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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)
An interesting thing came through the arXiv-o-tube this evening: “The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None”.
Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something “really is” and how something “appears to be”, and this gap helps us understand the mental processing that lead to how something appears to be. Illusions are also useful for investigating artificial systems, and much research has examined whether computational models of perceptions fall prey to the same illusions as people. Here, I invert the standard use of perceptual illusions to examine basic processing errors in current vision language models. I present these models with illusory-illusions, neighbors of common illusions that should not elicit processing errors. These include such things as perfectly reasonable ducks, crooked lines that truly are crooked, circles that seem to have different sizes because they are, in fact, of different sizes, and so on. I show that many current vision language systems mistakenly see these illusion-illusions as illusions. I suggest that such failures are part of broader failures already discussed in the literature.
It’s definitely linked in with the problem we have with LLMs where they detect the context surrounding a common puzzle rather than actually doing any logical analysis. In the image case I’d be very curious to see the control experiment where you ask “which of these two lines is bigger?” and then feed it a photograph of a dog rather than two lines of any length. I’m reminded of how it was (is?)easy to trick chatGPT into nonsensical solutions to any situation involving crossing a river because it pattern-matched to the chicken/fox/grain puzzle rather than considering the actual facts being presented.
Also now that I type it out I think there’s a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger. But that’s neither here nor there.
I think there’s a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger
I disagree, or rather I think that’s actually a feature; “neither” is a perfectly reasonable answer to that question that a human being would give, and LLMs would be fucked by since they basically never go against the prompt.
Surprised this hasn’t been mentioned yet: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/meta-ai-users-facebook-instagram-1235221430/
I think it did come up a few weeks back, but it’s indeed a hilarious mess. the engagement must flow!
hoping for a 2025 with solidarity, aid, and good opsec for everyone who needs it the most
https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780#m
The whole thread is terrible; controlling and borderline abusive behavior.
I feel personally attacked because I have a BELOVED dino plush that looks almost exactly like that one, only is, you know, a fucking plush toy not an eldritch horror. They took a perfectly fine toy and ruined it with a stupid chatbot, the girl did the smartest thing and just uses it as a normal plushy.
Also if you listen to the video at the end you can really easily figure out why kids don’t like that toy, IT’S FUCKING ANNOYING. Kids don’t want to deal with your bullshit and fortunately they don’t yet know how to pretend to care.
“In the meantime, would you like to play a game or maybe hear a fun fact?”
“No.”
“That’s okay! Is there something else you would like to do or talk about? I’m here to chat about anything you like!”
It’s like a deliberately written comedy scene of a character who can’t pick up on social cues.
Found a couple QRTs cooking the guy which caught my attention:
https://twitter.com/denimneverdies/status/1872364569743786286
https://twitter.com/TheWapplehouse/status/1873915404529406462
Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal year–
Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering
Huh. I guess it’ll be another weird one.
(I know I know, low effort post, I’m sick in bed and bored)
Hey, at least there’s no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?
Never mind.
They are also spinning it into “the car is so great you cant do terrorism with it due to how strong it is”, which considering the several vehicle terrorism acts recently seems very unwise.
Also ‘it would be different for the bystanders’ i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely) and still 7 people were hurt (and the driver died). Id wait a bit with drawing further conclusions.
chalk it down to perp incompetence. single direct hit with old 155mm shell (7kg explosive) can destroy a normal modern tank, nevermind a car. no amount of shitty panels would contain anything at least mildly substantial. there were cases of suicide vests with bigger charge than that (10kg) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66355032
i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely)
symbolic building (??) still makes sense as a target for terrorist attack
