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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    3 months ago

    Today in “Promptfondler fucks around and finds out.”

    So I’m guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn’t end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing or when to stop, especially when it’s being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.

    Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn’t remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.

    Emphasis added.

    • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      “I only had this problem because I was very reckless,” he continued, "partially because I think it’s interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it ‘when you’ve finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,’ I wouldn’t have had this problem.

      just instruct it “be sentient” and you’re good, why don’t these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:

      ❯ pbpaste| wc -c
    2063

      wow, so efficient! I’m so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection

      these fucking people

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Let’s try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:

        there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)

        if it were me, I’d be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers don’t seem to have that awareness

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            it’s a classic

            similarly, Mickens talks. if you haven’t ever seen ‘em, that’s your next todo

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!

          I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:

          Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.