than a demand by the wealthy creators of it for submission. It's a naked show of force by the powerful and stupid: you will use this tool, and you will like it."

Original link

OFC if there were any real sense or justice in the world, LLMs would be banned outright.

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.

last week's thread

In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy [...] perhaps most notably, that DeepSeek’s new, more efficient approach means AI might not need to guzzle the massive amounts of energy that it currently does.

The latter notion is misleading, and new numbers shared with MIT Technology Review help show why. These early figures—based on the performance of one of DeepSeek’s smaller models on a small number of prompts—suggest it could be more energy intensive when generating responses than the equivalent-size model from Meta. The issue might be that the energy it saves in training is offset by its more intensive techniques for answering questions, and by the long answers they produce.

Add the fact that other tech firms, inspired by DeepSeek’s approach, may now start building their own similar low-cost reasoning models, and the outlook for energy consumption is already looking a lot less rosy.

Sam "wrong side of FOSS history" Altman must be pissing himself.

Direct Nitter Link:

https://nitter.lucabased.xyz/jiayi_pirate/status/1882839370505621655

So I was just reading this thread about deepseek refusing to answer questions about Tianenmen square.

It seems obvious from screenshots of people trying to jailbreak the webapp that there's some middleware that just drops the connection when the incident is mentioned. However I've already asked the self hosted model multiple controversial China questions and it's answered them all.

The poster of the thread was also running the model locally, the 14b model to be specific, so what's happening? I decide to check for myself and lo and behold, I get the same "I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses."

Is it just that specific model being censored? Is it because it's the qwen model it's distilled from that's censored? But isn't the 7b model also distilled from qwen?

So I check the 7b model again, and this time round that's also censored. I panic for a few seconds. Have the Chinese somehow broken into my local model to cover it up after I downloaded it.

I check the screenshot I have of it answering the first time I asked and ask the exact same question again, and not only does it work, it acknowledges the previous question.

So wtf is going on? It seems that "Tianenmen square" will clumsily shut down any kind of response, but Tiananmen square is completely fine to discuss.

So the local model actually is censored, but the filter is so shit, you might not even notice it.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the next release. Will the censorship be less thorough, stay the same, or will china again piss away a massive amount of soft power and goodwill over something that everybody knows about anyway?