this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

“GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago

No no no it's fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

snrk

https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676

I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago

Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

I'm dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

[–] rook@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago

Um, actually it’s called a typestate.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

a user called "crypto-bitcoin" raises an issue with the World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility List

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

See image description below

Image descriptionImage shows user joined two weeks ago.
.
Yikes. Could be a troll (I hope it's a troll)

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 7 months ago

a lost not very computer literate dude who just got scammed i guess

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago

My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Metal music festival Shell Shock II loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest

Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: "Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with"

the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band

organisers: "We have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology." yeah you have a great show guys

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.

Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.

[–] RubyJones@smutlandia.com 1 points 7 months ago

@blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I don't understand the point of contributing if you don't think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

ah, sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension:

manmade horrors

(This would've been more shocking to me in 2023, but after over a year in this bubble I have stopped expecting anything resembling basic human decency from those who work in AI)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Not a lawyer, but wouldn't that be something her estate could kick up some legal dust about? That's two dozen kind of fucked up.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 7 months ago

As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Today in "Promptfondler fucks around and finds out."

So I'm guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn't end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn't actually understand what it's doing or when to stop, especially when it's being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.

Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn't remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.

Emphasis added.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 months ago

OMG. This is borderline unhinged behaviour. Yeah, let's just give root permission to an LLM and let it go nuts in prod. What could possibly go wrong?