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.)
Saw a six day old post on linkedin that Iāll spare you all the exact text of. Basically it goes like this:
āClaudeās base system prompt got leaked! If youāre a prompt fondler, you should read it and get better at prompt fondling!ā
The prompt clocks in at just over 16k words (as counted by the first tool that popped up when I searched āword count urlā). Imagine reading 16k words of verbose guidelines for a machine to make your autoplag slightly more claude shaped than, idk, chatgpt shaped.
We already knew these things are security disasters, but yeah that still looks like a security disaster. It can both read private documents and fetch from the web? In the same session? And it can be influenced by the documents it reads? And someone thought this was a good idea?
I didnāt think I could be easily surprised by these folks any more, but jeezus. Theyāre investing billions of dollars for this?
So apparently this was a sufficiently persistent problem they had to put it in all caps?
Emphasis mine.
Lol
The amount of testing they would have needed to do just to get to that prompt. Wait, that gets added as a baseline constant cost to the energy cost of running the model. 3 x 12 x 2 x Y additional constant costs on top of that, assuming the prompt doesnāt need to be updated every time the model is updated! (Iām starting to reference my own comments here).
New trick, everything online is a song lyric.
Loving the combination of xml, markdown and json. In no way does this product look like strata of desperate bodges layered one over another by people who on some level realise the thing theyāre peddling really isnāt up to the job but imagine the only thing between another dull and flaky token predictor and an omnicapable servant is just another paragraph of text crafted in just the right way. Just one more markdown list, bro. I can feel that this one will fix it for good.
The promptās random usage of markup notations makes obtuse black magic programming seem sane and deterministic and reproducible. Like how did they even empirically decide on some of those notation choices?
lol
uh