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.)
Interesting (in a depressing way) thread by author Alex de Campi about the fuckery by Unbound/Boundless (crowdfunding for publishing, which segued into financial incompetence and stealing royalties), whose latest incarnation might be trying to AI their way out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.
From the liquidator’s proposals:
We are also undertaking new areas of business that require no funds to implement, such as starting to increase our rights income from book to videogaming by leveraging our contacts in the gaming industry and potentially creating new content based on our intellectual property utilizing inexpensive artificial intelligence platforms.
(emphasis mine)
They don’t appear to actually own any intellectual property anymore (due to defaulting on contracts) so I can’t see this ending well.
Original thread, for those of you with bluesky accounts: https://bsky.app/profile/alexdecampi.bsky.social/post/3lqfmpme2722w
Loose Mission Impossible Spoilers
The latest Mission Impossible movie features a rogue AI as one of the main antagonists. But on the other hand, the AI’s main powers are lies, fake news, and manipulation, and it only gets as far as it does because people allow fear to make themselves manipulable and it relies on human agents to do a lot of its work. So in terms of promoting the doomerism narrative, I think the movie could actually be taken as opposing the conventional doomer narrative in favor of a calm, moderate, internationally coordinated (the entire plot could have been derailed by governments agreeing on mutual nuclear disarmament before the AI subverted them) response against AI’s that ultimately have only moderate power.
Adding to the post-LLM hype predictions: I think post LLM bubble popping, “Terminator” style rogue AI movie plots don’t go away, but take on a different spin. Rogue AI’s strength’s are going to be narrower, their weaknesses are going to get more comical and absurd, and idiotic human actions are going to be more of a factor. For weaknesses it will be less “failed to comprehend love” or “cleverly constructed logic bomb breaks its reasoning” and more “forgets what it was doing after getting drawn into too long of a conversation”. For human actions it will be less “its makers failed to anticipate a completely unprecedented sequence of bootstrapping and self improvement” and more “its makers disabled every safety and granted it every resource it asked for in the process of trying to make an extra dollar a little bit faster”.
New Blood In The Machine: The “AI jobs apocalypse” is for the bosses
So far away we wait for the AGI
For the billions all wasted and gone
We feel the pain of compute time lost in few thousand days
Through the sneering and the flames we carry onOT: Welp. Think interview went well. Just waiting for them to check references (oh god) and I should know whats what by Monday.
Good luck! I’m rooting for you.
I hate I’m so terminally online I found out about the rumor that Musk and Stephen Miller’s wife are bumping uglies through a horrorfic parody account
https://mastodon.social/@bitterkarella@sfba.social/114593332907413196
Midnight Pals is pretty great.
Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:
- The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
- AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search
Am I the only person not impressed by veo3? Yeah there are more details yada yada, but the details are still wrong.
The view of the garbage fractal isn’t improved by zooming deeper into the Bullshit-Mandlebrot Set.
I saw an ad for a local gin festival generated with veo3 and now I’ve sworn off gin
Sobering!
Looks like shit and it’s mostly entirely static because anything with a little more movement would look like complete piss.
Holy hell all the examples I found made me seasick. I am apparently physically incapable of watching veo3 videos.
that is because you can both read and write. the average social media slobbyist does not care. clevage, beats, teeth and consumption…
let us talk about what the difference between animals and humans is. some say it is the art we create. and i wonder if birds have a lower quality output that let’s say taylor swift or jk rowling. have doubts. maybe we are not so fucking special and 99% of media we consume is trash? did you ever check out spotify…they’ve proven ppl love slob by faking companies for jazz labels. and deezer has proven comsumer over 30 dont even access any new music. humans love slob. and your incapability tells me you think you were consuming prime rib before while it was just another industry slob.
Hard disagree, as much as I loathe JK Rowling’s politcal ideas, and the at-times unecessary cruelty found in the HP novels, it still shaped a large part of the imaginary world of a generation. As beautiful as bird songs are (who the hell refers to birdsong as “output”), this simply cannot be compared.
Yes commercial for-profit shareholder-driven lackadaisical “art” is already an insult to life and creativity, but a fully-or-mostly automated slop machine is an infinitely worse one.
Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through, people still made choice, even subjected to crazy uninispired didacts from above, the hands that fashion books, movies, music, video-games, tv-shows still have—must have—room to bring a given vision together.
I think people DO care.
I don’t know exactly what you wanted to say, if you wanted to express despair, cynisism, nihilishm or something else, but I would encourage you not to give up hope with humanity, people aren’t that stupid, people aren’t that void of meaning.
this is painfull. you compare lovecraft to rowling…sorry…no. she didnt come up with a backstory for most characters. hell no.
Oh no! I wasted my time on Troll. Typical.
just because your arguments dont stick doesnt make no one a troll. you hallucinate “this simply cannot be compared.” and then overvalue humans again and again.
Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through,
No. again you declare something art without the proof what makes this art. It is not art if someone is able to play a beat on old cans. It is a profession or skill. And that is all I ever saw from jkrowling,dua lipa and all that other human slob. please provide an argument where the sloppy art happend and what made it art. “Made by humans” != art
Dua lipa on the other hand is absolute slob - it made the existing art worse. Not only do all songs sound the same, they are also not original. Yet the fanarmy will use exactly your way of reasoning. pathetic. Do dua lipa fans care? so far they obviously havent…it is all old products from the industry revamped with studio1 and a human with zero personality. People DO care, right?
In an completely unprecedented turn of events, the word prediction machine has a hard time predicting numbers.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-says-its-still-2024/
Hey, mentally some people are still in 2019/early 2020. /s
Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.
Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.
New webbed brief from Heydon
New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:
What’s missing from the now ubiquitous “LLMs are good for code” is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code that’s realistically possible
LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev
currently reading https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570
this is PsiQuantum, who are hot prospects to build an actually-quantum computer
no, they have not yet factored 35
but they are seriously planning qubits on a wafer and they think they can make a chip with 1m noisy qubits
anyone know more about this? does that preprint (from last year) pass sniff tests?
(my interest is journalistic, and also the first of these companies to factor 35 gets all the VC money ever)
I unfortunately know jack shit about quantum computing, so I can’t really weigh in, but I am rooting for them to pull it off, because PsiQuantum getting all the VC money ever means AI stops getting all the VC money ever
Hey, if we boil the oceans via quantum research, at least we might get some new physics out of it.
New artcle from Brian Merchant: An ‘always on’ OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen
Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Devicetm, I think Merchant’s correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Devicetm and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.
headlines of Devicetm wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brian’s noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Devicetm as an open show of contempt for others, and between AI’s public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valley’s reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Devicetm wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.
Part of me wonders if this is even supposed to be a profitable hardware product or if they’re sufficiently hard-up for training data that “put always-on microphones in as many pockets as possible” seems like a good strategy.
It’s not, both because it’s kinda evil and because it’s definitely stupid, but I can see it being used to solve the data problem more quickly than I can see anyone think this is actually a good or useful product to create.
When I get a minute, I intend to do a back of the napkin calc to figure out how many words 100 million of these things would hear on an average day.
100 million sounds like a target that was naively pooped out by some other requirement, like “How much training data do we need to scale to GPT-5 before the money runs out, assuming the dumbest interpolation imaginable?”
What does solving the data problem supposed to look like exactly? A somewhat higher score in their already incredibly suspect benchmarks?
The data part of the whole hyperscaling thing seems predicated on the belief that the map will magically become the territory if only you map hard enough.
I fully agree, but as data availability is one of the primary limits that hyperscaling is running up against I can see the true believers looking for additional sources, particularly sources that aren’t available to their competitors. Getting a new device in people’s pockets with a microphone and an internet link would be one such advantage, and (assuming you believe the hyperscaling bullshit) would let OpenAI rebuild some kind of moat to keep themselves ahead of the competition.
I don’t know, though. Especially after the failure of at least 2 extant versions of the AI companion product I just can’t imagine anyone honestly believing there’s enough of a market for this to justify even the most ludicrously optimistic estimate of the cost of bringing it to market. It’s either a data thing or a straight-up con to try and retake the front page for another few news cycles. Even the AI bros can’t be dumb enough for it to be a legit effort.
OT: just got a job interview and wanted to pass the good vibes on!
Noice!
