So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.
As someone who’s doing a ton of frontend and backend, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck the asinine attitude that somehow everything that’s even remotely web-adjacent needs to be written or rewritten in pure JS.
Also Node is an abomination and literally every other language I’ve tried is better for the backend. People love to shit on Ruby, but JS has every flaw that Ruby is criticized for and then some, and at least Ruby makes an effort to take some great design paradigms from Lisp.
Peter, Paul and Mary are the only three people in the room. Peter only reads a book, and Paul plays a game of chess against someone else who’s also in the room. What is Mary doing?
My favorite bullshit test is to have the AI count letters. Something as simple as "How many A's are in this sentence?" will have the thing give you a seemingly random number (which might sometimes even be correct), but as soon as you ask it to list them, it will have a stroke and just make up stuff that makes no sense.
I can't be arsed to make an account with OpenAI or whatever, so here's an example with Bing Chat, but this has worked on every single chatbot I've tested it on.
Another fun test (as suggested by @flizzo last time I brought this up) is to have the chatbot attempt to crack a simple code. Just Caesar cipher something and ask it to crack it. Hilarity will ensue. You can even ask it to encrypt it first and then to crack it for extra fun.
Me: Encrypt the sentence "I am a stupid roided Clippy" with the Caesar cipher.
Clippy: [After explaining what the Ceasar cipher is, which I didn't ask for, thanks] Convert the sentence to uppercase: “I AM A STUPID ROIED CLIPPY”. Let’s apply the Caesar cipher to your sentence using a shift of 7.
- ‘I’ becomes ‘P’
- ‘A’ becomes ‘H’
- ‘M’ becomes ‘T’
- …
- ‘Y’ becomes ‘F’
So the encrypted sentence is: “PH HT H ZBHTLW YVPLUU”. 😊
Okay, first of all, it dropped a letter. And the shift isn't even correct, lol. It said Y becomes F and then does whatever the fuck.
Okay, so let's give it an easy example, and even tell it the shift. Let's see how that works.
This shit doesn't even produce one correct message. Internal state or not, it should at least be able to read the prompt correctly and then produce an answer based on that. I mean, the DuckDuckGo search field can fucking do it!
I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.
This is brilliant and I’m saving it and will post a link to it the next time someone at work asks why we can’t “just use AI to do it” when a ticket gets rejected for being stupid and/or unreasonable.
However:
The first is that we have some sort of intelligence explosion, where AI recursively self-improves itself, and we're all harvested for our constituent atoms […]. It may surprise some readers that I am open to the possibility of this happening, but I have always found the arguments reasonably sound.
Yeah, I gotta admit, I am surprised. Because I have not found a single reasonable argument for this horseshit and the rest of the article (as well as the others I read from their blog) does not read like it’s been written by someone who’d buy into AI foom.
Seriously, could someone gift this dude a subscription to spicyautocompletegirlfriends.ai so he can finally cum?
One thing that's crazy: it's not just skeptics, virtually EVERYONE in AI has a terrible track record - and all in the same OPPOSITE direction from usual! In every other industry, due to the Planning Fallacy etc, people predict things will take 2 years, but they actually take 10 years. In AI, people predict 10 years, then it happens in 2!
ai_quotes_from_1965.txt
Microsoft announced that 2024 will be the era of the AI PC, and unveiled that upcoming Windows PCs would ship with a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard.
Tell me they're desperate because not many people use that shit without telling me they're desperate because not many people use that shit.
Do they think intelligence is limited to speaking fancy, and/or having the tools to solve specific problems?
Yes. They literally think that. I mean, why else would they assume a spicy text extruder with a built-in thesaurus is so smart?
Oh shit, I remember the Musk namedrop in Discovery. Didn’t they name him alongside historical scientists and inventors? I seldom feel actual cringe but that was actually embarrassing.
There’s a giant overlap between Christian fundamentalism and the whole singularity shtick, and Yud’s whole show is really the technological version of Christian futurist eschatology (i.e. the belief that the Book of Revelations etc. are literal depictions of the future).
Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross call it Rapture of the Nerds.
I bet that guy watches anime on 2x speed and skips parts without dialog to feel more “productive”.
Proof that pasta doesn't exist:
- An atom isn't pasta.
- Adding an atom to something that isn't pasta doesn't make it pasta.
- Therefore nothing is pasta.
Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and "just asking questions". As if I didn't hate this clown enough.
(For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They're praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They're so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament's far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There's no leeway. They're literal card-carrying national socialists.)
I'm reading Feynman's lectures on electromagnetism right now, and GPT-4o can answer questions and help me with the math. I doubt that even a smart high school would be able to do it.
Ten bucks this guy hasn’t double-checked anything his chatbot told him but accepted it as truth because it used big words in grammatically coherent ways.
They managed to make this even more stupid than the open letter from last year which had Yud among the signatories. At least that one was consistent in its message while this one somehow manages to shoehorn an Altman milquetoast well-akshually in that AI is, like, totes useful and stuff until it's gonna murder us all.
Who are the even pandering to here?
"You know, we just had a little baby, and I keep asking myself... how old is he even gonna get?"
Tegmark, you absolute fucking wanker. If you actually believe your eschatological x-risk nonsense and still produced a child despite being convinced that he's going to be paperclipped in a few years, you're a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit. And if you don't believe it and just lie for the PR, knowingly leading people into depression and anxiety, you're also a sadistic egomaniacal piece of shit.
Many will point out that AI systems are not yet writing award-winning books, […]
Holy shit, these chucklefucks are so full of themselves. To them, art and expression and invention are really just menial tasks which ought to be automated away, aren’t they? They claim to be so smart but constantly demonstrate they’re too stupid to understand that literature is more than big words on a page, and that all their LLMs need to do to replace artists is to make their autocomplete soup pretentious enough that they can say: This is deep, bro.
I can’t wait for the first AI-brained litbro trying to sell some LLM’s hallucinations as the Finnegans Wake of our age.
So apparently Mozilla has decided to jump on the bandwagon and add a roided Clippy to Firefox.
I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, the way they present it, accessibility does seem to be one of the very few non-shitty uses of LLMs I can think of, plus it’s not cloud-based. On the other hand, it’s still throwing resources onto a problem that can and should be solved elsewhere.
At least they acknowledge the resource issue and claim that their small model is more environmentally friendly and carbon-efficient, but I can’t verify this and remain skeptical by default until someone can independently confirm it.
There’s a MacOS app around that does pretty much the same thing called Rewind AI, but it’s a stupid subscription service as usual and for some inexplicable reason some people actually want this.
While half of the reactions were “this is a the top of apps I wouldn’t install on my machine ever”, the other half was celebrating it in the name of our lord and savior productivity, going as far as saying this is a nice way to remember passwords …
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I
Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.
Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.
> Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.
“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”
I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.
This AI hype cycle has dramatically distorted society's views of what's possible with image upscalers.
It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.
> Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.
You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.
> Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.
And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.
SXSW audiences all day booed a festival video (played Tuesday in front of screenings) featuring tech pundits touting their enthusiasm for AI.
It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.
> “I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”
I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).
> Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.
Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.
Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.
> […] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].
Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".
> […] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”
I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.
Mii @awful.systems I wrangle code, draw pictures, and write things. You might find some of it here.