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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.
poor Musky lost custody. Couldn’t handle Grimes, now he mangles rhymes.
just imagining what happens the day his companies get taken away from him
"Life, it never die
Women are my favorite guy."
Wonder what is up with the folks and them getting into rhymes/poetry. Jordan B Peterson does something simple (his pinned tweet as example here. But we know he fried parts of his brain using the russian coma rehab method.
And it isn’t even the Sinterklaas period yet. No need for bad rhymes. (I’m also suddenly reminded of all the people who tried to ‘rap’ their messages in the late 90s).
Well my name is Jordan and I’m here to say/ we’re just like lobsters in a major way
“cooked, and (politically) red as fuck”?
I can pull finer bars out my arse than this fucking farce
This is probably Grok - creativity from him’s pretty sparse
Choom thinks he’s DOOM, but he won’t beat him any time soon
With how much crack this whack goes through, he’ll forget this before noon
(I’m no MF DOOM, but anything I can put out will beat this artless twat any day)
Religion is the opium of the masses
And I’m increasingly scared they’re gonna kick our asses
Maybe it’s time for all those mugs
To shut up and start hitting drugs
guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again
Don’t drink and tweet people.
E: my reaction to the people saying ‘it is bait’
Update: The QRTs are mainly sneering, but this one’s particularly good
EDIT: Against my better judgment, I’m letting another sidenote come out:
If you wanna encourage people to drop the master/slave naming scheme, this guy probably gave you a good bit of ammo. Changing a random naming scheme is a pretty low-priority task under most circumstances, but it gets a lot more tempting when it lets you distance yourself from people like this
This guy would be a lot happier if someone had given him a pound of weed when he was 12 then introduced him to college football fandom.
Dude is about 3 years too late but I guess it’s always 8 o’clock in the outrage store.
For reference, HN went wild on this submission from a pretty obvious 4chan troll (the self-described “Black developer” just so happened to include references to a Stormfront post (since removed)):
just imagine the kinda thinking that goes into even “I can make this post for fun, that’ll be a gas”
This is both old news and kinda… not that surprising when you think about it, but I searched and didn’t see any commentary on this here.
The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff
Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.
It’s weird how rarely I see people point this, but in theory this kind of boilerplate should be technically meaningless. If copyright protections include the privilege to use the work for training a machine learning algorithm, you need explicit permission anyway. OTOH if it’s fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holder’s objection doesn’t matter.
For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus they’re not only infringing on typical “all rights reserved” works, but also things such as Free software whose license terms require attribution if used in derivative work, and especially share-alike copyleft licensed work.
I thinkt it’s pretty well-lknown that Spotify got all its initial music from Oink. They moved fast, got dominant, and were able to present the record labels with a big audience prepared to pay for streaming music. The labels quickly ensured they’d get the lion’s share of that revenue.
OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didn’t work, and they’re in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what they’re doing is legal, it will cost them a lot in litigation fees, coupled with the public perception that these culture vampires are ripping off the poor honest author. Not a good place to be in.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.
Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.
At some point, something is going to reveal that all the money in AI has gone into power costs for datacenters and NVidia chips and that the AI companies themselves aren’t doing so hot. I hope it’s the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.
Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe
lmao incredible
Then there’s BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had “created a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease.” How’s the machine brain doing these days? Well, the company’s lead program failed in the clinic last year, and in April announced major layoffs.
just who buys this shit? this reads like refined crypto nonsense
People who don’t get much tech/overdose on hype and heard of alphafold. Imagine how much worse things could be now after the Nobel.
i mean how many these people are out there that also have money of this kind, other than softbank i mean
Given the past several decades of trickle-up economics, I think we haven’t seen anything close to the bottom of the well of basically-idle capital seeking unrealistic returns.
I’d go so far as to say that the current crop of bubbles possibly represents the greatest downards wealth transfer (albeit from billionaires to millionaires rather than, y’know, working people) since the second world war, but I haven’t done anything near the amount of research necessary for that to be more than exciting rhetoric.
too fucking many
Forget Gladwell
All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I’ve encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.
Obligatory IBCK ep on gladwell
has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? let’s hope so
we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine
I’m sorry Mr. Musk, grok’s a bit constipated today. Someone fed it too much cheese. Then it started hallucinating.
ooh I like that
They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…
Considering Glaze and Nightshade have been around for a while, and I talked about sabotaging scrapers back in July, arguably, it already has.
Hell, I ran across a much smaller scale case of this a couple days ago:
Not sure how effective it is, but if Elon’s stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.
It’s almost completely ineffective, sorry. It’s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.
On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn’t yet been invalidated and there’s no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.
I think that “force-feeding” is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that “forced” input is destined to be discarded or retagged.
yeah this is the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about
fucking reCaptcha is literally mass-weaponising users for data filtration, and there is no good counter besides just not using reCaptcha (which is something one can’t easily pull off without things like regulatory action, massive reputational problems that make people gtfo, etc)
I have similar worries about cloudflare being such a massive chokepoint and using that position to enable “ai bot filter” services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and I’m not entirely sure what the case grounds/structure on that would be (if any)
the only other viable strategy at the moment is fully breaking contact with any potential bad traffic systems, and that’s extremely fucking dire because that’s yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet
The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. I’ve had issues where I can’t get past it presumably just because I’m using some in-application browser just to get a login cookie, but other times it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked.
it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked
Fucking what. I’ve heard of sites blocking curl and I’ve been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now I’m cursed with the knowledge that I could probably just scrape stuff from everywhere
I saw people say they would add 10% opaque layers of the musk with Epstein’s accomplice (whos name i forgot for a second and too lazy to look her up) photo. Would be nice if there was a tool to do so automatically. (Not that i post on twitter anymore).
tbh that sounds like a pretty easy script to write! Too bad I am not near a computer rn
I got nerd sniped into trying to resize
felons_musk_and_maxwell.webp
to the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the samemagick
invocation but I need to sleep so I’m giving up for now.Wouldn’t really need a script, though. Just open up photoshop or GIMP and add a layer after everything is finished.
But that doesn’t scale properly, you want ideally some sort of browser extension that just automatically does it for you before the data gets send to twitter.
It would be funny if someone was literally beating up servers with a wooden shoe.
“percussive maintenance”
momty python style giant sabot descends on Microsoft data centre
I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.
that’s also happening, but yeah it’s going to have to be a team effort