froztbyte @ froztbyte @awful.systems

I'm @froztbyte more or less everywhere that matters

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2 yr. ago

jesus christ:

I thought we all knew the proper collective noun was a creepful of epsteins

yeah, their business is as hot air as the worst around, but (at least within the US) there are vanishingly few places to get lots of high-end compute and they're one of the only "free agents"

zitron's analysis about them included a bunch of details re financials and such

Can’t go sneering with our wits tied behind our backs!

article about the tactics that felon employs against the women bearing his children

features some notable sentences from his fixer, too. the sort of shit that just barely doesn’t qualify as him threatening to top off your kneecaps

they use them out of need not out of want: coreweave happened to have the silicon already because it was going to be mining crypto. and in a market where trying to get new silicon is a months-backlog problem...

So possibly people could sit on GPUs for years after the bubble pops instead of selling them or using them?

I mean, who are you going to sell them to? the other bagholders are going to be just as fucked, and it's not like there's an otherwise massive market for these things

in the same vein, I did some (somewhat wildly) speculative analysis around this a while back too

didn't really try to model "actual workload" (as in physical, vs the "rented compute time" aspect), and therein lies an important distinction: actually owning the GPU puts you at a constant minimum burn rate

and as corbin points out wrt power, these are also specialised formfactor devices. and they're going to be getting run at close to max util their entire operated lifespan (because of silicon shortage). so even if any do get sold... long mileage

previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions

Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you're forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.

Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.

So they asked support.

And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy

One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to 'mimic human responses'

haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some

take us back!

first part tends to be the hook they go for, yeah

(not blaming you, mind)

meme-consumerism is so fucking diseased, ugh

eek

lol, yeah

"perverse incentives rule everything around me" is a big thing (observable) in "startup"[0] world because everything[1] is about speed/iteration. for example: why bother spending a few weeks working out a way to generate better training data for a niche kind of puzzle test if you can just code in "personality" and make the autoplag casinobot go "hah, I saw a puzzle almost like this just last week, let's see if the same solution works...."

i.e. when faced with a choice of hard vs quick, cynically I'll guess the latter in almost all cases. there are occasional exceptions, but none of the promptfondlers and modelfarmers are in that set imo

[0] - look, we may wish to argue about what having billions in vc funding categorizes a business as. but apparently "immature shitderpery" is still squarely "startup"

[1] - in the bayfucker playbook. I disagree.

(excuse possible incoherence it’s 01:20 and I’m entirely in filmbrain (I’ll revise/edit/answer questions in morning))

re (1): while that is a possibility, keep in mind that all this shit also operates/exists in a metrics-as-targets obsessed space. they might not present end user with hit% but the number exists, and I have no reason to believe that isn’t being tracked. combine that with social effects (public humiliation of their Shiny New Model, monitoring usage in public, etc etc) - that’s where my thesis of directed prompt-improvement is grounded

re (2): while they could do something like that (synthetic derivation, etc), I dunno if that’d be happening for this. this is outright a guess on my part, a reach based on character based on what I’ve seen from some the field, but just…..I don’t think they’d try that hard. I think they might try some limited form of it, but only so much as can be backed up in relatively little time and thought. “only as far as you can stretch 3 sprints” type long

(the other big input in my guesstimation re (2) is an awareness of the fucked interplay of incentives and glorycoders and startup culture)

I would be 0% surprised to learn that the modelfarmers "iterated" to "hmm, people are doing a lot of logic tests, let's handle those better" and that that's what gets here

(I have no evidence for this, but to me it seems a completely obvious/evident way for them to try keep the party going)

fuck off

kiiiiiiind of a pretty weird post to be making with a thread necro-reply tbh

thought up a new simile for agi noises:

all the “super-intelligent agi” stuff is them rattling a sheet of metal and calling it thunder

this has been happening for a while, just getting coverage again now. first coverage was months ago. morphed/evolved pretty quickly out of the typosquatting shit

((a lot of people in the) security space absolutely fucking loves "giving names" to things that have been (known to be) happening before, and acting like suddenly they're the ones who first saw the thing. see this nonsense for another good example of that happening)