[-] nfultz@awful.systems 8 points 4 hours ago

Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

spoiler

In the meantime, if any search committees are reading this: I am still available. My research program is innovative and well-structured. I have a clear vision for my independent career.

It’s saved in a Google Doc that I can share with you. ChatGPT and I worked very hard on it.

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Nobody Knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI Hacking Sprees Are Illegal | Wired via naked capitalism

Are you liable when your random sentence generator does something random to someone else? Nobody knows!

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 1 points 2 days ago

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yTucIB_73L0

I noticed when I posted a little AI scene of me riding my mule and eating cheese sandwiches, but totally AI, like everyone got really mad, which I found quite amusing, y'know? So I kept doing it.

I mean, not sure what I expected when I looked him up.

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago

I see you, and raise by a Gundam solar space laser - https://www.reflectorbital.com/

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago

AI Crisis Flowchart spotted on linkedin

spoiler

and the actual article: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out-and-the-hype-that-followed-it

quoted zvi haha :|

To be fair, the safety community can plausibly claim vindication here. At worst, an autonomous agent that breaches containment and attacks a real third party is precisely the scenario researchers have warned about for years, which enthusiasts have routinely dismissed as speculative. And at best, the company in charge of maintaining safety failed to construct an adequate containment system.

are you fucking kidding me, they have been DDoSing sites for months, everybody knows about it, and the "safety" community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions. I know multiple companies that woke up one day to 10-20k netlify bills until they could stand up an anubis.

Just let hugging face sue the idiots, it isn't like law enforcement will do anything even though there's already laws on the books for unauthorized access, industrial espionage, etc etc etc.

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 19 points 1 month ago

https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism

Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.

More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.

? the kids are alright ?

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 19 points 1 month ago

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer

For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like "write this app" or "write this functionality" which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.

Please, just fucking don't, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don't actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 17 points 5 months ago

From fellow traveler stats consultant John Mount:

https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/WeAreCookedLLMs.html

Somehow he manages to touch on so many different subplots, a shotgun sneer instead of snipe

if “tech-bro” plus a LLM is a “100x engineer”, then “bro” isn’t needed for much longer as the LLM alone must be a “99x engineer.” However, I don’t think “bro plus” is often really a 100x engineer, and the LLM alone isn’t a 99x engineer. However, “bro plus” may outlast their peers who make the mistake of trying to do the actual work in place of talking LLMs up.

The above may or may not be the case. But if it is, then it is the LLM-bros (which include non-technologists, con artists, financiers, men and women) that are destroying everything - not the LLMs.

The problem with this iteration is the full court press of finance and technology. The major players are using financing to dump results at a price way below production costs. This isn't charity, it is to demoralize and kill competition.

claiming "after we take over the world we will consider adding Universal Basic Income (UBI)". The LLM bros already have a lot of the money, and they are not even rehearsing diverting it into basic income now. Why does one believe they would do that when they also have all of the power?

You don't have to hand it to Altman, but he did fund the largest UBI experiment through Open Research with his il gotten gains. OTOH, one interpretation of that data was that UBI "decreases the labor supply" which was then used directly as an argument against it.

Any worry about scope or power of LLMs is fed back as an alignment threat so dire that only the current LLM leaders should be allowed to continue work (inviting regulatory capture). Any claim the LLMs don't work is fed back as "you are prompting it wrong"

Orbital deployment makes all of radiation tolerance, connectivity, power, maintenance, and heat dissipation much harder and much more expensive. We are still at a time where putting an oven or air-frier in space is considered noteworthy (China 2025, NASA 2019 ref).

air friers IN SPACE ha

I am more worried about the LLM-bros and their auto-catalytic money doomsday machine than about the LLMs themselves.

100% - ACMDM is a nice turn of phrase as well.

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 27 points 5 months ago

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rentahuman-musk-ai h/t naked capitalism

Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.

gah

Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.

lmao of course they were

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 18 points 5 months ago

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science | Nature h/t naked capitalism

One reason for the boom is that LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity, by as much as 89.3%, according to research published in Science in December.

Let's not call it "productivity" - to quote Bergstrom, twice as many papers is not the same as twice as much science.

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 18 points 7 months ago

I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

In UCLA's Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to "Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles" and Goal 5 is to "Become a more effective institution". By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

My question is:

If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

Thank you.

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Another response to Ptacek.

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I found this seminar for spring quarter, does anyone have some suggested / related readings? Especially deep cuts or articles from the first AI winter.

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nfultz

joined 3 years ago