p3x.dediz, diz@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
Joined: 3 years ago
Posts: 8
Comments: 99
Posts and Comments by diz, diz@awful.systems
techtakes
Comments by diz, diz@awful.systems
NotAwfulTechHonestly 16 bit would be easier because there would just be so much less code.
Pre-LLM, I had to sit through one or two annual videos to the sense of “dont cut and paste from open source, better yet don’t even look at GPLd code you arent working on” and had to do a click test with questions like “is it ok if you rename all the variables yes no”. Ohh and I had to run a scanning tool as part of the release process.
I don’t think its the FSD they would worry about, but GPL especially v3. Nobody gives a shit if it steals some leetcode snippet, or cuts and pastes some calls to a stupid API.
But if you have a “coding agent” just replicating GPL code wholesale, thousands and thousands of lines, it would be very obvious. And not all companies ship shitcode. Apple is a premium product and ages old patched CVEs from open source cropping up in there wouldn’t be exactly premium.
That is not equivalent, though; other solutions to "can not be left unattended" exist; just ask Kristi Noem.
LLM snippets are so 2024. Coding agents, baby.
Yeah, that's a great example.
The other thing is that unlike art, source code is already made to be consumed by a machine. It is not any more transformative to convert source code to equivalent source code, than it is to re-encode a video.
The only thing they do that is "transformative" is using source code not for compiling it but for defrauding the investors.
Other funny thing: it only became a fully automatic plagiarism machine when it claimed that it wrote the code (referring to itself by name which is a dead giveaway that the system prompt makes it do that).
I wonder if code is where they will ultimately get nailed to the wall for willful copyright infringement. Code is too brittle for their standard approach, "we sort of blurred a lot of works together so its ours now, transformative use, fuck you, prove that you don't just blur other people's work together, huh?".
But also for a piece of code, you can very easily test if the code has the same "meaning" - you can implement a parser that converts code to an expression graph, and then compare that. Which makes it far easier to output code that is functionally identical to the code they are plagiarizing, but looks very different.
But also I estimate approximately 0% probability that the assholes working on that wouldn't have banter between themselves about copyright laundering.
edit: Another thing is that since it can have no own conception of what "correct" behavior is for a piece of code being plagiarized, it would also plagiarize all the security exploits.
This hasn't been a big problem for the industry, because only short snippets were being cut and pasted (how to make some stupid API call, etc), but with generative AI whole implementations are going to get plagiarized wholesale.
Unlike any other work, code comes with its own built in, essentially irremovable "watermark" in the form of security exploits. In several thousands lines of code, there would be enough "watermark" for identification.
Having worked in computer graphics myself, it is spot on that this shit is uncontrollable.
I think the reason is fundamental - if you could control it more you would put it too far from any of the training samples.
That being said video enhancements along the lines of applying this as a filter to 3d rendered CGI or another video, that could (to some extent) work. I think the perception of realism will fade as it gets more familiar - it is pretty bad at lighting, but in a new way.
Well, it did reach for "I double checked it, I'm totally sure now" language.
From the perspective of trying to convince the top brass that they are making good progress towards creating an artificial psychopath - not just an artificial human - it's pretty good.
Still seems terminally AI pilled to me, an iteration or two later. "5 digit multiplication is borderline", how is that useful?
I think there's a combination of it being a pinnacle of billions and billions of dollars, and probably theirs firing people for slightest signs of AI skepticism. There's another data point, "reasoning math & code" is released as stable by Google without anyone checking if it can do any kind of math.
edit: imagine that a calculator manufacturer in 1970s is so excited about microprocessors they release an advanced scientific calculator that can't multiply two 6 digit numbers (while their earlier discrete component model could). Outside the crypto sphere, that sort of insanity is new.
Yeah, I'd also bet on the latter. They also added a fold-out button that shows you the code it wrote (folded by default), but you got to unfold it or notice that it is absent.
Oh and also for the benefit of our AI fanboys who can't understand why we would expect something as mundane from this upcoming super-intelligence, as doing math, here's why:
Also, I just noticed something really fucking funny:
(arrows are for the sake of people like llllll...)
lmao: they have fixed this issue, it seems to always run python now. Got to love how they just put this shit in production as "stable" Gemini 2.5 pro with that idiotic multiplication thing that everyone knows about, and expect what? to Eliza Effect people into marrying Gemini 2.5 pro?
there was a directive that if it were asked a math question that you can’t do in your brain or some very similar language it should forward it to the calculator module.
The craziest thing about leaked prompts is that they reveal the developers of these tools to be complete AI pilled morons. How in the fuck would it know if it can or can't do it "in its brain" lol.
edit: and of course, simultaneously, their equally idiotic fanboys go "how stupid of you to expect it to use a calculating tool when it said it used a calculating tool" any time you have some concrete demonstration of it sucking ass, while simultaneously the same kind of people are lauding the genius of system prompts half of which are asking it to meta-reason.
Thing is, it has tool integration. Half of the time it uses python to calculate it. If it uses a tool, that means it writes a string that isn't shown to the user, which runs the tool, and tool results are appended to the stream.
What is curious is that instead of request for precision causing it to use the tool (or just any request to do math), and then presence of the tool tokens causing it to claim that a tool was used, the requests for precision cause it to claim that a tool was used, directly.
Also, all of it is highly unnatural texts, so it is either coming from fine tuning or from training data contamination.
misinterpreted as deliberate lying by ai doomers.
I actually disagree. I think they correctly interpret it as deliberate lying, but they misattribute the intent to the LLM rather than to the company making it (and its employees).
edit: its like you are watching a TV and ads come on you say that a very very flat demon who lives in the TV is lying, because the bargain with the demon is that you get to watch entertaining content in response to having to listen to its lies. It's fundamentally correct about lying, just not about the very flat demon.
Hmm, fair point, it could be training data contamination / model collapse.
It's curious that it is a lot better at converting free form requests for accuracy, into assurances that it used a tool, than into actually using a tool.
And when it uses a tool, it has a bunch of fixed form tokens in the log. It's a much more difficult language processing task to assure me that it used a tool conditionally on my free form, indirect implication that the result needs to be accurate, than to assure me it used a tool conditionally on actual tool use.
The human equivalent to this is "pathological lying", not "bullshitting". I think a good term for this is "lying sack of shit", with the "sack of shit" specifying that "lying" makes no claim of any internal motivations or the like.
edit: also, testing it on 2.5 flash, it is quite curious: https://g.co/gemini/share/ea3f8b67370d . I did that sort of query several times and it follows the same pattern: it doesn't use a calculator, it assures me the result is accurate, if asked again it uses a calculator, if asked if the numbers are equal it says they are not, if asked which one is correct it picks the last one and argues that the last one actually used a calculator. I hadn't ever managed to get it to output a correct result and then follow up with an incorrect result.
edit: If i use the wording of "use an external calculator", it gives a correct result, and then I can't get it to produce an incorrect result to see if it just picks the last result as correct, or not.
I think this is lying without scare quotes, because it is a product of Google putting a lot more effort into trying to exploit Eliza effect to convince you that it is intelligent, than into actually making an useful tool. It, of course, doesn't have any intent, but Google and its employees do.
Pretentious is a fine description of the writing style. Which actual humans fine tune.
The other interesting thing is that if you try it a bunch of times, sometimes it uses the calculator and sometimes it does not. It, however, always claims that it used the calculator, unless it didn't and you tell it that the answer is wrong.
I think something very fishy is going on, along the lines of them having done empirical research and found that fucking up the numbers and lying about it makes people more likely to believe that gemini is sentient. It is a lot weirder (and a lot more dangerous, if someone used it to calculate things) than "it doesn't have a calculator" or "poor LLMs cant do math". It gets a lot of digits correct somehow.
Frankly this is ridiculous. They have a calculator integrated in the google search. That they don't have one in their AIs feels deliberate, particularly given that there's a plenty of LLMs that actually run calculator almost all of the time.
edit: lying that it used a calculator is rather strange, too. Humans don't say "code interpreter" or "direct calculator" when asked to multiply two numbers. What the fuck is a "direct calculator"? Why is it talking about "code interpreter" and "direct calculator" conditionally on there being digits (I never saw it say that it used a "code interpreter" when the problem wasn't mathematical), rather than conditional on there being a [run tool] token outputted earlier?
The whole thing is utterly ridiculous. Clearly for it to say that it used a "code interpreter" and a "direct calculator" (what ever that is), it had to be fine tuned to say that. Consequently to a bunch of numbers, rather than consequently to a [run tool] thing it uses to run a tool.
edit: basically, congratulations Google, you have halfway convinced me that an "artificial lying sack of shit" is possible after all. I don't believe that tortured phrases like "code interpreter" and a "direct calculator" actually came from the internet.
These assurances - coming from an "AI" - seem like they would make the person asking the question be less likely to double check the answer (and perhaps less likely to click the downvote button), In my book this would qualify them as a lie, even if I consider LLM to not be any more sentient than a sack of shit.
Try asking my question to Google gemini a bunch of times, sometimes it gets it right, sometimes it doesn't. Seems to be about 50/50 but I quickly ran out of free access.
And google is planning to replace their search (which includes a working calculator) with this stuff. So it is absolutely the case that there's a plan to replace one of the world's most popular calculators, if not the most popular, with it.
Oh, by far. There’s only 80 decimal places in that at most.
It got to be a quantum sweatshop: a quantum computer for AGI (a guy instead)
Google unveils the number of remote Waymo operators
A quantum sweatshop.
How much does he think an engineer spends on CAD tools, anyway? Altium is like, what, $2500 / year? Very “how much can a banana cost”.
It’s all capital costs for tools, pretty much, anyway, maybe CAD should start charging per net lmao.
Oh they are going to charge per token for github copilot? That thing is a money waste for everyone, I’m pretty sure. I get a mix of inane mildly good suggestions, irrelevant stuff, and an occasional suggestion of super evil sabotage. Due to mild OCD about issues, I tend to have to fix said mildly good suggestions, but from the objective perspective that nitpickery is not worth it, everything was fine without, we had compiler warnings, coverity, etc.
edit: the difference being that the old stuff was deterministic and you just ran it on the whole codebase and had it pass. Unlike gh copilot that’ll just make up new shit. And as for the times it caught some bad bug that you made… add more tests instead.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if they really don’t, they’re just advertising the advertising lol.
edit: Basically what if you spent a trillion dollars so that you could beam ads to people’s bathroom mirrors. And better yet, ads reflected from water down in their toilets. Then in the interest of expediency you just take random ads and put them there for free, and your actual product, shares, sells better.
It makes every bad programmer into a 10x bad programmer (equivalent to 10 bad programmers).
I’m afraid they already had that exact idea when they named the startup “oklo”.
I think it’s not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.
I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won’t create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.
What’s difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.
Nuclear already makes 9% of world’s electricity.
Curiously enough you also have those radon spas in old uranium mines. I don’t think hinging their luck on “a little radiation is good for you” worked for anyone.
Exactly. It is not enough to know that a company stock will go down. It is necessary to know that it will never go higher than a certain point above the current value (not even momentarily) before it goes down. If you have a fuckload of other people’s money you can just keep double-or-nothing-ing it, that’s what banks were doing to gamestop, except that this can sometimes cause the stock to go even higher (a short squeeze), which would make you (who doesn’t actually have a fuckload of other people’s money) lose all of your money.
edit: also the other concerning possibility is that stock prices can go up simply due to the dollar going down.
Cory Doctorow: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (pluralistic.net)
The only thing that is allowed to tell good art from slop is the AI which needs to consume good art and not slop.
Its spelled “masterdebating”.
I mostly see "clanker" in reference to products of particularly asinine promptfondling: spambot "agents" that post and even respond to comments, LLM-based scam calls, call center replacement, etc.
These bots don't derive their wrongness from the wrongness of promptfondling, these things are part of why promptfondling is wrong.
I assume the writers wanted to portray the robots as unfairly oppressed, while simultaneously not trivializing actual oppression of actual people (the way "wireback" would have, or I dunno "cogger" or something).
Well yeah that would indeed be racist.
That just seems like an instance of good ol anti person racism / people trying to offend other people while not particularly giving a shit about the bots one way or the other.
The what now? You don't think there's a lot of homophobia that follows "castigating someone for what they do" format, or you think its a lot less bad according to some siskinded definition of what makes slurs bad that somehow manages to completely ignore anything that actually makes slurs bad?
Such as... "cracker"? Given how the law protects but doesn't bind AI, that seems oddly spot on.
Note also that genuine labor saving stuff like say the Unity engine with Unity asset store, did result in an absolute flood of shovelware on Steam back in the mid 2010s (although that probably had as much having to do with Steam FOMO-ing about the possibility of not letting the next Minecraft onto Steam).
As a thought experiment imagine an unreliable labor saving tool that speeds up half* of the work 20x, and slows down the other half 3x. You would end up 1.525 times slower.
The fraction of work (not by lines but by hours) that AI helps with is probably less than 50% , and the speed up is probably worse than 20x.
Slowdown could be due to some combination of
footnote: "half" as measured by the pre-tool hours.
And yet you are the one person here who is equating Mexicans and Black people with machines. People with disabilities, too, huh. Lemme guess next time we're pointing and laughing at how some hyped-up "PhD level chatbot" can't count the Es in dingleberry, you'll be likening that to ableism.
When you're attempting to humanize machines by likening the insults against machines to insults against people, this does more to dehumanize people than to humanize machines.
edit: Also I never seen and couldn't find instances of "wireback" being used outside pro-bot sentiments and hand-wringing about how anti bot people are akhtually racist. Had you, or is it all second or third hand? It's entirely possible that it is something botlickers (can I say that or is that not OK?) came up with.
edit: especially considering that these "anti-robot slurs" seem to originate in scifi stories where the robots are being oppressed, whereby the author is purposefully choosing that slur to undermine the position of anti robot characters in the story. It may well be that for the same reason that author has in choosing these slurs, they are rarely used (in the earnest).
To be honest, hand wringing over “clanker” being a slur and all that strikes me as increasingly equivalent to hand wringing over calling nazis nazis. The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I’d prefer the new so called slur to be “chatgpt”, genericized and negative connotated.
If you are in the US, we’ve had our health experts replaced with AI, see the “MAHA report”. We’re one moron AI-pilled president away from a less fun version of Skynet, whereby a chatbot talks the president into launching nukes and kills itself along with a few billion people.
Complaints about dehumanizing these things is even more meritless than a CEO complaining that someone is dehumanizing Exxon (which is at least made of people).
These things are extension of those in power, not some marginalized underdogs like cute robots in scifi. As an extension of corporations, it already got more rights than any human - imagine what would happen to a human participant in a criminal conspiracy to commit murder and contrast that with what happens when a chatbot talks someone into a crime.
I think this is spot on. I had that same thing happen at my former employer, which bought a lot of entirely pointless startups in 2010s instead of investing in core business equipment and processes.