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.)___
NOT a cult
What Yudkowsky doesn’t get that Hubbard certainly did is that this sort of belligerent boundary-setting against wrongthinkers and skeptics needs to be a consistent practice, not an occasional outburst.
I’ve been pondering whether the intermittency is also (by now) intentional - this way he only “sets direction” and the group self enforces. it’s a handy way to avoid really hard-ticking all the cult boxe
nfi if he’s really that clever tho
He acknowledges that the emails are authentic, and he is much more definite and public about condemning this than he says he would be about realizing that Ghislaine Maxwell was recruiting at community events.
Found this gem buried in !fuck_ai: This is a Conflict and there are Sides
Seems to be making the rounds. Baldur Bjrarnason commented on it (as seen in the webmentions; webmentions are so rad, does Lemmy do those?)
I’m a simple man. I see ‘azhdarchid’, I click.
(now is probably as good a time as any to note that ‘rhamph’ is intended as allusion to Rhamphorhynchus)
Nvidia Opens Investigation Into Jensen Huang’s Relationship With Chinese Spy
so uhh I take it thats not very good news for Nvidia
so uhh I take it thats not very good news for Nvidia
Depends on if there’s anyone left in the US govt who’d be interested in upholding all that stuff about not exporting top tier AI server components to geopolitical rivals I’d guess.
Maybe they’ll make an example of him to show what happens if you run competing grifts without cutting the presidential family in.
I think he’s out on a thin limb.
If there’s one thing people who espouse “reasonable pro-AI” views push, is that the US has to go ahead building chatbots because otherwise the Chinese will beat us.
In the current point in time, AI is under perceived attack by the Democrats (I doubt they’ll go against the lobbyists but w/e) and the US Right has realized that no-one really likes Big Tech - they’re convenient scapegoats for all sorts of things. Sure they want billionaires in charge but people like Sam Altman aren’t really their kinds of people.
Throwing the book at Jensen would help both sides.
Would be amazing if Trump’s swan song was to scapegoat the CEOs who have been showering him in golden busts and laughing at his jokes for the last 2-3 years.
The man has no concept of loyalty owed, only loyalty received.
Depends on if there’s anyone left in the US govt who’d be interested in upholding all that stuff about not exporting top tier AI server components to geopolitical rivals I’d guess.
Imo I can see both outcomes: Trump and Nvidia pulling strings and bending the rules to keep Huang in for the sake of the markets/protecting Trump’s precious ‘SI’ companies, and Trump getting pissed because of selling to China/GOP using him as a scapegoat and having him forcefully resign
HN is basically “this is a CIA plot to tank stonks” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418016
yc commenter:
I can see his remorse and genuine care for his family which makes me feel a bit sad.
I can barely imagine extending such good will to a family member if they willingly cheated, let alone a trillion dollar company CEO I’ve never met.
Parasocial tendencies are weird.
Emacs and GNU can’t stop failing to uphold the mission of Free Software. This mailing-list post has been going around and I think that it is a very good indicator of how head-up-ass the GNU project has become. Note that this email is not from RMS; the problem can’t be blamed on a particular BDFL. The following quote from the email is sufficient to completely end my interest in contributing to GNU ever again:
The Free Software movement doesn’t pursue the goal of “liberty for all humanity”. If you think it does, you are gravely mistaken. Our goals are different, and are well described elsewhere.
While the topic is about accepting chatbot contributions, it could also e.g. be about accepting contributions from members of Suckless or other fascist organizations; in the email, our brave GNU hero says that they’d accept contributions made with slave labor, too.
Any other answer [than accepting code produced by slave labour] is a first step towards splitting our community along the many lines of political and ideological divides that have nothing to do with software freedoms.
I’ve been reading Means and Ends recently, and this reminded me of syndicalist unions being hung up about political neutrality, because interacting with “politics” would interfere with their overarching mission. Believing your work is metapolitical seems to be a good trick to shut down that embarassing self-reflection part of your brain.
The Free Software movement doesn’t pursue the goal of “liberty for all humanity”. If you think it does, you are gravely mistaken. Our goals are different, and are well described elsewhere.
Never thought I’d see someone make a moral argument against Free Software, but here we are.
Taking thread opportunity to highlight the existence of ethical software licenses, including the anti-capitalist software license. It’s past time to evolve beyond Freedom 0.
Got another sneer in while looking at r/BetterOffline
The image doesn’t seem to link to anything.
this was just a screenshot I took. post on a different sub about the same thing
Did the stubsack get retitled instead of a new one getting posted?
looks like
Gonna fix that real quick
Anthropic’s IPO roadshow could potentially start this week the ‘before thanksgiving’ due date is still in place
Anthropic employee has had their brain destroyed by rationalist circlejerk
‘we need to make armageddon happen as fast as possible even though I dont think it will be very good. a trillion dollars please’
They have not called their elected representatives to inform them that this is what they believe
“Hello, Ms Congresswoman? The computers! They’re going to kill us all! The only way to save humanity is to spend a trillion dollars on killer computers! I work for a soon-to-be publicly listed company making maybe-killer computers.”
“Since you [Ms. Congresswoman] can’t manage an international total ban on all AI progress, the only alternative is to bail out my company so we can maybe have a small chance at inventing a friendly AI before the Chiense invent skynet. Obviously the Chinese are behind us and have only gotten as far as they have by distillation attacks to steal our models’ training (that we trained with honestly-and-totally-fair-use acquired scrapes of the entire internet), BUT if you just make us stop, the Chinese will catch up in 6 months and then we will have Chinese skynet, or worse yet, an AI aligned to communism and the CPP!”
I’ve been going down a Weird Little Guys archive binge for a little bit here and this eschatology is even less hinged than the most ridiculous accelerationist nazi terror screed.
Well obviously they wouldn’t bother calling themselves, that never accomplishes anything. They will instead raise money for a new lobbyist think-tank.
A tragedy in 3 acts.
2026-03-05 Why I Don’t Vibe Code
Like many developers, I have a whole folder of draft hobby projects that have never been finished. […] From the LLM perspective, these are folders of failures and I could indeed use LLM to make an app a day or whatever challenge I want. However, the process was far more important than the product (again!). Not every whimsy needs to become a reality. Often, I get more from the fun of brainstorming and the process of learning enough to know that I don’t need to continue and finish the job.
2026-04-29 The LLM Is Not a Junior Engineer
Contrary to how I might seem at times, I do think there could be a place for LLM models in modern software development. I do understand why some developers are entranced with the ability to create applications in hours and turn prototypes into products. I see how it could be highly useful for home hobbyists, back-office bureaucrats and expert engineers to build the low-stakes software they’ve never had the time or skill for.
2026-10-25 My Local LLM Stack
And yet, as a developer, I do feel like I need to work with these tools to understand their potential for augmenting my own software development work. There are some cases (basically as a limited coding assistant) where a LLM can be useful. Some recent examples I have used across several projects:
- Look through this codebase and find all the areas where I have
# FIXMEcomments. Collect them in a report and analyze if any no longer apply. - Improve the test coverage for this file to be above 90%
- Update the openapi spec for this project in the repo to match what the API actually implements today […]
- Look through the data here and find all cases where there are likely errors. For instance, if a person has an end date before their start date.
tangential sneer
Now that I had a machine, the next step was finding an ethical model for coding purposes.
Apparently IBM Granite is the most ethical model out there (read “ethical” as “least likely to get you in legal trouble by using its output”.) With all this agentic power at our fingertips, what are we going to use it for?
The 8B model can do many simple programming tasks (like searching through syntax trees or renaming functions).
Who needs birdshot, when we can aim 16-inch cannons at every sparrow?
This reminded me of @rhamph’s post last week. Is this an archetype of guy that is concious of the harms of LLMs, but cannot trust his own gut enough to see they are fundamentally wrong? So they try to come up with their own super-ethical spin on the beast and try to change the rotting carcass from within. But was anything gained here? I feel that an ideal of simple, elegant, and empowering code was lost.
Is this an archetype of guy that is concious of the harms of LLMs, but cannot trust his own gut enough to see they are fundamentally wrong? So they try to come up with their own super-ethical spin on the beast and try to change the rotting carcass from within.
I submit to you: slop liberals
- Look through this codebase and find all the areas where I have
AI 2027 tracker has updated again
-On the main page chart, they decided to map the Anthropic unreleased models from the METR report for some reason. Setting aside how mapping unreleased models is inherently flawed because we don’t have the full picture, the METR report also said that their measurements come with a high uncertainty
Onto the list of predictions
-Late 2026 is at 84%
-Still doing that weird thing where 80% is both partially accurate and confirmed accurate
-The stock market prediction should be lower, since it didn’t get anywhere near 30%
-Imo the AI narrative prediction should also be lower, since theres conflicting reports about AI being amazing/AI being trash all over mainstream news
-One prediction got a 100% score even though part of it didn’t happen (under OpenBrain releases Agent 1 mini: “The part that did not happen is OpenBrain blowing away the competition: several labs shipped cheap, near-frontier models within weeks of each other.”)
-The key metrics seem to be mostly based on estimates rather than confirmed figures, so likely subject to change
Overall seems like they got a lot of ‘easy’ stuff right (ie business gurus shilling AI) but missed the harder stuff
I looked again, and it seems they just flat out deleted every other ECI measurement except for Astra
Here’s what it looked like then
and heres what it looks like now
Which is suspect because all of those ECI measurements were behind pace
I looked through their methodology page (https://github.com/spicylemonade/AI-2027-tracker/blob/master/docs/methodology.md) and the only reason I can find is that AECI fits METR better, and that “The three ECI variants are too close to separate on 12 tests, so the chart keeps the simplest one.” Yet they say that ECI and AECI cannot be compared, so why keep Astra and get rid of all the other? They kept in multiple different models for Opus and Mythos, so why remove GPT 5.4 Pro, Sol and Opus’s ECI? Also shows that the website had AI slop assistance via Claude
ECI is supposed to be some sort of aggregate benchmark measurement, and AECI the same except the A is for Anthropic?
Yes.
ECI is the benchmark measurement from Epoch AI, and AECI is benchmark measurement from Anthropic
An interesting question from mcc:
I wonder if at this exact moment one could succeed in filing a issue against an open source project for an entirely ficticious vulnerability, get it assigned a CVE and a github score, and then get the upstream project to accept your patch for the vulnerability, with all these things presented as the issue, the CVE, and the PR being written by generative AI, but in fact you wrote them substantially by hand and the patch for your nonexistent vuln is actually a backdoor
Very probably the more your submission appeared to be written by generative AI, the more likely it would be to be accepted. If some person came in with an ungainly, unreadable patch and was aggressively pushing a project to accept it you’d get suspicious and wonder why but if an AI did that you’d be oh well AIs are just like that and AI written code is just like that
I am beginning to like the cut of this publications jib.
https://defector.com/there-is-no-place-in-a-functional-society-for-elon-musk
The federal government is in tatters, the judiciary seeded with sneering MAGA goons like bear traps on a forest floor, the executive branch a metastatic growth of varyingly murderous criminal enterprises in unholy union with a psychotic, apocalyptic tech industry in suicide-cult thrall to bumbling chatbots.
Happy Saturday. Pleas enjoy a very schadenfreude GitHub issue
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 wait is this guy blaming it on using the wrong version of the idiot robot?
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/59060#issuecomment-6601721599
You haven’t tried shutting down a remote server and having it wipe out the remote machine instead in the last 3 hours? Omg bro the newest models would never make that mistake! Just one more model bro!
That should cause an issue like this I assume.
But Sam Altman said AI is smarter than the smartest human scientists! I wasn’t expecting shutting down a server to be one of the deep, intractable mysteries of the universe, but here we are.
Should have taken the effort to type ‘shutdown -r now’ yourself.
Prob even quicker than asking an llm.
Ιt could have been part of a larger thing where it made sense to want to keep evidence of the shutdown in the chat context.
It’s not like they design or promote these things in any way that encourages user initiative, can’t have full cognitive surrender if the user is running system commands on the side.
Good point, had not thought about that. And that makes, in a way stuff even worse, as when it goes wrong people go all ‘skill issue’ despite the systems being designed and marketed for full cognitive surrender.
I will assert again that ~nobody who claims that prompting is a skilled practice also offers a guide to how to develop that skillset. And it would be effectively the same claim as having cracked the use of English as a computer programming language, so it should be pretty easy to produce that guide, right? Anthropic should have this shit front and center! First clickable link on their front page!
Yeah, coding guides are everywhere (or used to be at least, more and more seem to be shutting down due to declining sales + increased costs due to scraping).
Never saw anybody offer a link to a guide like that.
Hell coding has Become a Programmer, Motherfucker which isn’t just one guide, but an entire list of guides, and it even uses (old but checks out) meme to diversify itself from other people offering the same.
(I checked, the guy, despite still being on twitter, is still doing his thing trying to help people to learn how to code, his stance on AI wasn’t totally clear after a short glance, he is however a gamer angry about bad UI implementations (I can totally relate)).
Too many good sneers in this one.
Also, it was only yesterday that I learned that several great conservative thinkers on X thought that making a Harry Potter x Star Wars crossover with a genderbent character would be an exceptionally powerful cultural message that would greatly influence the outcome of the midterm elections. https://www.404media.co/republicans-learn-x-is-an-echo-chamber/
LLM technology - which does have many genuine positive uses
this ain’t it chief
There is a theoretical timeline shimmering somewhere out there in the void in which humanity figured out how to roll out LLM technology - which does have many genuine positive uses
makes wanking motion with right hand while rolling eyes
uwu pls don’t take away my sense of technological progress - it is the only thing that gives meaning to my life and culture
There is a theoretical timeline shimmering somewhere out there in the void in which humanity figured out how to roll out LLM technology - which does have many genuine positive uses
God damn it
that making a Harry Potter x Star Wars crossover with a genderbent character
And evil characters they claimed were right even. This is just ‘hitler did nothing wrong’ with extra steps.
@istewart@awful.systems Dave Karpf is coming out with a book which will be of interest: Vaporware, Inc.: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present (W.W. Norton, In Press) bookshop.org - Amazon
For thirty years, techno-optimists have promised dramatic technological innovation as long as we–the public, journalists, regulators, and policymakers–keep out of the way. The results have been great for Silicon Valley but haven’t gone so well for everyone else. They promise to stop climate change while building resource-intensive data centers, evade governmental regulations at our expense, and watch wealth inequality soar as they enjoy a permissive tax code. Venture capitalists and the companies they fund have amassed wealth, status, and political power, but their bold pronouncements have amounted to little more than vaporware.
In Vaporware, Inc., political scientist and tech commentator David Karpf looks back at the history of the digital future to understand the ideological project of techno-optimism, and why it has gone so wrong for the rest of us. With sharp wit and keen insight, Karpf debunks the foundational myths of the techno-optimists and traces how tech billionaires amassed power by selling the idea of the future. Eye-opening and essential, Vaporware, Inc. is a critical reappraisal of how Silicon Valley works and how we can make it work better.
