Welcome to November, and 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Anthropic released amended IPO-aaand its even worse!
The artificial intelligence company said it generated $33.24 billion in revenue for the nine months ended Sept. 30, up roughly 1,200% from the same period last year. It reported a $104 billion net loss during the period, after losing $25.1 billion over the same stretch in 2025.
‘b-but the convertible notes!!!’
Another entry in the weird “GPU world” writing competition (What kind of wonderful happy go lucky future is brought about by LLMs like those of today being ubiquitous and constantly used but unaccountably not leading to the Great Singularity)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/siTsb48Wr5vWDGxLd/gpu-world-submission
This one is less messed up than the last. Instead of weird sex and graverobbing it features… uh, a guy being paid by an LLM to braid string as busywork?
Remember the episode of DS9 where the authors agree that creating a holographic simulation of someone without their permission for sexual purposes is shameful? Ten years later in The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil seems to say that in the glorious virtual future this will be routine and accepted (its a section with a lot of dialogue between characters with years in their names, not digging out a copy and checking the page).
Does Kurzweil also have a bad take about people getting Tuvix’d
Kurzweil actually liked the warp 10 lizard sex episode – pass it on
Does he dance with the devil In The Pale Moonlight?
I find it so so funny that the Proton AI manifesto asks why the productivity is not increasing despite LLM usage, and then it’s all like… you’re not prompting hard enough!
I take it as a positive sign when even the biggest AI pushers realize it’s not working and turn to denial.
Oh my god
So why, at Proton, does it not feel like the revolution has come? Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?
The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 — using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.
The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselves… But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.
If you know there are always new bottlenecks tha keep slowing things down why try at all? When do you go ‘wow none of this helped and we wasted a lot of energy on spinning our wheels’
(Or perhaps you dont know what the actual bottlenecks are, a manager should know better).
Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?
Honestly, the manifesto should have stopped here. They admitted defeat right out of the gate. But the manifesto must continue, because the LLM cannot fail, it can only be failed. I wonder if this report is starting to get under their skin.
The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
This is not even a meaningful distinction. If I use an IDE command to change the name of a method everywhere it’s used, did I change all the names or did the IDE change all the names? What difference does it make?
I can only see this as them ordering engineers to use the AI more and go faster. The manifesto talks a good game about how “expertise” and “good engineering practices” are not dying, but telling engineers to offload more of their work to AI has the unavoidable tradeoff of making these things worse.
As a side question, how is it that all of these fuckers always want to use the precious gift of AI to go faster, not to, say, give their engineers more time to improve the quality of their software? Almost like they don’t actually give a shit about good engineering practices!
The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 — using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.
At least they’re realizing that maybe one of the anti-AI talking points has some merit to it. But they don’t seem to realize why they need stuff like code review and CI/CD: the AI is unreliable and these processes are needed to reduce the probability of a major fuckup reaching production. All they think is, hey, more opportunities to use AI!
(“Another takes it is place.” I had to look at the original text to make sure. At least we know the CTO wrote this himself after many drinks at 3 am. Damn, why are all those people on the internet so mean to us? I’m gonna show them!)
The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselves… But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.
What do I even say to this? Once again the problem is that there isn’t enough AI, and the solution is to buy more AI. We’re gonna buy so much more AI that we’re retooling the entire company and shoving it up every bodily orifice.
Get into the Cheesecake Factory or get left behind!
If you don’t eat cheesecake you’ll be left behind, Luddite
Like it or not, the cheesecake is here to stay
I left the cheesecake in the fridge and it looks like it is trying to take over my fridge and creating bioweapons.
Please fund my cheescake institute.
And no obv this is too dangerous to let out of the fridge.
Please join me on the Cheesecake Truck
Will it crash if the white house gets de-Baghdad-ified?
I’m looking it up and they have locations internationally, including in China. So I would say they are fairly regime tolerant. We just have to hope that Cheesecake Factory Alignment is solvable if not already solved
de-Ba’athified. Baghdad (or any city) is larger than a single notorious denizen.
Jepsen releases a barely contained sneer https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4
it’s a sneer that recommends the users move off the product, and it was paid by the company that prompted the product into existence.
looking through the timeline of GitHub issues they had jepsen booked for a good long while too
I approve of their very helpful and comprehensive documentation for LLMs: https://jepsen.io/llm/index
looks like iocaine with a papers corpus (although I guess kyle could’ve made his own thing too)
My educated guess it is iocaine, as Kyle’s been using it for other things too.
It’s quite something. Found deep in the discussion section:
Inserts ignored provided columns, creating rows best described as “deeply cursed” ¹²
- Jepsen encourages the consistency model research community to come up with more official terms for this.
