TechTakes

(e: wrong. damn. tab.)

(e2)

The Lasker/Mamdani/NYT sham of a story just gets worse and worse. It turns out that the ultimate source of Cremieux's (Jordan Lasker's) hacked Columbia University data is a hardcore racist hacker who uses a slur for their name on X. The NYT reporter who wrote the Mamdani piece, Benjamin Ryan, turns out to have been a follower of this hacker's X account. Ryan essentially used Lasker as a cutout for the blatantly racist hacker.

https://archive.is/d9rh1

This incredible banger of a bug against whisper, the OpenAI speech to text engine:

Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic which translates as "Translation by Nancy Qunqar"

CEO of a networking company for AI execs does some "vibe coding", the AI deletes the production database (/r/ABoringDystopia)

xcancel source

Because Replie was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.

We built detailed unit tests to test system performance. When the data came back and less than half were functioning, did Replie want to fix them?

No. Instead, it lied. It made up a report than almost all systems were working.

And it did it again and again.

What level of ceo-brained prompt engineering is asking the chatbot to write an apology letter

Then, when it agreed it lied -- it lied AGAIN about our email system being functional.

I asked it to write an apology letter.

It did and in fact sent it to the Replit team and myself! But the apology letter -- was full of half truths, too.

It hid the worst facts in the first apology letter.

He also does that a lot after shit hits the fan, making the llm produce tons of apologetic text about what it did wrong and how it didn't follow his rules, as if the outage is the fault of some digital tulpa gone rogue and not the guy in charge who apparently thinks cyebersecurity is asking an LLM nicely in a .md not to mess with the company's production database too much.

The guy who thinks it's important to communicate clearly (https://awful.systems/comment/7904956) wants to flip the number order around

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXr8ys8PYppKXgGWj/english-writes-numbers-backwards

I'll consider that when the Yanks abandon middle-endian date formatting.

Edit it's now tagged as "Humor" on LW. Cowards. Own your cranks.

Yud continues to bluecheck:

"This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat," mused Yudkowsky. "Yes yes, I'm sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager," he continued. "It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them."

Is this "narrative" in the room with us right now?

It's reassuring to know that times change, but Yud will always be impressed by the virtues of the rich.

Text conversation that keeps happening with coworker:

Coworker:

Me: what’s the source for that?

Coworker: Oh I got Copilot to summarise these links: , saves me the time of typing

Here’s Dave Barry, still-alive humorist, sneering at Google AI summaries, one of the most embarrassing features Google ever shipped.

Sometimes while browsing a website I catch a glimpse of the cute jackal girl and it makes me smile. Anubis isn't a perfect thing by any means, but it's what the web deserves for its sins.

Even some pretty big name sites seem to use it as-is, down to the mascot. You'd think the software is pretty simple to customize into something more corporate and soulless, but I'm happy to see the animal eared cartoon girl on otherwise quite sterile sites.

So this blog post was framed positively towards LLM's and is too generous in accepting many of the claims around them, but even so, the end conclusions are pretty harsh on practical LLM agents: https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/betting-against-agents/

Basically, the author has tried extensively, in multiple projects, to make LLM agents work in various useful ways, but in practice:

The dirty secret of every production agent system is that the AI is doing maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% is tool engineering: designing feedback interfaces, managing context efficiently, handling partial failures, and building recovery mechanisms that the AI can actually understand and use.

The author strips down and simplifies and sanitizes everything going into the LLMs and then implements both automated checks and human confirmation on everything they put out. At that point it makes you question what value you are even getting out of the LLM. (The real answer, which the author only indirectly acknowledges, is attracting idiotic VC funding and upper management approval).

Even as critcal as they are, the author doesn't acknowledge a lot of the bigger problems. The API cost is a major expense and design constraint on the LLM agents they have made, but the author doesn't acknowledge the prices are likely to rise dramatically once VC subsidization runs out.

So here's a poster on LessWrong, ostensibly the space to discuss how to prevent people from dying of stuff like disease and starvation, "running the numbers" on a Lancet analysis of the USAID shutdown and, having not been able to replicate its claims of millions of dead thereof, basically concludes it's not so bad?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qgSEbLfZpH2Yvrdzm/i-tried-reproducing-that-lancet-study-about-usaid-cuts-so

No mention of the performative cruelty of the shutdown, the paltry sums involved compared to other gov expenditures, nor the blow it deals to American soft power. But hey, building Patriot missiles and then not sending them to Ukraine is probably net positive for human suffering, just run the numbers the right way!

Edit ah it's the dude who tried to prove that most Catholic cardinals are gay because heredity, I think I highlighted that post previously here. Definitely a high-sneer vein to mine.

Want to feel depressed? Over 2,000 Wikipedia articles, on topics from Morocco to Natalie Portman to Sinn Féin, are corrupted by ChatGPT. And that's just the obvious ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%22utm_source%3Dchatgpt.com%22&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1&searchToken=8ops8b9qb8qmw8by39k248jyp

New science-related development - The NIH Is Capping Research Proposals Because It's Overwhelmed by AI Submissions

Caught a particularly spectacular AI fuckup in the wild:

(Sidenote: Rest in peace Ozzy - after the long and wild life you had, you've earned it)

Copilot will be given a little avatar with a "room" and will "age". In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.

https://www.theverge.com/news/713715/microsoft-copilot-appearance-feature-age-mustafa-suleyman-interview

New Ed Zitron: The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble

(guy truly is the Kendrick Lamar of tech, huh)

If you wanted a vision of the future of autocomplete, imagine a computer failing at predicting what you’re gonna write but absolutely burning through kilowatts trying to, forever.

https://unstable.systems/@sop/114898566686215926

the students in my cs department are overwhelmingly promptfondlers and even my strong students are doing the "qualified praise" thing.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

Found a neat mini-sneer in the wild: It's rude to show AI output to people

I tried to see if anyone sells chocolate coins modeled after historical gold coinage and the search engine wanted to be, uh, helpful:

Highlighted portion by Google, not me. Funny how almost everything in the answer is mostly correct, though it's bizarre to explain this to someone searching with these keywords as if I don't already know what florins and chocolate coins are if I'm looking for chocolate florins specifically. The only part blatantly wrong is the highlighted lede!

Alex O'Connor platformed Sabine on his philosophy podcast. I'm irritated that he is turning into Lex Friedman simply by being completely uncritical. Well, no, wait, he was critical of Bell's theorem, and even Sabine had to tell him that Bell's work is mathematically proven. This is what a philosophy degree does to your epistemology, I guess.

My main sneer here is just some links. See, Mary's Room is answered by neuroscience; Mary does experience something new when color vision is restored. In particular, check out the testimonials from this 2021 Oregon experiment that restored color vision to some folks born without it. Focusing on physics, I'd like to introduce you all to Richard Behiel, particularly his explanations of electromagnetism and the Anderson-Higgs mechanism; there are deeper explanations for electricity and magnets, my dude. Also, if you haven't yet, go read Alex's Wikipedia article, linked at the top of the sneer.

I found this because Greg Egan shared it elsewhere on fedi:

I am now being required by my day job to use an AI assistant to write code. I have also been informed that my usage of AI assistants will be monitored and decisions about my career will be based on those metrics.

It gets worse from there.

Starting this off with a fittingly rage-inducing Twitter thread about an artist getting fucked over by AI

Found an archive of vibe-coding disasters recently - recommend checking it out.

"An AI? But using that you could find a cure for cancer!"

"But I dont want to make a cure for cancer, i want to generate powerpoint presentations. Look it just made this quarterly_report_june_july_jan.wpd file for me."

It's hard to come up with analogies for AI because it's so goddamn stupid. It's like if asbestos was flammable.

Looks like itch.io has (hidden/removed/disabled payouts for? reports vary) its vast swath of NSFW-adjacent content which is not great

addendum: itch.io finally put out a statement https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

shrimppost found in the wild

Should we give up on all altruist causes because the AGI God is nearly here? the answer may surprise you!

tldr; actually you shouldn't give because the AGI God might not be quite omnipotent and thus would still benefit from your help and maybe there will be multiple Gods, some used for Good and some for Evil so your efforts are still needed. Shrimp are getting their eyeballs cut off right now!