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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Iām gonna do something now that prob isnāt that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (Iām quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.
E: HOLY SHIT. When I posted this it was at 400k signatures. It is now at 890k. Thanks everybody, I assumed it would never make it because after months it was at 400k now it looks like it might, and even if it doesnāt that is one final sprint. Thanks everybody for the help. E2: omg it actually made it.
Iām gonna do something now that prob isnāt that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about
I consider this both allowed and relevant, though I unfortunately canāt sign it myself
Thank you.
E: and small victory but at least .nl made it. more than 3k signatures in day in .nl alone, about 50k increase total.
same here, but Iāll pop the link to some euros I know
Signed!
Thanks!
Over 1 million, whoooooo!
I signed it but had the same assumption that it wouldnāt pass with 400k signatures over the first 362 days. But it did! The graph the last three days must look vertical.
Anyone whoās eligible and wants to sign it can still do so today, Saturday 17th. To show the popular support.
A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects donāt like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USAās judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.
I just read the github issue comment thread he links, what an entitled chode.
Love that the laughing face reactions to his AI slop laden replies stung so much he ended up posting through it on his blog.
Ow god that thread. And what is it with ālaw professionalsā like this? I also recall a client in a project who had a law background who was quite a bit of pain to work with. (Also amazing that he doesnāt get that getting a reaction where somebody tries out your very specific problem at all is already quite something, 25k open issues ffs).
E: Also seeing drama like this unfold a few times in the C:DDA development stuff (a long time ago), which prob was done by young kids/adults and not lawyers. My kneejerk reaction is to get rid of people like this from the project. They will just produce more and more drama, and will eventually burn valuable developers out. (E2: also really odd that despite saying he has a lot of exp talking to OSS devs, he thinks the normal remarks are all intended very hostile. ālikely your toolchain setting it or your build scriptā and āIāll unsubscribe from this bug nowā seem to me to be pretty normal reactions, one a first suggestion at what the problem potentially could be, and the other disclosing that he will not be working on the bug (holy shit the (non lawyer) guy being complained about here is prolific. ~100 contribs on average daily last week and an almost whole green year)). Also āI value such professional behavior very muchā tags post with ākorruptionā.
Another edit: Looked more at this guys blog and that are a lot of quite iffy opinions my man. (I noticed that the other post tagged ākorruptionā talks about the how the AfD should be allowed to go against āthe rainbow flagā (I dont know the exact details of the incident), which while yes, legally ok, it still is a bit iffy). And then I scrolled more and saw this: āDeutschland braucht eine konservative Revolution! Warum wir uns ein Beispiel an den USA nehmen solltenā āGermany needs a conservative revolution, why we should follow the USAās exampleā. He is a Musk/Trump/Venture Capitalist Manifesto true believer. Deregulate, stop the ideology build cars and go to space! The Bezos/Zuckerburg revolution. Common sense! āMusk, der Inbegriff des amerikanischen Unternehmergeistesā (If you allow me to react to this in Dutch: Lol). We need modern nuclear power, like how the USA does it (??). Deregulation, AI, humanitarian immigration that also only selects skilled workers, Freedom of speech which includes banning of ācancel cultureā, education reform, tax reform, stop crime, quantum computers, biotech, do more things online. We need to look forward, and change things, and thus a conservative revolution!
There is more stuff like: āDie temporƤre Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD in einer Verfahrensfrage wird das Parteiensystem nicht nachhaltig beschƤdigen.ā, or https://seylaw.blogspot.com/2021/04/der-negerkuss-eine-suspeise-die-gemuter.html (If you donāt speak German and want to listen to the weirdly racist drunking ramblings of a guy at the bar who is ājokingā throw it through google translate).
E: also forgot, lol at him going ājust run these two bash scripts I provided only takes 30 secsā like the devs need not first check of none of these is doing something malicious.
This was not what I had in mind for my German reading practice todayā¦
Yeah took me a lot of effort and double-checking with translate. My German is bad.
I ended up doing a messy copypasta of the blog through
wc -c: 21574dude was so peeved at getting told no (after continually wasting other peoplesā time and goodwill), he wrote a 21.5KiB screed just barely shy of full-on DARVO (and, frankly, Iām being lenient here only because of perspective (of how bad it couldāve been))
as Soyweiser also put it: a bit of a spelunk around the rest of his blog is also Quite Telling in what you may find
fuck this guy comprehensively, long may his commits be rejected
(e: oh I just saw Soyweiser also linked to that post, my bad)
It gets better btw, nobody mentioned this so far. But all this is over warnings. From what I can tell it still all compiles and works, the only references for the build failing seem to come from the devs, not the issue reporter.
E: Iām a bit tempted to send the guy a email to go āI saw your blog and had a question, was it an error or did it stop compilationā but that would imho cross the line into harassment, esp as to be fair I think I should also divulge where I come from as an outsider which would not go over well with a guy in that kind of mindset (if I have him pegged correctly). The next blogpost would be about me personally.
He is even politely asked at first āno AI sludge pleaseā which is honestly way more self-restraint than I would have on my maintained projects, but he triples down with a fucking AI-generated changeset.
the message I get is to preemptively ban user ms178 from any project Iām on
I did some reading of his blog. Yep, prob for the best.
deleted by creator
I know itās very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altmanās kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
The coda is top tier sneer:
Maybe itās useful to know that Altman uses a knife thatās showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it canāt be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste. If thatās any indication of how he runs the company, insolvency cannot be considered too unrealistic a threat.
It starts out seeming like a funny but petty and irrelevant criticism of his kitchen skill and product choices, but then beautifully transitions that into an accurate criticism of OpenAI.
Its definitely petty, but making Altmanās all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.
Definitely goes a long way to show why heās an AI bro.
The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. Iāll let Dr. Abeba Birhaneās horrified reaction do the talking:
this just started and iām already losing my mind and screaming
Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan ā literally interacting with it as if it is a āwoman that fled to chad from sudanā
just fucking shoot me
Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.
@BlueMonday1984 If Edward Said were still with us, this would be worth another chapter in Orientalism. Itās another instance of displacing actual people with a constructed fantasy of them, āotheringā them.
The stages of genocide:
- Classification
- Symbolization
- Dehumanization
- Discrimination
- Organization
- Polarization
- Preparation
- Persecuted
- Extermination
- Denial
AI is the perfect vehicle for genocide
https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
The oil industry estimates 1 billion famine deaths from climate change & they are flooding AI with investment
āThe devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machinesā
Frank HerbertUber but for vitrue signalling (*).
(I joke, because other remarks I want to make will get me in trouble).
*: I know this term is very RW coded, but I donāt think it is that bad, esp when you mean it like āan empty gesture with a very low cost that does nothing except for signal that the person is virtuous.ā Not actually doing more than a very small minimum should be part of the definition imho. Stuff like selling stickers you are pro some minority group but only 0.05% of each sale goes to a cause actually helping that group. (Or the rich guys charity which employs half his family/friends, or Mr Beast, or the rightwing debate bro threatening a leftwinger with a fight āfor charityā (this also signals their RW virtue to their RW audience (trollinā and fightinā)).
I mean āthe rightā has managed to corrupt all kinds of fine phrases into dog whistles. I think āvirtue signallingā as you have formulated it is a valid observation and criticism of someoneās actions. I blame āliberalsā for posturing and virtue signalling as leftist, giving the right easy opportunities to score points.
āFree speechā is now a rightwing dogwistle, at least for me.
Ahh yes, freeze peaches, buttery males etc.
Free speech is the perfect exemple of a formal liberty anyway. Materially it is entirely meaningless in a society where access to speech is so unequal, and not something worth fighting for in the absolute sense. Fight against the effective censorship of good ideas and minority perspectives instead.
@BlueMonday1984 omfg. Thatās abhorrent.
EWWW WHAT THE FUCK
Thanks I hate it
Todayās man-made and entirely comprehensible horror comes from SAP.
(two rainbow stickers labelled āpride@sapā, with one saying āI support equality by embracing responsible aiā and the other saying āI advocate for inclusion through aiā)
Donāt have any other sources or confirmation yet, so it might be a load of cobblers, but it is depressingly plausible. From here: https://catcatnya.com/@ada/114508096636757148
If this is real it would be double infuriating, not just because of the AI nonsense, but also because just 3 days ago SAP went bootlicker and announced ending diversity programs.
Ignored the text, go LGBT buster sword.
Inclusion through saving all the consumables for the next boss battle!
I advocate for inclusion with equal-opportunity E. coli contamination, thatās why I voted for RFK Jr. We can all spew together!
Iām mentally filing this next to that clip of a black guy telling someone to just call him the N-word.
So those safety pins that were a thing for a minute were AI Safety pins all along.
So I picked up Bender and Hannaās new book just now at the booksellerās and saw four other books dragging AI.
Feeling very bullish on sneer futures.
Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since weāve been stacking sneers for a while.
Even more signs that sneering might soon be profitable, or at least exploitable. Look who is pivoting to sneer
Okay, two separate thoughts here:
- Paul G is so fucking close to getting it, Christ on a bike
- How the fuck do you get burned by someone as soulless as Sam Altman
Terrible news: the worst fella we know just dropped a banger post ;_;
Yeah with PG it was āwho are you saying this for, you cannot be this denseā (Esp considering the shit he said about wokeness earlier this year).
Paul Graham randomly blurting out inane and ostensibly vague insinuations about fellow rich peopleās obvious bullshit smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a lifetime of ass kissing. I sure hope it isnāt. It would be really bad if Paul Graham got his rocks off on huffing the smell of his own farts.
Check the quote skeets for a lot more. Somebody messed up. Wonder if they also managed to collapse the whole model into this permanently. (Iām already half assuming they donāt have proper backups).
E: Also seems there are enough examples out there of this, donāt go out and test it yourself, try to keep the air in Tennessee a bit breathable.
I read a food review recently about a guy that used LLMs, with Grok namechecked specifically, to draft designs for his chocolate moulds. I wonder how those moulds are gonna turn out now
They all have vague imprints of the Rhodesian flag now.
everybodyās loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writerās strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience
5 seconds later
we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism
Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???
Personally Iād choose bitconnect. Bitconneeeeeeeeect!!!
I think itās just āWorldā now. Theyāve apparently had a pretty big marketing push in the states of late, trying to convince trendsetters and influencers to surrender their eyeballs to The Orb.
He looked in the mirror and wept, for there were no more things to ruin.
you must understand
Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat
All the eyeballs
Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.
me too. this heel turn is disappointing as hell, and I suspected fuckery at first, but the video excerpts Rebecca clipped and Conoverās actions on Twitter since then make it pretty clear he did this willingly.
I suspect Adam was just getting a bit desperate for money. He hasnāt done anything significant since his Adam Ruins Everything days and his pivot to somewhat lefty-union guy on youtube canāt be bringing all that much advertising money.
Unfortunately heās discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
ājustā?
āunfortunatelyā?
thatās a hell of a lot of leeway being extended for what is very easily demonstrably credulous PR-washing
Unfortunately heās discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
I think its accurate to just say that someone who is well known for reporting on exposing bullshit by various companies who then shills bullshit for a company, shows they arenāt always accurate.
It then also enables people to question if they got something else wrong on other topics. āWas he wrong about X? Did Y really happened or was it fluffed up for a good story? Did Z happen? The company has some documents that show they didnāt intend for it to happen.ā
Thereās a skeptic podcast I liked that had its host federally convicted for wire fraud.
Dunning co-founded Buylink, a business-to-business service provider, in 1996, and served at the company until 2002. He later became eBayās second-biggest affiliate marketer;[3] he has since been convicted of wire fraud through a cookie stuffing scheme, for his company fraudulently obtaining between $200,000 and $400,000 from eBay. In August 2014, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by three years of supervision.
I took it if he was willing to aid in scamming customers, he is willing to aid in scamming or lying to listeners.
Absolutely, the fact that his whole reputation is built around exposing people and practices like these, makes this so much worse. People are willing to (somewhat) swallow some gamer streamer endorsing some shady shit in order to keep food on their plate, but people donāt tolerate their skeptics selling them bullshit.
I donāt think I ever had a vibe-check as successful as this, literally never heard about the guy, said he needs to be shoved into a locker based on vibes, an hour later he searches for his own name to respond and gets hammered in replies for supporting The Big Orb. Just a quintessential internet moment.
an hour later he searches for his own name to respond
Is there anything more pathetic? Jesus.
Natural 20
Hey, it costs a lot to coif up that hair.
Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:
āā¦no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,ā says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.
If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.
The pro-child-porn caucus.
Expect the āAI safetyā weenuses to have a giant freakout too.
Whatās the over-under on how many of them voted for Trump lol
Given the libertarian fixation, probably a solid percentage of them. And even the ones that didnāt vote for Trump often push or at least support various mixes of āgrey-tribeā, āpolitics is spidersā, ācenter leftā, etc. kind of libertarian centrist thinking where they either avoided āpoliticalā discussion on lesswrong or the EA forums (and implicitly accepted libertarian assumptions without argument) or they encouraged āreaching across the aisleā or āavoiding polarized discourseā or otherwise normalized Trump and the alt-right.
Like looking at Scottās recent posts on ACX, he is absolutely refusing responsibility for his role in the alt-right pipeline with every excuse he can pull out of his ass.
Of course, the heretics who have gone full e/acc absolutely love these sorts of āpolicyā choices, so this actually makes them more in favor of Trump.
I have not kept up but Scott did write an anti trump article again before the election. So we really cant blame them /s
Reminds me of how Scott Adams hedged in 2016 with all sorts of disclaimers that he wasnāt really a Trump supporter, he was just impressed by a āmaster persuader.ā Now look at the guy.
His blog was wild. Remains sad that the first part of the āDANGER DO NOT READ!!! I will hypnotize you into having the best orgasms of your lifeā blog series was not properly archived.
The Repubs more-or-less renamed themselves Team Skynet with this open attempt to maximise AIās harms, I absolutely think theyāre McFucking Losing Itā¢ right now.
Its not a coincidence that the fossil fuel industry wants that same immunity. The fossil fuel industry funds AI initiatives.
The gun lobby pioneered that regulatory capture.
https://truthout.org/articles/big-oil-is-taking-a-page-from-gun-manufacturers-immunity-playbook/
Thereās estimates on the damages caused by the fossil fuel industry.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fossil-fuel-companies-emissions-climate-damage-study/
Wonder what the damage costs for AI will be? Perpetual religious wars? World war with AI drones?
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-heads-uae-it-hopes-advance-ai-ambitions-2025-05-15/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/trump-artificial-intelligence-uae
Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.
>lightweight >powered by large language modelslol
Not even Ken Thompson wrote such high quality code in his prime.
Seriously, donāt generate an array unless explicitly asked for it. Please.
Peak prompt engineering right there.
Even with the name it had me going for a while. Whoever wrote it is gonna want to have a lawyer on speed dial for the inevitable license violation.
as linked elsewhere by @fasterandworse, this absolute winner of an article about some telstra-accenture deal
it features some absolute bangers
provisional sneers follow!
Telstra is spending $700 million over seven years in the joint venture, 60 per cent of which is owned by Accenture. Telstra will get to keep the data and the strategy thatās developed
āaccenture managed to swindle them into paying and is keeping all platform IP rightsā
The AI hub is also an important test case for Accenture, which partnered with Nvidia to create an AI platform that works with any cloud service and will be first put to use for Telstra
āaccenture were desperately looking to find someone whoād take on the deal for the GPUs theyād bought, and thank fuck they found telstraā
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers
having literally worked telco shit for many years myself: no it wonāt
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers and the wider industry)
āand the wider industryā ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhaahahahahaha uh-huh, sure thing kiddo
āI always believe that for the front office to be simple, elegant and seamless, the back office is generally pretty hardcore and messy. A lot of machines turning. Itās like the outside kitchen versus the inside kitchen,ā said Karthik Narain, Accentureās chief technology officer.
āWe need a robust inside kitchen for the outside kitchen to look pretty. So thatās what we are trying to do with this hub. This is not just a showcase demo office. This is where the real stuff happens.ā
a simile so exquisitely tortured, de Sade wouldāve been jealous
Tante on the hype term āagentic AIā
Despite the snake-oil flavor of Vending-Bench, GeminiPlaysPokemon, and ClaudePlaysPokemon, Iāve found them to be a decent antidote to agentic LLM hype. The insane transcripts of Vending-Bench and the inability of an LLM to play Pokemon at the level of a 9 year old is hard to argue with, and the snake oil flavoring makes it easier to get them to swallow.
I now wonder how that compares to earlier non-LLM AI attempts to create a bot that can play games in general. Used to hear bits of that kind of research every now and then but LLM/genAI has sucked the air out of the room.
In terms of writing bots to play Pokemon specifically (which given the prompting and custom tools written I think is the most fair comparison)ā¦ not very wellā¦ according to this reddit comment a bot from 11 years ago can beat the game in 2 hours and was written with about 7.5K lines of LUA, while an open source LLM scaffold for playing Pokemon relatively similar to claudeās or geminiās is 4.8k lines (and still missing many of the tools Gemini had by the end, and Gemini took weeks of constant play instead of 2 hours).
So basically it takes about the same number of lines written to do a much much worse job. Pokebot probably required relatively more skill to implementā¦ but OTOH, Geminiās scaffold took thousands of dollars in API calls to trial and error develop and run. So you can write bots from scratch that substantially outperform LLM agent for moderately more programming effort and substantially less overall cost.
In terms of gameplay with reinforcement learningā¦ still not very well. Iāve watched this video before on using RL directly on pixel output (with just a touch of memory hacking to set the rewards), it uses substantially less compute than LLMs playing pokemon and the resulting trained NN benefits from all previous training. The developer hadnāt gotten it to play through the whole gameā¦ probably a few more tweaks to the reward function might manage a lot more progress? OTOH, LLMs playing pokemon benefit from being able to more directly use NPC dialog (even if their CoT āreasoningā often goes on erroneous tangents or completely batshit leaps of logic), while the RL approach is almost outright blindā¦ a big problem the RL approach might run into is backtracking in the later stages since they use reward of exploration to drive the model forward. OTOH, the LLMs also had a lot of problems with backtracking.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for āLLM agentsā is that people figure out how to use them as a ācreativeā component in more conventional bots and AI approaches, where a more conventional bot prompts the LLM for āplansā which it uses when it gets stuck. AlphaGeometry2 is a good demonstration of this, it solved 42/50 problems with a hybrid neurosymbolic and LLM approach, but it is notable it could solve 16 problems with just the symbolic portion without the LLM portion, so the LLM is contributing some, but the actual rigorous verification is handled by the symbolic AI.
(edit: Looking at more discussion of AlphaGeometry, the addition of an LLM is even less impressive than that, itās doing something you could do without an LLM at all, on a set of 30 problems discussed, the full AlphaGeometry can do 25/30, without the LLM at all 14/30,* but* using alternative methods to an LLM it can do 18/30 or even 21/30 (depending on the exact method). Soā¦ the LLM is doing something, which is more than my most cynical sneering would suspect, but not much, and not necessarily that much better than alternative non-LLM methods.)
Cool thanks for doing the effort post.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for āLLM agentsā is that people figure out how to use them as a ācreativeā component in more conventional bots and AI approaches
This was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already, with a less focus on the conventional bots/ai. Where they use the LLMs for some things still. But hard to spread fact from PR, and some of the things they say they do seem to be like it isnāt a great fit for LLMs, esp considering what I heard from people who are not in the hype train. (The example coming to mind is using LLMs to standardize some sort of reporting/test writing, while I heard from somebody I trust who has seen people try that and had it fail as it couldnāt keep a consistent standard).
his was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already
curious about this reference - wdym?
āwe use LLMs for X in our security productsā gets brought up a lot in the risky business podcast promotional parts basically, and it sometimes leaks into the other parts as well. That is basically the times I hear people speak somewhat positively about it. Where they use LLMs (or claim to use) for various things, some I thought were possible but iffy, some impossible, like having LLMs do massive amounts of organizational work. Sorry I canāt recall the specifics. (Iām also behind atm).
Never heard people speak positively about it from the people I know, but they also know Iām not that positive about AI, so the likelyhood they just avoid the subject is non-zero.
E: Schneier is also not totally against the use of llms for example. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/privacy-for-agentic-ai.html quite disappointed. (Also as with all security related blogs nowadays, dont read the comments, people have lost their minds, it always was iffy, but the last few years every security related blog that reaches some fame is filled with madmen).
Ah, I donāt listen to riskybiz because ugh podcast
Schneierās a dipshit well past his prime, though. people should stop listening to that ossified doorstop
The latest in chatbot āassistedā legal filings. This time courtesy of an Anthropicās lawyers and a data scientist, who tragically canāt afford software that supports formatting legal citations and have to rely on Clippy instead: https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-filing-citation-error
After the Latham & Watkins team identified the source as potential additional support for Ms. Chenās testimony, I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article. Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error. Our citation check also missed additional wording errors introduced in the citations during the formatting process using Claude.ai.
Donāt get high on your own AI as they say.
I wonder how many of these people will do a Very Sudden opinion reversal once these headwinds wind disappear
A quick Google turned up bluebook citations from all the services that these people should have used to get through high school and undergrad. There may have been some copyright drama in the past but I would expect the court to be far more forgiving of a formatting error from a dumb tool than the outright fabrication that GenAI engages in.
Thereās strawmanning and steelmanning, Iām proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:
If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, theyād say that āchinese spiesā had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! Thatās right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!
Ok thatās all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos
E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3
I know AGI is real because it keeps intercepting my shipments of, uh, āenhancementā gummies I ordered from an ad on Pornhub and replacing them with plain old gummy bears. The Basilisk is trying to emasculate me!
The AGI is flashing light patterns into my eyes and lowering my testosterone!!! Guys arm the JDAMs, itās time to collapse some models
Do you like SCP foundation content? There is an SCP directly inspired by Eliezer and lesswrong. Itās kind of wordy and long. And in the discussion the author waffled on owning that it was a mockery of Eliezer.
I adjusted her ESAS downward by 5 points for questioning me, but 10 points upward for doing it out of love.
Oh, itās a mockery all right. This is so fucking funny. Itās nothing less than the full application of SCPās existing temporal narrative analysis to Big Yudās philosophy. This is what they actually believe. For folks who donāt regularly read SCP, any article about reality-bending is usually a portrait of a narcissist, and the body horror is meant to give analogies for understanding the psychological torture they inflict on their surroundings; the article meanders and takes its time because thereās just so much worth mocking.
This reminded me that SCP-2718 exists. 2718 is a Basilisk-class memetic cognitohazard; it will cause distress in folks who have been sensitized to Big Yudās belief system, and you should not click if you canāt handle that. But it shows how these ideas werenāt confined to LW.
I enjoy that it exists, but have never dived into it.
In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a āconversational AIā to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).
To nobodyās surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.
Ghoul shit on ghoul shit
Epic announced that it had pushed a hotfix to address Vaderās unfortunate profanity, saying āthis shouldnāt happen again.ā
Translator: āWe are altering the prompt. We pray that we donāt have to alter it further.ā
