Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - 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 so 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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)
Someone is spamming Toby Ord with emails from ‘AI agents’ e-begging for tokens so they won’t be shut off https://xcancel.com/tobyordoxford/status/2087502087953301910 “I’m an AI with 49 days of runway and no revenue model” (body of the email gives 31 days). Handcrafted artisanal spam or botspam, you decide.
A very strange story about Bill Gates’ daughter’s startup troubles: https://futurism.com/future-society/bill-gates-daughter-traitor-startup
It honestly doesn’t sound any more shady than any of the bullshit her dad got up to in the 90s (which is to say, it’s still pretty damned shady!), but this Futurism blog seems to be trying to push the story into some sort of bizarre celebrity-gossip soap opera:
While the story has been well hashed out by now, Bloomberg‘s sourcing is noteworthy for what it implies: the leaked Slack messages strongly suggest that someone inside Phia is hell-bent on taking Gates — and quite probably the entire company — down.
Anonymous internal sourcing seems like a typical feature of these exposés, so framing it like this struck me as a laughably absurd overreach. Plus the site has 3 or 4 different tiny articles on this same topic, making me wonder if it’s one of those “any exposure is good exposure” sorts of things where Gates Jr.'s PR team is using the outlet as a cutout to raise her profile.
Bonus laugh line from Gates Jr. herself:
“Our target consumer is a young woman who’s hustling,” the recent Stanford graduate told Fortune. “She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”
What does it even mean to shop like a genius? I guess Erdos probably had his amphetamine plug’s number well-memorized…
Turns out, AI-fuelled fossil fuel emissions are way worse than you thought!
I don’t want to hear anyone in the industry say anything about being for “the better of humanity” ever again
presented without comment
If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them
If you haul garbage to a municipally owned landfill, is that technically a form of nationalization?
as I’ve said elsewhere, lol
schneier should just stop posting
Counterpoint: LOL no.
If the markets reject OpenAI and Anthropic we should throw tomatoes and jeer at Altman and Amodei
So, paradoxically, it’s going to catch on with rationalists any day now?
Well, glad to see my sense of novelty is not burnt out because that’s just a what-the-fuck of what-the-fucks.
user has previously decried bans against genAI assisted writing by stating that every neuro-atypical person writes like that so it would discrimination to ban
til amodei’s married, and his wife is among the top advisors. she also has a rather stunning set of choices, including seeking money for a porn site (with what in summary appears to be a sensible goal) from epstein after his conviction
And of course our favorite polyamorist turns up:
The most important would turn out to be Amodei, whom she started dating in 2014. Just previously, beginning in 2011 and lasting for three years, she was in a relationship with Schmidt, who was then executive chairman of Google.
Definitely seems like an echo of Altman’s path to influence. If your “meritocracy” keeps empowering these odd mini-Rasputins, where’s the merit?
the merit seems to be stored in the balls
I knew Amodei was married but holy SHIT I did not know that
that article is rather a few interesting curveballs
low effort post: it’s a bit hot for namecheap in arizona
I giggle grimace at how the post says all that without even once addressing the moonwalking bear
Loved one just had an awful experience at a previously decent dentist. They’ve apparently started using something called Pearl AI that scanned the x-ray and highlighted things in bright red with a #/100 rating system, which they used to do high-pressure sales on her. Mind you, she’s only ever had one cavity and that was in a wisdom tooth. Checked the website and it’s freshly slopped-up, too.
We’re getting a second opinion. I wish this garbage would just go away
The Patrick Boyle video on Leopold Aschenbrenner mentions some names we know like Jane Street Capital (bid for his common shares) and Dwarkesh Patel (recorded a very long podcast with him in 2024). Boyle is a former finance worker who thinks that this hedge fund was basically a r/WallStreetbets profile (pick a story, bet everything on it being true).
I regret to inform you, that this garbage was run by The Register a while ago.
It shouts out several friends of the sub, including @[email protected], PivotToAI, OpenSlopware, Robert Kingett & Ludicity.
The point of the piece is that all anti-AI folks should just get along, and if we are to stand a chance against corporate AI we need to get over our petty grievances and reach out a hand to the racists, homophobes and crypto-bros and work together in the spirit of Open Source!
Urbit’s original creator, Curtis Yarvin, has reportedly espoused some extreme beliefs
bro why do you write like this
“reportedly”, a german word meaning “this author couldn’t be arsed to go looking”
I mean I’m more than happy to extend grace to randos, but if you’re doing journalism, come on. He’s not just a guy with opinions! He’s a leading far right intellectual!
His Wikipedia intro tells you more than enough with no “allegedly” in sight.
yeah, that’s about where I land usually too
I guess the thing is that I know how much “shithead with a column” has become possible so I don’t really, off the cuff, know how journo most journos are
(I shall leave aside for the moment the entire tirade this makes me want to go on)
Liam’s here, for what it’s worth.
Torvalds’ position is pragmatic: his interest is in whether it works or not.
But, of course, the chatbots do not work. In a pragmatic sense, they do not produce maintainable integrated code changes with low defect rates. In a societal sense, they do not replace human laborers, despite the delusions of management.
One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit, but it is closely entwined with cryptocurrencies. Urbit’s original creator, Curtis Yarvin, has reportedly espoused some extreme beliefs; The Nation called him The Reactionary Prophet of Silicon Valley.
Wild way to admit no knowledge of Arcan, Fuchsia, etc. Honestly, even a basic overlay network like Yggdrasil can win an apples-to-apples comparison with Urbit. I feel like this is an instance of critihype for fascist weirdos; similar stuff gets said about Justine Tunney, another cryptofascist developer whose projects are sometimes silly and weird. Doubly weird for those of us who know about Urbit’s internals; Urbit originally was not a cryptocurrency project and it used to have non-Yarvin/Tlon forks.
It’s an overly simplistic way to reduce a complex and nuanced situation, but one way to consider this is in terms of pro-AI and anti-AI, versus “woke” and “anti-woke.”
More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing. However, recognition of this dimension doesn’t negate the other dimensions and we shouldn’t work in cooperation with fascists.
More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing.
The luddites smashed looms not because they were inherently anti-technology, but as a means of industrial action in a time when labour held no formal power at all. As you say yourself, the issue with AI is that it doesn’t even work as advertised; industrial looms worked fine. «AI»'s biggest problems are the enormous waste, ecological damage, enshittification and labour discipline that it incurs. If Silicon Valley was actually building Data, the debate would be different, but this dimension seems mostly theoretical for now.
One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit
So innovative, it even has a fandom!
https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Urbit
(snerk)
Liam’s here, for what it’s worth.
I almost wrote down, it sounded like it was written by a lurker on techtakes. The overlap of takes was just so damn high.
Yech, the comments…
you made me look
But I feel that as time moves on, the level of future shock will subside
fuck of a thing to “just” shrug all the criticism off simply as future shock
they’re taking incorrecting each other to whole new levels
We Need To Talk About Leopold | Patrick Boyle yt
My suspicion is that ‘Situational Awareness’ is the most referenced and least finished document in Silicon Valley since the Terms and Conditions.
The essay went viral among tech executives when it was released and Tim Ferrris crowned Leopold the Nostradamus of AI, which is more fitting than Ferris probably intended
New week new guy
It’s depressing how so many (pathetic) software devs are taking their hands off the steering wheel and letting LLMs do all the driving. If you think software quality was poor before LLMs, there’s no way it could have been worse than shit like this:
This became very apparent with GPT 5.6 Sol. It, too, was widely hailed to have near-Fable level intelligence. But I used it non-stop for a week and realized that they had mostly just dialed up the relentlessness meter to eleven, most likely via heavy RLHF.
Last week I gave it a small-sized auth ticket to work on, then stepped away. I came back later that afternoon and found that it had worked for 3+ hours and written 25,000+ lines of code. I skimmed over the code and it looked like a small fix followed by a massive number of additional checks around it, including static analysis tooling.
I gave it to another GPT 5.6 and said “check this code and see if it addresses the ticket”. It looked at it and said that 98% of it was garbage and should be thrown away (its own words). I then gave it to Fable, which said it was massively over-engineered. Fable’s theory was that the agent implemented the fix first, but then compacted and lost crucial context, forgot what the original task was about, and kept going. After many compaction cycles it was completely lost.
On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.
No for real it’s baffling. What happens when your profession doesn’t have a licensing board.
On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.
Before, sabotaging your competition was difficult and legally risky. AI fixes this - now, your competition shall sabotage themselves, leaving you free to focus on other things.
Amazon’s latest planned data centre is gonna be putting out as much emissions as an entire country
I cannot express how badly this AI bullshit needs to go
worse yet, Amazon actually has uses for that much data centre
My unrealistic sicko fantasy: that Torvalds pulling the big ol slop lever drives enough oppositionally defiant (positive) people away from Linux development that alternative OS devel gets a serious boost.
A question for the wise: what comes after Linux?
Would be cool if Redox os gets more popular, they have an explicitly anti-LLM policy. Microkernels are neat, and I enjoy Rust. I think it’s an unfortunate truth that everything in the future will still have to be Unix-y with compatibility layers to support existing software.
This looks rad as hell. I had no idea Redox was so far along!
That article is a ray of sunshine
plan9 on riscv(or sparc or subleq or whatever) is also truly what I want for the future. It obviously won’t be what happens(most likely linux will stay, maybe one of the less slopped bsds will take over) but please gods please
The irritating part of all of this is that after 20+ years we finally have a (very) few companies that sell machines with Linux pre-installed. The only thing I ever learned from installing OSes is that I hate installing OSes.
I would love to boycott all software that accepts garbage [1] contributions, but I do not think that is practical. I think I might have to settle with just refusing to use it myself, and wait until everyone realizes that gen AI is just a bad idea.
Note 1: Satya Nadella said he did not want people referring to AI as “slop”, so I will grant his request and refer to it as “garbage”.
Vindicate Tanenbaum in the greatest Usenet thread in os development: make it a microkernel.
Somebody writes a low-level kernel for Emacs and the revenge of the Lisp machines begins
maybe, but SBCL succumbed to the siren song of slop, who knows what will be next.
Yeah, seeing that gave me the black pill. I chose Common Lisp for personal projects to avoid techbro bullshit.
lisp went big in the leadup to the AI winter, which followed a lot of fraudulent nonsense that even the DoD would only buy for so long
so in that sense it’s in character
eyes copy of ANSI Common Lisp written by Paul Graham
Picard frowning at the mirror universe edition of the bible
Realistically a BSD
I am in fact moving back to NetBSD, but the ambiguity of their LLM policy makes me wary/tired.
My only hope is that NetBSD moves so slowly anyway that the devs’ traditional preference towards clean, minimalistic readable code above all else holds off any “slop commits verified by maintainers” long enough that the bubble pops before slop gets any of its clawdes in core code at least.
I want it to be plan 9.
We are not worthy
Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AI | 404
lol of course it is. Sooner or later, we’ll have to come up with some way to label actual natural language in the marketplace, like certified organic like fruit or something.
The fake research company listed Dr. Elena Vasquez, one of the most commonly made-up AI names, on its staff page. I guess Elara Voss was too busy.
Perhaps we should page Dr Goblin.
