Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
Coworker got fired because he used AI to plan for a site installment of our product. The AI made a very nice looking plan but it failed to include enough packing material so nearly half of the units arrived broken. Boss still thinks AI is going to revolutionize work for the better though.
to be fair, the plan would have worked if you had included the allotted number of goblins in the box in addition to the packing material.
Came across this today: the purpose of a system is what it does. Based on that I would say the purpose of Claude was to make mistakes and get my coworker fired.
UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You wonāt be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.
Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach
There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isnāt expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.
Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.
Finally, a machine which makes it impossible to watch the movie batman and robin.
(Joke explainer: the batsuit had nipples).
Are you worried about AI taking over the world and killing everyone? Fear not, the people who can stop it are collecting hats. Surely everything is under control.
Oddly this reminds me of a weird thing. (Not trying to attack you or others here btw, for reasons that I will make clear in the end). When I was active in student activism, I recalled how annoyed our leaders of the group were that a small but vocal (and inactive) part of the organisations membership didnt allow the leaders to be people.
When they (after already working crazy hours btw, these people were committed), spend some time in the evening to wind down and make some sort of joke(*), the inactive members alway would start to send angry emails. 'how dare you make an internal joke while students have less rights/the uni isnt eco friendly/etc". I though back on how that impulse from inside to org was indeed quite weird. Esp as the people complaining didnt seem to be that active members. (If they were they would know how much work was being done and the strain people were under and how the jokes were good for morale).
Something to take into account if you see lesswrong people react negatively to the hat post.
Of course none of this applies tonus as outsiders who do not take them that seriously at all. It is a weird thing to make a long post about indeed, esp with one of the hats being one of yuds it seems? Im wondering if this lesswrong thing is perhaps more of a personality cult that anything serious. A well at least nobody is using the org as a dating hunting ground, that would be bad.
*: basically they would spend their whole day prepping for meetings with the uni/other orgs, sending out emails trying to get the members to help out, doing research and summarizing that for the members etc etc, and at the end of the day they send one internal email about talk like a pirate day, and the next morning they get 21 replies to their work, 20 of those people being mad about the talk like a pirate email.
I havenāt experienced the situation youāre describing myself, but it feels very plausible.
Similarly, all developed societies depend on a number of people selflessly working in positions of elected or non-elected authority (local councils, HOAs, school boards) and treating them like people who cannot afford to make any mistakes is not a recipe for increased democratic engagement.
Anyway, so far no-one has commented, negatively or otherwise, and I think most LWers are treating it as harmless fun.
Itās not making me any more interested in coming more than 200 feet from any of these people, and neither is this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GtZKzWgAqWrE2tXrQ/contra-dance-at-lessonline, but maybe thatās just me being mean.
Isnāt that the hat from the picture that Yudkowsky showed off to prove he wasnāt a cult leader? Are they trying to beat the cult allegations by ha ha jokingly wearing the same silly clothes as their founder?
You would expect the leader of the āmake sure the prompt doesnt turn us into paperclipsā movement to better right.
owning us with hats and logic
Olay but this is good though. This is the kind of autism Lesswrong should focus more on. No bullshit, just the facts.
We have already all died and been uploaded, but it happend so seamlessly nobody noticed.
3 weeks after the āas soon as Fridayā news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure donāt sound confident about it. Whole post in full (sans legal fine print):
We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so weāre just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But itās a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.
May, likely, ifā¦ Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.
Edit: also Altmanās eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now
Wait why would they expect it to leak? (assuming that mentioning it isnāt just some marketing stunt, which it probably is)
Draft filings involve feedback from the SEC, so I think they may be throwing shade on government employees, whom they canāt fire or control directly.
But Iām also thinking they may be salty about the aforementioned āas soon as Fridayā articles, and then Anthropic beating them to filing.
Hard to tell how much of it is what, theyāre toxic inside and out.
Ed Zitron might have got hold of it, if his bsky is anything to go by.
We could be feasting soon!
IANAL, but my understanding is that companies are allowed to keep confidential the fact that they even filed the S-1. Thatās how I read OpenAIās statement. But itās not completely clear what āitā means in āwe expect it to leakā.
Donāt they have their CFO not even reporting directly to be CEO? I would bet that thereās a ton of internal dissent about timing and strategy of how to cash out.
Remember Crazy Taxi? Its back, infected with AI slop!
(I saw the massive wave of hype that gameās announcement unleashed, and its almost impressive how Sega wiped out every last bit of it with AI.)
Crazy taxi? In this house we remember Quarantine
Molly White continuing to slam it out of the park with a pivot to AI. As always, worth a read in full, but this intro bit stuck out to me after reading lots of inane blather on how crypto and AI are different:
Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake ā the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of cryptoās 2024 spending ā is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.
Literally the only pivot to AI that I am happy about. Molly is GOAT
Please enjoy this comment saying āNate Silver is a major proponent of AI assisted writingā like thatās a good thing, and the reply that argues against slop from the weird premise that enjoying oneās own writing process is bad.
AI slop will absolutely kill any forum in which it proliferates. So Iām totally fine with it proliferating on LW.
This all reads as a very elitist and privileged perspective.
Dude look where youāre commenting
I trust Nate Silverās writing advice exactly as much as I trust his recommendations for hair-care products
What if we replaced the kid in the Omelas hole with the wealthiest guy in Omelas?
I approve of this
J-R Conlin has left Mozilla after 15 years, and has some choice words for the company.
Iād been betting on one of the promptfarmer companies being the ones to set off the bubble-popping chain reaction, but looks like musk is so desperate for cash that his coterie of grifts are speedrunning for the underdog position
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This is by an llm-boosting firm, so be aware that itāll have a lot of marketing in it. It doesnāt say nice things about vibe code (presumably because the authors want to sell you a solution) but the numbers are interesting even so.
https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways
A few choice snippets, none of which will surprise anyone here:
- For every code change merged, the probability of a production incident has more than tripled.
The incidents-to-PR ratio is up 242.7% as teams move from low to high AI adoption.
- Bugs are accelerating, not stabilizing.
In our 2025 AI engineering report on the AI Productivity Paradox, bugs per developer were up 9% as AI adoption grew. In this dataset, that figure has risen to 54%
- The most experienced people in your organization are being buried.
Median time to first PR review is up 156.6%. Average time spent in code review is up 199.6%. Median time in review is up 441.5%. The engineers with the deepest knowledge of the system are spending their most valuable hours unraveling plausible-looking code that should never have reached them in the state it did.
This is fascinating to me and has shades of Iris Meridethās The Problem is Culture. In other engineering fields, if you had a tool that cut costs but caused a threefold increase in failures you would be looking at a massive scandal, probably because if this was structural engineering rather than software engineering youād be looking at a new Grenfell Tower or Hyatt Regency Walkway from every other project that used this shit. From what Iāve been following I donāt know that vibe coding has directly racked up quite so literal a body count yet, but if this pattern holds (and I see no reason to expect otherwise) then itās only a matter of time before someone fucks up something important.
Also the fact that the framing here doesnāt seem to treat this as an existential risk to the project of AI coding is fascinating. If youāre not producing stable and secure applications in prod then what in the actual fuck are you writing all that code for?
I think part of the issue is that historical software quality was an artefact of its timeā¦ if you canāt easily patch your released products, you need to work harder to ensure theyāre functional. If the only way for people to learn about how your product works in the documentation you ship with it, the docs need to be useful and comprehensive.
The combination of software needing no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose and the internet rendered those pressures obsolete. Ship shit, fix later. Mass-scale a/b testing over past decade or two shows that most people seemingly donāt care if their software runs like absolute garbage, and is covered in adverts, and harvests all their personal data and the leaks all of it that wasnāt sold.
An incident-to-pr ratio thatās up by 250% is unfortunate, but it is not yet so bad that the end-users actually care enough to do anything about it, even assuming they can do anything.
Is AI profitable yet? a website that tracks the spending and revenue of leading AI companies. The answer is so helpfully provided at the top of the page
Itās also fun to sort by pnl and see just how far the gap is for others that arenāt nvidia
New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so theyāve blocked it for everyone.
Theyāre claiming they believe itās because someone has managed to find a āminorā vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.
My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.
I question how robust Anthropicās geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropicās āitās too powerfulā narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I donāt think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
I think itās more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. Itās an IPO race to the bottom.
It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.
Yall sneer, but I made a couple of thousand bucks this saturday standing on a dark street corner selling illegal Fable and Mythic linkups. Gave the first question free to any boomers that came asking, to get them hooked.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropicās āitās too powerfulā narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I donāt think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
It also saves them on the cost of actually serving the model, and stalls the cycle of people gradually realizing the new model isnāt much better than the previous one.
Very fair point. Iām still inclined to think this wasnāt primarily a marketing decision, because I donāt think they would point the finger so directly at the government if that were the case. Perhaps the directive was a blessing in disguise for them though.
Either way, I think this is pretty telling for what we can expect over the next couple of months before we see any public SEC docs from either OpenAI or Anthropic. If it werenāt for the immense damage it will cause for innocent people, I might have broken out some popcorn. Popcorn might be my staple food for financial reasons soon anyway.
Now seeing one-shotted Europeans calling for the development of AI/LLMs at home - āMistralā is not adequate
Literally just started a discussion on European booster fanfic hype a few days ago: https://awful.systems/post/8591627/11736760
I wonder if Europe 2031 will get a boost out of this, it is really perfect timing for them, they can even claim an early prediction success on the US cutting Europe off! (But as with AI 2027, Europe 2031 assumes a much more competent US that can implement strategies like that in a competent fashion instead of some disorganized demands after 5pm on a Friday).
Iāve already seen āEurope 2031 was right. Shortest time between a work of science fiction and science factā on LinkedInā¦ ššš
