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)
So the ongoing discourse about AI energy requirements and their impact on the world reminded me about the situation in Texas. It set me thinking about what happens when the bubble pops. In the telecom bubble of the 90s or the British rail bubble of the 1840s, there was a lot of actual physical infrastructure created that outlived the unprofitable and unsustainable companies that had built them. After the bubble this surplus infrastructure helped make the associated goods and services cheaper and more accessible as the market corrected. Investors (and there were a lot of investors) lost their shirts, but ultimately there was some actual value created once we were out of the bezzle.
Obviously the crypto bubble will have no such benefits. Itās not like energy demand was particularly constrained outside of crypto, so any surplus electrical infrastructure will probably be shut back down (and good riddance to dirty energy). The mining hardware itself is all purpose-built ASICs that canāt actually do anything apart from mining, so itās basically turning directly into scrap as far as I can tell.
But the high-performance GPUs that these AI operations rely on are more general-purpose even if theyāre optimized for AI workloads. The bubble is still active enough that there doesnāt appear to be much talk about it, but what kind of use might we see some of these chips and datacenters put to as the bubble burns down?
Folks, I need some expert advice. Thanks in advance!
Our NSF grant reviews came in (on Saturday), and two of the four reviews (an Excellent AND a Fair, lol) have confabulations and [insert text here brackets like this] that indicate that they are LLM generated by lazy people. Just absolutely gutted. Itās like an alien reviewed a version of our grant application from an parallel dimension.
Who do I need to contact to get eyes on the situation, other than the program director? We get to simmer all day today since it was released on the weekend, so at least I have an excuse to slow down and be thoughtful.
I got this AMAZING OPPORTUNITY in my inbox, because once your email appears on a single published paper youāre forever doomed to garbage like this (transcript at the end):
Highlights:
- Addresses me as Dr. Iām not a doctor. I checked, and apparently Dr. Muhhamad Imran Qureshi indeed has a PhD and is a lecturer at Teesside University International Business School (link to profile). His recent papers include a bunch of blockchain bullshit. Tesside University appears to be a legit UK university, although Iām not sure how legit the Business School is (or how legit any Business School can be, really).
- Tells us their research is so shit that using wisdom woodchippers actually increases their accuracy.
- One of the features is āpublication supportā, so this might be one of those scams where you pay an exorbitant fee to get āpublishedā in some sketchy non-peer-reviewed journal.
- One of the covered AI tools is Microsoft Excel. If you were wondering if āAIā had any meaning.
- Also, by god, are there so many different ChatGPT clones now? I havenāt heard most of those names. I kinda hope theyāre as AI as Excel is.
Iām not sure which would be worse, this being a scam, or them legit thinking this brings value to the world and believing theyāre helping anyone.
transcript
Email titled Revolutionize Your Research: AI-Powered Systematic Literature Review Master Class
Online course on writing AI-Powered Systematic Literature Review
Register Now:
Dear Dr. [REDACTED],
weāre reaching out because we believe our AI-Powered Systematic Review Masterclass could be a game-changer for your research. As someone whoās passionate about research writing, we know the challenges of conducting thorough and efficient systematic reviews.
Key takeaways:
- AI-powered prompt engineering for targeted literature searches
- Crafting optimal research questions for AI analysis Intelligent data curation to streamline your workflow
- Leveraging AI for literature synthesis and theory development
Join our Batch 4 and discover how AI can help you:
- Save time by automating repetitive tasks
- Improve accuracy with AI-driven analysis
- Gain a competitive edge with innovative research methods
Enrollment is now open! Donāt miss this opportunity to take your systematic review skills to the next level.
Key Course Details: Course Title: AI-Powered Systematic Literature Reviews Master Class Live interaction + recording = Learning that fits your life Dates: October 13, 2024, to November 3, 2024 Live Session Schedule: Every Sunday at 2 PM UK time (session recordings will be accessible). Duration: Four Weeks Platform: Zoom Course Fee: GBP 100 Certification: Yes Trainer: Dr. Muhammad Imran Qureshi
Key features
- Asynchronous learning
- Video tutorials
- Live sessions with access to recordings
- Research paper Templates
- Premade Prompts for Systematic Literature Review
- Exercise Files
- Publication support
The teaching methodology will offer a dynamic learning experience, featuring live sessions every Saturday via Zoom for a duration of four weeks. These sessions will provide an interactive platform for engaging discussions, personalised feedback, and the opportunity to connect with both the course instructor and fellow participants. Moreover, our diverse instructional approach encompasses video tutorials, interactive engagements, and comprehensive feedback loops, ensuring a well-rounded and immersive learning experience.
Certification
Upon successful completion of the course, participants will receive certification from the Association of Professional Researchers and Academicians UK, validating their mastery of AI-enabled methodologies for conducting comprehensive and insightful literature reviews.
AI tools included
- Microsoft Excel
- ChatGPT
- Elicit
- Powerdrill
- Sciespace
- Jenni
- Gemni
- Copilot
- SCOPUS
- Scholarcy and many more Register Now
itās time for our weekly what in the fuck is wrong with you Proton
so, Iāve always thought that blindās āweāll verify your presence by sending you shit on your corp mailā (which, yāknow, mail logs etcā¦) is kinda a fucking awful idea. but!
this is remarkably fucking unhinged:
The Bookseller tried to hawk AI to its readerbase and they are not having it - theyāre getting ratioed hard:
The Aristocrats!
I need an early-2000ās style web video where a cutout of that Musk picture moves up and down to a sproingy-sproingy sound.
the loser energy radiating off musk at all times is incredible
Iām thoroughly convinced Musk is an AI generated person and his lifeās goal is simply to find the AI that generated him.
Musk looks like his own Madame Tussaudās waxwork
via friend:
Today in āPromptfondler fucks around and finds out.ā
So Iām guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesnāt end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesnāt actually understand what itās doing or when to stop, especially when itās being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesnāt remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.
Emphasis added.
OMG. This is borderline unhinged behaviour. Yeah, letās just give root permission to an LLM and let it go nuts in prod. What could possibly go wrong?
āI only had this problem because I was very reckless,ā he continued, "partially because I think itās interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it āwhen youāve finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,ā I wouldnāt have had this problem.
just instruct it ābe sentientā and youāre good, why donāt these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?
so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:
āÆ pbpaste| wc -c 2063wow, so efficient! Iām so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection
these fucking people
Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Letās try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:
there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)
if it were me, Iād be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers donāt seem to have that awareness
wat
Thanks for sharing this lol
itās a classic
similarly, Mickens talks. if you havenāt ever seen āem, thatās your next todo
But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!
I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:
Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.
A medium nationās worth of electricity!
Hopefully this doesnāt break the rules. But where can I find some educational podcasts that arenāt overly capitalist, reactionary, rationalist, or otherwise right-leaning or authoritarian in nature.
I want to specifically avoid content like Lex Friedman, Huberman, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. That sounds good on the surface but goes down a rabbit hole of affirming reactionary bias.
Iām not amazing with words, so I hope what Iām saying makes sense. Thanks.
If you want interesting historical deep dives, I always enjoy Dig - the history podcast. Well researched by actual scholars, which goes hand in hand with the episodes not dropping that often.
I tend to like āCool People Who Did Cool Stuffā more than āBehind the Bastardsā. Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.
My daily podcast is āIt Could Happen Hereā, but some other mainstays in the educational side include:
- Live Like the World is Dying
- Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
- Itās Going Down
- Final Straw Radio
- Reaction (especially liked her dives on the Pinkertons and āThe Business Plotā)
- Srsly Wrong [unrelated to the similarly named thing]
- The Iron Dice
- Bad Hasbara
- Frontline Herbalism if you like plants
Most everything from Cool Zone Media is going to be pretty decent. Havenāt listened to the whole catalogue, but Ed Zitron of Better Offline is an established nonmember (as far as I know) friend of the sneer and Behind the Bastards is truly excellent.
Maintenance Phase is an excellent examination of diet and health grifters, and Mikeās others (Youāre Wrong About and If Books Could Kill) are also pretty excellent.
I also want to spotlight Wittenburg to Westphalia, a history podcast ostensibly about the wars of the reformation and the social and economic chamges of the early modern period. But in order to really give a sense of how dramatic those changes are, he has so far provided only an incredibly thorough examination of medieval European society from the politics to economics and social structures. He has an episode about unfree labor that I found particularly interesting.
Second on Maintenance Phase! I marathonned it on a road trip a couple of days ago, and not only is it a well-researched and a fun listen, youāll discover that so much of the stuff Aubrey and Michael discuss is directly congruent to our typical subjects. Canāt recommend it enough.
Theyāve inspired me to work on an effort post for MoreWrite, tentatively titled, āA Unified Theory of Bullshitter-Driven Social Diseases.ā
Which isnāt going to be as pompous as it sounds, I promise!
Sounds great! Looking forward to reading it
The Wittenburg podcast sounds like right up my alley, thanks for the tip!
Behind the Bastards is very easy to listen to and usually focuses on documenting the bad shit that various reactionary and fascist figures have done (in a humorous manner ā the host was a writer for Cracked during its peak). a couple of the most recent episodes have covered some of the same topics we talk about in SneerClub and TechTakes, and theyāre well worth a listen even if you know the subject matter well. I havenāt checked it out yet, but I think It Could Happen Here is a spin-off with the same main host thatās also broadly anti-fascist.
e: also, and I had to look this up cause I keep switching podcast apps: I Donāt Speak German is also good, and my co-admin David was on it (episode 82? I swear it was more recent than thatā¦ David were you on more than once?)
i was! ep 82 and 85
IDSG has slowed down a lot cos Danielās got shit going on right now, but they try to do one when they can
These arenāt exactly educational but the two pods I bring up in this joint are āIf Books Could Killā and āScam Goddessā. Again, they arenāt exactly educational but youāll learn from them!
Some others that might work for you, mixture of informative and entertaining hosts
- Some More News
- This Machine Kills
- Never Post
- Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
- Maintenance Phase
- Youāre Wrong About
Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: āEven after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree withā
the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band
organisers: āWe have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.ā yeah you have a great show guys
By āliberal mobā he means āpeople who asked for their money back and arenāt coming anymoreā
I wish them a merry cable grounding fault and happy earth buzz to all
I didnāt realize I was still signed up to emails from NanoWrimo (I tried to do the challenge a few years ago) and received this āweāre sorryā email from them today. I canāt really bring myself to read and sneer at the whole thing, but Iām pasting the full text below because Iām not sure if this is public anywhere else.
spoiler
Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of this organization. One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size.
National Novel Writing Month To Our NaNoWriMo Community:
There is no way to begin this letter other than to apologize for the harm and confusion we caused last month with our comments about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We failed to contextualize our reasons for making this statement, we chose poor wording to explain some of our thinking, and we failed to acknowledge the harm done to some writers by bad actors in the generative AI space. Our goal at the time was not to broadcast a comprehensive statement that reflected our full sentiments about AI, and we didnāt anticipate that our post would be treated as such. Earlier posts about AI in our FAQs from more than a year ago spoke similarly to our neutrality and garnered little attention.
We donāt want to use this space to repeat the content of the full apology we posted in the wake of our original statements. But we do want to raise why this position is critical to the spiritāand to the futureāof NaNoWriMo.
Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of what we do. Our stated mission is āto provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worldsāon and off the pageā. Our comments last month were prompted by intense harassment and bullying we were seeing on our social media channels, which specifically involved AI. When our spaces become overwhelmed with issues that donāt relate to our core offering, and that are venomous in tone, our ability to cheer on writers is seriously derailed.
One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size. A year ago, we were attempting to do too much, and we were doing some of it poorly. Though we admire the many writersā advocacy groups that function as guilds and that take on industry issues, that isnāt part of our mission. Reshaping our core programs in ways that are safe for all community members, that are operationally sound, that are legally compliant, and that are mission-aligned, is our focus.
So, what have we done this year to draw boundaries around our scope, promote community safety, and return to our core purpose?
We ended our practice of hosting unrestricted, all-ages spaces on NaNoWriMo.org and made major website changes. Such safety measures to protect young Wrimos were long overdue.
We stopped the practice of allowing anyone to self-identify as an educator on our YWP website and contracted an outside vendor to certify educators. We placed controls on social features for young writers and weāre on the brink of relaunch.
We redesigned our volunteer program and brought it into legal compliance. Previously, none of our ~800 global volunteers had undergone identity verification, background checks, or training that meets nonprofit standards and that complies with California law. We are gradually reinstating volunteers.
We admitted there are spaces that we canāt moderate. We ended our policy of endorsing Discord servers and local Facebook groups that our staff had no purview over. We paused the NaNoWriMo forums pending serious overhaul. We redesigned our training to better-prepare returning moderators to support our community standards.
We revised our Codes of Conduct to clarify our guidelines and to improve our culture. This was in direct response to a November 2023 board investigation of moderation complaints.
We proactively made staffing changes. We took seriously last yearās allegations of child endangerment and other complaints and inspected the conditions that allowed such breaches to occur. No employee who played a role in the staff misconduct the Board investigated remains with the organization.
Beyond this, weāre planning more broadly for NaNoWriMoās future. Since 2022, the Board has been in conversation about our 25th Anniversary (which we kick off this year) and what that should mean. The joy, magic, and community that NaNoWriMo has created over the years is nothing short of miraculous. And yet, we are not delivering the website experience and tools that most writers need and expect; weāve had much work to do around safety and compliance; and the organization has operated at a budget deficit for four of the past six years.
What we want you to know is that weāre fighting hard for the organization, and that providing a safer environment, with a better user interface, that delivers on our mission and lives up to our values is our goal. We also want you to know that we are a small, imperfect team that is doing our best to communicate well and proactively. Since last November, weāve issued twelve official communications and created 40+ FAQs. A visit to that page will underscore that we donāt harvest your data, that no member of our Board of Directors said we did, and that there are plenty of ways to participate, even if your region is still without an ML.
With all that said, weāre one month away! Thousands of Wrimos have already officially registered and you can, too! Our team is heads-down, updating resources for this yearās challenge and getting a lot of exciting programming staged and ready. If youāre writing this season, weāre here for you and are dedicated, as ever, to helping you meet your creative goals!
In community,
The NaNoWriMo Team
@maol Bloody hell, they really dropped the ball.
I wasnāt aware of any of this as I havenāt been involved for over 10 years.
Itās a shame that they lost sight of the basics.
God thatās exhausting. Wasnāt Nanowrimo supposed to be a fun thing at some point? Is there anyone in the world who thinks this sort of scummy PR language is attractive?
I was not prepared for how many words the spoiler unlocked
I was not prepared for how many words would land in my inbox š
I donāt have the broader context to comment on the changes they discussed regarding child endangerment and community standards apart from āWaitā¦ oh my God you werenāt already doing that???ā
But itās such a huge pull back to go from āhating AI is ableist and basically Hilterā to āuhhhh guys weāve had our plates full cleaning up the mess and the most weāll say about AI is to stop being assholes about it on our forums.ā Clearly thereās still a lot of cleaning up to do at some level.
all the context one could need https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ae33g5/writing_discords_forums_and_a_decades_worth_of/
āWaitā¦ oh my God you werenāt already doing that???ā
Iām not at all surprised given it wasnāt exactly started in the present form by people with money to hire consultants who would know to do those things.
For the first mumble years there probably wasnāt much involvement by kids at all so it would never have occurred to them. Or there were some kids but not the forums or other potential settings for adult misconduct.
My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of āthe greenest search engineā (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a āgreen modeā which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.
See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320
Iām starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.
Theyāre from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. Theyāre famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isnāt bullshit.
Under the hood theyāre just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).
I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was āuser demandā which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I donāt believe it.
This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder whatās up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.
I got a downvote for some reasonā¦
Some people just want to watch the world burn
It seems they undid it. Maybe Ecosia are on to me
That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.
Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username
I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I donāt know if I have the āpressā clout to warrant a response (I know I donāt)
as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla
āif you canāt beat 'em, join 'emā but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?
And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet
this tracks analogously to something Iāve been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of āthe internetā, in the stead of āall the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone elseā
I guess they got tired of begging google for money?
If the stars come right, there may not be a Google to beg for money
Thanks I hate it.
[Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
Content is a scarce resource yāknow. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farmās two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be
terribleactually quite nice.We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozillaās history
WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.
this aged like fine milk (granted itās from 2019)
the predominant fork (afaik) is called LibreWolf
some indications that it is not atm entirely resilient to the upstream bullshit, but Iām curiously eyeballing whether that changes
personally, Iām hoping on servo
This particular bit of news has me so down. :(
I get ya.
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