6mo ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 27 October 2024

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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More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe'en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.
For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It's like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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.

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.

Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.
- This tool solely exists so that you can ask it questions and get assistance, but also we disavow any responsibility for the answers to the questions we just told you to ask it. Has this kind of clause been held up in court anywhere? Like, I'm sure it has but it seems like the same logic would be ridiculous in any other context. Like, consider the fraught legal history of the anarchist cookbook.

Update on LLM reviewer situation:
PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:
a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
intro to semiotics for the same
show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why "automated AI detection" is also bullshit).
show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didn't use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)
We'll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because it's a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. I'm also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the "It can't be that stupid" trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!
Wish us luck, heh!

Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.
Mostly VAT fraud.
News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard
- But your honor, we're a crypto mining company; we don't add any value!

‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit
“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”
I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.
Okay, quick personal sidenote:
With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect we're gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful they're gonna be, I don't know, but at the bare minimum it'll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.
- You know you're dealing with serious people when the dogwhistles come out.
- Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.
- They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.
  Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity's business model again?
  
  idea landlords: making sure that no one is living rent free in someone elses head
- they wish this technology didn’t exist
  this is supposed to be invalidating, but like... yes? what's wrong with that?

I just want to share this video because I think it is a work of art
"I'm gonna replace AI" by Olivia Squizzle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g
sorry for yt link, invidious didn't like it

has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? let's hope so
- They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  I saw people say they would add 10% opaque layers of the musk with Epstein's accomplice (whos name i forgot for a second and too lazy to look her up) photo. Would be nice if there was a tool to do so automatically. (Not that i post on twitter anymore).
- I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.
  
  that's also happening, but yeah it's going to have to be a team effort
- we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine
  
  I'm sorry Mr. Musk, grok's a bit constipated today. Someone fed it too much cheese. Then it started hallucinating.
  
  ooh I like that
- It would be funny if someone was literally beating up servers with a wooden shoe.
  
  "percussive maintenance"

If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the "prompt engineering" article, consult your physician.

I don’t go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling
https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/
https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/
- the Determinate Nix move was such an obvious next step I was convinced they had already done it; I guess they can let the mask fall off now that they’ve consolidated their control over the community. as was pointed out on mastodon, Determinate Systems previously promised this wasn’t their goal, which goes to show how much a promise from a fascist is worth.
  fortunately it seems like Lix has a NixOS fork on the horizon? I only know about it because the “just fork it or shut up” assholes are now complaining that a fork’s happening (which they seem to only know about by obsessively monitoring Lix’s git forge — I don’t think there’s been an announcement yet)
  
  I do hope Lix sticks around and flourishes

HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up
- Pretty good sneer there:
  BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states he's tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family

A friend of mine keeps suggesting Cursor to me. God damn I am sick of autoplag.
- I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but there's some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs
  fresh install:
  at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that it's going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
  figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myself...)
  while I'm certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think it's fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you don't even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s
  christ I'm gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time
  
  tangentially, I think about this thread every so often too. this just made me think of it again.

Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.
In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.
- literally the exact crowd shitting on the mere rumor of a Lix NixOS fork are clapping for this like trained seals. and I don’t think this getting announced right after those rumors is an accident — it gets Jon the most attention for his low-effort bullshit and might even let him hurt another fork by way of community fragmentation
  something I’m confused about is, is Ringer even effectively banned anymore? I stopped monitoring when someone with mod privileges unbanned him from a bunch of Nix community spaces. is he back to banned, or is this just a continuing tantrum from Jon having Release Manager stripped from him and given to someone who could do that incredibly thoroughly automated job without stirring up a fucking hate mob?
  
  Is their branding dominated an anime girl of ambiguous age?
  Just guessing, I promise I haven't checked.
  
  there is one silver lining: for once, I don’t have the cognitive load of another Nix fork to carefully consider switching to. there’s no way in fuck I’m using Ringer’s fork under any circumstances, and my brain already filed it away under “weird name, starts with an E, don’t remember the rest” seconds after I closed the tab

That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Musk's twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223
- Only now? It is amazing how disconnected Musk is from that part of SV culture. Amazing, even sucks at the thing he should have a home field advantage at.
  
  I had a mini identity crisis when i realized I'm more aware of techno-fascist writing than Elon Musk of all people.
- I wish I was cool enough to have the world's worst people get so mad at me that they...make fan art and put it up on their website. What's Elon going for here?
  If their aim is to make DG look bad ass, they're doing a good job.
  
  Anti David Gerard David Gerard Club
  
  david gerard refuses to respond to my allegations that he wears an awesome trenchcoat and uses magic to trap his opponents in a realm where everything is made of the pages of a failed novela, and I think that says a lot

62 comments

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