Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
Mathematicians: [challenge promptfondlers with a fair set of problems]
OpenAI: [breaks the test protocol, whines]
First of all, like, if you can't keep track of your transcripts, just how fucking incompetent are you?
Second, I would actually be interested in a problem set where the problems can't be solved. What happens if one prompts the chatbot with a conjecture that is plausible but false? We cannot understand the effect of this technology upon mathematics without understanding the cost of mathematical sycophancy. (I will not be running that test myself, on the "meth: not even once" principle.)
I would go so far as to try and find a suitably precocious undergrad to run the test that they themselves are capable of guiding and nudging the model the way OpenAI's team did but not of determining on their own that the conjecture in question is false. OpenAI's results here needed a fair bit of cajoling and guidance, and without that I can only assume it would give the same kind of non-answer regardless of whether the question is in fact solvable.
AcerFur (who is quoted in the article) tried them himself and said he got similar answers with a couple guiding prompts on gpt 5.3 and that he was “disappointed”
That said, AcerFur is kind of the goat at this kind of thing 🦊==🐐