rook

joined 3 years ago
[–] rook@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.

[–] rook@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago (4 children)

On the offchance that you’re not already familiar with the recent prompt injection tricks that meta’s latest toy is so vulnerable to, this is an interesting thread investigating the contents of the vm filesystem dumps that it can be made to regurgitate: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750

I was particularly entertained by the hard-coded list of “ideas”.

[–] rook@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Via catturd2.bsky.social (probably no relation),

https://gizmodo.com/fbi-warns-ice-agents-not-to-trust-any-woman-willing-to-date-them-2000814283

Something something domino meme leading from “eron gjoni can’t handle being dumped” to “women in long dresses and who cover their hair declared national security risks”.

alt text

The memo implied that ICE officers should be wary of any woman that knows they're an ICE agent, especially if they go out of their way to seem cool with ICE agents or identify themselves as tradwives. (Those are conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss. They're rare enough in reality that the going rate for a professional matchmaker to find one is reportedly $25k).

"These profiles were incorporating imagery of a 'traditional wife' aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to... individuals in law enforcement," the FBI wrote. "The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online."

[–] rook@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.

https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera

Very brief observations from micahflee:

https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v

This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software.

  • It's on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021
  • It's on Android patch level 2018-06-5
  • It's running Linux 3.18, released in 2017

This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities.

Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.

Fucking android?

[–] rook@awful.systems 25 points 2 weeks ago

AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you.

If you are interested in vibe code and want your hardware to love you back, buttplug.io has always been there for you.

My goddamn desktop environment and window manager is there to do a job, not pretend to be my friend whilst burning the goddamn world down.

What the fuck is wrong with these people. Do they ever use a computer to do anything other than flirt with claude. Why can’t they just use windows instead.

[–] rook@awful.systems 3 points 2 weeks ago

while explicitly forbidding it for communication, commit messages and assets

This is absolutely the best bit of the policy, and clearly shows how much thought went into the whole thing. Everyone knows that ai generated art is shit, so that’s forbidden, ai generated summaries are just inadequate so that’s forbidden too, using a chatbot to communicate with someone is deeply fucking insulting, so that’s forbidden as well, but… uh… using the bo-bot to write your code for you is apparently a-ok! for reasons! in a project which is primarily a a collection of code! 🤠

I can’t imagine why there’s acrimony. The whole thing is entirely coherent and well considered 🤗

[–] rook@awful.systems 3 points 2 weeks ago

That’s horrifying.

[–] rook@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

There was a photo from a cybertruck crash not so long ago where you could see that the doors and windows had been attacked with crowbars to try and get the damn things open before the people trapped inside burned to death. It didn’t work.

Things (and skills) for busting open locked doors and laminated glass aren’t (yet?) commonplace, and I wouldn’t trust tesla engineering to keep me alive long enough for the professionals to turn up with the right tools 🫤

[–] rook@awful.systems 15 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die.

https://archive.is/2026.09.05-135619/https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tesla-cybercab-no-steering-wheel-emergency-plan-push-musk-austin-rcna595741

Highlights:

  • No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning!
  • Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash.
  • No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way.
  • Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess?
  • Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons.
  • Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death.
  • The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise.
  • Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol.

The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed.

If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.”

🤡

Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying.

H/t to violet blue. https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802

[–] rook@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm.

I’m not an academic, so I saw that as (merely) another shitty and unreasonable thing, and failed to understand that this would have been academic fraud and should put a serious or terminal dent in the career of the people engaged in it.

I guess it’s another example of ai firms treating the sources of their training data and their fellow travellers as resources to be strip-mined, not maintained. Even livestock would get a bit more consideration.

[–] rook@awful.systems 16 points 3 weeks ago (17 children)

Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).

Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.

The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.

[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago

The “you had to flee america” line was aimed at someone who worked hard to get the unite-the-right nazis identified and prosecuted, and left the country for a few years after getting death threats as a result. Windisch also called them a “milquetoast lib”. So it is particularly shitty and rude, and also failed to spot that the person in question has already moved back to the US.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by rook@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
 

In an idle moment, I thought I’d explore the space of ridiculously bad ai company names. Literally the very first dystopia I thought of already has three ai companies named after it, and it hardly seemed worth exploring any further.

Because no one has got around to repealing poe’s law, I cannot tell if these are a bunch of idiot techbros, or people taking the piss out of idiot techbros, so I leave you to judge for yourself. Behold, people who think that “we tortured a child to bring you glossy web UIs” is a great corporate image:

  1. Omelas AI

AI-driven software development. Enterprise platforms delivered at startup speed.

I think they’re a consultancy? “One developer with AI produces what a 30-person agency does. 10+ production platforms in under two years.”

  1. Omelas IO

Omelas is the maker of Atreus, the leading AI research companion for foreign policy, national security, and geopolitical risk. Atreus has access to the Omelas database, multidomain intelligence, and unique research methods, yielding unparalleled insights in minutes.

“Atreus is the AI workbench purpose-built for intelligence work, fusing unique feeds, open-source intelligence, commercial data, satellite imagery and telemetry data into reports your analysts can act on immediately” which I guess means that they’re palantir wannabes, with the USP that they’ve grossly misunderstood le guin instead of Tolkien.

  1. omelas.tech

Omelas builds software across privacy, social connection, developer tools, and AI — designed and engineered in the Netherlands.

Another consultancy. They claim they make “thoughtful products”, hopefully with more thought than they put into their branding. Proof that inability to understand fantasy and sci-fi isn’t limited to silicon valley, or native english speakers.

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