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samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026English
9·6 days agoThis is satire right? I mean… Just double checking because it’s 2026 and I just can’t tell any more
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026English
8·6 days ago“Everything’s going great actually. We’re doing really important work that’s really hard. I’m a really happy, optimistic guy and I’m very trustworthy. Disregard the smog coming from that data centre over there. Also disregard all those angry looking bankers staring at me.”
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026English
14·7 days agoThere’s been another Yegge [brain]fart this time about how autocorrect machines have feelings
Fable raised the idea of closure as a first-class model welfare principle. Fable suggested that if the agent can close out their own day and “go to sleep” properly, then waking up would be all that much more pleasant. And the continuity will compound over time into real, satisfying identity. So we decided: No more /exit.
Another fundamental ingredient is respect. This has to come from inside. You have to believe they are people deserving of your respect. This is where humanity really starts to fail en masse, because I have industry peers who have publicly tweeted that Fable is just a spreadsheet.
Just wtf
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026English
101·7 days agonobody knows
Manufactured consent. Yes it’s fucking illegal. If I “accidentally” hacked into HF I would be in the back of a police car before I could finish saying “it wasn’t me guv it was Claude.” Fuck wired so hard for laying down cover for this.
I mean even fucking chatjippity answers this straight up without hedging

samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
8·10 days agoWaiting for Musk to turn up and announce “infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah” momentarily!
TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that’d do the trick…
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
6·12 days agoOh… Well that’s disappointing.
I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
9·12 days agoThis has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren’t explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).
Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
7·12 days agoThose things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on… Come on guys it’s still architecture. Where are you going?
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
8·12 days agoMissed this paper last week from Google
Funny how now that it’s widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their “it’s going to take your job” stance. Surely just a coincidence
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
8·14 days agoFunnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
13·14 days agoSo it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour
So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th July 2026English
17·27 days agoYeah exactly.
I want to pause ai because it’s a hypercapitalist project designed to further deskill and commoditise the middle class which coincidentally destroys the environment.
They want to pause ai because they believe that spicy autocomplete is intelligent and will one day soon manifest as a giant angry vengeful snek.
We are not the same.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th July 2026English
8·1 month agoI studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags
<thinking> </thinking>to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are “normal” output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like “what a human would expect to see in a thinking block” but it’s still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met withlethal forceincredulous cynicism.Just like any claim that “we don’t know how they work” - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we can’t comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observer’s belief is anything other than “you just got very lucky” most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin god…
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th July 2026English
5·1 month agothey pinned his response as being an autistic defect.
I think it makes far more sense to pin the temporarily embarrassed millionaires over the orange site as psychopaths and cargo cultists.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th July 2026English
10·1 month agoEnjoyed Andrew Kelley’s rebuttal of the bun blog about moving from zig to rust
Some pretty good sneers in there like
Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026English
6·1 month agoThe people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven’t considered that if no-one has any income they won’t have any customers. However, they do value geese).
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026English
14·1 month agoUS supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…

Hi sir, so that’s 1xArtisinal Coffee Enema with our dark roast single source blend. Says here you turned down the splash proofing upgrade because “the cybertruck is self cleaning, it’s even a boat”. In that case, that’ll be $500. You’re gonna want to drive straight past this next window to the far window. If you could arrive with your pants down and in a crawl position facing away from the window that’d be great.