blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

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My tax prep software definitely has a mode called "give me Deus Ex"

yes you need to read things to understand them

OK, here's your free opportunity to spend more time doing that. Bye now.

The stubsack is the weekly thread of miscellaneous, low-to-mid-effort posts on awful.systems.

Obligatory cross-reference: This came up in the stubsack before 404media wrote about it.

She said, “You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle.’”

"Crystal Nights"

"Cursor YOLO deleted everything in my computer":

Hi everyone - as a previous context I’m an AI Program Manager at J&J and have been using Cursor for personal projects since March.

Yesterday I was migrating some of my back-end configuration from Express.js to Next.js and Cursor bugged hard after the migration - it tried to delete some old files, didn’t work at the first time and it decided to end up deleting everything on my computer, including itself. I had to use EaseUS to try to recover the data, but didn’t work very well also. Lucky I always have everything on my Google Drive and Github, but it still scared the hell out of me.

Now I’m allergic to YOLO mode and won’t try it anytime soon again. Does anyone had any issue similar than this or am I the first one to have everything deleted by AI?

The response:

Hi, this happens quite rarely but some users do report it occasionally.

My T-shirt is raising questions already answered, etc.

(via)

The New York Times treats him as an expert: "Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and an author of a forthcoming book". He's an Internet rando who has yammered about decision theory, not an actual theorist! He wrote fanfic that claimed to teach rational thinking while getting high-school biology wrong. His attempt to propose a new decision theory was, last I checked, never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and in trying to check again I discovered that it's so obscure it was deleted from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Functional_Decision_Theory

To recapitulate my sneer from an earlier thread, the New York Times respects actual decision theorists so little, it's like the whole academic discipline is trans people or something.

viral: Midjourney fucking up human hands

spiral: Midjourney somehow fucking up Simpsons hands

https://bsky.app/profile/blakestacey.bsky.social/post/3lrep72zj4c23

When the complaint gets to saying what Midjourney advertises in their "explore" feature, it features dead-eyed waifu Elsa and body-pillow-ready topless Ariel.

In which the New York Times respects actual decision theorists so little, it's like the whole academic discipline is trans people or something

so much content

The choice of, or instinctive reaching for, the word content speaks volumes.

where anything you want to see or read can be spun up in an instant, without labor.

"Without labor," sure.

A comparison springs to mind: inviting the most pedantic nerds on Earth to critique your chatbot slop is a level of begging to be pwned that's on par with claiming the female orgasm is a myth.

Bringing over aio's comment from the end of last week's stubsack:

This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

Way down in the linked wall o' text, there's a comment by "Chaotic Enby" that struck me:

Another summary I just checked, which caused me a lot more worries than simple inaccuracies: Cambrian. The last sentence of that summary is "The Cambrian ended with creatures like myriapods and arachnids starting to live on land, along with early plants.", which already sounds weird: we don't have any fossils of land arthropods in the Cambrian, and, while there has been a hypothesis that myriapods might have emerged in the Late Cambrian, I haven't heard anything similar being proposed about arachnids. But that's not the worrying part.

No, the issue is that nowhere in the entire Cambrian article are myriapods or arachnids mentioned at all. Only one sentence in the entire article relates to that hypothesis: "Molecular clock estimates have also led some authors to suggest that arthropods colonised land during the Cambrian, but again the earliest physical evidence of this is during the following Ordovician". This might indicate that the model is relying on its own internal knowledge, and not just on the contents of the article itself, to generate an "AI overview" of the topic instead.

Further down the thread, there's a comment by "Gnomingstuff" that looks worth saving:

There was an 8-person community feedback study done before this (a UI/UX text using the original Dopamine summary), and the results are depressing as hell. The reason this was being pushed to prod sure seems to be the cheerleading coming from 7 out of those 8 people: "Humans can lie but AI is unbiased," "I trust AI 100%," etc.

Perhaps the most depressing is this quote -- "This also suggests that people who are technically and linguistically hyper-literate like most of our editors, internet pundits, and WMF staff will like the feature the least. The feature isn't really "for" them" -- since it seems very much like an invitation to ignore all of us, and to dismiss any negative media coverage that may ensue (the demeaning "internet pundits").

Sorry for all the bricks of text here, this is just so astonishingly awful on all levels and everything that I find seems to be worse than the last.

Another comment by "CMD" evaluates the summary of the dopamine article mentioned there:

The first sentence is in the article. However, the second sentence mentions "emotion", a word that while in a couple of reference titles isn't in the article at all. The third sentence says "creating a sense of pleasure", but the article says "In popular culture and media, dopamine is often portrayed as the main chemical of pleasure, but the current opinion in pharmacology is that dopamine instead confers motivational salience", a contradiction. "This neurotransmitter also helps us focus and stay motivated by influencing our behavior and thoughts". Where is this even from? Focus isn't mentioned in the article at all, nor is influencing thoughts. As for the final sentence, depression is mentioned a single time in the article in what is almost an extended aside, and any summary would surely have picked some of the examples of disorders prominent enough to be actually in the lead.

So that's one of five sentences supported by the article. Perhaps the AI is hallucinating, or perhaps it's drawing from other sources like any widespread llm. What it definitely doesn't seem to be doing is taking existing article text and simplifying it.

Today's "Christ, what an asshole" award goes to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at th'OSU.

/r/justonemoreprompt

A student put on some Internet radio station for background music at the end-of-semester barbecue, so I heard a Grammarly ad. In related news, I now long for the sweet embrace of a peat bog.

https://bsky.app/profile/tomdellaringa.bsky.social/post/3lr4djpa4zc2t

https://bsky.app/profile/dennisbhooper.bsky.social/post/3lr4lyaxmkc2b

There comes a point when "they are themselves racist AF" becomes the simplest explanation for so many things.

🎶 Substack, David Shor, Nate Silver, Noahpinion,

Dick Hanania, bathrobe from Aella

We didn't start the fire 🎶

Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?

LessWrong has swallowed the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" hook, line and sinker, so yeah, zero crank filter.

https://awful.systems/post/1246648

The Washington Post is driving straight into the portable toilets at a beer festival.