antifuchs

joined 1 year ago
[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago

I’m sure there are plenty of true believers (there always are in startup brain land), but even true believers like spending money.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 2 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

It’s the risk:benefit tradeoff always. Sure you can hold on to all your illiquid stock in a private company with transfer restrictions, but will that pay for a house or even a banana? Does it ever not. The “take a loan for liquidity until you can sell some stock” trick worked for a little bit but companies are wise to that too now, and don’t allow it.

So people can pick between real money they can spend on stuff (or invest in a slightly less illiquid way) or being paper multimillionaires with no actual liquidity; not a hard choice imho.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

AllTrails doing their part in the war on genAI by disappearing the people who would trust genAI: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/17/news/alltrails-ai-tool-search-rescue-members

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago

But it apologizes when you tell it it’s wrong!

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 25 points 1 week ago

but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

Classic “Yes” / “ask me later”. You hate to see it.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 14 points 2 weeks ago

Even the color scheme is the HN theme, looks like

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago

Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

But it lets you adjust your priors so pleasantly!

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 4 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, I grew up speaking a language that pronounces Latin closer to Italian than to English too (:

This particular thing is actually doubly funny to me, whose first practical professional program was one that took German text with English words mixed in and used regex to transform the English terms into nonsense words that would get pronounced right by the German-only text-to-speech system. That was 2002.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 6 points 4 weeks ago

Lots of mental masturbation will have that effect

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

They’re making students listen to fabulated pronunciations of their name at the graduation ceremony https://fixupx.com/CollinRugg/status/1925328380742062485

The Magna Cooom Loud thing could absolutely be a sketch https://fixupx.com/stevemur/status/1925350041277145159

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

Epic announced that it had pushed a hotfix to address Vader's unfortunate profanity, saying "this shouldn't happen again."

Translator: “We are altering the prompt. We pray that we don’t have to alter it further.”

 

Got the pointer to this from Allison Parrish who says it better than I could:

it's a very compelling paper, with a super clever methodology, and (i'm paraphrasing/extrapolating) shows that "alignment" strategies like RLHF only work to ensure that it never seems like a white person is saying something overtly racist, rather than addressing the actual prejudice baked into the model.

 

School student tells AI to put 20 other students’ faces on nude pictures, shares them in chat; it takes months for anyone including the school administrators to act because of some extremely, uh, dubious loophole.

If someone does that in photoshop, it’s a crime; if they do it in AI pretending to be photoshop, it’s somehow not. Gotta love this legal system’s focus on minor technicalities rather than the harm done.

 

They have Nik Suresh (the author) on, as well as Robert Evans. I haven’t listened to it all yet, but it’s fun so far.

view more: next ›