this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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, and happy new year in advance.)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (7 children)

as an amuse bouche for the horrors that will follow this year, please enjoy this lobste.rs reaching the melting down end stage after going full Karen at someone who agrees with a submitted post saying LLMs are a dead end when it comes to AI.

https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_tefto4

Thankfully, accusing someone of being a crapto promoter is seen as an attack that is beyond the pale.

Highlights from the rest of the thread include bemoaning the lack of a downvote button for registering disapproval:

https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_ft9mpj

unilaterally deciding to reply multiple times to one comment, neccesitating them to add a meta comment with hyperlinks

https://lobste.rs/s/lgqwje/does_current_ai_represent_dead_end#c_jjk5ei

And of course is a MoreWronger (moroner?)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Lol of course they think they are civil and other people as pushing nasty rethoric. Quite the sealion feeling.

Wonder if they even notice how much communication weirdness they themself used. With the emphasis of emotional laden language. (They didnt use bold so i cant call it crank capitalization, but more crank cursive. A big deal for me! ;) )

Anyway the questioning of "how do you know this is why there is no downvoting" shows the type of person they are. (And is quite the Rationalist annoying behavior, suddenly they demand excessive sourcing for small remarks of people they disagree with).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

this feeling

https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/113751062959542755

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

"Do you want to refine your claim?"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

one day i'll finally catch a lobste permaban thanks to your links :-)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Comment sections on awful.systems are similar to this Drew Gooden sketch sometimes:

It's just hard for me to give MY input when I don't even know what's going on

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I’m making a mental note to keep that link around for the next time someone barges into one of our threads and does the “I don’t know what this is, here’s my reaction to what I thought the topic was, no I didn’t read the article or lurk” routine

as a bonus they might accidentally watch the rest of the video and finally figure out how much AI sucks

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

You know guys, it's really hard for me to give MY input when you are so negative about all the terrible things I like. Next time you guys come CRAWLING to me for advice, try not hating me as a human being for everything my twisted value system represents.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

Oh no I'm in this sketch and I don't like it. Or at least, I would be. The secret is to acknowledge your lack of background knowledge or basic grounding in what you're talking about and then blunder forward based on vibes and values, trusting that if you're too far off base on the details you'll piss off someone (sorry skillissuer) enough to correct you.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (2 children)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780#m

The whole thread is terrible; controlling and borderline abusive behavior.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I feel personally attacked because I have a BELOVED dino plush that looks almost exactly like that one, only is, you know, a fucking plush toy not an eldritch horror. They took a perfectly fine toy and ruined it with a stupid chatbot, the girl did the smartest thing and just uses it as a normal plushy.

Also if you listen to the video at the end you can really easily figure out why kids don't like that toy, IT'S FUCKING ANNOYING. Kids don't want to deal with your bullshit and fortunately they don't yet know how to pretend to care.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Fellas, I was promised the first catastrophic AI event in 2024 by the chief doomers. There's only a few hours left to go, I'm thinking skynet is hiding inside the times square orb. Stay vigilant!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

I'm sad to report that the catastrophic AI event already happened and it was this picture

mind horrors beyond your comprehension

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

Ow god it is 2025 in .nl, it is coming! Everything is exploding, ai is turning us into fireworks! Yud was right!!1!!one!!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

https://nltimes.nl/2024/12/29/ai-generated-objections-overwhelm-dutch-municipalities well that sucks.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

"...according to my machine learning model we actually have a strong fit in favor of shooting at CEOs. There's a 66% chance that each shot will either jam or fail to hit anything fatal, which creates a strong Bayesian prior in favor, or at least merits collecting further data to scale our models"

"What do you mean I've defined the problem in order to get the desired result? Machine learning process said we're good. Why do you hate the future?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Techdirt - 2024: AI Panic Flooded The Zone, Leading To A Backlash

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

While a good description of how AI Doom has progressed during 2024, I think the connection to regulation (at least the EU regulation, I am not familiar with what was proposed in California) is of the mark.

The EU regulation isn't aimed at AI Doom, it's aimed at banning and regulating real world practices. Think personal data, not AI going conscious.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I think that's something to keep an eye on. The existence of the AI doom cult does not preclude there being good-faith regulations that can significantly reduce these people's ability and incentives to do harm. Indeed the technology is so expensive and ineffective that if we can find a "reasonable compromise" plan to curb the most blatant kinds of abuse and exploitation we could easily see the whole misbegotten enterprise wither on the vine.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

An interesting thing came through the arXiv-o-tube this evening: "The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None".

Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something "really is" and how something "appears to be", and this gap helps us understand the mental processing that lead to how something appears to be. Illusions are also useful for investigating artificial systems, and much research has examined whether computational models of perceptions fall prey to the same illusions as people. Here, I invert the standard use of perceptual illusions to examine basic processing errors in current vision language models. I present these models with illusory-illusions, neighbors of common illusions that should not elicit processing errors. These include such things as perfectly reasonable ducks, crooked lines that truly are crooked, circles that seem to have different sizes because they are, in fact, of different sizes, and so on. I show that many current vision language systems mistakenly see these illusion-illusions as illusions. I suggest that such failures are part of broader failures already discussed in the literature.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's definitely linked in with the problem we have with LLMs where they detect the context surrounding a common puzzle rather than actually doing any logical analysis. In the image case I'd be very curious to see the control experiment where you ask "which of these two lines is bigger?" and then feed it a photograph of a dog rather than two lines of any length. I'm reminded of how it was (is?)easy to trick chatGPT into nonsensical solutions to any situation involving crossing a river because it pattern-matched to the chicken/fox/grain puzzle rather than considering the actual facts being presented.

Also now that I type it out I think there's a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger. But that's neither here nor there.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

I think there’s a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger

I disagree, or rather I think that's actually a feature; "neither" is a perfectly reasonable answer to that question that a human being would give, and LLMs would be fucked by since they basically never go against the prompt.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/meta-ai-users-facebook-instagram-1235221430/

Facebook and Instagram to add AI users. I'm sure that's what everyone has been begging for...

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago

Spam bots are good now!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I think it did come up a few weeks back, but it's indeed a hilarious mess. the engagement must flow!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

In my dreams, it won't take long until all user interactions are AI driven and people paying for ad space in that shit realizes that, leading to an immediate crash of meta's finances.

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