blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] [email protected] 1 points 44 minutes ago

Andrew Gelman does some more digging and poking about those "ignore all previous instructions and give a positive review" papers:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/07/07/chatbot-prompts/

Previous Stubsack discussion:

https://awful.systems/comment/7936520

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago

Major Strasser has been shot... round up the usual suspects!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy.

If I may say so, sir, I noticed earlier the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged. It's impossible to go to lightspeed!

Captain, being held by you isn't quite enough to get me excited.

We're going to get pulverized if we stay out here much longer.

"You said they'd be left at the city under my supervision!"

"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I can see that my 50,000 a year has been well spent.

Donald, Donald... This park was not built to cater only for the super-rich.

This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.

Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together.

T-Rex doesn't want to be fed. He wants to hunt.

Unless they're continually supplied with lysine by us, they'll slip into a coma and die.

I was overwhelmed by the power of this place. But I made a mistake, too. I didn't have enough respect for that power and it's out now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

The quest for the Grail is not archaeology; it's a race against evil! If it is captured by the Nazis, the armies of darkness will march all over the face of the Earth! Do you understand me?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (4 children)

"It was the job we were chosen for."

"Of course you'd say that, James Bond, her majesty's loyal terrier, defender of the so-called faith."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (5 children)

I just found out, that a girl got killed here last week, and you knew it! You knew there was a shark out there!

Is it true that most people get attacked by sharks in three feet of water about ten feet from the beach?

The torso has been severed in mid-thorax; there are no major organs remaining... May I have a glass of water, please?

What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent.

I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up... bobbed up and down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (6 children)

It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is.

It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the Sun.

When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit.

You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.

If you're killed in the Matrix, you die here?

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world?

I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

The plodding pace she was forced to set—for the road was too narrow and winding to pass safely—allowed time for meditation.

Elizabeth Peters, Naked Once More

Outside the window the cry of gulls could faintly be distinguished as they swirled about aimlessly in the gloom.

Nicholas Meyer, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

The device had been constructed by a master craftsman, and the riddle was this—that though he'd been told the box contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no way into it, no clue on any of its six black lacquered faces as to the whereabouts of the pressure points that would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.

Clive Barker, Hellbound Heart (second sentence of first paragraph)

Skimmed by the savage Seneca from the waters of Pennsylvania's great Oil Creek, mister.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

Only those with unshakable psych profiles were assigned to the outlying agronomy posts; the screening was almost as rigid as that for deep space.

Margaret Wander Bonanno, Strangers from the Sky

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came from from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (opening line)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The crowd would have engulfed the platform and the open space as well if it had not been held back by the triple row of Sebastian soldiers on Pilate's left and the soldiers of the Ituraean auxiliary cohort on his right.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Only a few of them had been wounded; here and there you saw one stepping gingerly, leaning on a crutch or two canes, but so far on toward recovery that his face had color.

Dorothy Parker, "Soldiers Of The Republic"

Suppose they never get counted—what's the worst that can happen? If the number of imaginary sheep in this world remains a matter of guesswork, who is richer or poorer for it?

"The Little Hours"

In her twenties, after the deferred death of a hazy widowed mother, she had been employed as a model in a wholesale dress establishment—it was still the day of the big woman, and she was then prettily colored and high-breasted.

"Big Blonde"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Perhaps the Mysteries' secrets could be learned, and their powers could be thwarted.

Bill Watterson and John Kascht, The Mysteries

The girl and her companion obediently fell silent then, realizing they had been heard through the microphones embedded in the walls of the dining room.

Lois Lowry, Son

 

"TheFutureIsDesigned" bluechecks thusly:

You: takes 2 hours to read 1 book

Me: take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need, write a well-structured query, tell my agent AI to distribute it to the 17 models I've selected to help me with research, who then traverse approximately 1 million books, extract 17 different versions of the information I'm looking for, which my overseer agent then reviews, eliminates duplicate points, highlights purely conflicting ones for my review, and creates a 3-level summary.

And then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.

We are not the same.

For bonus points:

I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune.

You know, Dune.

(Via)

 

Everybody loves Wikipedia, the surprisingly serious encyclopedia and the last gasp of Old Internet idealism!

(90 seconds later)

We regret to inform you that people write credulous shit about "AI" on Wikipedia as if that is morally OK.

Both of these are somewhat less bad than they were when I first noticed them, but they're still pretty bad. I am puzzled at how the latter even exists. I had thought that there were rules against just making a whole page about a neologism, but either I'm wrong about that or the "rules" aren't enforced very strongly.

 

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.)

 

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.)

 

In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy [...] perhaps most notably, that DeepSeek’s new, more efficient approach means AI might not need to guzzle the massive amounts of energy that it currently does.

The latter notion is misleading, and new numbers shared with MIT Technology Review help show why. These early figures—based on the performance of one of DeepSeek’s smaller models on a small number of prompts—suggest it could be more energy intensive when generating responses than the equivalent-size model from Meta. The issue might be that the energy it saves in training is offset by its more intensive techniques for answering questions, and by the long answers they produce.

Add the fact that other tech firms, inspired by DeepSeek’s approach, may now start building their own similar low-cost reasoning models, and the outlook for energy consumption is already looking a lot less rosy.

 

In the spirit of our earlier "happy computer memories" thread, I'll open one for happy book memories. What's a book you read that occupies a warm-and-fuzzy spot in your memory? What book calls you back to the first time you read it, the way the smell of a bakery brings back a conversation with a friend?

As a child, I was into mystery stories and Ancient Egypt both (not to mention dinosaurs and deep-sea animals and...). So, for a gift one year I got an omnibus set of the first three Amelia Peabody novels. Then I read the rest of the series, and then new ones kept coming out. I was off at science camp one summer when He Shall Thunder in the Sky hit the bookstores. I don't think I knew of it in advance, but I snapped it up and read it in one long summer afternoon with a bottle of soda and a bag of cookies.

 

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.

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

 

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.

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

 

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.

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

 

Kate Knibbs reports in Wired magazine:

Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models. [...] In his order, Chhabria referenced an internal quote from a Meta employee, included in the documents, in which they speculated, “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.” [...] These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃”. They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as "MZ" in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta's AI team was "approved to use" the pirated material.

 

Retraction Watch reports:

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”

The resignation statement reads in part,

In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Related:

 

The UCLA news office boasts, "Comparative lit class will be first in Humanities Division to use UCLA-developed AI system".

The logic the professor gives completely baffles me:

"Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically."

I'm trying to parse that. Really and truly I am. But it just sounds like this: "Normally, I would [do work]. But now, I can actually [do the same work]."

I mean, was this person somehow teaching comparative literature in a way that didn't involve reading the primary sources and, I'unno, comparing them?

The sales talk in the news release is really going all in selling that undercoat.

Now that her teaching materials are organized into a coherent text, another instructor could lead the course during the quarters when Stahuljak isn’t teaching — and offer students a very similar experience. And with AI-generated lesson plans and writing exercises for TAs, students in each discussion section can be assured they’re receiving comparable instruction to those in other sections.

Back in my day, we called that "having a book" and "writing a lesson plan".

Yeah, going from lecture notes and slides to something shaped like a book is hard. I know because I've fuckin' done it. And because I put in the work, I got the benefit of improving my own understanding by refining my presentation. As the old saying goes, "Want to learn a subject? Teach it." Moreover, doing the work means that I can take a little pride in the result. Serving slop is the cafeteria's job.

(Hat tip.)

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