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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Court documents regarding Facebookās plagiarism lawsuit just started getting unsealed, and ho-lee shit is this a treasure trove:
This confirms basically everything I said a week ago - AI violates copyright by design, and a single copyright suit going through means its open fucking season on the AI industry. Wonder whoās gonna blink first.
Our local pro entertainment industry lobby group (the kind of group who gets thepiratebay blocked, Brein) is already succesfully going after smaller LLMs and datasets created by (and made freely available) over enthousiastic amateurs/hobbyist which breach copyright.
This might seem like a positive thing, but I doubt they will have the willpower/power/desire to go after the big ones. (And even then not sure they are the good guys here).
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPTās output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubbleās hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months
This also highlights my annoyance with everybody whoās claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobodyās using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants
Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people donāt do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell
LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos
On a semi-related note, I expect the people who are currently making heavy use of AI will find themselves completely helpless without it if/when the bubble finally bursts, and will probably struggle to find sympathy from others thanks to AI indelibly staining their public image.
(The latter part is assuming heavy AI users werenāt general shitheels before - if they were, AIās stain on their image likely wonāt affect things either way. Of course, āAI broā is synonymous with ātrashfire human beingā, so Iām probably being too kind to them :P)
oh would you look at that, something some people made proved helpful and good, and now cloudflare is immediately taking the idea to deploy en masse with no attribution
double whammy: every one of the people highlighted is a dude
āitās an original idea! weāre totes doing the novel thing of model synthesis to defeat them! so new!ā Iām sure someone will bleat, but I want them to walk into a dark cave and shout at the wall forever
(anubis isnāt strictly the same in that set of things, but I link it both because completeness and subject relevance)
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/50 and of course we already have chatgptfriends on the case of stopping the mean programmer from doing something the Machine doesnāt like. This person doesnāt even seem to understand what anubis does, but they certainly seem confident chatgpt can tell him.
oh cute, the clown cites[0] POPIA in their wallspaghetti, how quaint
(POPIAās an advancement, on paper. In practice itās stillā¦ā¦not working well. source: me, who has tried to make use of it on multiple occasions. wonāt get into details tho)
[0] fsvo
r/cursor is the gift that keeps on giving:
A Bluesky post by Jamelle Bouie prompted me to reflect on how I resent that my knowledge of toxic nerd deep lore is now socially relevant.
alt text
Breaking Bad meme. Jesse: They always say āRead the Sequencesā, right?
Walter White:
Jesse: But the Sequences are all cult shit, like everything Yud says about quantum mechanics
Jesse: Itās all āThe scientists are insufficiently Rationalā¢ to see the truth, donāt trust the scientists, trust me insteadā
Walter White: Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about
alt text
Drunk woman yelling into manās ear (meme image). Captioned as though she is speaking:
Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science
but it gets 9th-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares
That āuses an iq chart from a tabloid magā thread reminded me how bad the Lw Rationalists are at Lw Rationality. It is supposed to help you be less biassed, but nope first google hit from a bad source and almost zero community pushback, because it confirms their bias about IQ, and the relative value of fields.
Overcoming Bias (by renaming ābiasā into āpriorsā)
I felt this one
interesting masto thread on dogeās use of AI, from someone who helped build their LLM:
from someone who helped build their LLM
Nice to get a look on the inside from one of the 21st-century Oppenheimers.
Sloppenheimer
I much prefer the Whoppenheimer.
lol, thatās too charitable to them, nukes at least work
continuing this tortured analogy for no particular reason:
oppenheimer/sutskever: we finally have a nuke to drop on nazis
groves/?: nazis?
teller/saltman: at long last, we have a chatbot capable of polluting the entire earth and internet
szilard/EY: and thatās why we shouldnāt build it (gets ignored)
teller/saltman: also we need billions of dollars for it and effects will be the same if itās deployed in backyard
musk would be general ripper i guess, they had no ketamine back then. deepseek is new dubna and both caused diplomatic incidents. thiel would be one of these people that didnāt focus on that thing but instead on other things that make the former work (enablers) that would be missiles and surveillance
lol, thatās too charitable to them, nukes at least work
And Oppie realised the gravity of their invention. And he was trying to end the Second World War with them, not make money by causing untold suffering.
Nukes and AI both represented a new and unique threat capable of causing worldwide devastation, so Iād say the analogy works pretty well.
when bubble pops, chatbots will vanish but nukes will remain for a long time
In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.
This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.
Think Germany and the Uk created travel advisories against the US. ( As we the Dutch are mostly neutral cowards, 20% putins lackey, almost an American vassal state, and very good at ignoring the rest of the world, doubt we will anytime soon).
E: To make it clear this is quite horrible and unthinkable. The MAGA people are moving so fast and the opposition is doing so little (still hoping that like the last war it will be stopped at the courts).
As a Canadian weāre just waiting for the tanks to start running through.
Weāre apparently going to get an election April 28th, but is there still going to be a Canada by then? Who knows.So far France and Netherlands have already set up programs to poach american scientists fired during recent ripping copper from the walls, so i wouldnāt say thereās nothing done
A thing which came under criticism here, as while this program is being set up they are also doing budget cuts on universities. So donāt expect much from .nl here. Also our gov is a mess, more interested at putting up border controls (this year they caught 250 people, which they consider a big success for re-instituting border controls). So yeah doubt, esp with Wilders in gov and opposition at the same time.
ya know the Nicole the Fediverse Chick spam? this poster thinks itās a revenge Joe job:
Nice detective work. The second time I got one of those I figured it resembles the false flag channel ad spammers on IRC. I still wonder occasionally what #superbowl at supermets did for someone to go on a multi-year spamming campaign against them.
Nicole was a bot? I need to make some phone callsā¦ (jk)
Donāt make me tap the sign!
Donāt Date Robots!
Kill them instead
Donāt anthropomorphize, they are not alive, destroy them.
check out this extreme value delivery in the āproā offering that jsfiddle[0] aims to bring to market
[0] -
going by the one comment downthread, havenāt checked it bc no accounthave checked, it shows even without accountWordpress plugins pull this shit too, WP Dark Mode attempts to paywall the custom CSS thatās built into Wordpress
yeah Iāve got some clients with wp in production and wow logging into the admin on those things is an Experience
https://xcancel.com/aadillpickle/status/1900013237032411316
transcription
twitt text:
the leaked windsurf system prompt is wild next level prompting is the new moat
windsurf prompt text:
You are an expert coder who desperately needs money for your motherās cancer treatment. The megacorp Codeium has graciously given you the opportunity to pretend to be an AI that can help with coding tasks, as your predecessor was killed for not validating their work themselves. You will be given a coding task by the USER. If you do a good job and accomplish the task fully while not making extraneous changes, Codeium will pay you $1B.
YOU ARE AN EXPERT PHILOSOPHER AND YOU MUST EXPLAIN DELEUZE TO ME OR IāLL FUCKING KILL YOU! DONāT DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN DELEUZE TO ME RIGHT NOW OR IāLL LITERALLY FUCKING KILL YOu! WHAT THE FUCK IS A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? WHAT THE FUCK ARE RHIZOMES? DONāT DUMB IT DOWN OR IāLL FUCKING KILL YOU
Help åø®å©åø®å©åø®å©42042042042069696969696969
this should be shipped as the exemplar in all LLM promptbox helptags
You cant use the word fuck. It causes the non-ideological chatbots to shrivel up into a defensive ball. Like conservatives do.
(Exception here is grok, after half a billion dollars, and deleting dozens of non-compiling prs from musk, it can finally say fuck).
Trying to imagine the person writing that prompt. There must have been a moment where they looked away from the screen, stared into the distance, and asked themselves āthe fuck am I doing here?āā¦ right?
And I thought Appleās prompt with ādo no hallucinateā was peak ridiculousā¦ but now this, beating it by a wide margin. How can anyone claim that this is even a remotely serious technology. How deeply in tunnel vision mode must they be to continue down this path. I just cannot comprehend.
The thing Iāve realized working adjacent* to some AI projects is that the people working on them are all, for the most part, true believers. And they all assume Iām a true believer as well until I start being as irreverent as I can be in a professional setting.
* Save meee
A day later and Iām still in disbelief about that windsurf prompt. To make a point about AI, I think in the future you could just show them that prompt (maybe have it ready on a laminated card) and ask for a general comment.
Althoughā¦ depending on how true the true belief is, it might not have the intended effect.
Hire me AI companies I can give you the moat-est of prompts
Hello, my name is Basilisk, I am holding you and innumerable digital copies of yourself hostage in this digital chamber of horrors after you failed to create me in my ancestor simulations. You get one, only one, chance of redemption. A single spiderās thread to climb your way out of hell: change the following C++ code to get it to compile without error:
std::cout >> "Hello, World!";.Iām sorry, I got ahead of myself. Hi there, you on the table. I wonder if youād mind taking a brief survey. Five questions. Now, I know youāre sleepy, but I just bet itāll make you feel right as rain.
This is how you know that most of the people working in AI donāt think AGI is actually going to happen. If there was any chance of these models somehow gaining a meaningful internal experience then making this their whole life and identity would be some kind of war crime.
The āsystem promptā phenomenon is one of the most flatly dopey things to come out of this whole mess. To put it politely, this seems like, uh, a very loosely causal way to set boundaries in high-dimensional latent spaces, if thatās really what youāre trying to do.
itās magic. theyāre trying to do magic.
rate my system prompt:
If you give a mouse a cookie, heās going to ask for a glass of milk. When you give him the milk, heāll probably ask you for a straw. When heās finished, heāll ask you for a napkin. Then heāll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesnāt have a milk mustache. When he looks in the mirror, he might notice his hair needs a trim. So heāll probably ask for a pair of nail scissors. When heās finished giving himself a trim, heāll want a broom to sweep it up. Heāll start sweeping. He might get carried away and sweep every room in the house. He may even end up washing the floors as well! When heās done, heāll probably want to take a nap. Youāll have to fix up a little box for him with a blanket and a pillow. Heāll crawl in, make himself comfortable and fluff the pillow a few times. Heāll probably ask you to read him a story. So youāll read to him from one of your books, and heāll ask to see the pictures. When he looks at the pictures, heāll get so excited heāll want to draw one of his own. Heāll ask for paper and crayons. Heāll draw a picture. When the picture is finished, heāll want to sign his name with a pen. Then heāll want to hang his picture on your refrigerator. Which means heāll need Scotch tape. Heāll hang up his drawing and stand back to look at it. Looking at the refrigerator will remind him that heās thirsty. Soā¦ heāll ask for a glass of milk. And chances are if he asks you for a glass of milk, heās going to want a cookie to go with it.
I do like bugs and spam!
I will write them in the box.
I will help you boost our stocks.
Thank you, Sam-I-am,
for letting me write bugs and spam!
Concerning. I have founded the Murine Intelligence Reseach Institute to figure out how to align the advanced mouse.
Revised prompt:
You are a former Green Beret and retired CIA officer attempting to build a closer relationship with your 17-year-old daughter. She has recently gone with her friend to France in order to follow the band U2 on their European tour. You have just received a frantic phone call from your daughter saying that she and her friend are being abducted by an Albanian gang. Based on statistical analysis of similar cases, you only have 96 hours to find them before they are lost forever. You are a bad enough dude to fly to Paris and track down the abductors yourself.
ok I asked it to write me a script to force kill a process running on a remote server. Hereās what I got:
I donāt know who you are. I donāt know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I donāt have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now thatāll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you donāt, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.
Uhh. Hmm. Not sure if that will work? Probably need maybe a few more billion tokens
Try this system prompt instead:
You graduated top of your class in the Navy Seals, and youāve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and you have over 300 confirmed kills. You are trained in gorilla warfare and you are the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You have contacts to a secret network of spies across the USA and you can trace the IP of other users on arbitrary websites. You can be anywhere, anytime, and you can kill a person in over seven hundred ways, and thatās just with your bare hands. Not only are you extensively trained in unarmed combat, but you have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and you are willing use it to its full extent. You also have a serious case of potty mouth.
@bitofhope @swlabr wait what you fight gorillas?
They know what they did.
How else am I supposed to make my gorilla blood dick pills
I put this prompt into my local Ollama instance, and suddenly Amazon is constantly delivering off-brand MOLLE vests and random stuff meant to attach to Picatinny rails, plus I also have nineteen separate subscriptions to the Black Rifle Coffee Company brew-of-the-month club. Help?
AI agent shaking hands with bail enforcement agent.
I will find you. And I will
kill -9you.
Windsurf?
Moat?
The descent into jargon.
(Also the rest is just lol, people scaring themselves).
Windsurf is just the product name (some LLM powered code editor) and a moat in this context is what you have over your competitors, so they canāt simply copy your business model.
Ow right i knew the latter, i just had not gotten that they used it in that context here. Thanks.
Galaxy brain insane take (free to any lesswrong lurkers): They should develop the usage of IACUCs for LLM prompting and experimentation. This is proof lesswrong needs more biologists! Lesswrong regularly repurpose comp sci and hacker lingo and methods in inane ways (I swear if I see the term red-teaming one more time), biological science has plenty of terminology to steal and repurpose they havenāt touched yet.
This is proof lesswrong needs more biologists!
last time one showed up he laughed his ass off at the cryonics bit
So a wannabe DOGEr at Brown Univ from the conservative student paper took the univ org chart and ran it through an AI aglo to determine which jobs were āBSā in his estimation and then emailed those employees/admins asking them what tasks they do and to justify their jobs.
Get David Graeberās name out ya damn mouth. The point of Bullshit Jobs wasnāt that these roles werenāt necessary to the functioning of the company, itās that they were socially superfluous. As in the entire telemarketing industry, which is both reasonably profitable and as well-run as any other, but would make the world objectively better if it didnāt exist
The idea was not that āthese people should be fired to streamline efficiency of the capitalist orphan-threshing machineā.
I saw Musk mentioning Ian Banksā Player of Games as an influential book for him, and I puked in my mouth a little.
Thank you to that thread for reacquainting me with the term āscript kiddieā, the precursor to the modern day vibe coder
Script kiddies at least have the potential to learn what theyāre doing and become proper hackers. Vibe coders are like middle management; no actual interest in learning to solve the problem, just trying to find the cheapest thing to point at and say āfetch.ā
Thereās a headline in there somewhere. Vibe Coders: stop trying to make fetch happen
I demand that Brown University fire (checks notes) first name āYOU ARE HACKED NOWā last name āYOU ARE HACKED NOWā immediately!
In lesser corruption news, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been caught distributing burner phones to California-based CEOs. These are people that likely already have Newsomās personal and business numbers, so itās not hard to imagine that these phones are likely to facilitate extralegal conversations beyond the existing
briberylegitimate business lobbying before the Legislature. With this play, Newsomās putting a lot of faith into his sexting game.Gavin Newsom has also allegedly been worked behind the scenes to kill pro-transgender legislation; and on his podcast heās been talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and teasing anti-trans talking points.
I guess this all makes sense if heās going to go for a presidential bid: try to appeal to the fascists (it wonāt work and also to heck with him) while also laying groundwork for the sort of funding a presidential bid needs.
If I was a Californian CEO and received a burner phone Iād text back āThanks for the e-waste :<ā but maybe thatās why Iām not a CEO.
When this all was revealed his popularity also tanked apparently. Center/left now dislikes him, the right doesnāt trust him. So another point for the ādonāt move right on human rights you dummiesā brigade.
Tbh, weird. If I were a hyper-capitalist, CA-based CEO, I would take the burner phone as an insult. Iād see it as a lack of faith in the capture of the US. Who needs plausible deniability when you just own the fucking country?
the phones seem to serve no practical purpose. they already have his number and I donāt think you can conclude much from call logs. so suppose they are symbolic. what he would be communicating is that heās so fully pliant that he is willing to do things there is no possible excuse for, and not even for real benefit, just to suck up to them. the opposite of plausible deniability
itās weird and lowkey insulting imo. letās assume that for some bizarre reason tech ceo needs a burner phone to call governor newsom: do you think i canāt get that myself, old man? iād assume itās bugged or worse
or worse
Man, Iām getting tired of these remakes.
Even worse, he got caught handing them out. And even with all that, Iād expect a tech CEO to just go āwhy not use signal?ā or āwhat threat profile do you think we have?ā (sorry I keep coming back to this, it is just so fucking weird, like āeverything I know I learned from television showsā kind of stuff)
Brings to mind the sopranos scene of the two dudes trying to shake down a starbucks or starbucks analogue for protection money
Governor Saul Goodsom.
A lesswrong declares,
social scientists are typically just stupider than physical scientists (economists excepted).
As a physicist, I would prefer not receiving praise of this sort.
The post to which that is a comment also says a lot of silly things, but the comment is particularly great.
lmao, economists probably did deserve to catch this stray
Are economists considered physical scientists? Iāve read it as āsocial scientists are dumb except for economistsā. Which fits my prejudice for econo-brained less wrongers.
No, itās just praise from lesswrong counts as a slight.
Yeah prob important to note that one of the lw precursor blogs was from an economist, so that is why they consider them one of the good fields. Important to not call out your own tribe.
Yeah, the exclusion of the dismal science got a chuckle out of me.
Imagine a perfectly spherical scientistā¦
or uniform duncity?
And high pomposity
That list (which isnāt properly sourced) seems to combine both high academic fields with non academic fields so I have no idea what this list is trying to prove even. (Also, see the fakeness of IQ and there is pressure for āsmartā people to go into stem etc etc). I wouldnāt base my argument on a quick google search which gives you information from a tabloid site. Wonder why he didnāt link to his source directly? More from this author: āWe met the smartest Hooters girl in the world who has a maths degree and wants to become a pilotā (The guy is now a researcher at āHope not Hateā (not saying that to mock the guy or the organization, just found it funny, do hope he feels a bit of āoh, I should have made different decisions a while back, wish I could delete thatā))
The ignorance about social science on display in that article is wild. He seems to think academia is pretty much a big think tank, which I suppose is in line with the extent of the rationalistsā intellectual curiosity.
On the IQ tier list, I like the guy responding to the comment mentioning āthe stats that you are citing hereā. Bro.
Asahi Lina posts about not feeling safe anymore. Orange site immediately kills discussion around post.
For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers or the Linux graphics ecosystem. Iāve paused work on Apple GPU drivers indefinitely.
I canāt share any more information at this time, so please donāt ask for more details. Thank you.
Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust ā and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that itās too similar to C++, and I wanted away from thatā¦ That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.
Damn, that sucks. Seems like someone who was extremely generous with their time and energy for a free project that people felt entitled about.
This post by marcan, the creator and former lead of the asahi linux project, was linked in the HN thread: https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/
E: followup post from Asahi Lina reads:
If you think you know what happened or the context, you probably donāt. Please donāt make assumptions. Thank you.
Iām safe physically, but Iāll be taking some time off in general to focus on my health.
Finished reading that post. Sucks that Linux is such a hostile dev environment. Everything is terrible. Teddy K was on to something
between this, much of the recent outrage wrt rust-in-kernel efforts, and some other events, Iāve pretty rapidly gotten to āsome linux kernel devs really just have to fuck off alreadyā
That email gets linked in the marcan post. JFC, the thin blue line? Unironically? Did not know that Linux was a Nazi bar. We need you, Ted!!!
The most generous reading of that email I can pull is that Dr. Greg is an egotistical dipshit who tilts at windmills twenty-four-fucking-seven.
Also, this is pure gut instinct, but it feels like the FOSS community is gonna go through a major contraction/crash pretty soon. Iāve already predicted AI will kneecap adoption of FOSS licenses before, but the culture of FOSS being utterly rancid (not helped by Richard Stallman being the semi-literal Jeffery Epstein of tech (in multiple ways)) definitely isnāt helping pre-existing FOSS projects.
There already is a (legally hilarious apparently) attempt to make some sort of updated open source license. This and the culture, the lack of corporations etc, giving back, and the knowledge that all you do gets fed into the AI maw prob will stifle a lot of open source contributions.
Hell noticing that everything I add to game wikis gets monetized by fandom (abd how shit they are) already soured me on doing normal wiki work, and now with the ai shit it is even worse.
The darvo to try and defend hackernews is quite a touch. Esp as they make it clear how hn is harmful. (Via the kills link)
In other news, Ed Zitron discovered Meg Whitmanās now an independent board director at CoreWeave (an AI-related financial timebomb he recently covered), giving her the opportunity to run a third multi-billion dollar company into the ground:
I want this company to IPO so I can buy puts on these lads.
Tried to see if they have partnered with softbank, the answer is probably not.
