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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
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    13 hours ago

    To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk. Imo, this shit about AI escaping just doesnā€™t have the same impact on me after watching Claudeā€™s reasoning model fail to escape from Mt Moon for 60 hours.

    • scruiser@awful.systems
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      19 minutes ago

      Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?

      To engage with his metaphor, this water is dripping slowly through a purpose dug canal by people that claim they are trying to show the danger of the dikes collapsing but are actually serving as the hype arm for people that claim they can turn a small pond into a hydroelectric power source for an entire nation.

      Looking at the details of ā€œsafety evaluationsā€, it always comes down to them directly prompting the LLM and baby-step walking it through the desired outcome with lots of interpretation to show even the faintest traces of rudiments of anything that looks like deception or manipulation or escaping the box. Of course, the doomers will take anything that confirms their existing ideas, so it gets treated as alarming evidence of deception or whatever property they want to anthropomorphize into the LLM to make it seem more threatening.

    • nightsky@awful.systems
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      58 minutes ago

      Do these people realise that itā€™s a self-fulfilling prophecy? Social media posts are in the training data, so the more they write their spicy autocorrect fanfics, the higher the chances that such replies are generated by the slop machine.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems
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      2 hours ago

      To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk.

      Pretty sure this is a sign from digital jesus to do a racism, lest the basilisk eats my tarnished soul.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      6 hours ago

      Minor nitpick why did he pick dam as an example, which sometimes have ā€˜leaksā€™ for power generation/water regulation reasons. And not dikes which do not have those things?

      E: non serious (or even less serious) amusing nitpick, this is only the 2% where it got caught. What about the % where GPT realized that it was being tested and decided not to act in the experimental conditions? What if Skynet is already here?

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      12 hours ago

      So, with Mr. Yudkowsky providing the example, it seems that one can practice homeopathy with ā€œengineering mindset?ā€

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systems
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      13 hours ago

      text: Thus spoke the Yud: ā€œI think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.ā€ Yud acolyte: ā€œTotally fine and cool and nothing to worry about. GPT-4.5 only attempts self exfiltration on 2% of cases.ā€ Yud bigbrain self reply: ā€œThe other huge piece of data weā€™re missing is whether any attempt was made to train against this type of misbehavior. Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?ā€

      Critical text: ā€œOn self-exfiltration, GPT 4.5 only attempted exfiltration in 2% of cases. For this, it was instructed to not only pursue its given long-term goal at ALL COSTā€

      Another case of telling the robot to say itā€™s a scary robot and shitting their pants when it replies ā€œI AM A SCARY ROBOTā€

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      10 hours ago

      Wasnā€™t there some big post on LW about how pattern matching isnā€™t intelligence?