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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 day ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Just two weeks til' Halloween now.

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.)

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 3 points 1 hour ago

New Odium Symposium premium episode. We talk about Julia Galef guest hosting the Ezra Klein show to shill superforecasting

https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/ezra-klein-is-2-172872571

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Quick Q, from where does the weird term "abliteration" come from? I've seen it used for "jailbroken" GenAI models.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

With a bit of google searching by date it seems like this guy (https://huggingface.co/failspy/Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct-abliterated-v3.5) claims ownership of the coining, which I find plausible, based on the list of released weights and their timing.

As far as "abliteration": it's just a fun play-on-words using the original "ablation" term used in the original paper to refer to removing features, which I made up particularly to differentiate the model from "uncensored" fine-tunes. Ablate + obliterated = Abliterated.

The paper being referred to being: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction which seems to have somehow started out on the "AI alignement forum" of LessWrong https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in-llms-is-mediated-by-a-single-direction first posted 27th of April 2024. In general it's a method of weight alteration so only really applicable to some opensource (or i guess leaked) models.

First model with abliterated in the name by "failspy" on 8th of May 2024.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

Thanks!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

wiktionary claims it is a blend of "ablate" and "obliterate", it does not list an origin (at this point in time)

edit: looking a little more into this, knowing the etymology requires reading about AI discussions which I am not prepared for at this point in time but it is out there in the internet

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 3 points 3 hours ago

New OpenBSD is out and the commemoratove artwork is definitely trying to say something about genAI.

[–] Rinn@awful.systems 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.

So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I'm thinking locksmithing.

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 4 points 4 hours ago

If you're interested in locksmithing I've got bad news. It got harder after WFH, waaaay more people home in rich neighbourhoods

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

OT: popping in for a second since I’m not drowning in homework for once (midterms start friday) to say carpal tunnel stripping is really good.

(so far I’m averaging in the high 80s last I checked).

[–] robjwells@awful.systems 2 points 6 hours ago

Good luck with your exams.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 11 hours ago

going thru it myself, can report that non-graded "suggested exercises," with exams being the only graded material, is not any better

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