antifuchs @ antifuchs @awful.systems

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4

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152

Joined

1 yr. ago

I’m excited that Silicon Valley tech has finally managed to invent thinking. Makes this book obsolete at long last.

From the people who brought you performance review season: a way to evaluate code quality of humans and machines

I didn’t see this article here yet, but I just saw it elsewhere and it’s pretty good: Potemkin Understanding in Large Language Models

At least Microsoft Bob gave us comic sans.

If you wanted a vision of the future of autocomplete, imagine a computer failing at predicting what you’re gonna write but absolutely burning through kilowatts trying to, forever.

https://unstable.systems/@sop/114898566686215926

Forget counting the Rs in strawberry, biggest challenge to LLMs is not making up bullshit about recent events not in their training data

The whisper model has always been pretty crappy at these things: I use a speech to text system as an assistive input method when my RSI gets bad and it has support for whisper (because that supports more languages than the developer could train on their own infrastructure/time) since maybe 2022 or so: every time someone tries to use it, they run into hallucinated inputs in pauses - even with very good silence detection and noise filtering.

This is just not a use case of interest to the people making whisper, imagine that.

This incredible banger of a bug against whisper, the OpenAI speech to text engine:

Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic which translates as "Translation by Nancy Qunqar"

Here’s Dave Barry, still-alive humorist, sneering at Google AI summaries, one of the most embarrassing features Google ever shipped.

Good poetic sneer: https://blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre-putting-blue-food-coloring-in-everything/

Ooooh that would explain a similarly weird interaction I had on a ticket-selling website, buying a streaming ticket to a live show for the German retro game discussion podcast Stay Forever: they translated the title of the event as “Bleib für immer am Leben”, guess they named it “Stay Forever Live”? No way to know for sure, of course.

It’s distressingly pervasive: autocorrect, speech recognition (not just in voice assistants, in accessibility tools), image correction in mobile cameras, so many things that are on by default and “helpful”

Poor rich guy, forced by the leftmost party available to support the party that is now constructing concentration camps.

Now I’m curious how a protected class question% speedrun of one of these interviews would look. Get the bot to ask you about your age, number of children, sexual orientation, etc

Fucking rude to drag lisp into this. How dare they.

According to some scholars, s-risks warrant serious consideration as they are not extremely unlikely and can arise from unforeseen scenarios.

Guys I have found a way to phrase my anxiety in a way where every single word is extremely load-bearing

Unilever are looking for an Ice Cream Head of Artificial Intelligence.

I think I have found a new favorite way to refer to true believers.

I’m sure there are plenty of true believers (there always are in startup brain land), but even true believers like spending money.

It’s the risk:benefit tradeoff always. Sure you can hold on to all your illiquid stock in a private company with transfer restrictions, but will that pay for a house or even a banana? Does it ever not. The “take a loan for liquidity until you can sell some stock” trick worked for a little bit but companies are wise to that too now, and don’t allow it.

So people can pick between real money they can spend on stuff (or invest in a slightly less illiquid way) or being paper multimillionaires with no actual liquidity; not a hard choice imho.

AllTrails doing their part in the war on genAI by disappearing the people who would trust genAI: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/17/news/alltrails-ai-tool-search-rescue-members