A second LLM shitshow has hit vim - this time, its the lead maintainer losing his marbles:

If you wanna see the disaster for yourself, the entire thread’s still on GitHub as of this writing.

OT: A spiritual successor to Adobe Flash is in the works, and its dev already has a Patreon up and running

The HarfBuzz maintainer has drunk the slop-aid - Baldur has commented on it, warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences:

Fonts are a lucrative target. They require a complex parser, usually written in a language that isn’t memory safe, and often directly exposed to outside data (websites, PDFs, etc. that contain fonts). This means a flaw could lead to an attack worst case scenario: arbitrary code execution. HarfBuzz is pretty much the only full-featured library for that takes font files, parses them, and returns glyphs ready to render. It is ubiquitous. A security flaw in HarfBuzz could make a good portion of the world’s user-facing software (i.e. that renders text) unsafe.

Recently discovered Donald Knuth got oneshot by Claude recently (indirectly, through fedi) - feeling the itch to write about tech’s vulnerability to LLMs because of it.

The purpose of AI is theft, part infinity: chardet steals LGPL code for profit using Claude

John Scalzi’s shitcanned any book club plans for the foreseeable future, and AI spammers are the reason why.

Skyview.social mirror so everyone can see - he’s locked out everyone who’s not signed in.

The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield.

You might think using a hallucination machine was risking their lives already.

They are being issued a handgun which goes off on its own (which killed an airman in 2025), so that tracks.

The army’s shiny new service rifle from SIG Sauer (in a shiny new caliber that nobody else in NATO uses) also got slammed by Army troops and gun nerds alike for a variety of reasons, so its not just AI that the brass is being braindead on.

(Meanwhile, the USMC told SIG to fuck off and stuck with their M27 IARs, which had served them well since 2011.)

the one about arena shooters dying off

That extruded piece of audiovisual garbage has been bugging me massively for a couple hours now, so I’m gonna make a quick recommendation:

If you’re looking for a non-dogshit video about the arena shooter’s implosion, boomer shooter YouTuber Skeleblood made a pretty solid one a couple years ago.

Stumbled across a YouTube slop-farm calling itself The Interactive Archive recently, and the whole thing is just plain shameless:

AI slop banner, AI slop thumbnails, AI slop avatar, its all slop from top to fucking bottom.

Its getting pitiful views, too - the highest-viewed video on the damn thing (as of this writing) is the one about arena shooters dying off, sitting at just under 400 views:

Putting that into context, a random screen recording I uploaded hit nearly 700 through sheer luck.

TBF, fighter jets should have been unmanned drones

On the one hand, an autonomous fighter jet would be immune to G-LOC, letting them perform maneuvers that would incapacitate/kill a human pilot. On the other hand, air-to-air combat is a complex affair, and the enemy will be probing for any weaknesses in your drones’ programming to exploit.

Autonomous bombers seem easier to pull off - bombing missions are (relatively) straightforward compared to air-to-air combat.

I personally wouldn’t count on it - if nothing else, losing Internet access would be crippling in modern day life.

I’m not gonna completely rule it out, though - CNN wrote on Instax making a comeback and the BBC reported a general spike in retro tech sales last year.

Mozilla is actively hiding slop commits to Firefox

Jonathan Hogg gives his two cents on gen-AI, pointing to high barriers to entry causing vibe-coding to explode:

We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.

You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

(Adding my two cents, Adobe Flash filled the same role as HyperCard in the '00s, providing the public an easy(ish) way to get into programming, and providing an outlet for many an aspirating animator and gamedev.)

Good to know, David.

throwing chatbots into the military

Not the first time the US gov’s pulled that shit, and it sure as hell won’t be the last.

File this shit next to the SIG M18 and the XM7 in its list of grade-A blunders.

The promptfondlers did it, they made a computer which doesn’t do what you tell it to do

Starting this Stubsack off with one programmer’s testimony on the effects of the LLM rot:

For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

Before LLMs, I’d encounter [software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge] a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it’s a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

After LLMs, there’s been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can’t do any work at all. They can’t even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can’t even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

It’s bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.

Quick update: The post’s popped off in the Fediverse, and Doctorow’s actively posting through it in the replies.

EDIT: Tante’s also written a follow-up post, trying to convince people to tone down their vitriol against Cory.

edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he’s all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?

This is probably just me, but that doesn’t seem particularly shocking. If this AI bubble’s taught me anything, its that tech culture (if not tech as a whole) was deeply, deeply vulnerable to the LLM rot from the start.