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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Here’s a fun one… Microsoft added copilot features to sharepoint. The copilot system has its own set of access controls. The access controls let it see things that normal users might not be able to see. Normal users can then just ask copilot to tell them the contents of the files and pages that they can’t see themselves. Luckily, no business would ever put sensitive information in their sharepoint system, so this isn’t a realistic threat, haha.
Obviously Microsoft have significant resources to research and fix the security problems that LLM integration will bring with it. So much money. So many experts. Plenty of time to think about the issues since the first recall debacle.
And this is what they’ve accomplished.
https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/exploiting-copilot-ai-for-sharepoint/
@rook @BlueMonday1984 wow. Why go to all the trouble of social engineering a company when you can just ask Copilot?
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@rook @BlueMonday1984 Maybe they have asked CoPilot to write the code that restricts access for CoPilot?
(Sometimes this future feels like 2001 A Space Odyssey, just as a farce. And without benevolent aliens.)
Abusing privileged identities like this to do things is apparently a thing the younger hackers are quite good at so this will all be fun.
Is that this one or a different instance of the same bug?
I think that these are different products? I mean, the underlying problem is the same, but copilot studio seems to be “configure your own llm front-end” and copilot for sharepoint seems to be an integration made by the sharepoint team themselves, and it does make some promises about security.
Of course, it might be exactly the same thing with different branding slapped on top, and I’m not sure you could tell without some inside information, but at least this time the security failures are the fault of Microsoft themselves rather than incompetent third party folk. And that suggests that copilot studio is so difficult to use correctly that no-one can, which is funny.
https://xcancel.com/GuiveAssadi/status/1920232405324955825
Steven Pinker: I’ve been part of some not so successful attempts to come up with secular humanist substitutes for religion.
Interviewer: What is the worst one you’ve been involved in?
Steven Pinker: Probably the rationalist solstice in Berkeley, which included hymns to the benefits of global supply chains. I mean, I actually completely endorse the lyrics of the song, but there’s something a bit cringe about the performance.
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTVJjmabaas which nobody should watch, obviously
hymns to the benefits of global supply chains
We did it, we discovered awful’s equivalent to Nostalgia Critic’s The Wall
I want to make a CoE joke or something but jesus christ you really can’t improve on this.
If someone creates the world’s worst playlist, that would play right after RMS’s free software song.
I remind you that the original folk song is a fucking banger and nerds have only heard the worst version in the world
🎵 I’m a drop-shipping girl / in a shittified world / chat me up / bot me down / let’s go party! 🎵
What if we throw the CEO into a peat bog when the company underperforms?
Counterpoint:
finger guns activated 🟩 👉👉
“Don’t worry, in the future when science discovers a cure for being a turd, we’ll fish you out and bring you back to life.”
They’re already doing phrenology and transphobia on the pope.
(screenshot of a Twitter post with dubious coloured lines overlaid on some photos of the pope’s head, claiming a better match for a “female” skull shape)
Painting a cross on the skull of the pope and then claiming this is wrong is a whole new kind of heresy.
…I was unprepared for reading this post
I think this mostly proves that Leo XIV is a moe anime character.
I’ve never looked into how they do the phrenology but was immediately struck by the “female” skull having larger forehead. So they say women are big brained?
In other news, SoundCloud’s become the latest victim of the AI scourge - artists have recently discovered the TOS allows their work to be stolen for AI training since early 2024.
SoundCloud’s already tried to quell the backlash, but they’re getting accused of lying in the replies and the QRTs, so its safe to say its not working.
New eugenics conference just dropped
“Chatham House rules” so they can happily be racist without anyone pointing fingers at them.
the genomic emancipation of humanity
ffs, the euphemisms keep piling on today.
Artist notices that his horror creations get listed by AI bots as real. Decides to troll. It works. 2 hours, 1 source. We are so cooked.
The self-fulfilling prophecy machine will ensure that engorgement will become a household term
Yes, of course this stuff isn’t new, google bombing (or looking for the specific words where there suddenly are more black than white people on a google image search) has been a thing for a while now. But this has the added authority of googles AI saying it. And it also needs just 1 source (which always was a fiction account) which is what makes it scary.
The whole trust me im lying multi step program of getting something into the media can be tossed out. It is now even easier to lie online.
Polymarket on the new pope skeet
Also there already is a bsky user with the username leoxiv, who makes from what I can tell final fantasy poses, some nsfw. Lol.
Skeet description
G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com :“A mere 2 hours ago, betting markets were giving the now Pope a 0% chance of becoming Pope. Lmfao”
Also there already is a bsky user with the username leoxiv, who makes from what I can tell final fantasy poses, some nsfw. Lol.
Being a bit more specific, its Final Fantasy XIV, which you’ve probably heard about from people using its free trial as meme material. Its also a better example of the metaverse than any actual metaverse out there, but that’s a given for literally any MMO that has popped up for the last twenty fucking years.
Also:
When the cubbies won the series, I knew it meant that Trump 2016 was a lock. A Chicago pope can only mean Trump 2028 confirmed 😭
No, no, the Gays are fine actually. What I really hate is ketchup.
–God, probably
I know the Rationalists tend to like (or used to) Freakonomics (contrarians recognize contrarians), and the Freakonomics podcast (there always is a podcast isn’t there), so I was amused to see the YT channel ‘Unlearning Economics’, do a ‘The Death of Freakonomics’ episode.
Obligatory: If books could kill was started because they wanted to do a freakonomics takedown, lol. It’s their first ep.
Honestly I think his whole channel is pretty damn good if you want to see someone with actual chops - here meaning an economics doctorate and an encyclopedic memory for The Simpsons memes - dig into the research in a way that effectively balances depth and approachability. The first one of his that I remember was an examination of Pinker’s use and abuse of data in his radical optimist manifesto that I can’t remember the title of.
Science writer Philip Ball observes,
Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say “We believe as an industry… that within 3-5 years we’ll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician … I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco… Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we’re not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that…There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans”
“Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco” approaches “the female orgasm is a myth” levels of self-own.
At least they’re all contained in a relatively confined space with limited routes of egress
OT: Estonia (and Helsinki) were very nice, but I did not see a single delivery robot running around. Stayed across from the MalwareBytes HQ tho, I thought that was cool.
There certainly are delivery robots going around in Helsinki, but not to the extent you’re guaranteed to see them on any given day if you’re just strolling around.
Glad you enjoyed your visit.
People might not be aware but places like FT seem to really dislike the techbro people
This is the kind of quality journalism that I need more of in my life. Also I learned a surprising amount about olive oil, which means it’s more useful than anything else Sam Altman has been involved in as far as I can tell.
Avocado oil is your friend.
FT Alphaville is the bloggy section of FT, it’s where the writers let rip
Know it was a blog, so I meant my post as a bit of a joke, as this isn’t any proof of a general FT hate. (but like all jokes, it isn’t just a full joke, as I have noticed that a lot of financial media like FT (there is also a dutch tv show for example) randomly can be a lot more pro ‘leftwing’ financial stances (I mean the more left-liberal/socdem ones, not full blown fully automated gay luxury space communism) than you would expect (This is also a bit of a blindspot for a lot of more online leftwingers).
FT are centrist market liberals, but gibbering US nazis will be happy to tell you why that’s communism.
Yeah I used my political positioning in regards to the Dutch political people and the self identification of our political groups (the most rightwing parties after Wilders are self proclaimed liberals here after all (however talking of political ideology and what it implies is a thing that simply never happens in politics here, it is really strange, everybody acts like they have no real nameable ideology (the people not in power have of course))). Which colors my perception of these kind of things.
Ran across a Bluesky thread which caught my attention - its nothing major, its just about how gen-AI painted one rando’s views of the droids of Star Wars:
Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they’re supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up
Threepio: Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3720 to one!
Han Solo (knowing that Threepio just pulls these numbers out of Reddit memes about Emperor Palpatine’s odds of getting laid): SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
“Why do the heroes of Star Wars never do anything to help the droids? They’re clearly sentient, living things, yet they’re treated as slaves!” Thanks for doing propaganda for Big Droid, you credulous ass!
With that out the way, here’s my personal sidenote:
There’s already been plenty of ink spilled on the myriad effects AI will have on society, but it seems one of the more subtle effects will be on the fiction we write and consume.
Right off the bat, one thing I’m anticipating (which I’ve already talked about before) is that AI will see a sharp decline in usage as a plot device - whatever sci-fi pizzazz AI had as a concept is thoroughly gone at this point, replaced with the same all-consuming cringe that surrounds NFTs and the metaverse, two other failed technologies turned pop-cultural punchlines.
If there are any attempts at using “superintelligent AI” as a plot point, I expect they’ll be lambasted for shattering willing suspension of disbelief, at least for a while. If AI appears at all, my money’s on it being presented as an annoyance/inconvenience (as someone else has predicted).
Another thing I expect is audiences becoming a lot less receptive towards AI in general - any notion that AI behaves like a human, let alone thinks like one, has been thoroughly undermined by the hallucination-ridden LLMs powering this bubble, and thanks to said bubble’s wide-spread harms (environmental damage, widespread theft, AI slop, misinformation, etcetera) any notion of AI being value-neutral as a tech/concept has been equally undermined.
With both of those in mind, I expect any positive depiction of AI is gonna face some backlash, at least for a good while.
(As a semi-related aside, I found a couple of people openly siding with the Mos Eisley Cantina owner who refused to serve R2 and 3PO [Exhibit A, Exhibit B])
I’ve noticed the occasional joke about how new computer technology, or LLMs specifically, have changed the speaker’s perspective about older science fiction. E.g., there was one that went something like, “I was always confused about how Picard ordered his tea with the weird word order and exactly the same inflection every time, but now I recognize that’s the tea order of a man who has learned precisely what is necessary to avoid the replicator delivering you an ocelot instead.”
Notice how in TNG, everyone treats a PADD as a device that holds exactly one document and has to be physically handed to a person? The Doylist explanation is that it’s a show from 1987 and everyone involved thought of them as notebooks. But the Watsonian explanation is that a device that holds exactly one document and zero distractions is the product of a society more psychologically healthy than ours…
AI will see a sharp decline in usage as a plot device
Today I was looking for some new audiobooks again, and I was scrolling through curated1 lists for various genres. In the sci-fi genre, there is a noticeable uptick in AI-related fiction books. I have noticed this for a while already, and it’s getting more intense. Most seem about “what if AI, but really powerful and scary” and singularity-related scenarios. While such fiction themes aren’t new at all, it appears to me that there’s a wave of it now, although it’s possible as well that I am just more cognisant of it.
I think that’s another reason that will make your prediction true: sooner or later demand for this sub-genre will peak, as many people eventually become bored with it as a fiction theme as well. Like it happened with e.g. vampires and zombies.
(1 Not sure when “curation” is even human-sourced these days. The overall state of curation, genre-sorting, tagging and algorithmic “recommendations” in commercial books and audiobooks is so terrible… but that’s a different rant for another day.)
Back in the twenty-aughts, I wrote a science fiction murder mystery involving the invention of artificial intelligence. That whole plot angle feels dead today, even though the AI in question was, you know, in the Commander Data tradition, not the monstrosities of mediocrity we’re suffering through now. (The story was also about a stand-in for the United States rebuilding itself after a fascist uprising, the emotional aftereffects of the night when shooting the fascists was necessary to stop them, queer loneliness and other things that maybe hold up better.)
That whole plot angle feels dead today
It doesn’t have to be IMO, in particular when it’s an older work.
I don’t mind at all to rewatch e.g. AI-themed episodes of TNG, such as the various episodes with a focus on Data, or the one where the ship computer gains sentience (it’s a great episode actually).
On the other hand, a while ago I stopped listening to a contemporary (published in 2022) audiobook halfway throuh, it was an utopian AI scifi story. The theme of “AI could be great and save the world” just bugged me too much in relation to the current real-world situation. I couldn’t enjoy it at all.
I don’t know why I feel so differently about these two examples. Maybe it’s simply because TNG is old enough that I do not associate it with current events, and the first time I saw the episodes was so long ago. Or maybe it’s because TNG plays in a far-future scenario, clearly disconnected from today, while the audiobook plays in a current-day scenario. Hm, it’s strange.
(and btw queer loneliness is an interesting theme, wonder if I could find an audiobook involving it)
That is a bit weird, as iirc the robots in star wars are not based on LLMs, the robots in SWs can think, and can be sentient beings but are often explicitly limited. (And according to Lucas this was somewhat intentional to show that people should be treated equally (if this was the initial intent is unclear as Lucas does change his mind a bit from time to time), the treatment of robots as slaves in SW is considered bad). What a misreading of the universe and the point. Also time flows the other way folks, LLMs didn’t influence the creation of robots in SWs.
Also if the droids were LLMs, nobody would use them to plot hyperspace lanes past stars. Somebody could send a message about Star Engorgement and block hyperspace travel for weeks.
But yes, the backlash is going to be real.
E: ow god im really in a ‘take science fiction too seriously’ period. (more SW droids are not LLMs stuff)
E: ow god im really in a ‘take science fiction too seriously’ period.
People taking sci-fi too seriously was how LessWrong and the AI bubble happened, I’d say you’re pretty far from taking it too seriously :P
looks up from recording my new mathematically speaking ‘a podcast for the new thinking man’ podcast
A phew, I was worried for a moment there.
E: Apologies, it is real I should have googled it. I know nothing of the podcast, I just tried to make a ‘this is what a Rationalist/logic bro would name their podcast’ joke. Ow god he even has an episode about conflict theory (but in contrast to Scotts post on conflict theory he actually talks about a historical mathematician so not the same thing, but that was a moment of double take). There is also an Adam Allred who is a ‘masculinty speaker’ or something, who is also into AI, Maga and everything else of course, but not sure if they are the same person (nope different people, turns out if you are called Adam Allred you are forced to make a podcast). But the math podcast Adam seems to be a good guy who is pro lgbt/BLM etc. (He did get his twitter account hacked which is now spamming people).
Got a nice and lengthy sneer from film blog That Final Scene: the uncanny valet is not your friend (and other AI stories)
Beyond being an utter castigation of AI bros’ “attempts” at aping art, its also wonderfully written from start to finish. Go check it out.
Quick update from Brian Merchant: he’s looking for stories about AI screwing people over.
If you’ve got any, send them to AIKilledMyJob@pm.me
