Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 for starting this.)
This is by an llm-boosting firm, so be aware that it’ll have a lot of marketing in it. It doesn’t say nice things about vibe code (presumably because the authors want to sell you a solution) but the numbers are interesting even so.
https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways
A few choice snippets, none of which will surprise anyone here:
- For every code change merged, the probability of a production incident has more than tripled.
The incidents-to-PR ratio is up 242.7% as teams move from low to high AI adoption.
- Bugs are accelerating, not stabilizing.
In our 2025 AI engineering report on the AI Productivity Paradox, bugs per developer were up 9% as AI adoption grew. In this dataset, that figure has risen to 54%
- The most experienced people in your organization are being buried.
Median time to first PR review is up 156.6%. Average time spent in code review is up 199.6%. Median time in review is up 441.5%. The engineers with the deepest knowledge of the system are spending their most valuable hours unraveling plausible-looking code that should never have reached them in the state it did.
New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so they’ve blocked it for everyone.
They’re claiming they believe it’s because someone has managed to find a “minor” vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.
My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.
I question how robust Anthropic’s geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
I think it’s more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. It’s an IPO race to the bottom.
It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.
Now seeing one-shotted Europeans calling for the development of AI/LLMs at home - “Mistral” is not adequate
Literally just started a discussion on European booster fanfic hype a few days ago: https://awful.systems/post/8591627/11736760
I wonder if Europe 2031 will get a boost out of this, it is really perfect timing for them, they can even claim an early prediction success on the US cutting Europe off! (But as with AI 2027, Europe 2031 assumes a much more competent US that can implement strategies like that in a competent fashion instead of some disorganized demands after 5pm on a Friday).
I’ve already seen “Europe 2031 was right. Shortest time between a work of science fiction and science fact” on LinkedIn… 🙃🙃🙃
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
It also saves them on the cost of actually serving the model, and stalls the cycle of people gradually realizing the new model isn’t much better than the previous one.
Very fair point. I’m still inclined to think this wasn’t primarily a marketing decision, because I don’t think they would point the finger so directly at the government if that were the case. Perhaps the directive was a blessing in disguise for them though.
Either way, I think this is pretty telling for what we can expect over the next couple of months before we see any public SEC docs from either OpenAI or Anthropic. If it weren’t for the immense damage it will cause for innocent people, I might have broken out some popcorn. Popcorn might be my staple food for financial reasons soon anyway.
The “Behind the Bastards” on Nicole Daedone’s California sex cult does have a lot of similarities to Ziz’s stories of CFAR events, and the CFAR founders’ hints at what went wrong. They mention cuddle puddles and a series of early figures who dropped out or were pushed out. Its not at all the vision I got ten years ago from the blogs and podcasts.
Anthropic’s fear mongering has finally backfired! The US government ordered them to suspend all foreign access to Fable and Mythos: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
Well, I’m not sure this has properly backfired. They were probably struggling to serve the models to everyone, and they were probably losing a lot of money on everyone with subscription access using Fable for the free trial period. And there was a lot of complaints about how insanely oversensitive Fable’s censors and guardrails were. Now they get all the benefits and hype of having released the model, without having to pay the insane costs (or the letdown of people releasing it is just another incremental step)! (Well, depending on how much flexibility they have in their GPU cloud access). If this blows over in a few weeks it will probably be worthwhile for the hype “Our models are so dangerous the government had to ban foreign access”.
Also, funnily enough the US banning foreign access to their models was a major plot point in the Europe 2031 booster fanfic I recently boosted. Of course there, it was a massive point of leverage against Europe and led to immense value loss to the Europeans, where irl Fable/Mythos are just another incremental step (if even that much) being marketed very well.
Aren’t they still labeled a supply chain risk to the US? Feels like the US having their cake and eating it too
Although it is satisfying to see Anthropic’s methods come to bite them.
That got blocked in court… or one of the two legal mechanisms by which the SCR could work got blocked, the other didn’t? Something messy and stupid and complicated like that.
And of course, that all got ignored with US government participation in Glasswing. So idk… it’s all so chaotic and stupid.
Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to “sue” journalists by “summoning” them to a “tribunal” staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first “lawsuit”, which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D’Souza
threw a hissy fithas shuttered everything “temporarily”.D’Souza has observed that his friends are “the best little boys in the world. They all went to the fanciest universities and won all the prizes.”
and wiped out several cities in the processMy profile of Sackler, it turns out, was the first case to be brought before Objection’s tribunal, although the company told me there are now dozens in its virtual docket. “You’re Exhibit A,” D’Souza said, observing that the verdict on my work was part of the company’s soft launch: “Building software is hard.”
did they try to turn their first target into unwilling and adversarial beta-tester?
After we spoke, I awaited my verdict before the Objection tribunal in the Sackler case. None arrived. Eventually, the landing page was taken offline. I asked D’Souza about it. He explained that Objection would “hold off publishing any adjudications” until “a new major strategic partnership” was announced.
so it seems
(As a general matter, D’Souza questions the common journalistic practice of quoting “experts” as part of coverage.)
it does fit a pattern
In D’Souza’s interview with the Australian newspaper, he explained why: “It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
D’Souza continued, “Ultimately, what’s the last job? It won’t be knowledge work. It won’t be physical work. It will be interfacing between the physical and the digital worlds, and right now that frontier is journalism.”
Taken together it becomes incredibly transparent that the actual goal here is to transform themselves into a kind of priest-king class, exercising absolute authority on behalf of the remote and unfathomable god that they built. Just please pay no attention to who built the AI, who runs the AI, or where all the money and power end up.
Twitter really broke their brains.
I don’t understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they’re mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal ‘social credit score’ for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D’Souza implies here:
One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)
but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That’s just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it’s staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.
Special mentions:
Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.
“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
Honestly, I think D’Souza explains the business best:
Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding “so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,” D’Souza says. “What I know from the Gawker litigation, having dealt with not just Hulk Hogan but dozens of other parties who felt like they were aggrieved by the media, is that they actually don’t want a financial remedy. What they want is a moral victory. Most of them just want a PDF that they can send to their investors and their family which says, ‘I did not go to Epstein Island.’”
Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.
oh lol
“Endless Shrimp Jesus”: Red Lobster (a) still exists and (b) is going all-in on AI
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/red-lobsters-ceo-says-hes-153500558.html
Someone saw the infinite orgasming shrimp idea and decided to pivot.
They’ve gone bankrupt once in '24 , I’d bet good money they’re gonna go bankrupt again.
Oh, OK, cool. Let me know how the chatbot handles temperature management, stock rotation, allergen cross-contamination for seafood, all that good stuff.
Gotta love it when people who try to cause problems for others run into the consequences of their actions and then try to make these consequences everyone else’s problem.
My favorite part of that whole beautiful affair was towards the end with dgerard’s Chinese counterpart saying “no don’t ban them yet I need more material for an article I’m halfway through writing.”
he should 10x his budget. what kind of startup gets bankrupt after 2k loss? maybe they’re just deterred and will try again later (which was implied)
a truly magnificent feat of prompt engineering, coalesced into a single repository
https://github.com/thesysdev/make-no-mistakes
(do we accept snark from boosters? repo appears to function as a soft ad for a bespoke DSL and its surrounding tooling for LLMs to autoextrude.)
You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?
Well now malware authors are including biology terms like “saccharide” in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway
What a time to be alive
The first I heard of a project doing this was iocaine, an anti-scraper tool (that I think awful.systems uses??) which has module names like “sex_dungeon” and “GargleBargle” intended to make the codebase unmanageable to navigate for llm tooling. It’s pretty funny that this has become an established technique.
awful does indeed use iocaine! and yeah the codebase is fun :)
it’s stunningly effective at handling scrapers, and it’s even more fucked how intense a plague the scrapers (combined with running shitty job scheduling with even worse code through resproxies) are
ig chucking in a segment of merck index (short entries with compound properties, 2000 pages of) to iocaine training corpus would trip it
Amazing stuff. LLM security is so cooked.
Edward W. Niedermeyer, who wrote the book on how Tesla is a tax fraud and pump-and-dump disguised as a car company, will livestream the SpaceX IPO Friday https://atmo.rsvp/p/niedermeyer.online/e/3mo23aiagjs3t The real drama will be spread over at least a month.
Remember, investing is about decades and national economies not days and individual companies. If you think the US stock market is going to become more like Russia’s than France’s, you can make a policy and act on it to reduce your stocks’ exposure to the Mega-IPOs.
So very excited for the biggest pump and dump in the history of consumer investing, brought to us by a man actively inciting race riots in northern ireland. Can’t wait for this afternoon 🙏
Hardly anyone who matters is on twitter any more so I think many policymakers (and most retail investors) don’t understand what Musk is tweeting every few minutes
New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/
It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)
Some highlights in sneering:
The hours Christian’s team pulled were insane – seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, people sleeping in the office.
One of the character’s is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.
Someone mentioned, in passing, that they thought artificial general intelligence - AI that is better than any human at most tasks - was probably two or three years out.
This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.” Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to ‘most’ and not ‘all’ and swapped ‘cognitive tasks’ for ‘benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks’ and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.
Standalone American AI tools are considered a data-protection risk.
This ‘scenario’ has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.
The infrastructure story is just as grim. The largest AI supercomputer in the US runs at 1,250 megawatts. The largest in Europe runs at eighty-three.
So I couldn’t a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the ‘planned’ American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.
Up to this point, everything we’ve said has happened – with only Caroline’s and Christian’s personal stories representing fictional elements. From here on out, we start speculating. We no longer single out individual AI companies, and instead refer to made-up actors: Atlas for the leading American AI company, Helios for the leading European company, and Zimo for the leading Chinese one.
They are even copying AI 2027’s stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!
Works councils slow the deep adoption of powerful AI tools; employment protections make it hard to let go of staff whose jobs can be automated and whose labour force would be needed in parts of the labour market that faces shortages.
Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is “Europe needs to copy America’s lack of labor laws or other regulations”. I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other ‘parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing’ or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.
But Europe has one last card to play. After five years of failing to build a frontier AI sector, it still owns the one bottleneck which the entire race runs through. ASML remains the only company in the world capable of building the EUV lithography equipment that is used to print cutting-edge chips. Without access to its machines, the US could not keep extending its lead in AI; with access to its machines, China would likely have caught up some time ago.
So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?
Europe’s slide into irrelevance was not inevitable. Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course, had it shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures.
By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.
Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition
They do this with everything, because the tech doesnt hold up to the dreams, a lot of things get diluted. Esp noticably when they compared llms to humans learning and instead of noting llm advancements they talked down how humans learned.
See also the fields reaction to the chinese room thought experiment.
I love the deep lack of specificity in “other sectors of the economy facing shortages”. Either you have to acknowledge that you’re talking about the cafe economy and gig economy and those sectors aren’t so much facing labor shortages as much as leveraging the worker’s chronic underemployment to keep costs down or you’re making shit up wholesale. Also please note that American companies are already finding that as the investor capital subsidies run out it’s often cheaper to hire a person than pay the token costs to do the job with AI.
Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!
We are already a few years behind on the planned AI destroying the world
I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because apparently that’s the latest date Kurzweil gives for his Singularity™ (can’t be arsed to go reread his book and double-check, my copy was a PDF that came via the high seas 5 computers ago anyway)
We can (and probably will) keep having AI bubbles as long as capitalism exists (and thus rich idiots with too much money are looking for ways to get richer) and there are new AI approaches/paradigms (with flashy demo-able potential) left to discover.
Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess what…
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
When Frontiers started automating the editorial process, I stayed. I reasoned that as long as the automation could be turned off, human editors can still ensure rigorous, high-quality peer review. This now became impossible - the system has been entirely hijacked by algorithms.
Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting “reviewers” with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.
I emailed and met with the editorial office to ask for the AI assistant to be turned off. I was told this is not possible. Instead, I was treated to some vague promises of potential future improvements and a dose of gaslighting.
If human editors can’t control who reviews science, it’s no longer peer review — it’s a rubber-stamp machine designed for volume and profit, not quality. I have no intention of attaching my name to it. So I’m out.
https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25
Sigh.
ACM will no longer require disclosure of the use of #generativeAI in writing papers… an absolutely terrible change by the @ACM Publications Board to the Policy on Authorship. Yes, this will give ACM more papers. No, the ideology of “number go up” productivism is not the path to responsible, ecological or ethical computing, but to irrelevance.
I signed up for ACM last year, just hit my expiry (like, today), and truly don’t know if I want to renew
it’s been an extreme avenue of generative hype, constantly pushing talks, books, etc. I have no idea how they square it with the ethical pledge
I was flipping through this month’s magazine on the bus, don’t worry, they have a solution for reviewers…
https://cacm.acm.org/research/from-volunteerism-to-duty-reforming-peer-review-with-tokens/
:(
To prevent fraud and rule exchanges, tokens can be implemented as a digital entity, representing a fungible unit of value. Tokens can be transferred through cryptographic protocols and governed by rules running in the TMS.
They’re gonna do it. Peer review is going ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
Anything to avoid paying people for their time.
By not thinking about it, one presumes.
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
Link for that development, in case anyone missed it:
https://awful.systems/post/8263538/11477939
I did, indeed, turn them down, and I told the journal why.
A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They’re probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.
Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.
All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI “audience immersive presentations” where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.
Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).
was there an ownership change or something? this is atrocious
Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently
I have some modest proposals for handling private equity but they would all probably count as fedposting. We still haven’t found a decent replacement for the market niche JoAnn fabrics occupied.
The slop startup dubs this “Audience Intelligence” and claims pixar experience. There are two “interactive movies” by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.
Gary Marcus has been spamming out sneers at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic over the last 24h. He’s right but he’s such a knob about it. The first of his posts was a whopper where he just quoted himself predicting things correctly from like a year ago. It is nice to feel vindicated and say “I told you so” but it’s way too much. It reminds me of Juergen Schmidhuber who was famous on x-twitter for shouting “I ALREADY INVENTED THIS 30 YEARS AGO” every time a new notable paper came out of an AI Lab and whose name became a verb for “claiming credit for something”
He keeps going on about how we will have AGI but it won’t be via transformers. Dude why do we even need or want AGI? He comes so close to being “one of the good guys” and then shows his true colours every single time.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
MONAAYYY
Gary’s been on a sneering spree this whole week. While good for him and everything, I truly could not care less for his neurosymbolic AI rambles and mostly read the stuff where he dunks on the current state of AI
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
To solve biology and physics and live forever amongst the stars, obvs.
Or to allow a tiny elite to treat the rest of humanity like cattle since they no longer depend on them for physical and mental labour.
It’s striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
We need salvation but it won’t come via rapture this decade
It might have come this decade, had they faithfully funded the path of symbolic AI, but instead they wandered around in the desert chasing the false idols of connectionism and deep learning.
