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.)
Elon makes Grok developers install intrusive surveillance software on their laptops. They’re being told to enable screen captures and URL tracking.
In conjunction with his comments about making it antiwoke by modifying the input data rather then relying on a system prompt after filling it with everything, it’s hard not to view this as part of an attempt to ideologically monitor these tutors to make sure they’re not going to select against versions of the model that aren’t in the desired range of “closeted Nazi scumbag.”
prompt injection phish by email
so glad these things have a solid security model and this totally won’t result in a scrambled half-assed fix
A prompt-injection attack on Google’s Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla’s bug bounty program
Whenever I think Mozilla can’t get any worse…
So now they do “Agentic Security” and “Real-time GenAI intelligence on emerging threats”.
mozilla has for years had a habit of tailchasing some utterly fucking weird shit instead of focusing on their core business, and this feels very much like part of that. but fucking still
So random thought, you now how LW is worried about an seed AI going foom right, how it bootstraps itself into a new AI with better capabilities which bootstraps etc all the way till the singularity.
Why isn’t it happening? Gpt-2 was released 2019, 3 2022, 4 2023, so where is 5 and 6? Where is our double event?
LW:
Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.
Perfect. No notes.
The top comment begins thusly:
I think you make a reasonably compelling case, but when I think about the practicality of this in my own life it’s pretty hard to imagine not spending any time talking to chatbots. ChatGPT, Claude and others are extremely useful.
I didn’t think it was possible, but the perfection continues! Still, no notes!
the comments are wild “yes good post having my brain taken over by a superintelligent autocomplete is a reasonable concern”
They’re LWers, they already baked their psyche long ago
LW’er: “sorry can you excuse me for a moment? I’m having a bad day, somebody gave me a stack of papers with a paperclip in it”
(I do now worry if there are actual LWers who for real gave themselves ptsd like reactions from seeing paperclips. Like the woman who mistook ‘free parking’ for ‘free palestine’ a couple of years back).
wonder if that’s why they tried and failed to change it to “squiggle maximizing”
Remember Devin, the AI coding bot that turned out to be a complete scam?
Well, looks like Goldman Sachs decided to let it loose on its code base. In YOLO mode too, it seems.
It would be really funny if Devin caused a financial crash this way
Total fucking Devin move if you ask me.
Devin will be supervised by human employees and will handle jobs that engineers often consider drudgery, like updating internal code to newer programing languages, he said.
Good luck to the workers having to debug that shit.
Goldman is the first major bank to use Devin, according to Cognition, which was founded in late 2023 by a trio of engineers and whose staff is reportedly stocked with champion coders.
Being good at Codeforces contests surely translates to any other domain. I expect the Cognition guys to fully deliver on their promises.
A hackernews muses about vibe coding a chatbot to provide therapy for people in crisis. Soon, an actual health care professional shows up to butcher the offender and defile the corpse. This causes much tut-tutting and consternation among the locals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535197
Edit: a shower thought: have any of yall noticed the way that prompt enjoyers describe using Cursor, tab completions, and such are a repackaging of the psychology of loot boxes? In particular, they share the variable-interval reward schedule that serves as the hook in your typical recreational gambling machines.
I’ve been making casual observation how a number of the adhd people I know to have addiction tendencies tend to get real into prompts, but hadn’t observed the lootbox thing
that’s going into the ponder bucket.
you should be read up on the gospel of @fasterandworse never shutting up about “Hooked”
the psychology of loot boxes?
yep! https://awful.systems/post/4568900
the book is “Hooked” and it’s Don’t Build The Torment Nexus I’m Now Providing You A Detailed Blueprint Of
Ye gods! Also, great write-up!
Do you reckon that Altman recognized the gacha potential from the get-go? That Big LLM has always been FanDuel for dorks, but on purpose?
One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370
This isn’t an original thought, but a better matrix for comparing the ideology (such as it is) of the current USG is not Nazi Germany but pre-war US right wing obsessions - anti-FDR and anti-New Deal.
This appears in weird ways, like this throwaway comment regarding the Niihau incident, where two ethnic Japanese inhabitants of Niihau helped a downed Japanese airman immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Imagine if you will, one of the 9/11 hijackers parachuting from the plane before it crashed, asking a random muslim for help, then having that muslim be willing to immediately get himself into a shootouts, commit arson, kidnappings, and misc mayhem.
Then imagine that it was covered in a media environment where the executive branch had been advocating for war for over a decade, and voices which spoke against it were systematically silenced.
(src)
Dude also credits LessOnline with saving his life due to unidentified <<<ethnics>>> shooting up his 'hood when he was there. Charming.
Edit nah he’s a neo-Nazi (or at least very concerned about the fate of German PoWs after WW2):
This is, sadly, pretty unsurprising, as carrying forward the anti-FDR/anti-New Deal movement was a foundational pillar of the libertarianism that Trump co-opted. Heavily promoted by the LewRockwell.com/Mises.org crowd.
I’m going to put a token down and make a prediction: when the bubble pops, the prompt fondlers will go all in on a “stabbed in the back” myth and will repeatedly try to re-inflate the bubble, because we were that close to building robot god and they can’t fathom a world where they were wrong.
The only question is who will get the blame.
I increasingly feel that bubbles don’t pop anymore, the slowly fizzle out as we just move on to the next one, all the way until the macro economy is 100% bubbles.
The only question is who will get the blame.
Isn’t it obvious? Us sneerers and the big name skeptics (like Gary Marcuses and Yann LeCuns) continuously cast doubt on LLM capabilities, even as they are getting within just a few more training runs and one more scaling of AGI Godhood. We’ll clearly be the ones to blame for the VC funding drying up, not years of hype without delivery.
it was me, I popped AI. I destroyed Twitter (and, in collateral damage, I blew up the United States), and those fuckers are next. You’re welcome.
You’re welcome.
Given their assumptions, the doomers should be thanking us for delaying AGI doom!
nah they’ll just stop and do nothing. they won’t be able to do anything without chatgpt telling them what to do and think
i think that deflation of this bubble will be much slower and a bit anticlimatic. maybe they’ll figure a way to squeeze suckers out of their money in order to keep the charade going
maybe they’ll figure a way to squeeze suckers out of their money in order to keep the charade going
I believe that without access to generative AI, spammers and scammers wouldn’t be able to successfully compete in their respective markets anymore. So at the very least, the AI companies got this going for them, I guess. This might require their sales reps to mingle in somewhat peculiar circles, but who cares?
i meant more like scamming true believers out of their money like happens with crypto, this is cfar deal currently. spam, as something nobody should or wants to spend their creative juices on, or for that matter interact in any way, seems a natural fit for automation with llms
Whoever they say they blame it’s probably going to be ultimately indistinguishable from “the Jews”
They’re doing it with cryptocurrency right now.
In past tech bubbles, it was basically the VCs, the media hypesters and the liars in the companies. So the right people.
The only question is who will get the blame.
what does chatbot say about that?
Penny Arcade chimes in on corporate AI mandates:
This is so Charlie Stross coded that I tried to read the Mastodon comments.
Lmao I love this Lemmy instance
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
womp, hold on let me finish, womp
had a quick scan over the blogposts earlier, keen to read the paper
would be nice to see some more studies with more numbers under study, but with the cohort they picked the self-reported vs actual numbers are already quite spicy
and n=16 handily beats the usual promptfondler n=1
Also the attempt to actually measure productivity instead of just saying “they felt like it helped” - of course it did!
Another day, another jailbreak method - a new method called InfoFlood has just been revealed, which involves taking a regular prompt and making it thesaurus-exhaustingly verbose.
In simpler terms, it jailbreaks LLMs by speaking in Business Bro.
I mean, decontextualizing and obscuring the meanings of statements in order to permit conduct that would in ordinary circumstances breach basic ethical principles is arguably the primary purpose of deploying the specific forms and features that comprise “Business English” - if anything, the fact that LLM models are similarly prone to ignore their “conscience” and follow orders when deciding and understanding them requires enough mental resources to exhaust them is an argument in favor of the anthropomorphic view.
Or:
Shit, isn’t the whole point of Business Bro language to make evil shit sound less evil?
maybe there’s just enough text written in that psychopatic techbro style with similar disregard for normal ethics that llms latched onto that. this is like what i guess happened with that “explain step by step” trick - instead of grafting from pairs of answers and questions like on quora, lying box grafts from sets of question -> steps -> answer like on chegg or stack or somewhere else where you can expect answers will be more correct
it’d be more of case of getting awful output from awful input
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JspxcjkvBmye4cW4v/asking-for-a-friend-ai-research-protocols
Multiple people are quietly wondering if their AI systems might be conscious. What’s the standard advice to give them?
Touch grass. Touch all the grass.
Username called “The Dao of Bayes”. Bayes’s theorem is when you pull the probabilities out of your posterior.
知者不言，言者不知。 He who knows (the Dao) does not (care to) speak (about it); he who is (ever ready to) speak about it does not know it.
What’s the standard advice to give them?
It’s unfortunately illegal for me to answer this question earnestly
In the morning: we are thrilled to announce this new opportunity for AI in the classroom
Someone finally flipped a switch. As of a few minutes ago, Grok is now posting far less often on Hitler, and condemning the Nazis when it does, while claiming that the screenshots people show it of what it’s been saying all afternoon are fakes.
Someone finally flipped a switch. As of a few minutes ago, Grok is now posting far less often on Hitler, and condemning the Nazis when it does, while claiming that the screenshots people show it of what it’s been saying all afternoon are fakes.
LLMs are automatic gaslighting machines, so this makes sense
*musk voice* if machine god didn’t want me to fuck with the racism dial, he wouldn’t make it
The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altman
This entire blog post is sneerable so I encourage reading it, but the TL;DR is:
We’re already in the singularity. Chat-GPT is more powerful than anyone on earth (if you squint). Anyone who uses it has their productivity multiplied drastically, and anyone who doesn’t will be out of a job. 10 years from now we’ll be in a society where ideas and the execution of those ideas are no longer scarce thanks to LLMs doing most of the work. This will bring about all manner of sci-fi wonders.
Sure makes you wonder why Mr. Altman is so concerned about coddling billionaires if he thinks capitalism as we know it won’t exist 10 years from now but hey what do I know.
I think I liked this observation better when Charles Stross made it.
If for no other reason than he doesn’t start off by dramatically overstating the current state of this tech, isn’t trying to sell anything, and unlike ChatGPT is actually a good writer.
Chat-GPT is more powerful than anyone on earth (if you squint)
xD
No sorry, let me rephrase,
Lol, lmao
How do you even grace this with a response. Shut your eyes and loudly sing “lalalala I can’t hear you”
anyone who doesn’t will be out of a job
quick, Sam, name five jobs that don’t involve sitting at a desk
Today’s bullshit that annoys me: Wikiwand. From what I can tell their grift is that it’s just a shitty UI wrapper for Wikipedia that sells your data to who the fuck knows to make money for some Israeli shop. Also they SEO the fuck out of their stupid site so that every time I search for something that has a Finnish wikipedia page, the search results also contain a pointless shittier duplicate result from wikiwand dot com. Has anyone done a deeper investigation into what their deal is or at least some kind of rant I could indulge in for catharsis?
I’ve seen conspiracy theories that a lot of the ad buys for stuff like this are a new avenue of money laundering, focusing on stuff like pirate sports streaming sites, sketchy torrent sites, etc. But a full scraped, SEOd Wikipedia clone also fits.
