Want to wade into the snowy 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. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)
The monorail salespeople at Checkmarx have (allegedly) discovered a new exploit for code extruders.
The “attack”, titled “Lies in the Loop”, involves taking advantage of human-in-the-loop “”“safeguards”“” to create fake dialogue prompts, thus tricking vibe-coders into running malicious code.
Came across this gem with the author concluding that a theoretical engineer can replace SaaS offerings at small businesses with some Claude and while there is an actual problem highlighted (SaaS offerings turning into a disjoint union of customer requirements that spiral complexity, SaaS itself as a tool for value extraction) the conclusion is just so wrong-headed.
So, I’m taking this one with a pinch of salt, but it is entertaining: “We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.”
The whole exercise was clearly totally pointless and didn’t solve anything that needed solving (like every other “ai” project, i guess) but it does give a small but interesting window into the mindset of people who have only one shitty tool and are trying to make it do everything. Your chatbot is too easily lead astray? Use another chatbot to keep it in line! Honestly, I thought they were already doing this… I guess it was just to expensive or something, but now the price/desperation curves have intersected
Anthropic had already run into many of the same problems with Claudius internally so it created v2, powered by a better model, Sonnet 4.5. It also introduced a new AI boss: Seymour Cash, a separate CEO bot programmed to keep Claudius in line. So after a week, we were ready for the sequel.
Just one more chatbot, bro. Then prompt injection will become impossible. Just one more chatbot. I swear.
Anthropic and Andon said Claudius might have unraveled because its context window filled up. As more instructions, conversations and history piled in, the model had more to retain—making it easier to lose track of goals, priorities and guardrails. Graham also said the model used in the Claudius experiment has fewer guardrails than those deployed to Anthropic’s Claude users.
Sorry, I meant just one more guardrail. And another ten thousand tokens capacity in the context window. That’ll fix it forever.
Ben Williamson, editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology:
Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that’s when it got real weird… So this was the non-existent paper I searched for:
Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication. European Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 279–296.
But the search result I got was a bit different…
Here’s the paper I found online:
Williamson, B. and Piattoeva, N. (2022) Education Governance and Datafication. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 3515-3531.
Same title but now with a coauthor and in a different journal! Nelli Piattoeva and I have written together before but not this…
And so checked out Google Scholar. Now on my profile it doesn’t appear, but somwhow on Nelli’s it does and … and … omg, IT’S BEEN CITED 42 TIMES almost exlusively in papers about AI in education from this year alone…
Which makes it especially weird that in the paper I was reviewing today the precise same, totally blandified title is credited in a different journal and strips out the coauthor. Is a new fake reference being generated from the last?..
I know the proliferation of references to non-existent papers, powered by genAI, is getting less surprising and shocking but it doesn’t make it any less potentially corrosive to the scholarly knowledge environment.
Relatedly, AI is fucking up academic copy-editing.
One of the world’s largest academic publishers is selling a book on the ethics of artificial intelligence research that appears to be riddled with fake citations, including references to journals that do not exist.
OT: Lurasidone is neat stuff.
Today, in fascists not understanding art, a suckless fascist praised Mozilla’s 1998 branding:
This is real art; in stark contrast to the brutalist, generic mess that the Mozilla logo has become. Open source projects should be more daring with their visual communications.
Quoting from a 2016 explainer:
[T]he branding strategy I chose for our project was based on propaganda-themed art in a Constructivist / Futurist style highly reminiscent of Soviet propaganda posters. And then when people complained about that, I explained in detail that Futurism was a popular style of propaganda art on all sides of the early 20th century conflicts… Yes, I absolutely branded Mozilla.org that way for the subtext of “these free software people are all a bunch of commies.” I was trolling. I trolled them so hard.
The irony of a suckless developer complaining about brutalism is truly remarkable; these fuckwits don’t actually have a sense of art history, only what looks cool to them. Big lizard, hard-to-read font, edgy angular corners, and red-and-black palette are all cool symbols to the teenage boy’s mind, and the fascist never really grows out of that mindset.
It irks me to see people casually use the term “brutalist” when what they really mean is “modern architecture that I don’t like”. It really irks me to see people apply the term brutalist to something that has nothing to do with architecture! It’s a very specific term!
“Brutalist” is the only architectural style they ever learned about, because the name implies violence
ModRetro, retro gaming company infamous for being helmed by terrible person Palmer Luckey, has put out a version of their handheld made with “the same magnesium aluminum alloy as Anduril’s attack drones” (bluesky commentary, the linked news article is basically an ad and way too forgiving).
So uhh… they’re not beating those guilt by association accusations any time soon.
Time Extension’s decided to wash their hands of ModRetro after seeing the news. Good call on their part.
Obviously, if they’ve got magnesium alloy to divert into Game Boy ripoffs, the attack drone contract must not be going particularly well
i think that some of these are meant to be disposable
In the case of loitering munitions (also known as kamikaze drones, or suicide drones), you’d be correct - by design, they’re intended to crash into their target before blowing them up. Some reportedly do have recovery options built-in, but that’s only to avoid wasting them if they go unused.
a version of [the ModRetro Chromatic] made with “the same magnesium aluminum alloy as Anduril’s attack drones”
Obvious moral issues aside, is that even an effective marketing point? Linking yourself to Anduril, whose name is synonymous with war crimes and dead civs, seems like an easy way to drive away customers.
I’m holding out for the Lockheed-branded Atari Lynx clone thats made from surplus R9X knife missile parts.
I have my eye on the McDonnell Douglas-branded Neo Geo, which will be a value-engineered trijet and a brick of explosive all while only running the version of worm that was on the nokia brick phone.
Be careful my pal says the engines tend to fall off!
yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.
The before-games-went-woke sector was large enough to bring us gamergate so there’s definitely a sizable available crossover.
For more lighthearted gaming-related news, Capcom fired off a quick sneer, whilst (indirectly) promoting their their latest Mega Man game:
(alt text: “As a reminder for those entering the Mega Man: Dual Override Boss Design Art Contest, please remember the rules posted at bit.ly/MMDORobotMaster. Entrants must follow this account, and please leave the AI to the robots: generative AI is prohibited for this contest.”)
This was a prime opportunity to trot out bad box art megaman and they didn’t take it
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ucla-replace-teaching-assistants-ai
Miller’s team also recently used software from startup StackAI to develop an AI-powered app that writes letters of recommendation, saving faculty members time. Faculty type basic details about a student who has requested a letter, such as their grades and accomplishments, and the app writes a draft of the full letter.
AI is “one of those things that you might worry could dehumanize the process of writing recommendation letters, but faculty also say that process [of manually writing the letters] is very labor intensive,” Miller said. “So far they’ve gotten a lot out of” the new app.
Anyone using this thing should be required to serve on the admissions committee. LoRs aren’t for generic B+ students that you don’t even remember, just say no.
I googled stackai, saw their screenshots and had ptsd flashbacks of mid 2000s alteryx. why do we keep reinventing no-code drag-and-drop box-and-arrow crap.
Orange site mods retitled a post about a16z funding AI slop farms to remove the a16z part.
The mod tried to pretend the reason was that the title was just too damn long and clickbaity. His new title was 1 character shorter than the original.
I don’t love the title but it’s the best I could come up with to fit within the 80 character limit.
A half dozen people might still be reading hackernews on punchcards so they ha-
ve no choice but to argue about how to shorten “long” titles every day.
80 character limit
Lot of roguelike development in the past was still obsessed with that. Was a bit amusing, think even they have dropped this now.
I went down a punch-card history rabbit hole today on the empirical software engineering discord. TIL:
- IBM leased machines, didn’t sell them
- Lease required using IBM branded punchcard (Razor and Blade Model)
- Until “The Consent Decree of 1956” forced them to unbundle https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/09/business/ibm-and-the-limits-of-a-consent-decree.html
- The competing punch card standard of the time had 90 columns
We have been living in a world 10 columns too short. Think of all the HN headlines we could have had instead…
I imagine it was like VHS vs Beta only with pocket protectors.
Razor and Blade Model
HACK THE PLANET
- IBM leased machines, didn’t sell them
Good to know that Orange Website is being considerate of us VT220 users. I knew there was a reason why mine has the amber phosphorus.
A rare W for the Tennessee General Assembly:
https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-politics/bill-targets-ai-hurt-manipulate/
Ryanair now makes you install their app instead of allowing you to just print and scan your ticket at the airport, claiming it’s “better for our environment (gets rid of 300 tonnes of paper annually).” Then you log in into the app and you see there’s an update about your flight, but you don’t see what it’s about. You need to open an update video, which, of course, is a generated video of an avatar reading it out for you. I bet that’s better for the environment than using some of these weird symbols that I was putting into a box and that have now magically appeared on your screen and are making you feel annoyed (in the future for me, but present for you).
chat is this kafkaesque
New conspiracy theory: Posadist aliens have developed a virus that targets CEOs and makes them hate money.
….this made me twitch
Lol talk about mixed messages.
[Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser
Firefox’s social media account today:
Firefox is not becoming an AI browser.
What the fuck would an “AI browser” even be, let alone a modern one. I know what a web browser is, basically a combined HTTP client and HTML renderer. An AI browser is not something that has a commonly understood meaning, so to claim Firefox or anything else will be one without elaboration is just wankery.
I can’t help but do their dirty work for them and try to imagine what the hell an AI browser would be. Maybe you develop a standard protocol for prompting chatbots and a markup format for displaying responses and an AI browser is a client for that? Or maybe you just put an LLM in the search bar so Mozilla’s bullshit machine can give you wrong answers before pressing the return key and having Google’s bullshit machine give you wrong answers. Maybe there’s an about:chatbot page. I think all of these are bad bullshit ideas, but at least they’re ideas and not just “what if we added <latest fad> into <product>”.
AI Browsers. Metaverse fast food. Blockchain sneakers. Gigwork apartments. Cloud toilets. Big Data headphones. AR chairs. Military grade pianos. 3D books. App drugs. Dotcom condoms. Cyberspace bicycles. Wireless jump ropes. Video silverware. WYSIWYG carpets. Transistor fanny packs. Electromechanical ladders. Atomic flooring. Radio saunas. Horseless glue. Steam pens. Water powered masturbation.
I assume some mesolithic asshole said shit like “we are transforming our hunter-gatherer settlement to a ‘cave painting first’ society” and neighboring community leaders gave that guy like a hundred animal skins each for his insight.
The ACM has fallen
https://types.pl/@wilbowma/115733550130706711
https://types.pl/@[email protected]/115736432049018026
I became a member this year! and then immediately got to notice how it’s oozing out every pore
what’s kinda wild for me is that there’s also an ethics pledge involved, and I do not understand how they square that with the mass theft all LLM services and progress are/is based on
them automatically fucking with authors’ papers….ew
ACM is now showing an AI “summary” of a recent paper of mine on the DL instead of the abstract. As an author, I have not granted ACM the right to process my papers in this way, and will not. They should either roll back this (mis)feature or remove my papers from the DL.
Relatedly:
As is typical for educators these days, Heiss was following up on citations in papers to make sure that they led to real sources — and weren’t fake references supplied by an AI chatbot. Naturally, he caught some of his pupils using generative artificial intelligence to cheat: not only can the bots help write the text, they can supply alleged supporting evidence if asked to back up claims, attributing findings to previously published articles. […] That in itself wasn’t unusual, however. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals. […] That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations.
a16z funds 1000+ strong phone farm and uses it for mass manufacturing tiktok ai influencers, security turns out to be not good enough https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-the-a16z-backed-phone-farm-flooding-tiktok-with-ai-influencers/
the usecase is spam:
The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them. It’s not clear if the other 200 accounts ever promoted products or were being “warmed up,” as Doublespeed describes the process of making the accounts appear authentic before it starts promoting in order to avoid a ban.
I’ve seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.
