[-] corbin@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

To complexity theorists, this is an extremely funny situation; I bet OpenAI started by asking the bot about P vs NP and they got the worst-possible result, a useless and unexpected refutation of a conjecture. To be clear, I don't trust Lean or OpenAI, so I don't yet accept this result, but I hear Ryan Williams and Russell Impagliazzo are hand-checking the proof and I do trust them.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

It's too bad that Janus got cooked. They didn't set up sufficient defenses, but also they drank too deeply. I still think that their framing, that the chatbots are simulators of conversations, is the best one; it's honestly kind of pathetic how they then claim that the simulations are alive, intelligent, sapient, etc.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago

Of the numbers that are present in the document, a lot are unaudited and were not worked out according to GAAP — which S-1 numbers are supposed to conform to. There’s whole multi-page subsections of these BS numbers that you should not see in a credible S-1.

In the USA, GAAP is not optional for large businesses. GAAP is expected for businesses with thousands of customers at a minimum; Anthropic wants to scale up to millions of customers and therefore has zero excuses for non-GAAP numbers. Please be less UK-brained in the future, thanks.

7

Scientology survivor Jenna Miscavige tells the story of her life to the camera. Unlike similar interviews she's given over the past decade-ish, this isn't a discussion with a journalist or a generalist overview, but a deep dive from somebody who served Sea Org, Disconnected their family, and was Audited daily. Content warning for internal details of the Church of Scientology and Sea Organization; there's a lot of abuse. I figured that our newer friends might not realize the degree to which the CoS threatened the Internet and violates human rights, and her story is a complete slice of everything we dislike about the church.

Never forget Lisa McPherson.

28

Anthropologist Gutsick Gibbon, with guest population-geneticist Alex Hancock, dismantles professional bigot Vox Day's creationist claims and then proceeds to dismantle the rest of his history and public appearances.

Sorry if that title causes psychic damage. Content warning: math.

15

Just a quick little explanation of those cameras put up by Flock Safety (YC S17). Posting it here in the hopes that it'll quell the urge I feel to post it to Lobsters and make pushcx delete it.

10

That one SciShow knitting video was so bad that it inspired a complete remake. I figured that, with the realization that Hank Green has been chatbot-assisted for a while, it's worth remembering that one time when he (or ChatGPT) wrote a lot of misogynist stuff into a SciShow script and also compared knitting to magnets.

spoilerThere is no spoiler. The video starts by explaining that it is a parody and then proceeds to be an incredibly sharp parody.

11

Kevin Perjurer (not their real name) recounts the history of Disney's "Living Characters Initiative", a multi-decade attempt to create a more immersive character-driven experience.

spoilers

This is basically an introductory course on AI as told through the history of Disney's animatronics. There is a companion video which covers the early decades of robotics and focuses on Walt's futurism; this longer video focuses on how AI has attempted to ~~pull money out of customer wallets~~ delight park visitors by putting smiles onto faces. Perjurer focuses on concrete examples; there's no talk of hyperreality here, although there is a bit of theory-building which fits each example into a generic framework for understanding conversations.

The video has too many good sneers for me to choose. A common theme is guests tricking AI hosts into behaving inappropriately. There's this theme of the robots only functioning properly within controlled conditions, as if every robot were its own science experiment. This lines up with what I've seen in manufacturing and logistics; robots sure can work fast but they are inflexible, pre-programmed, and highly sensitive to unexpected variance in their environment.

No, I take it back. Listening to E.T. say "D-D-D-D-D-D-" or "lasagna, lasagna" is very funny. Skip to the interlude about Universal Studios for that.

Of course, little of this is truly new, but it's nice to see a version of this history which puts everything together to point out that Disney's goal of creating robots which imitate inhuman characters is fucked-up horror but which isn't a fucked-up horror story. Going in the other direction, an AI-skeptical viewpoint could maybe make those stories more interesting.

29

Hi folks, I'm making another tech-stack recommendation. Previously, on Awful, I noted that below 87.5% availability, whether a service is up is effectively random chance. We've reached that point for GitHub's Platform, which includes components like Actions, Copilot, Pages, and the core API of issues and PRs. I do not have confidence in GitHub's owners or operators to remedy this situation, so I cannot recommend it professionally nor to neighbors. As a bit of nuance, note that Pages seems to have relatively decent availability and is often up even when the rest of GitHub is down, so static content hosted on Pages can be deprioritized for migration.

The thread is open on Lemmy. I'm interested in your thoughts, particularly around alternative forges, alternative paradigms for forges, community-driven plans for migration, strategies for migrating, and tools that ease the burden of maintaining many git repositories.

16

I'm not gonna dig up the links since I'm sure y'all're already tired of talking about quantum computing. I am going to insist that, while I professionally disagree with Filippo about plenty of things, I do not see any mistakes in their analysis here. Please start thinking about post-quantum cryptographic tooling today.

13

Welcome to the carnival! We've got fun and games. I asked vibecoders to complete three tasks. When folks complained about that, I offered up five more tasks. I did half of these and got average scores. How well did the community do? Scroll to the end to find out!

8

Okay, previously, on Awful, we established that vibecoding can't produce working compilers. Let's try some other side projects of mine. I have important stuff to work on and a deadline, so I'm not matching these projects with my own submissions. Instead, I've laid out a psuedo-objective rubric and I'm going to say that par is 10/10 points.

74
[-] corbin@awful.systems 42 points 9 months ago

Okay guys, I rolled my character. His name is Traveliezer Interdimensky and he has 18 INT (19 on skill checks, see my sheet.) He's a breeding stud who can handle twenty women at once despite having only 10 STR and CON. I was thinking that we'd start with Interdimensky trapped in Hell where he's forced to breed with all these beautiful women and get them pregnant, and the rest of the party is like outside or whatever, they don't have to go rescue me, I mean rescue him. Anyway I wanted to numerically quantify how much Hell wants me, I mean him, to stay and breed all these beautiful women, because that's something they'd totally do.

9

I’m tired of hearing about vibecoding on Lobsters, so I’ve written up three of my side tasks for coding agents. Talk is cheap; show us the code.

23

Happy Holiday and merry winter solstice! I'm sharing a Nix flake that I've been slowly growing in my homelab for the past few months. It incorporates this systemd feature, switches from CppNix to Lix, and disables a handful of packages. That PR inspired me, and I'm releasing this in turn to inspire you. Paying it forward and all that.

Should you use this? As-is, probably not. It will rebuild systemd at a minimum and you probably don't have enough RAM for that; building from this flake crashed my development laptop and I had to build it on a workstation instead. Also, if you have good taste in packages then this will be a no-op aside from systemd and Lix, and you can do both of those on your own.

Isn't this merely virtue-signalling? I think that the original systemd PR was definitely signalling, since it's unlikely to ever get deployed on the systems of our friends. However, I really do sleep better at night knowing that it's unlikely that jart or suckless have any code running on my machines.

Why not make a proper repository and organization? Mostly the possibility that GitHub might actually take down a repository named nixpkgs-antifa. If there's any interest then I could set up a Codeberg repo. However, up to this point, I've only used it internally and my homelab has its own internal git service.

Mods: You've indicated that you don't like it when people write code to approach our social problems. That's fine; I'm not publishing an application or service and certainly not starting a social movement, just sharing some of my internal code.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 31 points 1 year ago

The orange site has a thread. Best sneer so far is this post:

So you know when you're playing rocket ship in the living room but then your mom calls out "dinner time" and the rocket ship becomes an Amazon cardboard box again? Well this guy is an adult, and he's playing rocket ship with chatGPT. The only difference is he doesn't know it and there's no mommy calling him for dinner time to help him snap out of it.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 23 points 1 year ago

It's been almost six decades of this, actually; we all know what this link will be. Longer if you're like me and don't draw a distinction between AI, cybernetics, and robotics.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 25 points 2 years ago

Somebody pointed out that HN's management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it's the sort of thing Dan might blank:

but I don't want to get hellbanned by dang.

Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It's caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices -- the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.

I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 22 points 2 years ago

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

[-] corbin@awful.systems 25 points 2 years ago

Meanwhile, actual Pastafarians (hi!) know that the Russian Federation openly persecutes the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for failing to help the government in its authoritarian activities, and also that we're called to be anti-authoritarian. The Fifth Rather:

I'd really rather you didn't challenge the bigoted, misogynist, hateful ideas of others on an empty stomach. Eat, then go after the bastards.

May you never run out of breadsticks, travelers.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 27 points 2 years ago

He's talking like it's 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it's not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he's lining the floors of hamster cages.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 49 points 2 years ago

This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I've ever seen. To recap:

  • NYC elects a cop as mayor
  • Cop-mayor decrees that NYC will be great again, because of businesses
  • Cops and other oinkers get extra cash even though they aren't business
  • Commercial real estate is still cratering and cops can't find anybody to stop/frisk/arrest/blame for it
  • Folks over in New Jersey are giggling at the cop-mayor, something must be done
  • NYC invites folks to become small-business owners, landlords, realtors, etc.
  • Cop-mayor doesn't understand how to fund it (whaddaya mean, I can't hire cops to give accounting advice!?)
  • Cop-mayor's CTO (yes, the city has corporate officers) suggests a fancy chatbot instead of hiring people

It's a fucking pattern, ain't it.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 22 points 2 years ago

I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn't realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.

2017: AI will soon replace human labor

2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want

2020: COVID-19 won't be that bad

2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him

2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers

2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn't understand why I''m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)

view more: next ›

corbin

0 post score
0 comment score
joined 3 years ago