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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A company that makes learning material to help people learn to code made a test of programming basics for devs to find out if their basic skills have atrophied after use of AI. They posted it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507369
Not a lot of engagement yet, but so far there is one comment about the actual test content, one shitposty joke, and six comments whining about how the concept of the test itself is totally invalid how dare you.
Looks like it’s been downranked into hell for being too mean to the AI guys, which is weird when its literally an AI guy promoting his AI generated trash.
It seems that the test itself is generated by autoplag? At least that’s how I understand the PS and one of the comments about “vibe regression” in response to an error
Anyway, they say it covers Node and to any question regarding Node the answer is “no”, I don’t need an AI to know webdev fundamentals
In the recent days there’s been a bunch of posts on LW about how consuming honey is bad because it makes bees sad, and LWers getting all hot and bothered about it. I don’t have a stinger in this fight, not least because investigations proved that basically all honey exported from outside the EU is actually just flavored sugar syrup, but I found this complaint kinda funny:
The argument deployed by individuals such as Bentham’s Bulldog boils down to: “Yes, the welfare of a single bee is worth 7-15% as much as that of a human. Oh, you wish to disagree with me? You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts”.
“Of course such underhanded tactics are not present here, in the august forum promoting 10,000 word posts called Sequences!”
Damn making honey is metal as fuck. (And I mean that in a omg this is horrible, you could write disturbing songs about it way) CRUSHED FOR YOUNG! MAMMON DEMANDS DISMEMBERMENT! LIVING ON SLOP, HIVE CULLING MANDATORY. Makes a 40k hive city sound nice.
I thought you were talking about lemmy.world (also uses the LW acrynom) for a second.
Lesswrong is a Denial of Service attack on a very particular kind of guy
You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts”.
This, coming from LW, just has to be satire. There’s no way to be this self-unaware and still remember to eat regularly.
Bummer, I wasn’t on the invite list to the hottest SF wedding of 2025.
Update your mental models of Claude lads.
Because if the wife stuff isn’t true, what else could Claude be lying about? The vending machine business?? The blackmail??? Being bad at Pokemon???
It’s gonna be so awkward when Anthropic reveals that inside their data center is actually just Some Guy Named Claude who has been answering everyone’s questions with his superhuman typing speed.
11.000 indian people renamed to Claude
Elon makes Grok developers install intrusive surveillance software on their laptops. They’re being told to enable screen captures and URL tracking.
In conjunction with his comments about making it antiwoke by modifying the input data rather then relying on a system prompt after filling it with everything, it’s hard not to view this as part of an attempt to ideologically monitor these tutors to make sure they’re not going to select against versions of the model that aren’t in the desired range of “closeted Nazi scumbag.”
prompt injection phish by email
so glad these things have a solid security model and this totally won’t result in a scrambled half-assed fix
A prompt-injection attack on Google’s Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla’s bug bounty program
Whenever I think Mozilla can’t get any worse…
So now they do “Agentic Security” and “Real-time GenAI intelligence on emerging threats”.
mozilla has for years had a habit of tailchasing some utterly fucking weird shit instead of focusing on their core business, and this feels very much like part of that. but fucking still
This isn’t an original thought, but a better matrix for comparing the ideology (such as it is) of the current USG is not Nazi Germany but pre-war US right wing obsessions - anti-FDR and anti-New Deal.
This appears in weird ways, like this throwaway comment regarding the Niihau incident, where two ethnic Japanese inhabitants of Niihau helped a downed Japanese airman immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Imagine if you will, one of the 9/11 hijackers parachuting from the plane before it crashed, asking a random muslim for help, then having that muslim be willing to immediately get himself into a shootouts, commit arson, kidnappings, and misc mayhem.
Then imagine that it was covered in a media environment where the executive branch had been advocating for war for over a decade, and voices which spoke against it were systematically silenced.
(src)
Dude also credits LessOnline with saving his life due to unidentified <<<ethnics>>> shooting up his 'hood when he was there. Charming.
This is, sadly, pretty unsurprising, as carrying forward the anti-FDR/anti-New Deal movement was a foundational pillar of the libertarianism that Trump co-opted. Heavily promoted by the LewRockwell.com/Mises.org crowd.
So random thought, you now how LW is worried about an seed AI going foom right, how it bootstraps itself into a new AI with better capabilities which bootstraps etc all the way till the singularity.
Why isn’t it happening? Gpt-2 was released 2019, 3 2022, 4 2023, so where is 5 and 6? Where is our double event?
Remember Devin, the AI coding bot that turned out to be a complete scam?
Well, looks like Goldman Sachs decided to let it loose on its code base. In YOLO mode too, it seems.
It would be really funny if Devin caused a financial crash this way
Total fucking Devin move if you ask me.
Devin will be supervised by human employees and will handle jobs that engineers often consider drudgery, like updating internal code to newer programing languages, he said.
Good luck to the workers having to debug that shit.
Goldman is the first major bank to use Devin, according to Cognition, which was founded in late 2023 by a trio of engineers and whose staff is reportedly stocked with champion coders.
Being good at Codeforces contests surely translates to any other domain. I expect the Cognition guys to fully deliver on their promises.
Another day, another jailbreak method - a new method called InfoFlood has just been revealed, which involves taking a regular prompt and making it thesaurus-exhaustingly verbose.
In simpler terms, it jailbreaks LLMs by speaking in Business Bro.
I mean, decontextualizing and obscuring the meanings of statements in order to permit conduct that would in ordinary circumstances breach basic ethical principles is arguably the primary purpose of deploying the specific forms and features that comprise “Business English” - if anything, the fact that LLM models are similarly prone to ignore their “conscience” and follow orders when deciding and understanding them requires enough mental resources to exhaust them is an argument in favor of the anthropomorphic view.
Or:
Shit, isn’t the whole point of Business Bro language to make evil shit sound less evil?
maybe there’s just enough text written in that psychopatic techbro style with similar disregard for normal ethics that llms latched onto that. this is like what i guess happened with that “explain step by step” trick - instead of grafting from pairs of answers and questions like on quora, lying box grafts from sets of question -> steps -> answer like on chegg or stack or somewhere else where you can expect answers will be more correct
it’d be more of case of getting awful output from awful input
LW:
Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.
Perfect. No notes.
They’re LWers, they already baked their psyche long ago
LW’er: “sorry can you excuse me for a moment? I’m having a bad day, somebody gave me a stack of papers with a paperclip in it”
(I do now worry if there are actual LWers who for real gave themselves ptsd like reactions from seeing paperclips. Like the woman who mistook ‘free parking’ for ‘free palestine’ a couple of years back).
wonder if that’s why they tried and failed to change it to “squiggle maximizing”
The top comment begins thusly:
I think you make a reasonably compelling case, but when I think about the practicality of this in my own life it’s pretty hard to imagine not spending any time talking to chatbots. ChatGPT, Claude and others are extremely useful.
I didn’t think it was possible, but the perfection continues! Still, no notes!
the comments are wild “yes good post having my brain taken over by a superintelligent autocomplete is a reasonable concern”
A hackernews muses about vibe coding a chatbot to provide therapy for people in crisis. Soon, an actual health care professional shows up to butcher the offender and defile the corpse. This causes much tut-tutting and consternation among the locals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535197
Edit: a shower thought: have any of yall noticed the way that prompt enjoyers describe using Cursor, tab completions, and such sounds congruent with the psychology of loot boxes? In particular, they share the variable-interval reward schedule that serves as the hook in your typical recreational gambling machines.
the psychology of loot boxes?
yep! https://awful.systems/post/4568900
the book is “Hooked” and it’s Don’t Build The Torment Nexus I’m Now Providing You A Detailed Blueprint Of
Ye gods! Also, great write-up!
Do you reckon that Altman recognized the gacha potential from the get-go? That Big LLM has always been FanDuel for dorks, but on purpose?
I’ve been making casual observation how a number of the adhd people I know to have addiction tendencies tend to get real into prompts, but hadn’t observed the lootbox thing
that’s going into the ponder bucket.
you should be read up on the gospel of @fasterandworse never shutting up about “Hooked”
One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370
Musk objects to the “stochastic parrot” labelling of LLMs. Mostly just the stochastic part.
“We made it more truth-seeking, as determined by our boss, the fascist megalomaniac.”
Wake up babe, new alignment technique just dropped: Reinforcement Learning Elon Feedback
I have become aware that there is a very right wing Catholic podcaster who has a Catholicism AI chatbot app. It’s called Truthly.
Your Trusted Catholic AI Conversation Companion Deepen your understanding, explore ideas, and engage in meaningful dialogue—anytime, anywhere.
If someone could call up Pope Leo and get him to excommunicate the guys who invented this, that would be great.
Nah, we just need to make sure they properly baptise whatever servers it’s running on.
really, really thoroughly baptise. not just drops but fistfuls of water. the more water the more holy. the servers will love being really holy!
Just throw the whole unit into the font, just to be safe. Or better yet, a river!
Can’t find the angle to spin this out into a grown-up buttcoin post, but if I did, the title would be “Horse_ebutts”.
Anyway: recently I’ve been burdened with the knowledge that there’s a bunch of horse racing related crypto companies. They’re all obviously terrible.
- Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
- EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
- BTX Racing: a blockchain platform for buying stake in horses. Not sure if you get to choose which cut of the horse you own. Also, not sure if when you liquidate your equine tranche you get cash or a bucket of glue.
Also, insert obligatory stablecoin reference here.
Wait wtf I once built a blockchain called equestreum *as a joke* https://github.com/hat-festival/equestreum I need to step away from the lathe
think of all the rug you could have pulled…
Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
They’re also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who’s winning this particular fight for people’s cash.
EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
It’d arguably be helpful if the caregivers are helping themselves to the stash, but I doubt there’s anything stopping then from BSing the blockchain, too.
They’re also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who’s winning this particular fight for people’s cash.
It’s almost as if people don’t want to spend money on bland low-poly 3D models of horses and would instead prefer waifu art with surprisingly intricate character design that I definitely do not know anything about*
*I actually do not, but for the bit, pretend that I do and am being defensive
I can honestly say that I have never played Umamusume Pretty Derby because on my PC the sound keeps cutting out and the cutscenes don’t play which greatly disappointed me.
Yeah that “they can just input bs” has always been the whole issue with those whole logging bit on the blockchain stuff. Esp considering the costs and risk of implementing a thing like this and the low costs of normal existing logging I dont see how this could ever become mainstream viable. (And that is ignoring the ease of use).
A Supabase employee pleads with his software like a parent pleads with a toddler in a toy store.
The Supabase homepage implies AI bros are two levels below “beginner”, which I found somewhat amusing:
Skill Level
Its also completely accurate - AI bros are not only utterly lacking in any sort of skill, but actively refuse to develop their skills in favour of using the planet-killing plagiarism-fueled gaslighting engine that is AI and actively look down on anyone who is more skilled than them, or willing to develop their skills.
oof! That’s hilarious!
