Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 minutes ago

      The fucking bubble is bursting.

      Doubt it, like cryptocurrencies, it will be kept on life support a lot longer and even more and more parts of the economy will be sacrificed to it.

    • aspragg@ohai.social
      3·
      3 hours ago

      @gerikson @BlueMonday1984

      Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, “literally” has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means “figuratively”.

      …sorry, I meant it literally also means “figuratively”.

      …no, wait, that’s just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means “figuratively”.

      (Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        34 minutes ago

        What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now?

        “Literally, not figuratively”, said in a Sterling Archer voice.

        The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”

        — Merriam-Webster

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Best part is the footnote:

      About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        13 minutes ago

        Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.

        “Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.”

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      8 hours ago

      Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends

      (His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        48 minutes ago

        oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is… of its time

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    13 hours ago

    link

    article link

    transcript

    Graham Linehan is a normal and well man.

    A few hours later, he sends me an example of how he’s been using AI. It’s a “hidden role deduction” game he’s working on. At the top is the prompt he put into ChatGPT: “You are five blind lesbian adventurers out for a good night out. Slaying dragons and whatnot. But one of your number is a hulking great troll pretending to be a woman. Find the troll lesbian and then devise an amusing punishment without giving him an erection.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      5 minutes ago

      Yeah thats a kink. There prob are a bunch of sexworkers he could hire who could help him with that.

    • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      oh no

      He followed his friends Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay, formerly of GB News, over here. They were hired by US comic actor Rob Schneider’s production company and put in a word for Linehan. He moved in March and works for Schneider too. Having co-created Father Ted in the 1990s and created The IT Crowd in the 00s, Linehan is co-creating a sitcom called Tenure – “Our academics are like Father Ted academics: they’re very old and musty” – with Doyle, Gourlay and British comedian Jonathan Kogan. They’ve written eight episodes.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      12 hours ago

      So I’m not double checking their work because that’s more of a time and energy investment than I’m prepared for here. I also do not have the perspective of someone who has actually had to make the relevant top-level decisions. But caveats aside I think there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn here:

      • It’s actually heartening to see that even the LW comments open by bringing up how optimistic this analysis is about the capabilities of LLM-based systems. “Our chatbot fucked up” has some significant fiscal downsides that need to be accounted for.

      • The initial comparison of direct API costs is interesting because the work of setting up and running this hypothetical replacement system is not trivial and cannot reasonably be outsourced to whoever has the lowest cost of labor due. I would assume that the additional requirements of setting up and running your own foundation model similarly eats through most of the benefits of vertical integration, even before we get into how radically (and therefore disastrously) that would expand the capabilities of most companies. Most organizations that aren’t already tech companies couldn’t do it, and those that could will likely not see the advertised returns.

      • I’m not sure how much of the AI bubble we’re in is driven even by an expectation of actual financial returns at this point. To what extent are we looking at an investor and managerial class that is excited to put “AI” somewhere on their reports because that’s the current Cutting Edge of Disruptive Digital Transformation into New Paradigms of Technology and Innovation and whatever else all these business idiots think they’re supposed to do all day.

      I’m actually going to ignore the question of what happens to the displaced workers here because the idea that this job is something that earns a decent living wage is still just as dead if it’s replaced by AI or outsourced to whoever has the fewest worker protections. That said, I will pour one out for my frontline IT comrades in South Africa and beyond. Whenever this question is asked the answer is bad for us.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        10 hours ago

        I’ve worked in an adjacent field (workforce planning) and I deliver B2B software support for a living, so I too have Thoughts.

        At least here in Schwedenland, contact centers have been filed down by relentless cost and tech pressure to be about as automated as can be. You have websites with FAQs, simple chatbots that basically repeat the FAQ for those for whom reading more than a sentence of text is too hard, phone trees to gatekeep you from the Inner Sanctum, etc. etc. The end result is that the actual people taking the calls are gonna be the ones who can make human decisions - troubleshoot a complex issue, handle insurance claims, upsell your mortgage.

        Trying to att LLM voice tech to that is just going to add another filter between the customer and the center, with the additional reputational risk of the robot fucking up and losing the customer.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      people out there signing off shit like that with their online presence that wouldn’t be waterboarded out of anyone 15 years ago

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    just found out about the incredibly dystopian US prison “ADX”

    Inside the federal supermax tucked away in Colorado’s high desert, prisoners spend 22 to 24 hours a day locked alone inside concrete cells that are smaller than a standard parking space. The prison, formally called United States Penitentiary Florence Administrative Maximum Facility but better known as ADX, has earned the nickname “The Alcatraz of the Rockies” because of its harsh conditions.

    Contact with others is extremely limited; programming, such as anger management or religious services, is broadcast over televisions in the cells, while psychological evaluations happen through the steel doors. Belongings are also strictly limited and prisoners aren’t allowed to hang photographs or drawings on their walls. Exercise time out the cell happens alone inside large cages called “dog runs”, where prisoners can only walk a few paces each direction. Prisoners are given virtual reality goggles to simulate the outdoors or community. A former warden once called ADX a “clean version of hell,” and said that living there was “far much worse than death.” Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are both incarcerated at ADX.

    https://boltsmag.org/death-row-clemency-adx-supermax/

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    From the r/SunoAI subreddit: “Sick of having to come up with prompts”.

    Hey y’all, looking for some tips here. I like what I’ve made so far with Suno but now I’m kind of hitting a wall with ideas for prompts. Why doesn’t Suno also have a feature to write prompts for you? Like just hit a button the says “new prompt” and then hit make song when it comes up with something that sounds interesting! Thoughts?

    (Via Dan of the Year.)

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      FFS so many promptfondlers and gish-gallopers in there. Echoes of pro-crapto (can’t criticize if you don’t buy in, use case is coming bro, it’s actually decentralized)

      Edit the worst thing isnt’t the number of fondlers, it’s the upvotes they’re getting.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    New York Times Magazine asks the question on everyone’s minds: Is ChatGPT Conscious?

    The piece is, unsurprisingly, a complete pile of hot garbage, openly refusing to recognise the difference between lying machines and human beings. This is probably Pivot material.

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    Ziz was arraigned on Monday, according to The Baltimore Banner. She apparently was not very cooperative:

    As the judge asked basic questions such as whether she had read the indictment and understood the maximum possible penalties, [Ziz] LaSota chided the “mock proceedings” and said [US Magistrate Douglas R.] Miller was a “participant in an organized crime ring” led by the “states united in slavery.”

    She pulled the Old Man from Scene 24 gag:

    Please state your name for the record, the court clerk said. “Justice,” she replied. What is your age? “Timeless.” What year were you born? “I have been born many times.”

    The lawyers have accepted that sometimes a defendant is uncooperative:

    Prosecutors said the federal case would take about three days to try. Defense attorney Gary Proctor, in an apparent nod to how long what should have been a perfunctory appearance on Monday ended up taking, called the estimate “overly optimistic.”

    Folks outside the USA should be reassured that this isn’t the first time that we’ve tried somebody with a loose grasp of reality and a found family of young violent women who constantly disrupt the trial; Ziz isn’t likely to walk away.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      She wants to be a martyr so bad, doesn’t she? She desperately needs to be punished for the sake of her beliefs (and the things she did made others do). All for the great cause of… uh… y’know, the important thing she’s being silenced for. Things like that.