Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025
Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.)
All participants in the Stubsack, including awful.systems regulars and those joining from elsewhere, are reminded that this is not debate club. Anyone tempted by the possibility of debate-club behavior is encouraged to touch your nearest grass immediately. We are here to sneer, not to bicker: This is a place to mock the outside world, not to settle grand matters of ideology, unless the latter is done in an extraordinarily amusing way.
I need to lurk more, feel like I missed some good drama 🍿
If it isn't on this quick sneer page, you can just look at the posts with a lot of replies, either shows it broke containment, or somebody went full debate mode.
sometimes both
My dad was a bit freaked out by a video version (We're not ready for super-intelligence)of the "AI 2027" paper, particularly finding two end scenarios a bit spooky: colossus-style cooperating AIs taking over the world, and the oligarch concentration of power one, which i think definitely echoed sci-fi he watched/read as a teen.
In case anyone else finds it useful these are the "Comments as I watch it", that I compiled for him
Before watching Video Notes:
AI Only channel with only 3 videos
Produced By "80000hours", which is an EA branch (trying to peddle to you the best way to organize 40years * 50 weeks * 40 hours [I love that they assume only 2 weeks of holidays]); which is definitely cult adjacent: https://80000hours.org/about/#what-do-we-do. Mostly appears to be attempting to steer young people to what they believe are "High impact" jobs.
Video Notes:
The backing paper is a bit of a joke, one "AI 2027", for reference one of the main authors is very much a "cult member", Scott Alexander Siskind, author of "Slate Star Codex" and "Astral Codex Ten".
Other authors include [AI Futures Project] :
A lot of fluff trying to hype up the credentials of the authors.
AGI does not have a bounded definition.
They are playing up the China angle to try and drum up jingoistic support.
Exaggerating Chat GPT-3 success, by merely citing "users", without mentioning actual revenue, or actual quality.
Quote:
-> I think this epitomises the biggest flaw of their movement, they believe that from "first-principles" it's possible to think hard enough (without needing to confront it to reality) and you can divine the future.
-> You can look up "Prediction Markets", which is another of their ontological sins.
I will note that the prediction of "Agents" was not a hard one, since this is what all this circle wants to achieve, and as the video itself points out it's fantastically incompetent/unreliable.
Note: This video was made before the release of GPT-5. We don't know precisely how much more compute altogether GPT-5 truly required, but it's very incremental changes compared to GPT-4. I think this philosophy of "More training" is why OpenAI is currently trying (half-succeeding half failing) to raise Trillions of dollars to build out data-centers, my prediction is that the AI bubble bursts before these data centers come to fruition.
Note: The video assumes keeping models secret, but in reality OpenAI would have a very vested interest in displaying capability, even if not making a model available to the public. Also even on consumer models, OpenAI currently loses a bunch of money for every query.
Note: The video assumes "Singularitarianism", of ever acceleration in quality of code, and that's why they keep secret models. I think this hits a compute/energy wall in real life, even if you assume that LLMs are actually useful for making "quality" code. These ideas are not new, and these people would raise alarms about it with or without current LLM tech.
Specific threats of "Bio-weapon", which a priori can not really be achieved without experimentation, and while "automated" labs half exis, they still require a lot of human involvement/resources. Technically grad students could also make deadly bioweapons, but no one is being alarmist about them.
Note: "Agent 2" Continuous Online learning is gobbledygook, that isn't how ML, even today works. At some point there are very diminishing returns, and it's a complete waste of time/energy to continue training a specific model, a qualitative difference would be achieved with a different model. I suspect this sneakily displays "Singularitarianism" dogma.
Quote:
-> This is just science-fiction, in the real world these models require specialized hardware to be run at any effective speed, this would be extremely unlikely to evade detection. Also this treats the model as a single entity with single goals, when in reality any time it's "run" is effectively a new instance.
Note: This subculture loves the concept of "science in secrecy", which features a lot in the writings of Elizer Yudkowsky. Which is cultish both in keeping their own deeds "in a veil of secrecy", and helpful here when making a prophecy/conspiracy theory, by making the claim hard to disprove specifically (it's happening in secret!)
Note: Even today Chain-of-thought is not that reliable at explaining why a bot gives a particular answer. It's more analog to guiding "search", rather than true thought as in humans anyway. Them using "Alien-Language" would not be that different.
Agent 3, magically fast-and-cheap, assuming there are now minimum energy requirements. Then you can magically run 200,000 copies of. magically equivalent to 50,000 humans sped up by 30x. (The magic is "explained" in the paper by big assumptions, and just equating essentially how fast you can talk with the quality of talking, which given the length of their typical blog posts is actually quite funny)
Note: "Alignment" was the core mission of MIRI/Eliezer Yudkowsky
Note: Equating Power and Intelligence a lot (not in this video, but in general being suspiciously racist/eugenicist about it), ignoring the material constraints of actual power [echo: Again the epitomical sin of "If you just think hard enough"]
Note: Also assuming that trillions of dollars of growth can actually happen, simultaneously with millions losing their jobs.
I am betting that the "There is another" part of the video is probably deliberately echoing Colossus.
The video casually assumes that the only limits to practical fusion and nanotech just intelligence (instead of potential dead-ends, actually the nanotech part is a particular fancy of theirs, you can lookup "diamondoid bacteria" on LessWrong if you want a laugh)
The two outcomes at the end of the video are literally robo-heaven and robo-hell, and if you just follow our teachings (in this case slow-downs on AI) you can get to robo-heaven. You will notice they don't imagine/advocate for a future with no massive AI integration into society, they want their robo-heaven.
Quote:
-> I would say specifically some of them are suggesting that AGI soon is implausible quite strongly. I think many would agree that right now the future looks dire with or without super-AI, or even regular AI.
Takeaway section:
Yeah this really is a cult recruitment video essentially.
We’re almost at the end of 2025 and agents don’t fucking exist the way they predicted. Literally 0% acc so far. Ai 2027 agmi.
^image of Daniel K who already updated his rapture prophecy to 2029 because he’s a mark
I stumbled onto that vid a while back, watched the first minute or so, lol'ed at the glazing of kokotajlo, and stopped the vid. I did think about posting it here to be torn apart but forgot about it. I watched a little bit further and got "they chose to write this as a narrative" of course they fucking did. It's their one thing. Write a shitty 10k word story that amounts to some combination of "really makes you think" and "big if true".
Here's a story: Once upon a time there was a world. In it people were sad. Then one day swlabr was elected supreme benevolent ruler and then nobody was sad again :) the end. Wow make u think. Many experts agree
Haven’t seen this skeet posted here. Skeet:
who's the basilisk now?
Last week, we learned that area transphobe Sabine Hossenfelder is using her arXiv-posting privileges to shill Eric Weinstein's bullshit. I have poked around the places where I'd expect to find technical discussion of a physics preprint, and I've come up with nothing. The Stubsack thread, as superficial as it was, has been the most substantive conversation about her post's actual content.
Wrong link. this points to the NeurIPS post for this week.
Good catch; thanks. I think I had too many awful.system tabs open at once.
today in I fucking called it fedora aka mostly red hat has decided to allow slop code in a way that violates even their utterly mid stated principles around the tech
if you’re downstream from any fedora packages (and I don’t know the scope of this policy so it might be safe to consider anything owned by red hat in general to be tainted — yes I realize most of us are downstream from a bunch of red hat shit) it might be time to evaluate an alternative if available
among others, so many systemd and libvirt things :|
fortunately a long-ish tail on a lot of that, but fucking still
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content
And yet the BBC still has a Programme Director for "Generative AI" who gets trotted out to say "We want these tools to succeed". No, we don't, you blithering bellend.
@blakestacey @BlueMonday1984 I also want my Perpetual Motion Machine and Circle-Squaring Algorithm to succeed, but what are ya gonna do? 🤷♀️
New paper on LLMs just dropped, titled LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot"!
Currently a novelty at this point, but could prove useful to make the likes of Iocaine and Nepenthes more effective - especially since the paper notes:
It does also suggest doing some actual quality control to prevent damage to the LLMs, but that sure ain't happening
The paper is itself written by LLM.
Fuck.
Another attempt to platform fascists has cropped up in FOSS, and Drew DeVault's talked all about it. Featuring our good friend Curtis Yarvin.
of course the organization I know primarily for platforming fascists and astroturfing on YouTube was secretly an even worse grift and somehow tied in with Yarvin, why wouldn’t it be
given that Rossmann’s at the head of this thing too, I’m starting to regret not taking GrapheneOS (who, notably, were also a target for this grift) seriously when they said Rossmann’s involved in a bunch of terrible shit. the right to repair deserves a better figurehead.
fuckin pisses me off, given his clippy campaign is helping move pivot shirts
sigh
I WILL NOT CHANGE, CLIPPY SUCKED FIRST
Damn right. He needs to quit, he's the one who sucks.
The fash don't have magic doodoo fingers that obligate decent people to surrender every time they touch something we like, and we should never concede as if they do.
hadn't been aware that rossman's into dodgy stuff (knew fairly little about him outside of some repair stuff on his channel), but ugh
also clicking through into FUTO's projects and it's all a bit gravitating around a point, "built on polycentric". so I wonder what that means?
already at "I'm interested" because it's interesting to see what other work happens in this space.
and then very next sentence we get to
ah. I see. the "opt-out moderation" is also telling - how does it work? who knows! it's got a paragraph under introduction but seems to not be mentioned anywhere else in the docs.
extra frustrating to see because the projects these fucks are taking on (like the open cast thing) are items that sorely need stronger options in the open space. but not like this. never like this.
Ah, it's another Urbit isn't it?
certainly has more than a bit of that urbit coiner Sovereign Individual shit going on yeah
I tried looking around a bit to see if I could find any info about contributors there, and for the most part none of them really seem to have much internet fingerprint at all. did find one person with a moderately extensive set of personal repo/project commits spanning back a few years, spanning long enough so as to find that they were doing a BSc/Hons/something circa 2018. which isn't concrete but does strongly hint at a current age of mid 20s to mid 30s. "get 'em while they're young and you can poison their brains early!" - the bayfucker mantra
god damn it. i guess the name of the founder might have been a hint, only one letter away from our favorite roman saluter.
i use immich, one of the projects they seem to have actually funded in a big way. it's a very good selfhosted replacement for google photos. at least the license is actually open source, as opposed to grayjay, so here's hoping it has a future in case the fascists try to fuck with it.
i guess the problem though isn't with the funding and/or control of individual projects, it's with the long-term influence in the foss community they seem to be after.
i had a feeling about FUTO because of rossmann's involvement. became leery of him after this youtube bullshit from 2018:
This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.
(Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about "leftist professors" to saying stuff like "it's not great that we're deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad". Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)
TechDirt has posts about this quite often.
Biggest examples I know of is Shaun's 4-hour review of the "War on Science" book, and the backlash to the Riyadh Comedy Festival (the whole drama here was hilarious, and not because of the comedy).
Here's a written review of that book which covers its problems fairly well, I think. (Which indirectly reminded me that last year I wrote a blog post about how Sokal and Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense wasn't such hot stuff. I guess I hadn't shared that here before.)
I also found this Reddit comment that lays into Sokal and Bricmont's treatment of Lacan, but not having read Lacan, I can't vouch for it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/rsbx6e/are_there_any_contemporary_thinkers_who_are/hqnelw7/
I'll just note the sneerability of how Sokal contributed to sex pest Krauss' War on Science book, right alongside Jordan Peterson, who has said plenty of things as batshit as Sokal accused Lacan of being.
In lighter news, this anti-LLM rhyme made me chuckle:
I suppose it is an iambic tetrameter, but the third and fourth lines do not fit.
That’s how you know a human wrote it
You don't recognize it?
No, I don't.
one of today's lucky 10,000
very short children's book, with intentionally atypical rhythm, by Dr Seuss
written in call-response style in dialogue between two characters (unnamed and Sam-I-Am)
https://www.readstoriesforkids.com/Green-Eggs-and-Ham-text.html - text without images, but best enjoyed with the images
the full book on The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/greeneggsham0000unse/
dr seuss - green eggs & ham
For something lighter, here's an AI bro getting wowed by the shittiest "video game" I've ever seen (trust me, the screenshot doesn't do it justice):
In lieu of sneering this shit, I'd like to argue that arts education should become mandatory for all students post-bubble, regardless of their profession. STEM, humanities, tech, doesn't matter - give them four years of art so they don't turn out like this guy.
The Framework thread caused by the company's fash turn is still going even after eight full days.
Lotta lowlights to pick from, but the guy openly praising DHH for driving Basecamp straight off a cliff is particularly sneer-worthy:
"Apolitical" is peak red flag these days, eh?
Definitely, it's just code for I'm ok with nazis at this point.
Yeah definitely synonymous with the whole “neutrality sides with the oppressor” thing
More "red hat" than "red flag", but you're still dead-on.
I hope it's still going after 8 full years, if the company's even still in business. Trust is only built back with accountability.
"Not Winston Smith?" So, O'Brien?
The idea that AI will be a boon for searching the mathematical literature is undermined somewhat by how it shits the bed there too.
Closely related is a thought I had after responding to yet another paper that says hallucinations can be fixed:
Every time I hear a moderate AI argument (e.g. AI will be an aid for searching literature or writing code), it's like, "Look, it's impressive that the AI managed to do this. Sure, it took about three dozen prompts over five hours, made me waste another five hours because it generated some completely incorrect nonsense that I had to verify, produced an answer that was much lower quality than if I had just searched it up myself, and boiled two lakes in the process. You should acknowledge that there is something there, even if it did take a trillion dollars of hardware and power to grind the entire internet and all books and scientific papers into a viscous paste. Your objections are invalid because I'm sure things are gonna improve because Progress."
I am doubly annoyed when I turn my back and they switch back to spouting nonsense about exponential curves and how AI is gonna be smarter than humans at literally everything.
Wouldn't f(x) = x^2 + 1 be a counterexample to "any entire (differentiable everywhere) function that is never zero must be constant"? Or are some terms defined differently in complex analysis than in the math I learned?
I've never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it is zero at i.
A fact that AI gets wrong.
flaviat explained why your counterexample is not correct. But also, the correct statement (Liouville's theorem) is that a bounded entire function must be constant.
Or Picard's little theorem, which says that if an entire function misses two points (e.g. is never 0 or 1), then that function must be constant.
Oh, I didn't know that!
Who is flaviat? I don't see that handle on this lemmy or Greg Egan's mastodon account, and Egan just re-tooted someone who gives x^2 + 1 as a counterexample.
Does this link work for you to see the comment? https://awful.systems/comment/9163259
now it works! I do not understand the two sentences "I’ve never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it (what? - ed.) is zero at i."
I believe those sentences can be paraphrased as, "The term entire function is only used in complex analysis. The function f(z) = z^2 + 1 is zero at z = i."
Thanks, i don't speak english natively
the poster is referring to the function
f(z) = z^2 + 1It's worth noting that, unlike a real function, a complex function that is differentiable in a neighborhood is infinitely differentiable in that neighborhood. An informal intuition behind this: in the reals, for a limit to exist, the left and right limit must agree. In C, the limit from every direction must agree. Thus, a limit existing in C is "stronger" than it existing in R.
Edit: wikipedia pages on holomorphism and analyticity (did I spell this right) are good
entire always means holomorphic on the whole complex plane
so a couple months ago it was noted that mattermost’s website had gone very problematic, extreme emphasis on pitching to mil/int with very little indicating its foss roots/nature
and now it seems they’re going for rent extraction even on the self-hosted
Kind of a ramble: So, I’ve been out in the wild recently. I use discord and have noticed that in most of the servers I’m in, either they have an explicit no-genAI policy or quarantined sections where genAI content is allowed. On one podcast’s server, I posted a complaint about some genAI content that was posted to the podcast’s socials, and the embed was removed because it showed the genAI content- 10/10, love to see it. On another server, I figured out that the channel was created specifically because they had a sealion problem but didn’t want to ban their sealion (it appeared to be just one).
An interesting (read: stupid) thing about this sealion was that they are a self-styled leftist that was pro-AI. I won’t try to replicate any of their nonsense here, because A) it was nonsense stemming from a refusal to believe any anti-AI data and a lack of understanding of how LLMs work, and B) I don’t want to look like I’m posting about some kind of argument I had elsewhere here in order to score internet points, as I’m self aware/anxious enough to know that I sound exactly like that right now.
They posted this recent article written by Peter Coffin. There isn’t much about this guy on the internet. All I can gather is that they are some kind of breadtuber or in the breadtube orbit. It’s funny (read: farcical) to see a person posing as leftist say they are “pro-AI” but “anti-AI industry”. Either they don’t understand how the technology works (i.e. ignorant) or are accelerationist, wanting both the destruction of the environment and art (i.e. wilfully stupid)
Anyway, this exploration has shown me that some leftists don’t support copyright protections. I understand that from a couple different perspectives: 1. The main beneficiaries of copyright protections are large media corporations, and 2. it can be interpreted as trying to capitalistically extract fictional value, much like a landlord charging rent. I’m not trying to debunk this (I don’t think I’m representing this well enough). My thought is that I don’t give a shit about corporations losing money, what I care about is the work of individual artists being under/de-valued. Copyrights are an imperfect method that artists use to try seek justice, so it’s a grey area for me. Coffin in the article linked paints the situation as black and white: anyone who tries to stop someone “stealing” is actually rent seeking, whether or not they are a megacorp or a starving artist. (edit) I think this comes from Coffin's "extremely pro-AI" agenda, i.e., being anti-AI is enough to be reductively lumped together under some conspiratorial pro-capitalist agenda.
End of ramble, sorry that there wasn’t much of a point or structure here. Would love to hear any thoughts that come out from reading this.
E: note that this vid is posted as a common criticism of Coffin.
E2: ::: spoiler re: video above: I really didn't know about this before writing that edit. I did some more reading. Coffin is something of a pick-me internet guy, his entire personality crystallised by that video. He's moved from internet trend to internet trend, one of note being gamergate, formerly anti, now pro (yes, as of 2024). He also did rap parodies? Anyway this isn't about him. :::
I'm a leftist who doesn't support intellectual property. My solutions to intellectual property are 1) communism, or at least 2) basic income, in that order of preference.
Until one of the solutions to the problem of intellectual property is implemented, individuals should be allowed full sovereignity over their intellectual creations as they see fit. Personally all my intellectual creation is either public domain, or published under open, explicitly anti-capitalist licenses. But that's because I have a day job and a safe economic situation. If an artist decides people should pay to use their stuff, people should pay to use their stuff. The consent of the creator is non-negotiable.
Capitalists are the enemy and I don't give a flying fuck about capitalist intellectual property. My rule, grosso modo, is: if I pay to access this piece of art, does the money go to the creators, or does it go to some corporation's shareholders? If the first, I pay, gladly. If the second, I sail the high seas. Sometimes when it's hybrid (usually of the form "the artist gets peanuts and the capital owners get the lion's share") I will dig up the artist's patreon or ko-fi or whatever, donate the price of the thing there, and pirate it, under the assumption that the patreon/ko-fi/bandcamp/etc. cut is smaller than the typical entertainment industry's.
Peter Coffin is a fuck and his contrarian-ass pro-AI stuff deserves sneering to the full extent of sneerdom
Is it a single person or a worker co-op? Their copyright is sacred.
Is it a corporation? Lol, lmao, and also yarrr
Glorious banner material
I’m stealing this take :p
I will deliberately avoid declaring the take to be in the public domain, just so that you can enjoy the street cred of your life of crime 🏴☠️
One of my favourite musicians, Patricia Taxxon is quite vocal on being against intellectual property, but also that AI people should just be able to scrape everything and put it in their machine. It makes me sad.
Yeah I mean I am in favour that food should not be paywalled from the hungry and everyone who wants food should be able to just go to the food and eat it (i.e. I am in favour of a system that allocates resources according to need). I am not in favour that wealthy capital owners who already hold all the power in the world should be allowed to vacuum all the food into a hell blender that produces processed food product to try and impress investors into another round of funding for their food sucking machine. These are not the same thing.
i think her takes make a little more sense if you think of the infinite noise machine as the art object itself rather than any particular output of it. i obviously can't read her mind but if you think of a music-generating model as an interactive music toy rather than "a replacement for a musician", then her position makes way more sense. why wouldn't you want more people doing Poet Laureate Infinity? i think for her the crime isn't scraping, but scraping in service of overmarketed smoothed-over slop generators instead of actually interesting art
There is actually, but it is mostly on youtube. Anyway he aligned himself to Caleb Maupin. A colorblind communist who thinks brown is red. (I dont think he is actually colorblind, but he likes Dugin).
if only, maupin spoke on a conference in teheran next to dugin and publishes his books. the layer of red paint on brown couldn't be possibly thinner. see also: jackson hinkle, maga-communism. i wish everyone involved nice tuberculosis infection in damp ukrainian prison
It was amazing that maupin went 'people accuse me of being a duginist and it was crazy, never read any of his work when people said that. Minutes later I have read his work now however, and quite agree with him'. (Badly paraphrased however).
Also lol at crp.
Ah yes I am always finding out ways in which I can be more online
Yeah, im just saying it exists. Not saying people make similar bad life choices to me that make you realize this stuff exists. (If you do want to however thought slimes 'hmm borger king' video about maupin is quite something).
coffin's a grifter with a narcissistic streak. they surfaced around gamergate and then quickly shat the metaphorical floor.
Reading the post and later seeing that Steve Harvey clip was like reading Pinker and then seeing his pics with Epstein. Except Coffin (or just his own foot) is his own Epstein.
My exposure to the guy began and ended at seeing him tut-tutting HBomberguy for nuking James Somerton's career - glad to know my five-second assessment of him was dead on
Oh, hey, that's the "Plagiarism is AWESOME, And Here's Why" guy, who tut-tutted HBomberguy for erasing plagiarist shithead James Somerton from existence and went to bat for JK Rowling okay yeah dump this guy's shit in the fucking bin
I was pretty strongly anti-copyright back when I was younger, but after seeing the plague of art theft and grave robbing the NFT fad brought (documented heavily by @NFTTheft on Twitter), and especially after the AI bubble triggered an onslaught of art theft, cultural vandalism and open hostility to artists, I have come around to strongly supporting it.
I may have some serious complaints about the current state of copyright (basically everyone has), but its clear that copyright is absolutely necessary to protect artists (rich and poor) from those who exploit the labour of others.
Yeah. At the very least copyrights give some level of protection to the individual that you don’t often see elsewhere. Like, the government can take your land, but they can’t steal your memes.
not looking to start instance war or anything btw
iirc one of db0 admins is of this opinion which boils down to, in their case, that they're pro-ai but only if self-hosted (ie "yes, i'm pro-ai, just not pro-the kind of ai that is actually used in 99.9% ai output"). they join it with pro-piracy and anarchist positions and it's part of the reason why ai content is allowed on that instance. iirc it's not even consensus among their other admins
Like being pro-corporatism but only with regard to the breadcrumbs that fall off the oligarchs' tables.
We should start calling so-called open source models trickle-down AI.
When I steal the trickle-down lying machine, it's called a "piss take."
Self-identifying as "progressive" and being anti-copyright and thus pro-AI is something I've seen before online.
I've never charged money for my creative output, but my "moral right" as an author/creator is very important to me.
The “thus pro-AI” is just so, so, stupid. Like, any anti-capitalist argument you make against copyright just immediately implodes when you do the qui bono.
Previously, on Awful:
Quoting Anarchism Triumphant, an extended sneer against copyright:
Or more politely, previously, on Lobsters:
Were we anti-copyright leftists really so invisible before, or have you been assuming that No True Leftist would be anti-copyright?
If you look at data in the way that best obscures what it actually means, of course it can't be told apart from other data. Binary is simply a way to encode information that most often has an analogue equivalent. You can of course question the copyright of all works, but looking at them in a hex editor is almost a distraction.
This is getting pretty close to technolibertarianism. Corbin, I like your posts but i can't get behind this
TL; DR: please forgive my ignorance on this topic:
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a “good” leftist in the sense that I don’t do a ton of reading, and didn’t think too hard about copyright at this level. I did try do some reading because the anti-copyright takes as I encountered them in this context initially seemed iffy, but through research I found that my initial ideas weren’t well informed.
The most common form of anti-copyright sentiment I’ve encountered comes from mostly the piracy community. I don’t really participate in the community part of that, so I haven’t spent a lot of time reading any of their theory or philosophy, which has been to my detriment here. That being said, the stuff that I have seen has been mostly from a place of entitlement, so I felt safe in not exploring the literature.
Also, basically all of my recent reading of leftist material has had no focus on copyright. It’s all been economic, geopolitical stuff. That isn’t to say copyright issues aren’t important, it just hasn’t been in focus.
Anyway, this all started on my end because, in a discord server unrelated to this instance, I had expressed consternation over individual artists getting fucked over by AI companies, and celebrating whenever they clawed back whatever amount of justice they could. This was immediately in bad faith equated with full throated support for Disney’s ruthless copyright lawyer army. I didn’t really understand why that was happening, so I did some reading, and thought it was worth sharing about here.
So to specifically answer this:
More the former than the latter, but only due to my blind ignorance. The latter was not my assumption. I had encountered someone claiming to be a leftist but was not, for reasons unrelated to being anti-copyright.
@corbin
"[Copyright i]s not for you who love to make art and prize it for its cultural impact and expressive power, but for folks who want to trade art for money."
Fatuous romantic bollocks.
the concept that copyright is about art or artistic value and not money, is about as attached to reality as the ai technorapture
this barely has to even be argued, in spirit or in practice. even the concept of "ownership" as ascribed to creators is basically just a right to sell the work or sublicense said "ownership"
@ebu
"the concept that copyright is about art or artistic value and not money"
I didn't say it was.
"Real artists do it for love, not money" is as stupid as saying "Real artists shoot heroin and have untreated mental illness."
Real artists have bills to pay and families to feed.
you definitely did in fact say that the idea that "copyright is about trading art for money" is bollocks. that is in fact a thing you said, straightforwardly
compare and contrast with "real artists do it for love, not money", which is a thing nobody in this entire thread said
and wouldn't you know it, a complete devolution into full-tilt """debate""" shadowboxing is my cue to turn off notifications. best of luck in the ring, i hear the spectre of communism has a nasty left hook
Thanks! You're getting better with your insults; that's a big step up from your trite classics like "sweet summer child". As long as you're here and not reading, let's not read from my third link:
Maybe you're a little busy with your Biblical work-or-starve mindset, but I encourage you to think about why we even have copyright if it must be flaunted in order to become a skilled artist. It's worth knowing that musicians don't expect to make a living from our craft; we expect to work a day job too.
well there you have it
bitter winter adult it is
look at the depth of this grifting
a whole One (1!) H100! in space!
note how it mentions nearly absolute fucking nothing about the supporting cast. about storage and networking, about interface capabilities, what kind of programmatic runtimes you could have! none of it. just gonna yeet a sat into space, problem solved! space DCs!
compute! in space! "what do you mean 'compute what'? compute!" I hear, as the jackass rapidly packs up their briefcase and starts edging towards the door. who needs to care about getting data to and from such a device? it'll run Gemma![0] magic!
scan-time "inference", like you'd definitely know every parameter you'd want to query and every result you'd want to have, first-time, at scan! there's a fucking reason this shit gets turned into datasets, and that the tooling around processing it is as extensive as it is.
and, again, this leaves aside all the other practical problems. of which there are many. even just the following ones should make you wince: launch, maintenance, power, heat dissipation (vacuum is an insulator!), repair, (usable) lifetime, radiation. and that's before even touching on the nuances in those, or going further on the list
good god.
I guess the one good bit here is that it isn't the "we're gonna micromachine them in orbit!" bullshit fantasy, but I bet that's not far behind
[0] - "multimodal and wide language support" so literally a Local LLM, but that means it needs... input... and... response... which again goes back to all those pesky "interaction" and "network" and "storage" questions.
This is something the writers of the Mass Effect series got right, and they were doing a sci-fi trilogy, not handling a literal space mission!
This will be easy thanks to the "Benevolence of the Rocket" equation as seen on Trashfuture.
Tf is a sneer machine
unless they talk about ukraine, then they're just a bunch of sorry vatniks.
Oof, really?
unfortunately. hard to say if this is caused by them being primarily contrarians or because alice is too much into warsaw pact nostalgia, or because it's edgy; edgelordism and reflexive contrarianism cause so many people to lose the contact with reality.
Heh I haven’t seen that, will have to go look
If we knew how to use hot air for rocket propulsion we could just shove saltman et al in there and solve multiple problems at once…alas
this reminds me of that episode of justice league unlimited where the superheroes are all on a satellite and batman says getting it built was just
though, to be fair, that explanation is more plausible than starcloud working
Batman's superpower is being a billionaire, there was probably some Shenanigans^tm^ involved
i don't think it's fair to assume that a billionaire who dresses up like a bat to extra-legally fight crime necessarily engages in shenanigans when donating a satellite to his vigilante friends
just as the tshirt goes: my opening sentence was not for nothing
@froztbyte Maybe it’ll mine bitcoin?
@froztbyte "vacuum is an insulator" oh well TIL
@BlueMonday1984
Yeah heat management in space turns out to be pretty fucking hard. You could ask “who knew?!” but there’s that whole space program thing…
I presume that they’re not in fact blind to this fact, mind you. You cannot be doing actual astro tech design without it (your object would never make it to launch - there’s too many blockers that’d stop it), but the properties of heat generation from a H100 are known, and thus whatever they’re applying to deal with it very can’t be lightweight/little
@froztbyte thats one thing but im still interested in the physics of the insulatory effects of the vacuum 👀
@xyhhx @froztbyte “vacuum is an insulator” is what makes a high-quality double-walled thermos high quality — there is no air between the outer and inner walls
@benchase oh shit, i knew that (when shopping for water bottles) but didn't put two and two together
@froztbyte
exactly so :)
no matter means no heat transmission through conduction (=particle motion), only radiation
@Reach_the_man so wait, is not heat a form of energy (or a result thereof)? can energy not dissipate through a vacuum?
or is it that the energy dissipates less effectively when it can't transfer itself *as heat* through a medium?
heat is describing the average kinetic energy of the material's particles, with no contact it can't transfer as kinetic energy, only through photons emitted
@Reach_the_man that clears it up for me! thanks for taking the time to answer
Trump freed Binance fraudster, SBF pardon futures mooning rn
Does anyone else get flashbacks to that episode of the Powerpuff girls where the villain takes over the city and makes a law that "crime is now legal"? Because that keeps popping into my head for some reason.
NeurIPS is one of the big conferences for machine learning. Having your work accepted there is purportedly equivalent to getting a paper published in a top-notch journal in physics (a field that holds big conferences but treats journals as more the venues of record). Today I learned that NeurIPS endorses peer reviewers asking questions to chatbots during the review process. On their FAQ page for reviewers, they include the question
And their response is not shut the fuck up, the worms have reached your brain and we will have to operate. You know, the bare minimum that any decent person would ask for.
"Yeah, go ahead, ask 'Grok is this true', but pretty please don't use the exact words from the paper you are reviewing. We are confident that the same people who turn to a machine to paraphrase their own writing will do so by hand first this time."
"Having positioned yourself at the outlet pipe of the bullshit fountain and opened your mouth, please imbibe responsibly."
Far be it for me to suggest that NeurIPS taking an actually ethical stance about bullshit-fountain technology would call into question the presentations being made there and thus imperil their funding stream. But, I mean, if the shoe fits....
I did not think anything could make me sympathetic to the authors who put 0.1pt white text in their papers so that any reviewer lazy enough to use an LLM would get prompt injected, but here we are.
Highlight the space just after the abstract of my own most recent arXiv preprint for a surprise. :-)
A question from ejwillingham:
The obvious workaround is to stop using google search.
Yes, but I wouldn't say that to someone I want to still like me after.
I use Mullvad Leta, which is basically a front-end for the Google (and Brave) API. It used to be exclusive to Mullvad customers but I believe it's available to everyone now.
It doesn't support image search, but so far this has been consistently good enough for me.
https://xcancel.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1980035057067884670
hmm yes, this will surely replace wikipedia.
Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die? - Arstechnica.com
AI ""copy""
To lightly paraphrase Yahtzee Croshaw:
Short answer: No. Long answer: No, and go fuck yourselves, you ignorant hype-mongering cockbags.
This is the second time this rancid idea has been put forward, and its just as morally bankrupt as the first.
What, are you telling me you’re not prepared to share your most intimate details with elon musk’s edgelord/waifu simulator in order to let it pretend to be you well enough to fool a bunch of professionals who should know better, and let it decide whether you should live or die? With a marketing pitch like that, who could possibly refuse?
I know full well you're being sarcastic, but my answer is an emphatic "NO". I feel like I'm gonna need a lobotomy to get this hypothetical out my head now.
Yahtzee, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
Guy's been doing well for himself since the Escapist imploded in 2023 - he's doing video reviews and video essays over on Second Wind, under the names Fully Ramblomatic and Semi Ramblomatic, respectively.
(As for the Escapist, it got sold off to a "private investor" and turned into a gambling content mill in 2025)
New Baldur Bjarnason: The inevitability of anger, on the impending reckoning for AI and tech influencers' attempts to avoid it, plus how social media shapes public discourse.
Guys, it's a problem that GenPop thinks "AI" is useless, because that means they will deny the inevitable coming existence of the Evil Robot God and make it harder to stop it
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W2dTrfTsGtFiwG5hM/origins-and-dangers-of-future-ai-capability-denial
The whole thing has to be read to be believed. But there are some fun nuggets:
i'm only at the beginning, but this already stuck out to me:
"Guys we need to pump this
bubbleRational Stock Appreciation Trend more, the plebs are starting to think it's all bullshit!!"That’s because despite Moravec’s paradox being noted down in the 80s (y’know, the last ai winter) there’s still a certain kind of asshole who thinks that flipping burgers is an easy task performed by stupid people but playing go is somehow the height of human intellect, despite 40+ years of evidence to the contrary.
Well, it is true that computer programs have far surpassed humans in board games. They are very well suited for it. It just has nothing to do with the hypothesized abilities of future "AI" as rationalists conceive them.
So anybody else noticing regular outages here today or was it just me?
uggggh yep sorry, I meant to deploy some changes that would mitigate this a couple nights ago but had a bunch of things crop up. I’ll do my best to work it in tonight!
some specifics for the changes to expect:
Nah it happens, at least it isnt on my end.
current issue is likely the most recent bout scraper waves (based on it matching data myself and others have seen elsewhere); suggestions have been made, so hopefully soon(tm) changes
(don’t mean to speak on @self’s behalf ito plans, mind. that’s for them to do :D)
nah same for me
Yeah, there's been a bunch of outages recently.
noticed someone like "comments are lazy! never use them! write better code!"
A:
I once had someone tell me to my face that comments were a code smell.
I've found that people who talk about "code smell" generally should not be listened to as it's entirely vibes-based-on-the-last-medium-post-i-read-this-morning. I had a dipshit manager tell me that he didn't like my use of decorators (in python mind you) because it was a "code smell" and recommended I read "clean" code, and I immediately threw every other opinion he had in the trash.
Managers gonna manage, but having a term for bad code that works that is more palatable than 'amateur hour' isn't inherently bad imo.
Worst i've heard is some company forbidding LINQ in C#, which in python terms is forcing you to always use for-loops in place of filter/map/reduce and comprehensions and other stuff like pandas.groupby
that's truly assenine as LINQ is supposed to be one of the few reasons to want to use C#
Depends on how they are used. They are extremely useful when they add context that is otherwise not present in the code, but way too often I see people simply restating what the code does in the comment. That's not very useful and can become confusing if the code later gets updated without updating the associated comment.
this seems counterintuitive but... comments are the best, name of the function but longer are the worst. Plain text summary of a huge chunk of code that I really should have taken the time to break up instead of writing a novella about it are somewhere in the middle.
I feel a lot of bad comment practices are downstream of javascript relying on jsdoc to act like a real language.
"yor mums a code smell"
Simon Willison writes a fawning blog post about the new "Claude skills" (which are basically files with additional instructions for specific tasks for the bot to use)
How does he decide to demonstrate these awesome new capabilities?
By making a completely trash, seizure inducing GIF...
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
He even admits it's garbage. How do you even get to the point that you think that's something you want to advertise? Even the big slop monger companies manage to cherry pick their demos.
Just felt like I got an aneurysm there.
(in unrelated things, first)
Man's spent several years and shitloads of cash destroying his public image (and probably his brain) via slop bots, I suspect he's getting desperate to prove his LLM booster turn wasn't a career-ruining blunder
(He's also probably lost the ability to tell good work from bad work as well - that's a universal quality among slop advocates, as Gerard has pointed out on multiple occasions)
Oh boy, another AI doom video popped up on my feed. Time for more morbid curiosity. The topic is about Big Yud and Nate Soares's new book ("If You Build It, Everyone Dies") about how AI is gonna kill us all. I have better things to waste 30 minutes on, so I'm not watching the full video, but the thumbnail ("The 7 Minute War") kinda suggests what the contents are gonna be.
Thankfully, the description of the video has a Google doc with their sources! I'm sure it's full of hard evidence from careful experiments that logically demonstrate why their doomsday scenario is something to worry about, not just a random assortment of Anthropic blog posts and completely unrelated events.
Somehow, there are a bunch of sources for the first 2 minutes of the video.
Geoffrey "All radiologists will be replaced in 5 years" Hinton, Nobel laureate in physics, famous for his work in ... physics.
This is not the first we've seen from MIRI, and I have a feeling it will not be the last. The monster under my bed is a fictional narrative illustrating risks, not prediction.
They are still trying to flog the Anthropic/Apollo Research claims that chatbots will lie to you if you tell them to lie to you.
What does this even demonstrate? Some people can do some stuff with some GPUs? I ate some oatmeal today. Now everyone should be thoroughly convinced of my oatmeal-eating abilities.
I watched for a few seconds around the timestamp, and it seems to be the beginning of their scifi story, I mean, AGI scenario. Yes, if you want to convince people that your scenario is plausible, I'm sure this is the part that you need serious amounts of evidence for. Remember, almost half the sources have timestamps for the first two minutes of the video.
Again, what does this demonstrate? I tried solving P vs NP with a cheeseburger. That didn't work either. The only purpose of mentioning this is for narrative window dressing, because Math Is For Smart People.
These are the sources for just the first two minutes. After that, they get a bit sparse.
More Anthropic blog posts and system cards? Come on, I can't sneer the same thing twice in one post!
I don't know what this has to do with supporting the validity of their AI doomsday scenario, but kudos to them for showing why cryptocurrency is also stupid, I guess.
More? I guess this is hard evidence for showing why cryptocurrency is stupid. I still don't understand how this demonstrates that AI is scary.
I knew MIRI would be back. It's illustrative, not predictive! Please don't blame us if none of this even remotely happens! But it's based on years of technical research. An entire graduate student's worth of output in a decade.
The link they give references ... another one of their own videos. You really are not beating the circular reference allegations here. Even if the purported story is somehow accurate, this again demonstrates how cryptocurrency is stupid. At least they use an LLM as a prop this time.
I think Yud is obsessed with this topic in particular. Better than diamondoid bacteria, I guess. Again, the AI just magically comes in and uses this stuff somehow.
Okay, let me be completely serious for this one. What would someone do if they truly believed that their work would lead to a horrible disaster, such as the extinction of humanity? Would they continue to work in the field, let alone make enough contributions to rise to the top? Alright I'm done.
assigning a number to it makes it scientific
::: spoiler aside/rant i wonder to what extent this bullshit works because of people's fear of math
i wish i could convince people that STEM skills are no different than a law degree, in essence --- you'll meet dipshits that are excellent mathematicians and you'll meet smart people that are mediocre mathematicians. i suspect it's because people view mathematical notation as impenetrable (when that just depends on the same shit any technical writing depends on, like the writer's skill at communicating, the reader's familiarity and strength with the prerequisite material, etc.)
it's frustrating, given the number of stupid mathematicians i've met :::
ahem. h5n1 for ferrets was probably made because ferrets turn out to have immune systems similar enough to humans, in that they do get (common strains of) flu and transmit it by sneezing, that is ferrets are good model organisms for flu vaccine development. so if regular ferrets don't catch h5n1, then you have to modify either virus or ferret because otherwise it won't work. it's not some random virologist deciding to wage biological war against fuzzy noodle critters
The Oppenheimers we have at home
Watched a debate between Emily M. Bender and Sébastien Bubeck --- an OpenAI researcher --- from March. As usual, Dr. Bender fucking rules. Bubeck struck me as an idiot and kind of an ass.
Crypto Investor Proposes 450-Foot Statue of Greek God on Alcatraz Island is a story making the rounds in the press lately and aaaaaah I hate it. I'd say something more coherent than that but it's already given me quite a headache.
He has a personal website as well as a website for his stupid statue idea. Both of which are buggy / ugly -- apparently after saving $450 million for a dumb statue he has none left for good website coding.
I propose a 450-foot-tall statue of the most famous parts of Kirk Johnson's anatomy, facing southwest back towards the city
Guy should just get “I love for-profit prisons” tattooed on his face instead of dressing up an island in bad bioshock cosplay.
@sailor_sega_saturn
If they're going to make a 450 foot tall statue of Greek people I can think of more appropriate designs for San Francisco Bay.
"We call this the Reacharound Collossi"
(thinks) The Colossus of Chodes
this reminded me of a superb article i've read recently on the topic. decided it deserved a thread
https://awful.systems/post/6040844
Tenner says he vibe-coded both of them himself. Man's a capitalist at heart, he thinks paying labour their fair due is an abomination unto God.
Everything about this is terrible:
Crypto scammer reported to ICE after stealing cancer patient’s treatment fund
Dont know the exact details, but there now is a fork from the popular doom engine gzDoom called, UZDoom, because the initial dev came out retirement out of nowhere and started to vibe code, causing all the others to quit.
More here https://zdoom.org/news#p80996
you know, I shouldn't be surprised by the extremely toxic lead developer to prompt enthusiast pipeline, but... slopcode in gzDoom of all things? fucking why?
I heard there was even more wrong with what he did than was described in the quite nicely written zdoom post (who clearly just want to move past the drama) but that was third hand information. Altogether quite odd behavior of the old dev. Clearly he didn't learn from Frozen.
JFC some CSAM collector stormed a Wikipedia conference with a gun https://slate.com/technology/2025/10/wikipedia-editors-conference-gunman-culture-war.html
A second teardown of Omarchy has hit the web
https://eepy.moe/notes/ae7rhgxvpw8d09kw
just once i want to buy a computery thing and not have it end up being fasctech
i was so excited about this laptop 😭
MNT Reform's doing a similar thing to Framework, but its nowhere near what they offered. The team is completely free of venture capital, and its got a non-binary head representing it, so it should be safe from a fashtech turn.
@BlueMonday1984 Open Source Hardware, developed in the open, sweet retro aesthetic, batteries are standard cells, mounting pattern inside the chassis is a regular grid!
this is cool, but honestly, after the red hat/fedora announcement that they'll allow slop contributions, i may just try and use my phone for everything
android 16 QPR1 gets a proper desktop mode and it should get ported to grapheneos soon enough
this is just copium, of course. thank you for sharing the link to the mnt reform. <3
@BlueMonday1984 @Seminar2250 LGBTQ is no protection from fascism. Pim Fortuyn, the predecessor to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, was gay.
@fazalmajid @BlueMonday1984 @Seminar2250 peter thiel, too, and probably many others indeed, heck, ernst rhöm, leader of the SA, was homosexual, too, bad people come in all shapes, colors, culture, and orientation.
there was also yolo minneapolis, or whatever was his name i don't think he was relevant since covid
Uh I think his name is actually jimbob snuffleupagus
Did not know Farage was gay
@gerikson actually you got me to doubt and verify and i'm not sure anymore, i might have mixed up with someone else, will edit out.
@Seminar2250 @irelephant yeah :((((
The fact that a mod named "catastrophe" did this is morbidly funny to me.
Anyways, whatever doubts I (or anyone had) about Framework are basically gone. I hope Nirav and the Framework team enjoy their Nazi bar.
Lol at the sealion in that thread
of course
Naturally, the worst people on that thread are praising it - for example, here's the "DHH destroying Basecamp is based" guy whining about people not accepting outright fascists:
100% certain this dork has the wikipedia page for logical fallacies open 24/7
why is aweful systemes broken today? does it depend on aws somehow?
nah sorry about that, the scrapers took the opportunity to knock us offline again so I did a little bit of impromptu maintenance to make us more rugged against the same type of failure in the future
the next work I do around this will be significantly more planned because it’ll be iocaine
Well, what do you think "aws" stands for ;)
Charities Using AI-Generated Photos of Starving Children to Raise Money
Morally, attacking the poor and downtrodden through polluting the world with AI is abhorrent, and anyone doing this should be permanently barred from working at any charity.
Practically, the sight of blatant AI-generated poverty porn is going to drive people away from giving to these charities, damaging their ability to do good.
I know nfts are old news now, but:
lol, decentralisation.
::: spoiler alt text A screenshot of some boardape nfts on opensea. All the actual images are replaced with an error message saying “this nft is not available due to an ongoing AWS outage” :::
Promptfondlers are biologically incapable of telling good from bad, video game edition.
Level design, color palette, continuity, assets and physics by a bowl of salvia
Hey now, at least the bowl of salvia has a theme, predictable effects, immersive sensations, and the ability to make people feel emotions.
I read that as saliva and I thought you were both absolutely correct.
@blakestacey
Salvia, LSD, peyote, and three hallucinogens unknown to science.
Also: They made a "game" that is 100% glitches.
Oh, so Call of Duty
Besides the ridiculousness of those issues, I'm taken aback that this "game" is just a series of crappy cutscenes and then you can pick 1 of 3 choices here and there? Worst "choose your own adventure" ever...
Found the original promptfondler behind this a couple hours ago.
I literally can't even.
As someone who spent countless hours of my youth in hammer, laying out areas with props and lighting and doing play testing about areal movement with test npcs, it's hilarious that these people see this slop and say, yes this is the future.
also : "I’m working on a theory that “AI is art” boosters have some kind of limited ability to perceive details. Like they literally only perceive large shapes, colors, and noises. Anything remotely more detailed than ‘big thing go boom’ they actually lack the ability to see it." 🤔🤔🤔
also: after discussing with my brother I came to the realization that this rube was likely very into the "play2earn" bullshit during the nft era
@blakestacey
The video game equivalent of
holy discontiguous interscene blending, watman
there are so many parts that people in the skeet[0] replies have already pointed at but the thing that someone just went "tune the smoother way up! just make sure it looks good!" and thought they were done with the assignment... amazing. really does a fantastic job of highlighting the same old problem of these things only managing short-duration outputs coherently!
10/10 would cringe again
0 - what's a blacksky skeet called? do they have their own term? I don't know how standalone blacksky operates and I refuse to learn any more about skeeterprotocol than I already know
Before I knew that they were called skeets, I was mentally calling them “bluesks”. So maybe “blasks?” Btw these are intentionally bad, so spare your critiques.
"blask" slaps idc what anyone says
I see there’s at least one big fan of Moldbug still trying to implement his perfect neofeudal state.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-wants-strong-influence-over-the-robot-army-hes-building/
I’m sure this is fine, largely because he is an idiot. Probably bad news for other shareholders and customers though.
Anyone else getting “when I die, you’re all joining me in my mausoleum” vibes from musk?
@rook @BlueMonday1984
Is this "Robot Army" in the room with us now Elon?
I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it but AI is shitting all over the tattoo industry. Listening to a podcast rn (Beneath the Skin) and the hosts are really not keen on the LLMs lol.
(I’m a week out from my next one woo)
Amazon unveils AI-Powered AR glasses for delivery drivers.
The response I've seen from actual drivers has been somewhere between "eh? I guess?" and "fuck you, pay me".
Actual prescription lenses or generic supermarket lenses?
Does it have GPS so it can flash "WRONG HOUSE, FUCKWIT"
Via a prev sneer, here's a Bloomberg post about call center workers being accused of being LLMs:
https://archive.is/K3N51
I used to work in a call-center adjacent industry and the amount of crap some employers used to make sure their workers sounded as much as robots as possible was astounding.
openai released their spyware browser and it is... not good
https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/22/atlas-anti-web-browser/
Adding insult to injury, OpenAI's also encouraging people to abuse ARIA tags so their slopbots can steal more effectively, threatening to damage web accessibility in the process:
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/10/openai-aria-and-seo-making-the-web-worse.html
But of course they named it “atlas”. Openai is clearly the work randian supermen.
Also, anil sounds like he might be a little out of touch with regards to how people search these days. Careful keyword searching isn’t even as useful as it used to be, given the damage google et al have done to their own products.
(also also, interactive fiction has marched on a little since zork and infocom were the latest and greatest things, but I accept that most people won’t have noticed)
US engaging in quantum socialism:
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/trump-administration-in-talks-to-take-equity-stakes-in-quantum-computing-firms-60ee5143
sigh
I am the scream
Kinda interesting that Google's TPUs are back in the news. Seemed like they had fallen by the wayside for a while. Of course there are no technical details, just blah blah revenue blah blah, but that's CNBC for you.
I have a webserver using Ubuntu. Are any of the popular LLM-poisoning solutions packaged for that?
I ran across this today and while I had fun mashing together the Sequences, Moby Dick and 1984, a pre-packaged solution would be even better.
New Ed Zitron, giving exact numbers for how much money Cursor and Anthropic have lit on fire and continuing to shed light on the AI industry's ability to incinerate revenue.
tldr is that anthropic spent on aws only 2x their revenue in 2024, spent on aws approx the same as their revenue in 2025 up to september, and they also pay unknown amount but known to be a lot for google cloud, on top of everything else like salaries and who the fuck knows what else
something something Ed Zitron really needs an editldr
i heard from reliable source (ed zitron) that he has one
I lolled at how this post literally included an “[editor’s note: ….]” at one point but the entire damn thing was still exactly his usual textual diarrhoea. 30 paragraphs that could’ve been two simple charts. A++ would absolutely only skim through again.
The FSF considers large language models, failing to recognise the purpose of plagiarism machines in the process.
Comments are also pretty sneerable - main thread's a bunch of promptfondlers trying to gas up spicy autocomplete, but I did find some guy claiming programmers steal and plagiarise much like LLMs do.
this comment:
is so stupid
rubber duck debugging with a cost multiplier magnitude coming in at a couple of zeroes tail end of the figure
and worse results
it sounds like you've only used the llm with the anus logo
have you tried this other llm^[https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes]?
::: spoiler image description picture of various tech company's logos arranged in the outline of a butt with claude's logo in the center
claude's logo looks like an anus :::
"Blue Monday" was released in 1983.
Correct.
So kurzgesagt put out an anti AI-slop piece 2 weeks ago. It's hits good angles too, going hard on the society-eroding effects. The conclusion is a little mushy, but hey, I wasn't expecting an instigation to machine-breaking from kurzgesagt.
Its quite the turn-around from when they fearmongered about Superintelligence^tm^ a year ago.
My only critique with their anti-slop piece is that they describe the lying machine as a tool, but otherwise its a fine enough takedown, and its clear they know enough to avoid AI like the plague. B+.
I got the calendar on order too. It's a nice calendar.