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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.
Firstly, an update on Grok’s White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok’s prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.
Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:
You want my opinion on the “scab” comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.
Think you are misreading the blog post. They did this after the Grok had its white genocide hyperfocus thing. It shows the process of the xAI public github (their fix (??) for Groks hyperfocus) is bad, not that they started it. (There is also no reason to believe this github is actually what they are using directly (would be pretty foolish of them, which is why I could also believe they could be using it))
If anything I think this is pretty solid evidence that they aren’t actually using it. There was enough of a gap that the nuke of that PR was an edit to the original post and I can’t imagine that if it had actually been used that we wouldn’t have seen another flurry of screenshots of bad output.
I think it also suggests that the engineers at x.ai are treating the whole thing with a level of contempt that I’m having a hard time interpreting. On one hand it’s true that the public GitHub using what is allegedly grok’s actual prompt (at least at time of publishing) is probably a joke in terms of actual transparency and accountability. On the other hand, it feels almost like either a cry for help or a stone-cold denial of how bad things are that the original change that prompted all this could have gone through in the first place.
Yeah indeed, had not even thought of the timegap. And it is such a bit of bullshit misdirection, very Muskian, to pretend that this fake transparency in any way solves the problem. We don’t know what the bad prompt was nor who did it, and as shown here, this fake transparency prevents nothing. Really wished more journalists/commentators were not just free pr.