blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Tag your favorite name for a Star Wars background character. Mine is enodopmisch reticulum.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago

I see that wedging Copilot into Excel is going just swimmingly:

Honey, I invested $100 billion in AI, and all I got was 1 + 2 + 3 = 15

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The $10K Existential Hope Meme Prize: A celebration of creativity, optimism, and big-picture thinking.

And none other than friend-of-the-pod Steven Pinker is a judge!

(Via)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How do we make the experience of dating apps even worse? With AI, of course:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/12/chatgpt-ed-into-bed-chatfishing-on-dating-apps

The funniest bit is the guy who needed multiple exchanges with the ocean-boiling slop machine to come up with "Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you".

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

e/acc-elerating doses of amphetamines

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

A spectre is haunting Silicon Valley. The spectre of getting force-femmed by diamondoid bacteria.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It wasn't on LW proper, but Yud endorsing a pedo science-fiction book as "basically Safe For Work" has to be up there.

https://awful.systems/post/2972738

Also PrimalPoly's dating advice:

https://awful.systems/post/67

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

Well, now the students have incentive to record all the stages of their progress. And the professors have incentive to assign projects in stages, each one of which has a tangible output. It's the golden age of the index card, baby! Fill out one for each idea or claim you want to use from a book you read, wrap the stack with a rubber band... This oddly dovetails with the professors' obligations, since now we have to teach how to do research all over again.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

A major Australian university used artificial intelligence technology to accuse about 6,000 students of academic misconduct last year.

The most common offence was using AI to cheat, but many of the students had done nothing wrong.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-09/artificial-intelligence-cheating-australian-catholic-university/105863524

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago

We won't have any usable web browsers, but that's OK, because there won't be a web worth browsing.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
 

In October, New York City announced a plan to harness the power of artificial intelligence to improve the business of government. The announcement included a surprising centerpiece: an AI-powered chatbot that would provide New Yorkers with information on starting and operating a business in the city.

The problem, however, is that the city’s chatbot is telling businesses to break the law.

 

a lesswrong: 47-minute read extolling the ambition and insights of Christopher Langan's "CTMU"

a science blogger back in the day: not so impressed

[I]t’s sort of like saying “I’m going to fix the sink in my bathroom by replacing the leaky washer with the color blue”, or “I’m going to fly to the moon by correctly spelling my left leg.”

Langan, incidentally, is a 9/11 truther, a believer in the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and much more besides.

 

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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 here 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.

 

If you've been around, you may know Elsevier for surveillance publishing. Old hands will recall their running arms fairs. To this storied history we can add "automated bullshit pipeline".

In Surfaces and Interfaces, online 17 February 2024:

Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2].

In Radiology Case Reports, online 8 March 2024:

In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model. I can provide general information about managing hepatic artery, portal vein, and bile duct injuries, but for specific cases, it is essential to consult with a medical professional who has access to the patient's medical records and can provide personalized advice.

Edit to add this erratum:

The authors apologize for including the AI language model statement on page 4 of the above-named article, below Table 3, and for failing to include the Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted Technologies in Scientific Writing, as required by the journal’s policies and recommended by reviewers during revision.

Edit again to add this article in Urban Climate:

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines HW as “Sustained periods of uncharacteristically high temperatures that increase morbidity and mortality”. Certainly, here are a few examples of evidence supporting the WHO definition of heatwaves as periods of uncharacteristically high temperatures that increase morbidity and mortality

And this one in Energy:

Certainly, here are some potential areas for future research that could be explored.

Can't forget this one in TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry:

Certainly, here are some key research gaps in the current field of MNPs research

Or this one in Trends in Food Science & Technology:

Certainly, here are some areas for future research regarding eggplant peel anthocyanins,

And we mustn't ignore this item in Waste Management Bulletin:

When all the information is combined, this report will assist us in making more informed decisions for a more sustainable and brighter future. Certainly, here are some matters of potential concern to consider.

The authors of this article in Journal of Energy Storage seems to have used GlurgeBot as a replacement for basic formatting:

Certainly, here's the text without bullet points:

 

In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.

 

So, there I was, trying to remember the title of a book I had read bits of, and I thought to check a Wikipedia article that might have referred to it. And there, in "External links", was ... "Wikiversity hosts a discussion with the Bard chatbot on Quantum mechanics".

How much carbon did you have to burn, and how many Kenyan workers did you have to call the N-word, in order to get a garbled and confused "history" of science? (There's a lot wrong and even self-contradictory with what the stochastic parrot says, which isn't worth unweaving in detail; perhaps the worst part is that its statement of the uncertainty principle is a blurry JPEG of the average over all verbal statements of the uncertainty principle, most of which are wrong.) So, a mediocre but mostly unremarkable page gets supplemented with a "resource" that is actively harmful. Hooray.

Meanwhile, over in this discussion thread, we've been taking a look at the Wikipedia article Super-recursive algorithm. It's rambling and unclear, throwing together all sorts of things that somebody somewhere called an exotic kind of computation, while seemingly not grasping the basics of the ordinary theory the new thing is supposedly moving beyond.

So: What's the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in your field of specialization?

 

Yudkowsky writes,

How can Effective Altruism solve the meta-level problem where almost all of the talented executives and ops people were in 1950 and now they're dead and there's fewer and fewer surviving descendants of their heritage every year and no blog post I can figure out how to write could even come close to making more people being good executives?

Because what EA was really missing is collusion to hide the health effects of tobacco smoking.

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