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.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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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)
Forget counting the Rs in strawberry, biggest challenge to LLMs is not making up bullshit about recent events not in their training data
The AI is right with how much we know of his life he osnt really dead, the AGI can just simulate hom and resurrect him. Takes another hit from my joint made exclusively out of the sequences book pages
(Rip indeed, what a crazy ride, and he was all aboard).
click here to take 10d8 psychic damage
Ouch. Also, I'm raging and didn't even realize I had barbarian levels.
Well I suppose it can't be much worse than graphology or myers-briggs!
is graphology the pentaseptateragonoid spiderweb-dartboard-connect-the-spines thing?
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failed my saving throw.
I don't know what I expected
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?
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.
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"
Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.
I'm confused by this. Didn't we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn't perfect but at least didn't hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??
Transformers do way better transcription, buuuuuut yeah you gotta check it
I'm just confused because I remember using Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows 98 in the 90s and it worked pretty accurately already back then for dictation and sometimes it feels as if all of that never happened.
Lol, training data must have included videos where there was silence but on screen was a credit for translation. Silence in audio shouldn't require special "workarounds".
The whisper model has always been pretty crappy at these things: I use a speech to text system as an assistive input method when my RSI gets bad and it has support for whisper (because that supports more languages than the developer could train on their own infrastructure/time) since maybe 2022 or so: every time someone tries to use it, they run into hallucinated inputs in pauses - even with very good silence detection and noise filtering.
This is just not a use case of interest to the people making whisper, imagine that.
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Ernie Davis gives his thoughts on the recent GDM and OAI performance at the IMO.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/deepmind-and-openai-achieve-imo-gold
New Ed Zitron: The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
(guy truly is the Kendrick Lamar of tech, huh)
Hey, remember the thing that you said would happen?
https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3lujqik6nnc2z
Edit: whoops, looks like we posted at about the same time!
Hey, remember the thing that you said would happen?
The part about condemnation and mockery? Yeah, I already thought that was guaranteed, but I didn't expect to be vindicated so soon afterwards.
EDIT: One of the replies gives an example for my "death of value-neutral AI" prediction too, openly calling AI "a weapon of mass destruction" and calling for its abolition.
Managed to stumble across two separate attempts to protect promptfondlers' feelings from getting hurt like they deserve, titled "Shame in the machine: affective accountability and the ethics of AI" and "AI Could Have Written This: Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work".
I found both of them whilst trawling Bluesky, and they're being universally mocked like they deserve on there.
I really like how the second one appropriates pseudomarxist language to have a go at those snooty liberal elites again.
edit: The first paper might be making a perfectly valid point at a glance??
Not sure if this was already posted here but saw it on LI this morning - AI for Good [Appearance?] - sometimes we focus on the big companies and miss how awful the sycophantic ecosystem gets.
ah yeah @fasterandworse found this when it was happening (and I pulled archives of the live streams on the days it was playing)
some further observations to the stuff in her writeup: the day1 livestream also “starts late” (and cuts suspiciously cleanly in mid-sentence). I still want to do some tests to find out if YouTube’s live editor allows editing out stream history while stream is going, but either way they made very sure that they could completely silence that talk if it turned out that she didn’t bend as forced
(the now-up video published on youtube definitely starts differently to the livestream, too, so it’s likely a local post-mix recording that got uploaded. I haven’t had time to review both and find possible differences)
Enjoy this LW answer about "myths that encapsulate eternal truths". No. 3 will surprise you!