I mean, in the worst case, we find out if these database backups are worth a damn? but realistically, we see so much spam from activitypub already that it should be hard to make things fall over*

• unless you know which parts to push on, then it’s instant

type systems are censorship. proof assistants? how dare you imply I would need to prove anything

…fuck, I’m flashing back to the one time a Verilog developer told me formal verification wasn’t real because mathematicians don’t understand engineering

that’s a good question! I’ll probably have to brainstorm this with @dgerard@awful.systems later today. in the meantime, is there any precedent for how to do it on Mastodon? we might be able to adopt whatever they do — or maybe at the very least, if there’s a good way to do it there, we could link to a Mastodon thread for the bracket and keep discussion on here.

I’d really like to know too, especially given how many times we’ve already seen LLMs misused in scientific settings. it’s starting to feel like the LLM people don’t have that notion — but that’s crazy, right?

like fuck, all you or I want out of these wandering AI jackasses is something vaguely resembling a technical problem statement or the faintest outline of an algorithm. normal engineering shit.

but nah, every time they just bullshit and say shit that doesn’t mean a damn thing as if we can’t tell, and when they get called out, every time it’s the “well you ¡haters! just don’t understand LLMs” line, as if we weren’t expecting a technical answer that just never came (cause all of them are only just cosplaying as technically skilled people and it fucking shows)

uh huh

it’s fucking amazing, all these words and you’ve managed to post exactly zero facts. time for you to fuck off

We’d be better off not trying to censor it

this claim keeps getting brought up and every time it doesn’t seem to mean a damn thing, particularly since no, censoring the output of an LLM doesn’t do anything to its ability to predict text. censoring its training set would, but seeing as the topic of this thread is a fact an LLM fabricated by being just a dumb text predictor — there’s no real way to censor the training set to prevent this, LLMs are just shitty.

I summarize all of that by saying AI is a useful tool

trying to find a use case for this horseshit has broken your brain into thinking these worthless tools would have value if only they weren’t “being censored” or whatever cope you gleaned from the twitter e/accs

believe it or not, yes. there’s an extensive early awful.systems thread where @dgerard@awful.systems and I found Yarvin’s original spec that described this (since then Urbit’s gotten much more intentionally obscure, but the ideological base is exactly the same) which I can dig up if you’re interested

non-edit: fuck it here you go, and if you’d like more psychic damage just search our local threads for urbit because there’s so much more and it gets so much stupider

It would be a simple matter to have it summarize the output it’s about to give you and dump the output of it paints the subject in a negative light.

“it can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong”

lisp machines but networked

urbit’s even stupider than this, cause lisp machines were infamously network-reliant (MIT, symbolics, and LMI machines wouldn’t even boot properly without a particular set of delicately-configured early network services, though they had the core of their OS on local storage), so yarvin’s brain took that and went “what if all I/O was treated like a network connection”, a decision that causes endless problems of its own

speaking of, one day soon I should release my code that sets up a proper network environment for an MIT cadr machine (which mostly relies on a PDP-10 emulator running one of the AI lab archive images) and a complete Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine environment (which needs a fuckton of brittle old Unix services, including a particular version of an old pre-ntp time daemon (this is so important for booting the lisp machine for some reason) and NFSv1 (with its included port mapper dependency and required utterly insecure permissions)) so there’s at least a nice way to experience some of this history that people keep stealing from firsthand

Also, I’m shockingly infuriated that the tech workers that would end up being the ones replaced the soonest are so busy licking boots rather than throwing their shoes into the machinery.

so much of our industry is dedicated to ensuring that tech workers, most of whom consider themselves experts on complex systems, never analyze or try to influence the social systems surrounding and influencing their labor. these are the same loud voices that insist tech isn’t political, while turning important parts of our public and open source tech infrastructure into a Nazi bar.

I can see that as being one of the influences that fed into the formation of the TESCREAL belief package — “I have an automaton that behaves like a person but with supernatural qualities” really is an ancient grift, and the TESCREAL belief in omnipotent AGI being just around the corner is that same grift taken to an extreme

I agree; LLMs and generative AI are indelibly a product of capitalism, and they can’t exist without widespread theft, exploitation of labor, massive concentrations of capital, and a willingness to destroy the environment. they are the stupidest use of technology I’ve ever seen, and after cryptocurrencies the bar for stupid was pretty fucking high. that the products themselves obscure the theft and exploitation that went into training them is a feature for the corporations developing this horseshit, not a bug.

and that’s why it’s notable that the self-described AI researchers behind these garbage products can’t even do basic shit like have the LLM not call a journalist a pedophile without resorting to an absolute hack that won’t scale. there’s no fixing LLMs; systemically, they are what they are. and now this absolute horseshit is a component of what’s unfortunately still the dominant desktop operating system.

are there mechanisms known to researchers that Microsoft’s not using that can prevent this type of failure case in an LLM without resorting to whack-a-mole with a regex?

god, so this is actually the best the AI researchers can do with the tools they’ve shit out into the world without giving any thought to failure cases or legal liability (beyond their manager on slackTeams claiming it’s been taken care of)

so fuck it, let’s make the defamation machine a non-optional component of windows. we’ll just make it a P0 when someone who could actually get us in legal trouble complains! everyone else is a P2 that never gets assigned.

Copilot then listed a string of crimes Bernklau had supposedly committed — saying that he was an abusive undertaker exploiting widows, a child abuser, an escaped criminal mental patient. [SWR, in German]

These were stories Bernklau had written about. Copilot produced text as if he was the subject. Then Copilot returned Bernklau’s phone number and address!

and there’s fucking nothing in place to prevent this utterly obvious failure case, other than if you complain Microsoft will just lazily regex for your name in the result and refuse to return anything if it appears

“what kind of a boy is Curtis Yarvin?”

well… he’s a birthday boy

Most shockingly to Urbit devotees and outsiders alike, the board welcomed back Curtis Yarvin, the project’s founder, who left in 2019.

nothing has ever shocked me less than Yarvin “returning” to urbit

In 2015, a technical conference rescinded his speaking invitation. The following year, another tech conference lost sponsors and was almost canceled because it allowed him to speak, over objections that this verbose, bespectacled engineer would make attendees feel somehow “unsafe.” (Perhaps some feared he would bore everyone to death by reading his posts aloud, or torture them with his poetry.)

[…]

While the cancel culture of the 2010s and early 2020s may be subsiding, bringing Yarvin back remains a calculated risk for Urbit, William Ball, the board member, said on the developer call.

these fuckers are still fucking seething over their adult baby godking being asked not to come to a functional programming conference because he publicly advocates for a fascist takeover of the United States, receives funding from fascists, does press interviews promoting the fascist influencer circles he hangs out in, and is the computer science equivalent of a flat earther. how will our industry ever recover from the absolutely no value that was lost by disinviting him?

ah shit, I wrote the above before the edit to Holium — I remember that twitter post! (also, xcancel link for anyone who wants to see this weird shit and can’t)

now that’s definitely worth digging into — I want to see the specific political angle these shitheads are going after. it really could be a renewal of the “web3 crypto OS, whatever the fuck that means” angle now that Thiel and company are pumping so much money into getting pro-crypto politicians elected

I need to look more into this, but I’ve got the sinking suspicion that the technofascists have come to a realization: that ultra-obscure non-functioning systems like urbit play well if your techfash inroad is forming an influential technocratic thinktank (and there’s plenty of precedent for exactly this type of shit working to gain lasting political influence), but it’s utterly worthless if your path to fascist takeover is through, say, the defense industry. urbit is useless for reliably launching or controlling a missile; urbit can’t even do normal desktop shit right, and unlike a lot of defense contracting failures, this is utterly obvious and can’t be papered over.

NixOS is too heavy to run on a missile (it might have a place onboard a drone, maybe), but Nix can easily be (and has been) sold as a massive boon to missile firmware development, and a way to modernize a number of launch and control systems external to a missile. that’s why Nix was a good fucking get for the fascists — it’s working, unique technology none of them were smart enough to come up with, its creators are too socially immature and hateful to know what happens when they become a nazi bar, and Nix itself is still obscure and impenetrable enough (and the techfash element of the community has absolutely ensured this has gotten worse) that having a monopoly on software engineering contractors with Nix expertise and clearance can still be used as a wedge to establish an unassailable position with a high level of political control.

Kinode can’t be used in a missile or a drone, but it’s definitely an adaptation of the non-language parts of urbit to something that wants to look like a more typical cloud deployment. I wish I could analyze what Kinode’s political inroad is, but all the docs on their terrible website 404, so I should dig in and see if they’re still active, or if their funders have decided there’s a more promising inroad elsewhere.