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Mii

mii@awful.systems
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I wrangle code, draw pictures, and write things. You might find some of it here.

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This was worse than I imagined from the quotes. I feel like I need to take a shower, now.

[…] which would severely limit the Federal Reserve’s ability to control the economy while exporting inflation abroad, and likely bring our material standard of living down to a German or Dutch level

According to this Quality of Life index which I just searched up and have not critically assessed, but I doubt the guy did that either for his claims, so I guess it’s fine, the Netherlands rank second and Germany ranks 12th, while the US is on the 15th place. In other words: what is he even talking about?

Every day in this country more and more Hispanics marry corn-fed blonde midwesterners and produce pale Castizo children who only speak English, consider themselves basically White, and vote like Irish and Italians.

Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t even come up with a funny sneer here because this reads like he just pulled it out of the 1940s Nazi Party’s bag of race laws for who’s allowed to marry whom, and it’s making me feel icky.

I also subscribe to the old fascist idea that adversity gives life meaning. A comfortable and easy life without struggle or conflict is miserable, and just makes you a slave to the hedonic treadmill. When you live for pleasure, no pleasure is ever enough, and continued success will just leave you so pampered that any task that’s challenging or outside your comfort zone will begin to feel onerous.

Ignoring the low-hanging fruit that this guy just flat-out said “well, fascism wasn’t all bad”, what kind of toxic consumer mentality is ingrained in these chucklefucks that they are seemingly unable so sit their sorry asses down on the couch and just say, yeah, I’m happy right now, to the point where they just postulate that other people must feel the same way, because they just can’t imagine anyone being different?

Like, seriously, get a hobby or something.

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Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 […]

Christ on a stick, the fucking lore I’m learning today. I had never heard the name Prabhakar Raghavan before, but it seems like this dude has been the man behind the curtain in my life for a while. I used to use Yahoo before Google in the early 2000s before it became shit, and then I used Google until it became shit. I hope he doesn’t end up applying at DuckDuckGo next season.

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It’s already too late for a lot of places, imo. DeviantArt for example is overrun by LLM-generated sludge and no amount of cleanup will undo that; and that site has been a staple of amateur and upcoming artists for decades. The same seems to be happening to Pixiv (which is big in Japan), too. Search engines are also full of generated SEO spam and it’s getting worse, with image search being close to useless unless you do implement some sort of blocklist. Which, for that use case, luckily already exist and aren’t bad (shameless self-plug), but it’s still a manual step you have to take and won’t help my grandma who’s looking for cookie recipes.

The silver lining might be that a growing number of people are willing to try decentralized solutions. I’ve seen more non-techies come over to Lemmy, Mastodon and Misskey as a result, but it’s still sad to see, especially because this will ultimately lead to tons of older content becoming either lost or needles in a shitstack you can’t ever hope to recover.

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“You know, we just had a little baby, and I keep asking myself… how old is he even gonna get?”

Tegmark, you absolute fucking wanker. If you actually believe your eschatological x-risk nonsense and still produced a child despite being convinced that he’s going to be paperclipped in a few years, you’re a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit. And if you don’t believe it and just lie for the PR, knowingly leading people into depression and anxiety, you’re also a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit.

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This is brilliant and I’m saving it and will post a link to it the next time someone at work asks why we can’t “just use AI to do it” when a ticket gets rejected for being stupid and/or unreasonable.

However:

The first is that we have some sort of intelligence explosion, where AI recursively self-improves itself, and we’re all harvested for our constituent atoms […]. It may surprise some readers that I am open to the possibility of this happening, but I have always found the arguments reasonably sound.

Yeah, I gotta admit, I am surprised. Because I have not found a single reasonable argument for this horseshit and the rest of the article (as well as the others I read from their blog) does not read like it’s been written by someone who’d buy into AI foom.

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My favorite bullshit test is to have the AI count letters. Something as simple as “How many A’s are in this sentence?” will have the thing give you a seemingly random number (which might sometimes even be correct), but as soon as you ask it to list them, it will have a stroke and just make up stuff that makes no sense.

I can’t be arsed to make an account with OpenAI or whatever, so here’s an example with Bing Chat, but this has worked on every single chatbot I’ve tested it on.

Another fun test (as suggested by @flizzo last time I brought this up) is to have the chatbot attempt to crack a simple code. Just Caesar cipher something and ask it to crack it. Hilarity will ensue. You can even ask it to encrypt it first and then to crack it for extra fun.

Me: Encrypt the sentence “I am a stupid roided Clippy” with the Caesar cipher.

Clippy: [After explaining what the Ceasar cipher is, which I didn’t ask for, thanks] Convert the sentence to uppercase: “I AM A STUPID ROIED CLIPPY”. Let’s apply the Caesar cipher to your sentence using a shift of 7.

  • ‘I’ becomes ‘P’
  • ‘A’ becomes ‘H’
  • ‘M’ becomes ‘T’
  • ‘Y’ becomes ‘F’

So the encrypted sentence is: “PH HT H ZBHTLW YVPLUU”. 😊

Okay, first of all, it dropped a letter. And the shift isn’t even correct, lol. It said Y becomes F and then does whatever the fuck.

Okay, so let’s give it an easy example, and even tell it the shift. Let’s see how that works.

This shit doesn’t even produce one correct message. Internal state or not, it should at least be able to read the prompt correctly and then produce an answer based on that. I mean, the DuckDuckGo search field can fucking do it!

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Peter, Paul and Mary are the only three people in the room. Peter only reads a book, and Paul plays a game of chess against someone else who’s also in the room. What is Mary doing?

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As someone who’s doing a ton of frontend and backend, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck the asinine attitude that somehow everything that’s even remotely web-adjacent needs to be written or rewritten in pure JS.

Also Node is an abomination and literally every other language I’ve tried is better for the backend. People love to shit on Ruby, but JS has every flaw that Ruby is criticized for and then some, and at least Ruby makes an effort to take some great design paradigms from Lisp.

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So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.

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Depends, I guess. After reading (well, skimming, to be honest) it, I love David even more. <3

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