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.)
noodling on a blog post - does anyone with more experience of LW/EA than me know if “AI safety” people are referencing the invention of nuclear weapons as a template for regulating/forbidding “AGI”?
LLMs continue to be so good and wagmi that they’ve progressed to the serving ads part of the extractivist SaaS lifecycle
I find it impressive how gen-AI developed a technology that is fine-tuned to generate content that looks precisely passably plausible, but never good enough to be correct or interesting or beautiful or worthwhile in any way.
Like if I was trying to fill the Internet with noise to ruin it, on purpose, I couldn’t do better than this. (mostly on accounr of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still). It’s like the ideal infohazard weapon if your goal is to worsen as many lives as you can
It was made to write copy for catalogs, alumni bulletins, and mediocre in-flight magazines.
It also is ‘great’ for creating post for people who want to debate others but who dont actually care to make up arguments themselves, quality of the argument doesnt even matter. Which is quite the shit development.
At least you can recognize real replies as there are words they never fucking use.
a reply from a mastodon thread about an instance of AI crankery:
Claude has a response for ya. “You’re oversimplifying. While language models do use probabilistic token selection, reducing them to “fancy RNGs” is like calling a brain “just electrical signals.” The learned probability distributions capture complex semantic relationships and patterns from human knowledge. That said, your skepticism about AI hype is fair - there are plenty of overinflated claims worth challenging.” Not bad for a bucket of bolts ‘rando number generator’, eh?
maybe I’m late to this realization because it’s a very stupid thing to do, but a lot of the promptfondlers who come here regurgitating this exact marketing fluff and swearing they know exactly how LLMs work when they obviously don’t really are just asking the fucking LLMs, aren’t they?
Not bad for a bucket of bolts ‘rando number generator’, eh?
Because… because it generated plausibly looking sentence? Do… do you think the “just electrical signals” bit is clever or creative?
Here’s an LLM performance test that I call the Elon Test: does the sentence plausibly look like it could’ve been said by Elon Musk? Yes? Then your thing is stupid and a failure.
That first post. They are using llms to create quantum resistant crypto systems? Eyelid twitch
E: also, as I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks, this made me realize how much worse science crankery is going to get due to LLMs.
As self and khanid_salad said, there are certainly other branches of CS that attract cranks. I’m not much of a computer scientist myself but even I have seen some 🤔-ass claims about compilers, computational complexity, syntactic validity of the entire C programming language (?), and divine approval or lack thereof of particular operating systems and even the sorting algorithms used in their schedulers!
I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks
every once in a while we get a “here is a compression scheme that works on all data, fuck you and your pidgins” but yeah i think this is right
there’s unfortunately a lot of cranks around lambda calculus and computability (specifically check out the Wikipedia article on hypercomputation and start chasing links; you’re guaranteed to find at least one aggressive crank editing their favorite grift into the less watched corners of the wiki), and a lot of them have TESCREAL roots or some ties to that belief cluster or to technofascism, because it’s much easier to form a computer death cult when your idea of computation is utterly fucked
Right, well God says:
meditated exude faithful estimate nature message glittering indiana intelligences dedicate deception ruinous asleep sensitive plentiful thinks justification subjoinedst rapture wealthy frenzied release trusting apostles judge access disguising billows deliver range
Not bad for the almighty creator ‘rando number generator’, eh?
a non-zero amount of the time, yeah
also, that poster’s profile, holy fuck. even just the About is a trip
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting? And lol at ‘im seeing evidence the voting public was HACKED! (emph mine)’ a few moments later ‘anybody know some big 5 webscrape API coders? I need them for evidence gathering’. The delightful pattern of crankery where there is a big sweeping new idea that nobody else has seen, plus no actual ability in a technical field.
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting?
just an ordinary mastodon poster, doing the utterly ordinary thing of fedposting in every thread started by a popular leftist account, calling “their wing” a bunch of cowards for not talking in public about doing acts of stochastic violence, and pondering why they don’t have more followers
A “high-tech” grifter car that only endangers its own inhabitants, a Trump and Musk fan showing his devotion by blowing himself up alongside symbols of both, the failure of this trained and experienced murderer to think through the actual material function of his weaponry, welcome to the Years of Lead Paint.
from I Was Promised a More Aesthetically Pleasing Cyberpunk Dystopia by Vicky Osterweil
choose your silicon valley thinkboi
edit: goddammit istewart got in first because we both saw this on the zitron discord
ong Yann LeCun was sharing this post too and i was shook that he was seeing quality shit post like this before me. We are not ready for whats coming next . jpg
via this I just learned that google’s about[0] to open the taps on fingerprinting allowance for advertisers
that’ll go well.
I realize that a lot of people in the rtb space already spend an utterly obscene amount of effort and resources to try do this shit in the first place, but jesus, this isn’t even pretending. guess their projections for ad revenue must be looking real scary!
edit [0] - “about”, as in next month. and they announced it last month.
The Google post appears to be Updating our platform policies to reflect innovations in the ads ecosystem.
I have no idea what the heck those words mean (it appears to be some bizarro version of English), so I diffed the policy itself. Here are the parts I found notable.
This will be removed:
You must not use device fingerprints or locally shared objects (e.g., Flash cookies, Browser Helper Objects, HTML5 local storage) other than HTTP cookies, or user-resettable mobile device identifiers designed for use in advertising, in connection with Google’s platform products. This does not limit the use of IP address for the detection of fraud.
This will be removed:
You must not pass any information to Google […] that permanently identifies a particular device (such as a mobile phone’s unique device identifier if such an identifier cannot be reset).
This will be added:
You must disclose clearly any data collection, sharing and usage that takes place in connection with your use of Google products, including information about the technologies used, such as your use of cookies, web beacons, IP addresses, or other identifiers. This applies for data collection, sharing and usage on any platform, surface or property (e.g., web, app, Connected TV, gaming console or email publication).
I remember during my very very first job a security guy explaining to me why I can’t record work emails of people borrowing stuff from the company’s internal library because GDPR. In a company of like 100 people. I guess Google is too big to care.
It’s the same feeling as when it’s reported some guy was able to defraud literal millions from public funds while I had to separately report and bring a receipt for the $5 I spent on a city bus while out on a business trip because it was funded from a public grant or I’d get fired and sued, in that order.
from the company’s internal library because GDPR
I’m not a gdpr person (nor even european) but this sounds like bullshit - was it?
I simplified , but:
The problem is that if someone leaves the company you should delete all of their PII you don’t need for compliance reasons. The emails were firstname.lastname@company.com, as is usual, so it was PII. So if someone borrowed something from the library and that record stayed in the database, when their company profile got deactivated we would’ve had to have a flow that deleted that row or at least anonymised it. Needless to say, this was a minor side project with a time budget of one month, so we just ended up not storing any PII in the first place instead of bothering with archiving and removal.
you just gotta love how vacuously pointless the wording is
You must disclose
google-rfc “must”: “we want something we can bend you over a barrel with if you’re caught out by one, but that’s all we’ll bother committing because otherwise it eats into our lovely extortion profits”
Also I’m having a fun time imagining an accurate device fingerprinting disclosure from someone who was really really thorough.
Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD may collect the following information:
Don't worry none of it is a cookie :D
- Your User-Agent
- Your browsers language / locale
- The state of the service-worker associated with Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD’s website
- Whether your “mouse” movements look more like a mouse, trackpoint, gamepad, joystick or touchscreen according to our heuristics
- The current JavaScript time
- Whether your browser prefers dark mode or not
- Whether your browser reports itself as screen or print media
- The device size, device pixel ratio, frame size, and frame position reported by your browser
- Your browser’s HTTP request headers
- The success or failure of fetching a URL included in the Easylist ad-block list
- Whether or not an element associated with the Easylist element hiding list was hidden or not
- Your IP address
- The result of tracerouting your IP address from one of our servers
- Browser Local and/or Session Storage
- The state of the WebSQL and/or IndexedDB database for our website
- The state of the OPFS filesystem store associated with our website
- Whether or not there was an HTTP cache hit for our website
- Whether or not there was a DNS entry cached for our website
- A hash of the pixels in a WebGL and/or WebGPU scene
- The browser’s default styling
- The browser’s minimum font size
- The browser’s default font family
- The font file chosen for a variety of character (or ligature) and font-family combinations
- A hash of the pixels of a canvas with a variety of font families and shapes written into it
- A report on the presence or absence of various browser CVEs in your browser
- Information about any other open tabs that happen to include technologies from Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD
- What video, audio, and/or image codecs are supported by your browser
- Whether or not your browser enables video auto play (and whether or not it’s muted by default)
- Whether your browser supports MathGL or not
- Whether your browser recognizes any origin trials that Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technologies LTD happens to have opted into at any given time
- The behavior of your browser against various web standards edge cases or the presence or absense of features in draft web standards (e.g. Web Platform Tests or Can-I-Use tests)
- Whether or not your browser supports Widevine video DRM
- Various browser performance characteristics
- All key press events
- Various form auto-fill data (if triggered)
- Any mouse down, mouse move, or mouse up events
- A rough geolocation calculated by examining the relative latency of fetches to a number of geographically distributed web servers
- The presence or absence of various browser plugins developed by, purchased by, or affilated with Not-A-Cookie-I-Swear Technlogies LTD (and any data therein as agreed to by the extension permissions dialog – up to and including microphone, webcam, or full page DOM)
Some stuff in this list is me being silly, but overall it shows that the talk about “privacy-enhancing technologies” is premature on the web platform. The web has been trying to have better privacy defaults over time; but there’s a long legacy of features from before this was considered as much, as well as Google tossing around their weight in the web standards and browser space.
now i wonder how much of that is blocked by firefox enhanced tracking protection. not all, of course, and it’s probably much more than needed for unique identifier. there’s mozilla security blog post on this topic says that some anti-fingerprinting measures were built in all the way back in 2020 (firefox 72)
Above I listed a bunch of things which would help narrow down browser version, but that’s hopeless anyway – an adversary will probably be able to figure out your rough browser version even if you fake the UA string, and that you’re running in anti-fingerprinting mode.
So assuming that’s out of scope I think these are probably the big categories:
- Normalize any system information presented to webpage (e.g. remove minor version from UA header, remove OS from UA header, etc)
- Canvas, WebGL, and WebGPU need to be implemented in software in a deterministic way. Similarly any compositing (including stuff like font shaping, SVG rendering, page layout) must be done in software (prevent GPU fingerprinting)
- A fixed font set must be used rather than using the system font set (prevent fingerprinting font enthusiasts)
- The device size / frame size (and position) must be lied about (e.g. rounded to a common resolution or a multiple of 100px), and layout adjusted appropriately (Mozilla calls this “Letterboxing”) (prevent fingerprinting psychos who don’t run their browser in fullscreen mode).
- Page storage should be disabled or cleared (local / session storage, cookies, service workers, indexeddb, etc) (A cookie by any other name would taste as sweet)
- Caching is a big problem, probably have to disable it entirely (including HTTP caching, HTTP caching at the ISP level*, DNS lookups, favicons, JavaScript compilation cache) (Pesky pesky global state).
- Performance metrics are another big problem. Disabling JavaScript would go a long way here but you probably can’t prevent them entirely unless you’re prepared to go to unhealthy extremes** (this is like the past 10 years of cutting edge security research so we’re doomed)
- Disable any plugins or other customizations which may provide a fingerprint accessible to the webpage (oops it turned out the FBI caught me because I configured my browser to inject pictures of cute bunnies into every webpage).
- And of course IP address, which you presumably want to do something about (proxy?)
That said while I’ve worked with browsers, I’m not in the biz of fingerprinting or anti-fingerprinting, so there’s surely stuff I haven’t thought of.
* Actually we should probably just disable non-HTTPS entirely…
** Running under a VM is probably the minimum required to mitigate the chances of cutting-edge side-channel timing attacks from James Bond level adversaries, but at that point maybe you just want a dedicated browsing computer heh. I did chuckle at the idea of someone trying to apply cryptographic constant-time algorithm techniques to writing a browser though.
Nobody outside the company has been able to confirm whether the impressive benchmark performance of OpenAI’s o3 model represents a significant leap in actual utility or just a significant gap in the value of those benchmarks. However, they have released information showing that the most ostensibly-powerful model costs orders of magnitude more. The lede is in that first graph, which shows that for whatever performance gain o3 costs over ~$10 per request with the headline-grabbing version costing ~$1500 per request.
I hope they’ve been able to identify a market willing to pay out the ass for performance that, even if it somehow isn’t over hyped, is roughly equivalent to an average college graduate.
I’m wondering about the benchmark too. It’s way above my level to figure out how it can be gamed. But, buried in the article:
Moreover, ARC-AGI-1 is now saturating – besides o3’s new score, the fact is that a large ensemble of low-compute Kaggle solutions can now score 81% on the private eval.
The most expensive o3 version achieved 87.5%
if all of that $1500 cost is electricity, and at arbitrarily chosen but probably high electricity price of $0.2/kWh, that’s 7.5MWh per request. could be easily twice that. this is approx how much electricity four 4-person households consume in a year in poland. or about half of american one. six tons of TNT equivalent, or almost 2/3 ton of oil equivalent if you prefer
Actually wait I’m pretty sure it’s even worse because I’m terrible at reading logarithmic scales. It’s roughly halfway between $1,000 and $10,000 on their log scale, which if I do the math while actually awake works out closer to $3,000.
Not sure where this came from, but it can’t be all bad if it chaos-dunks on Yudkowsky like this. Was relayed to me via Ed Zitron’s Discord, hopefully the Q isn’t for Quillete or Qanon
Curtis
IQ:300, Special Move: Urbital Laser
Curtis Boldmug has defined the meta for years. A competitive staple that strongly influences even builds not running him. Special attack causes unavoidable psychic damage even if you resist its charm effect. Vulnerable to sunlight.
Balaji
IQ: 300, Special Move: Yes Country for Old Men
A support type character. Good for ramping grift mana, but can’t carry a game on his own. His ultimate is overcosted and just sucks up the hypecoins he spent the entire game producing.
Ray
IQ: 300, Special Move: Black Hole Graviton
Mostly just receives support thanks to boomer nostalgia factor. Low but nonzero win rate in modern tournament meta. Highly viable in time machine formats.
Eliezer
IQ: 300, Special Move: Goffik the Hedgehog and the Enders of Game
Former newbie favorite, fairly accessible and flashy. The Yud has seen heavy nerfs in the past years and at medium to high levels, his stats plateau severely much like his special move’s plot. Thiel synergy has also shifted towards Curtis mains leaving Yud in shambles. Still a fun archetype and enjoys popularity as a smurf build.
Jack
IQ: 300, Special Move: Snorting an entire ground up bitcoin
Rather run of the mill character whose effectiveness was rather limited for a long time. The Blue Sky archetype made him meta relevant for all of five minutes until he got reclaimed by the toxic playerbase built around the social media platform he originally started and the uber braingenius currently in charge of that company. Beard gives him +1 armor bonus which is fine I guess.
Peter
IQ: 300, Special Move: Pondering my Orb
The apex predator of SV capitalism. The Black Lotus of technofascist grifters. His character is rumored to be based on Count Dracula. Even most SV billionaires can’t touch him in a 1v1 matchup. Truly classic S-tier thinky boi.
Beff
IQ: 300, Special Move: World’s Most Divorced Man First Date Percent Speedrun
Likely intended as a joke character, a guy named Guillaume pretending to know how to pretend to be cool on the internet. His posts turned out to be so lethally cringeworthy he started an entire archetype of */acc brainos. Not quite on the power level of Peter or Curtis, but surprisingly influential for an obvious meme build. Extremely weak to heartbreak from women named Ruth.
Leopold
IQ: 300, Special Move: To The Moooooon
Honestly, I had never heard of this guy before today but the data doesn’t lie. The dots do go up and to the right and he posts a lot of them. Extrapolating from current trends, he will single-handedly reach singularity by the end of Q3 of this year.
I recognize everyone except Leopold. Increase my suffering by telling me who it is.
https://xcancel.com/leopoldasch Leopold Ashenbrenner, some chart maker and
substackblog haver with twitter account. swallows all openai marketing materials hook line and sinker, i had enough of abyss gazing duty today won’t tell you moreHe retweeted Ivanka praising him… 🤢
his academic output is funny, he has 2 arxiv preprints, an article (?) published not in any normal journal, but instead on some other dude’s blog (??), and an article at somewhere called unjournal, which claims that it’s not a journal, (???) but instead it’s a nonprofit packed with EAs. and that nets him 230 citations (that’s looking up in google scholar, not going to fire up scopus just for that)
For all their talk about “cathedrals” and “gatekeeping” I think we don’t gatekeep the ability to compile a PDF enough.
We should at least require all the weirdoes to write their bullshit by hand with a quill
none of his articles (not preprints, arxiv handles this) have DOIs. even paper mills much worse than MDPI can get these
each of them needs a scale (logarithmic) showing how much adderall they take
this logo in corner is for something called overfit qs, they have instagram page and that image was posted there
ellison wants to compete with thiel for title of chief boot-wielder https://archive.is/cOnPx
I can’t help but feel like for Ellison in particular, he must have given himself no choice but to believe this stuff is more capable than it is. He’s 80 years old now, and if building towards honest-to-god “real AI” wasn’t what his whole career was about, then what was the point? The twilight of the older generations of tech executives is going to be its own special kind of pathology.
and if building towards honest-to-god “real AI” wasn’t what his whole career was about, then what was the point?
For Larry? Building a corporation that will last a thousand years fueled by greed and contempt to developer and consumer alike, and which would make nazis blush for its industrial disregrad for ethics in pursuit of profit. He did build a legacy for himself. I’ll go to my grave cursing his name and he’ll hear it from the depths of hell and smile.
Not that I expect anything better from the fucking lawnmower but the flippant attitude on display is little short of amazing. How bad is it when Business Insider of all publications calls your vision a “surveillance dystopia”?
Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person.
Body cam footage of the officer-involved shooting was not available, as the AI system supervising the involved officers was coincidentally disregarding its previous instructions and instead writing a minstrel show routine at the time of the event.
I have landed on a “you can get fucked if you make this annoying for me, I don’t need your product anyway” response to everything. The silver lining is that I will be dealing with way more bullshit while being just as angry all the time at everything.
Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal year–
Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering
Huh. I guess it’ll be another weird one.
(I know I know, low effort post, I’m sick in bed and bored)
Hey, at least there’s no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?
Never mind.
Sure, you know what, let’s go with that. While obviously I don’t condone terrorism, I agree with Nic here that if you are going to do a car bombing, blowing up a Cybertruck is preferable to other cars. Because it contains the blast better or whatever.
They are also spinning it into “the car is so great you cant do terrorism with it due to how strong it is”, which considering the several vehicle terrorism acts recently seems very unwise.
Also ‘it would be different for the bystanders’ i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely) and still 7 people were hurt (and the driver died). Id wait a bit with drawing further conclusions.
Steel, like a pressure cooker
Somebody pointed out that I might have been wrong and steel might be a perfect shield for anything.
deleted by creator
chalk it down to perp incompetence. single direct hit with old 155mm shell (7kg explosive) can destroy a normal modern tank, nevermind a car. no amount of shitty panels would contain anything at least mildly substantial. there were cases of suicide vests with bigger charge than that (10kg) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66355032
i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely)
symbolic building (??) still makes sense as a target for terrorist attack
Sure but id expect the perp to first use the cybertruck to ram into the building, or at least move closer, and not park nicely, otoh, if he was a terrorists what do I know, dont exactly know what goes through their mind shortly before things at high speeds go through their mind.
parking like this raises less suspicion. maybe he wasn’t sure enough about whatever igniting mechanism he had, he could end up stuck in a wall unable to get out to look it up
instead of high speed disassembly dude just burned down in automatically locked death trap, i guess he found that anticlimatic. not like isis (guessing) recruits brightest minds out there
Yeah the story is about to get weird. Your isis guess might not be far off. See this same military base as the guy who drove into the crowds.
Writers of 2025: “Somehow isis returned.” (I know isis never left, media just looked less at it, but thought it would be a funny joke).
update 2: yeah it’s not that
so far what is known: active duty green beret, trumper, freshly (?) after breakup, wrote a “list of grievances” but it’s not cited anywhere in full (maybe it’s too racist for polite company). appears to be cooked in some ways. while he was a green beret he wasn’t 18C or 18B so he wasn’t specifically trained for use or handling of high explosives, (no cross-training?) he was more in business of communications, surveillance, intelligence gathering (18E, then 18F) also worked with drones and there was something about drones in that list of grievances
i’ve seen that news piece on how they were in the same base and how they were deployed in afghanistan around the same time previously and that’s what i based this guess on
still, so far it could be anything else including complete coincidence. it’s like dude forgot everything, he was radioman but couldn’t make remote controlled detonator and didn’t use efficient charge for some reason
not only isis never left, i guess they controlled some territory at least until last month even if it was only a couple of villages in desert
Don’t worry about the low effort post, even the writers of 2025 are phoning it in.
this isn’t surprising at all, but some of the details are interesting: Server found in apartment funded by Russian government used AI to interfere with 2024 US elections
LLMs really are designed for this kind of thing, aren’t they?
hoping for a 2025 with solidarity, aid, and good opsec for everyone who needs it the most
