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 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 soo 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.
Mostly VAT fraud.
News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard
But your honor, weāre a crypto mining company; we donāt add any value!
āThey wish this technology didnāt existā: Perplexity responds to News Corpās lawsuit
āThere are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didnāt exist,ā said the Perplexity team in the blog. āThey prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.ā
I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.
Okay, quick personal sidenote:
With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect weāre gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful theyāre gonna be, I donāt know, but at the bare minimum itāll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.
You know youāre dealing with serious people when the dogwhistles come out.
Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.
they wish this technology didnāt exist
this is supposed to be invalidating, but likeā¦ yes? whatās wrong with that?
They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.
Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexityās business model again?
idea landlords: making sure that no one is living rent free in someone elses head
More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Halloweāen themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.
For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. Itās like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.
If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the āprompt engineeringā article, consult your physician.
Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.
This tool solely exists so that you can ask it questions and get assistance, but also we disavow any responsibility for the answers to the questions we just told you to ask it. Has this kind of clause been held up in court anywhere? Like, Iām sure it has but it seems like the same logic would be ridiculous in any other context. Like, consider the fraught legal history of the anarchist cookbook.
In other news, thereās been a statement on AI training thatās racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:
Now, Iām way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so Iāll whip one out:
Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artistsā work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghmanās run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.
Update on LLM reviewer situation:
PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:
- a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
- intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
- intro to semiotics for the same
- show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why āautomated AI detectionā is also bullshit).
- show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
- Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didnāt use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)
Weāll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because itās a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. Iām also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the āIt canāt be that stupidā trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!
Wish us luck, heh!
good luck! it sounds like youāre coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless theyāre gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PMās better than that), youāre at least likely to make an impact
Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose
between this and all the SEO on OpenAIās marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, itās exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, Iāve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAIās promises didnāt pan out. Iām hoping you can find what you need ā our back archives might have a few links if you havenāt searched through here yet.
Kinda nervous about it, not gonna lie. Really appreciate the positive vibes!
Edit: And thanks so much for keeping this community alive!
hah of course!
HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up
Pretty good sneer there:
BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states heās tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family
what fascinating timing, whatās it been, a month or so since he got outed as a Russian agent?
has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? letās hope so
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 Elonās stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.
Itās almost completely ineffective, sorry. Itās certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.
On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasnāt yet been invalidated and thereās 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 āforce-feedingā is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that āforcedā input is destined to be discarded or retagged.
yeah this is the thing Iāve 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 canāt 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 āai bot filterā services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and Iām 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 thatās extremely fucking dire because thatās yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet
The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. Iāve had issues where I canāt get past it presumably just because Iām 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. Iāve heard of sites blocking curl and Iāve been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now Iām 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 Epsteinās 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.webpto the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the samemagickinvocation but I need to sleep so Iām giving up for now.
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.
thatās also happening, but yeah itās going to have to be a team effort
They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency insteadā¦
we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine
Iām sorry Mr. Musk, grokās a bit constipated today. Someone fed it too much cheese. Then it started hallucinating.
ooh I like that
It would be funny if someone was literally beating up servers with a wooden shoe.
āpercussive maintenanceā
momty python style giant sabot descends on Microsoft data centre
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 āin imprint pages across our marketsā. The new wording states: āNo part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systemsā, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isnāt gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. itās time to give Big AI a wedgie.
Itās 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 itās fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holderās objection doesnāt matter.
For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus theyāre not only infringing on typical āall rights reservedā 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 itās 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 theyād get the lionās share of that revenue.
OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didnāt work, and theyāre in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what theyāre 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 isnāt gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. itās 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 arenāt doing so hot. I hope itās the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.
itās pretty publicly known
the VCs are gonna take one heckuva bath
I just want to share this video because I think it is a work of art
āIām gonna replace AIā by Olivia Squizzle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g
sorry for yt link, invidious didnāt like it
The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/
Edit: TIL about the US copyright office websiteās ai generation info on works. Thatās a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.
who does this? I love audiobooks, but Iāve put them down when the narrator didnāt work for me. Who wants everything to sound like itās being read by a serial killer?
It looks like an AI-powered fiction version of this scam. On one hand being fiction means that itās less likely to actively risk killing people with phony medical advice. But being AI powered means that the grifters can now cut the underpaid gig workers out of the loop entirely, which is probably the most concrete example of AI displacing human workers Iāve yet seen.
Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe
lmao incredible
Then thereās BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had ācreated a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease.ā Howās the machine brain doing these days? Well, the companyās 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 donāt 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 havenāt seen anything close to the bottom of the well of basically-idle capital seeking unrealistic returns.
Iād 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, yāknow, working people) since the second world war, but I havenāt done anything near the amount of research necessary for that to be more than exciting rhetoric.
Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.
In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.
literally the exact crowd shitting on the mere rumor of a Lix NixOS fork are clapping for this like trained seals. and I donāt think this getting announced right after those rumors is an accident ā it gets Jon the most attention for his low-effort bullshit and might even let him hurt another fork by way of community fragmentation
something Iām confused about is, is Ringer even effectively banned anymore? I stopped monitoring when someone with mod privileges unbanned him from a bunch of Nix community spaces. is he back to banned, or is this just a continuing tantrum from Jon having Release Manager stripped from him and given to someone who could do that incredibly thoroughly automated job without stirring up a fucking hate mob?
Is their branding dominated an anime girl of ambiguous age?
Just guessing, I promise I havenāt checked.
there is one silver lining: for once, I donāt have the cognitive load of another Nix fork to carefully consider switching to. thereās no way in fuck Iām using Ringerās fork under any circumstances, and my brain already filed it away under āweird name, starts with an E, donāt remember the restā seconds after I closed the tab
Youāre right, Borkfan is too easy to remember, my not-ban fork is now called Frabnok.
> FRABNOK LANTERN Your lantern explodes into a rant about the wokes, killing you instantly. *** You have died *** Your score is 0 out of a possible 10 points, in 1 move. This gives you the rank of Release Manager.
