this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 22 minutes ago (1 children)

In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:

Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:

Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.

[–] FRACTRANS@awful.systems 1 points 25 minutes ago
[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 3 hours ago

Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment

An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.

The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 10 hours ago (4 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

poor Musky lost custody. Couldn’t handle Grimes, now he mangles rhymes.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 5 hours ago

just imagining what happens the day his companies get taken away from him

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

"Life, it never die

Women are my favorite guy."

Wonder what is up with the folks and them getting into rhymes/poetry. Jordan B Peterson does something simple (his pinned tweet as example here. But we know he fried parts of his brain using the russian coma rehab method.

And it isn't even the Sinterklaas period yet. No need for bad rhymes. (I'm also suddenly reminded of all the people who tried to 'rap' their messages in the late 90s).

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Well my name is Jordan and I’m here to say/ we’re just like lobsters in a major way

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 5 hours ago

"cooked, and (politically) red as fuck"?

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

I can pull finer bars out my arse than this fucking farce

This is probably Grok - creativity from him's pretty sparse

Choom thinks he's DOOM, but he won't beat him any time soon

With how much crack this whack goes through, he'll forget this before noon

(I'm no MF DOOM, but anything I can put out will beat this artless twat any day)

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Religion is the opium of the masses

And I'm increasingly scared they're gonna kick our asses

Maybe it's time for all those mugs

To shut up and start hitting drugs

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

Update: The QRTs are mainly sneering, but this one's particularly good

EDIT: Against my better judgment, I'm letting another sidenote come out:

If you wanna encourage people to drop the master/slave naming scheme, this guy probably gave you a good bit of ammo. Changing a random naming scheme is a pretty low-priority task under most circumstances, but it gets a lot more tempting when it lets you distance yourself from people like this

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more "master copy" or "master recording" than "master of a slave". This isn't IDE. Who names their VCS branch "slave"?

Well, I guess that guy does.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 3 points 54 minutes ago

I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more “master copy” or “master recording” than “master of a slave”. This isn’t IDE. Who names their VCS branch “slave”?

In a better world, this would've probably been a solid argument for letting the master/slave naming convention stick around. We don't live in a better world.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

This guy would be a lot happier if someone had given him a pound of weed when he was 12 then introduced him to college football fandom.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Don't drink and tweet people.

E: my reaction to the people saying 'it is bait'

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 11 hours ago

Dude is about 3 years too late but I guess it's always 8 o'clock in the outrage store.

For reference, HN went wild on this submission from a pretty obvious 4chan troll (the self-described "Black developer" just so happened to include references to a Stormfront post (since removed)):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26487854

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago

just imagine the kinda thinking that goes into even "I can make this post for fun, that'll be a gas"

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 18 hours ago

This is both old news and kinda… not that surprising when you think about it, but I searched and didn’t see any commentary on this here.

Meta has hired a former Project 2025 staffer and Ron DeSantis chief of staff as its director of public policy in the South.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn't gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it's time to give Big AI a wedgie.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 13 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

It's weird how rarely I see people point this, but in theory this kind of boilerplate should be technically meaningless. If copyright protections include the privilege to use the work for training a machine learning algorithm, you need explicit permission anyway. OTOH if it's fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holder's objection doesn't matter.

For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus they're not only infringing on typical "all rights reserved" works, but also things such as Free software whose license terms require attribution if used in derivative work, and especially share-alike copyleft licensed work.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 12 hours ago

I thinkt it's pretty well-lknown that Spotify got all its initial music from Oink. They moved fast, got dominant, and were able to present the record labels with a big audience prepared to pay for streaming music. The labels quickly ensured they'd get the lion's share of that revenue.

OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didn't work, and they're in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what they're doing is legal, it will cost them a lot in litigation fees, coupled with the public perception that these culture vampires are ripping off the poor honest author. Not a good place to be in.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.

Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

At some point, something is going to reveal that all the money in AI has gone into power costs for datacenters and NVidia chips and that the AI companies themselves aren't doing so hot. I hope it's the discovery process for some of the inevitable lawsuits.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

it's pretty publicly known

the VCs are gonna take one heckuva bath

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

lmao incredible

Then there's BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had "created a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease." How's the machine brain doing these days? Well, the company's lead program failed in the clinic last year, and in April announced major layoffs.

just who buys this shit? this reads like refined crypto nonsense

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

People who don't get much tech/overdose on hype and heard of alphafold. Imagine how much worse things could be now after the Nobel.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

i mean how many these people are out there that also have money of this kind, other than softbank i mean

Given the past several decades of trickle-up economics, I think we haven't seen anything close to the bottom of the well of basically-idle capital seeking unrealistic returns.

I'd go so far as to say that the current crop of bubbles possibly represents the greatest downards wealth transfer (albeit from billionaires to millionaires rather than, y'know, working people) since the second world war, but I haven't done anything near the amount of research necessary for that to be more than exciting rhetoric.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 21 hours ago

too fucking many

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Forget Gladwell

All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I've encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 19 points 1 day ago (8 children)

has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? let's hope so

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I'm sorry Mr. Musk, grok's a bit constipated today. Someone fed it too much cheese. Then it started hallucinating.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 9 hours ago

ooh I like that

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Considering Glaze and Nightshade have been around for a while, and I talked about sabotaging scrapers back in July, arguably, it already has.

Hell, I ran across a much smaller scale case of this a couple days ago:

Not sure how effective it is, but if Elon's stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's almost completely ineffective, sorry. It's certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn't yet been invalidated and there's no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.

I think that "force-feeding" is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that "forced" input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

yeah this is the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about

fucking reCaptcha is literally mass-weaponising users for data filtration, and there is no good counter besides just not using reCaptcha (which is something one can’t easily pull off without things like regulatory action, massive reputational problems that make people gtfo, etc)

I have similar worries about cloudflare being such a massive chokepoint and using that position to enable “ai bot filter” services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and I’m not entirely sure what the case grounds/structure on that would be (if any)

the only other viable strategy at the moment is fully breaking contact with any potential bad traffic systems, and that’s extremely fucking dire because that’s yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. I've had issues where I can't get past it presumably just because I'm using some in-application browser just to get a login cookie, but other times it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked.

[–] ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked

Fucking what. I've heard of sites blocking curl and I've been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now I'm cursed with the knowledge that I could probably just scrape stuff from everywhere

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