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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.)

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[-] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago

yet again, you can bypass LLM "prompt security" with a fanfiction attack

https://hiddenlayer.com/innovation-hub/novel-universal-bypass-for-all-major-llms/

not Pivoting cos (1) the fanfic attack is implicit in building an uncensored compressed text repo, then trying to filter output after the fact (2) it's an ad for them claiming they can protect against fanfic attacks, and I don't believe them

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

I think unrelated to the attack above, but more about prompt hack security, so while back I heard people in tech mention that the solution to all these prompt hack attacks is have a secondary LLM look at the output of the first and prevent bad output that way. Which is another LLM under the trench coat (drink!), but also doesn't feel like it would secure a thing, it would just require more complex nested prompthacks. I wonder if somebody is just going to eventually generalize how to nest various prompt hacks and just generate a 'prompthack for a LLM protected by N layers of security LLMs'. Just found the 'well protect it with another AI layer' to sound a bit naive, and I was a bit disappointed in the people saying this, who used to be more genAI skeptical (but money).

[-] flaviat@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Now I'm wondering if an infinite sequence of nested LLMs could achieve AGI. Probably not.

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[-] maol@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

That Couple are in the news arís. surprisingly, the racist, sexist dog holds opinions that a racist, sexist dog could be expected to hold, and doesn't think poor people should have more babies. He does want Native Americans to have more babies, though, because they're "on the verge of extinction", and he thinks of cultural groups and races as exhibits in a human zoo. Simone Collins sits next to her racist, sexist dog of a husband and explains how paid parental leave could lead to companies being reluctant to hire women (although her husband seems to think all women are good for us having kids).

This gruesome twosome deserve each other: their kids don't.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago
[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google's AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

Also on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:

Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers

Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours

Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)

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[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

"Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’"

https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3lne5zqaxyc2c

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

I’m sure whoever put money into that venture will see dramatically amazing returns, now there’s a founder that will not take the money and run.

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[-] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Not the usual topic around here, but a scream into the void no less....

Andor season 1 was art.

Andor season 2 is just... Bad.

All the important people appear to have been replaced. It's everything - music, direction, lighting, sets (why are we back to The Volume after S1 was so praised for its on-location sets?!), and the goddamn shit humor.

Here and there, a conversation shines through from (presumably) Gilroy's original script, everything else is a farce, and that is me being nice.

The actors are still phenomenal.

But almost no scene seems to have PURPOSE. This show is now just bastardizing its own AESTHETICS.

What is curious though is that two days before release, the internet was FLOODED with glowing reviews of "one of the best seasons of television of all time", "the darkest and most mature star wars has ever been", "if you liked S1, you will love S2". And now actual, post-release reviews are impossible to find.

Over on reddit, every even mildly critical comment is buried. Seems to me like concerted bot actions tbh, a lot of the glowing comments read like LLM as well.

Idk, maybe I'm the idiot for expecting more. But it hurts to go from a labor-of-love S1 which felt like an instruction manual for revolution, so real was what it had to say and critique, to S2 "pew pew, haha, look, we're doing STAR WARS TM" shit that feels like Kenobi instead of Andor S1.

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)

The piece falls back into the standard "AI Is Inevitable™" at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.

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[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

Show HN: AI Paying with Bitcoin and Lightning – A Working Demo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770953

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble's aftermath

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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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