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.)
Found a good security-related sneer in response to a low-skill exploit in Google Gemini (tl;dr: “send Gemini a prompt in white-on-white/0px text”):
I’ve got time, so I’ll fire off a sidenote:
In the immediate term, this bubble’s gonna be a goldmine of exploits - chatbots/LLMs are practically impossible to secure in any real way, and will likely be the most vulnerable part of any cybersecurity system under most circumstances. A human can resist being socially engineered, but these chatbots can’t really resist being jailbroken.
In the longer term, the one-two punch of vibe-coded programs proliferating in the wild (featuring easy-to-find and easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities) and the large scale brain drain/loss of expertise in the tech industry (from juniors failing to gain experience thanks to using LLMs and seniors getting laid off/retiring) will likely set back cybersecurity significantly, making crackers and cybercriminals’ jobs a lot easier for at least a few years.
I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.
It’s something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I’m not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it’s the websites themselves.)
Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.
On a product page I then saw:
Material: gefühlt
This was very strange… because that makes no sense at all. “Gefühlt” is a form (participle) of the verb “fühlen”, which means “to feel”. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.
So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense “to feel” as “felt”. And of course “felt” can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called “Filz”), so it’s a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they’re in.
And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.
And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It’s unbearable. At least there’s a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?
Guys, how about we made the coming computer god a fan of Robert Nozick, what could go wrong?
Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.
I expect the time right around when the first ASI gets built to be chaotic, unstable, and scary
Somebody should touch grass, or check up on the news.
Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673
The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.
Apologies if this was posted when published.
OpenAI claims that their AI can get a gold medal on the International Mathematical Olympiad. The public models still do poorly even after spending hundreds of dollars in computing costs, but we’ve got a super secret scary internal model! No, you cannot see it, it lives in Canada, but we’re gonna release it in a few months, along with GPT5 and Half-Life 3. The solutions are also written in an atrociously unreadable manner, which just shows how our model is so advanced and experimental, and definitely not to let a generous grader give a high score. (It would be real interesting if OpenAI had a tool that could rewrite something with better grammar, hmmm…) I definitely trust OpenAI’s major announcements here, they haven’t lied about anything involving math before and certainly wouldn’t have every incentive in the world to continue lying!
It does feel a little unfortunate that some critics like Gary Marcus are somewhat taking OpenAI’s claims at face value, when in my opinion, the entire problem is that nobody can independently verify any of their claims. If a tobacco company released a study about the effects of smoking on lung cancer and neglected to provide any experimental methodology, my main concern would not be the results of that study.
Edit: A really funny observation that I just thought of: in the OpenAI guy’s thread, he talks about how former IMO medalists graded the solutions in message #6 (presumably to show that they were graded impartially), but then in message #11 he is proud to have many past IMO participants working at OpenAI. Hope nobody puts two and two together!
https://xcancel.com/jasonlk/status/1946069562723897802
Vibe Coding Day 8,
I’m not even out of bed yet and I’m already planning my day on @Replit.
Today is AI Day, to really add AI to our algo.
[…]
If @Replit deleted my database between my last session and now there will be hell to pay
their story is so incoherent, i can’t even tell if there was a database to begin with
also great: the promptfondlers unrapidly rediscovering why source control management exists and is desired
I’d be lying if I said the randomly generated narrative the LLM is stringing together isn’t hilarious.
“I panicked and ran database commands without permission.”
“I destroyed all production data.”
“You immediately said ‘No’, '‘Stop’, ‘You didn’t even ask.’”
“But it was already too late.”
Thread on this lying bullshit
I feel like this response is still falling for the trick on some level. Of course it’s going to “act contrite” and talk about how it “panicked” because it was trained on human conversations and while that no doubt included a lot of Supernatural fanfic the reinforcement learning process is going to focus on the patterns of a helpful asistant rather than a barely-caged demon. That’s the role it’s trying to play and the work it’s cribbing the script from includes a whole lot of shitposts about solving problems with “rm -rf /”
Saw this, was going to post this a literal minute before you did but stared into this abyss a little too long.
Here’s what the abyss revealed:
- Guy is fucking stupid
- Guy is fucking stupid, hence the AI use
- Guy is fucking stupid, AI accidentally his whole database and he is still an AI glazer
Can’t wait to see this guy just use a different but same tool to delete his shit again, and learn nothing
Copy/pasting a post I made in the DSP driver subreddit that I might expand over at morewrite because it’s a case study in how machine learning algorithms can create massive problems even when they actually work pretty well.
It’s a machine learning system, not an actual human boss. The system is set up to try and find the breaking point, where if you finish your route on time it assumes you can handle a little bit more and if you don’t it backs off.
The real problem is that everything else in the organization is set up so that finishing your routes on time is a minimum standard while the algorithm that creates the routes is designed to make doing so just barely possible. Because it’s not fully individualized, this means that doing things like skipping breaks and waiving your lunch (which the system doesn’t appear to recognize as options) effectively push the edge of what the system thinks is possible out a full extra hour, and then the rest of the organization (including the decision-makers about who gets to keep their job) turn that edge into the standard. And that’s how you end up where we are now, where actually taking your legally-protected breaks is at best a luxury for top performers or people who get an easy route for the day, rather than a fundamental part of keeping everyone doing the job sane and healthy.
Part of that organizational problem is also in the DSP setup itself, since it allows Amazon to avoid taking responsibility or accountability for those decisions. All they have to do is make sure their instructions to the DSP don’t explicitly call for anything illegal and they get to deflect all criticism (or LNI inquiries) away from themselves and towards the individual DSP, and if anyone becomes too much of a problem they can pretend to address it by cutting that DSP.
If anyone else is wondering: DSP here I think stands for “Delivery Service Partner”, and driver for someone driving a vehicle. (I assumed the context “Digital Signal Processing” and driver as in “device driver” at first and was quite confused :P)
On-topic: I think regulation needs to come down hard on the delivery industry in general, be it parcels or food or whatever, working conditions there have been terrible for a long time.
Daniel Koko’s trying to figure out how to stop the AGI apocalypse.
How might this work? Install TTRPG afficionados at the chip fabs and tell them to roll a saving throw.
Similarly, at the chip production facilities, a committee of representatives stands at the end of the production line basically and rolls a ten-sided die for each chip; chips that don’t roll a 1 are destroyed on the spot.
And if that doesn’t work? Koko ultimately ends up pretty much where Big Yud did: bombing the fuck out of the fabs and the data centers.
“For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes.”
As a worker in the semiconductor space, I suddenly feel the urge to write a 100k word blog post about how a preemptive strike against LW is both necessary and morally correct.
For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes.
“If the AI God doesn’t kill you, we will.” is one hell of a sales pitch.
Democratizing graphic design, Nashville style
Description: genAI artifact depicting guitarist Slash as a cat. This cursed critter is advertising a public appearance by a twitter poster. The event is titled “TURDSTOCK 2025”. Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl, which seems like a missed opportunity tbh.
Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl
truth in advertising: they’re hinting what the music will sound like
Fucking monodactyl ass cat
Turdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.
Intentionally being on Broadway at 1-4 PM on a Sunday is a whole vibe, and that’s before considering whatever the fuck this is.
The whole thing screams old people desperately trying to be edge and cool but missing all the signifiers. A 'bad’word but baby talk style (like a young child saying poop), reference to slash which was already dated when I was young, the time of day so people can arrive home early and still make dinner (and not late at night like the cool music thing). The headliner is a twitter microceleb and not an actual cool band. But hey, at least kid rock isnt attending, so it escapes the 100% poser feeling.
E: saw this on my bsky, the guy is such a sad loser.
What in the world is a catturd2 public appearance like, anyway? This sad, drunk old loser shouting random slurs at the crowd?
I can answer that, as turdstock 2024 is on yt, it seems this john rich guy talking about how much he likes catturd, begging for donations (while saying fema is bad), some people spending a lot of time saying nothing (I’m skimming past and there is so much nothing being said), and some country songs (which is not my genre, did notice that for one guy the mix was off, making the music/singing bad to hear, so well done tech team there (they fix it later but still)). And then I saw the audience (they also said millions watched catturd 2023, which considering this vid has 9k views, and there are like 100 people in the audience I doubt (checked turdstock 2023, which seems to only be on rumble 223k views. So lol, double lol, saw the same fucking artists (and the for the same guy the technical issues, poor guy) (and wow rumble sucks compared to yt)). There actually also don’t seem to be that many songs, think half the time was people talking. Also, No Catturd appearance from what I can tell (E: he is there, he just doesn’t do anything it seems, he prob speaks a few minutes I guess). Also really weird bit about how somebody send a mean facebook post and facebook went ‘are you sure this is mean’ and they went all ‘zuck was never punched in the face on the playground … the founding fathers … there was a patriot girl … [5 minutes of talking] … when those redcoats moved on us … etc (this bit took 20 minutes between songs)’. There is also a guy praying for various things on stage, angry raised catholic noises
But yes, can’t judge it on the music, as an event it seemed boring as fuck, too much talking, not enough music, boring audience (none of who were holding drinks), weird political message. Rather watch Kreator for 4 hours, which considering some of the speech clips I hear, seems to be the message they were going for. Somehow the geriatrics in the audience are the most dangerous people because they only want to be left alone (??). No lightshow, no stage presence, no skulls, no fireworks (this is both a comment on the lack of fireworks, and a general comment on what I saw).
Anyway, seems my initial feeling of massive uncool stands.
Also seem they reused the slash cat AI image for 2025.Nope different cat, just same AI slop shit.E: “Ticket Price: $199 plus taxes and fees.” WHAT Wacken metalfest costs 333,00 € and that is for a whole weekend (and actually has a real Slash).
lol holy shit
Thank you for your service!
What is esp interesting is how they make this event sound bigger than it is. The venue is small, but that makes the ‘it was sold out’ show up sooner (also less hard to find enough people who would chuck down 200 bucks for this shit), but then they make claims about the livestream numbers. (which are going to be hard to check) etc. Weird sort of radicalization way to make people think there are more people in their movement than there are. Bit like going ‘catturd2 has 4m followers!’ like those numbers mean much online, esp on zombie twitter (see also John Rich has 150k subs on yt, but averages to 10k plays per non-music video at a quick glance (his music songs do very well however at millions per views (the one song I listened to was also about how Jesus was coming back soon to punish all the evildoers))), so people like the music+message in the music, but not when the guy actually opens his mouth for other stuff, all very vibes stuff. But also just how few actual music is being played vs people making nonsense talks about America/whatever. (and also listening to his live performance, I don’t think John Rich is a good musician (at least not live, the yt clips of him are pretty good, so either he was having a bad day, or autotune stuff).
And it wasn’t that hard, not like I spend that much time on it, it is quite interesting in a way, to look at these kinds of movements and try to see past their propganda and notice who they actually reach and what they do and say. And considering the people they attracted it feels very much a last attempt from a dying generation whos sun has set. (but that could also just be because younger people aren’t as easily scammed into giving away 200 bucks for this).
Yud:
ChatGPT has already broken marriages, and hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool.
And suddenly I realized that I never want to hear a Rationalist say the words “mating pool”.
(I fired up xcancel to see if any of the usual suspects were saying anything eminently sneerable. Yudkowsky is re-xitting Hanania and some random guy who believes in g. Maybe he should see if the Pioneer Fund will bankroll publicity for his new book…)
Good news for women, less risk of the pool needing to be drained because someone crapped in it again.
rsyslog goes “AI first”, for what reason? no one knows.
Opening ipython greeted me with this: “Tip: IPython 9.0+ has hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.”
I wish open source projects would stop doing this.
My favorite static site generator, Marmite, is now making Special Accomodations for AI bros by making a context file? The dev is also making all of his PRs with Claude.
Anyone have any recommendations for replacements?
I don’t know static site generators, but I took a look at your site and the text doesn’t render! The font file appears to not be good. Also sorry for having to move to another software.
I’m working on it! Hopefully it’ll be legible sometime this week.
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It’s extremely annoying everywhere. GitHub’s updates were about AI for so fucking long that I stopped reading them, which means I now miss actually useful stuff until someone informs me of it months later.
For example, did you know GitHub Actions now has really good free ARM runners? It’s amazing! I love it! Shame GitHub only bother’s to tell me about their revolutionary features of “please spam me with useless PRs” and… make a pong game? What? Why would I want this?
ugh, why would i want a summary of a pull request? the whole point of reviewing a pull request is checking the details to make sure it’s not missing something important or doing something wrong.
