Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025
Want to wade into the snowy 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. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)
Sunday afternoon slack period entertainment: image generation prompt “engineers” getting all wound up about people stealing their prompts and styles and passing off hard work as their own. Who would do such a thing?
https://bsky.app/profile/arif.bsky.social/post/3mahhivnmnk23
Ahh, sweet schadenfreude.
I wonder if they’ve considered that it might actually be possible to get a reasonable imitation of their original prompt by using an llm to describe the generated image, and just tack on “more photorealistic, bigger boobies” to win at imagine generation.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2025-share
did they use ai to make the image? "wood of of year"
It's most obvious on the cat which is all around nightmare material.
The image also comes with alt text:
Can I just take a moment to appreciate Merriam-Webster for coming in clutch with the confirmation that we're not misunderstanding the "6-7" meme that the kids have been throwing around?
Ryanair now makes you install their app instead of allowing you to just print and scan your ticket at the airport, claiming it's "better for our environment (gets rid of 300 tonnes of paper annually)." Then you log in into the app and you see there's an update about your flight, but you don't see what it's about. You need to open an update video, which, of course, is a generated video of an avatar reading it out for you. I bet that's better for the environment than using some of these weird symbols that I was putting into a box and that have now magically appeared on your screen and are making you feel annoyed (in the future for me, but present for you).
chat is this kafkaesque
New conspiracy theory: Posadist aliens have developed a virus that targets CEOs and makes them hate money.
….this made me twitch
Popular RPG Expedition 33 got disqualified from the Indie Game Awards due to using Generative AI in development.
Statement on the second tab here: https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq
Today in autosneering:
https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielcgreen.bsky.social/post/3mahkarjj3s2o
Obscure crypto programming term. Sure
Follow the hype, Kevin, follow the hype.
I hate-listen to his podcast. There's not a single week where he fails to give a thorough tongue-bath to some AI hypester. Just a few weeks ago when Google released Gemini 3, they had a special episode just to announce it. It was a defacto press release, put out by Kevin and Casey.
Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindsey's video about deaccenting in English language and how "AI" speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, it's usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesn't use destressing.
It reminded me of a particular line in Portal
::: spoiler spoilers for Portal (2007 puzzle game) GLaDOS: (with a deeper, more seductive, slightly less monotone voice than unti now) "Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin."
The words "the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin" are spoken with the exact same intonation both times, which helps maintain the robotic affect in GLaDOS's voice even after it shifts to be slightly more expressive.
Now I'm wondering if people whose native language lacks deaccenting even find the line funny. To me it's hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it's unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.
It is not lost on me that the fictional evil AI was written with a quirk in its speech to make it sound more alien and unsettling, and real life computer speech has the same quirk, which makes it sound more alien and unsettling. :::
Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated "without changing its stress".
That's interesting. If I weren't going for a comical effect I'd try and rephrase the sentence, probably with a relative pronoun or something similar, but if unable to do so* I'd probably deemphasize the whole phrase the second time I say it. Though in terms of multi-word phrased, I think intonation would be the more accurate word to use than stress per se.
*"To do so" would be another way to avoid repetition
Why is my home directory gone Claude?
This just keeps happening...
Previously, Previously Previously
Sir a NaNth deletion has hit the home directory.
Oh god, reddit is now turning comments into links to search for other comments and posts that include the same terms or phrases.
A few people on bsky were claiming that at least reddit is still good re the AI crappification, and they have no idea what is coming.
I wonder when those people started using reddit. I started in 2012 and it already felt like a completely different (and generally worse) experience several times over before the great API fiasco.
Yeah, it also has an element of 'it is one of the few words you can add to search engines which give you a hope of a good result' and not regular users who see the shit, or got offered nfts.
it shows up only when logged out
You see, tilde marks old versions of files, so Claude actually made you a favour by freeing some disk space
……snrk
iykyk. this comment is sublime
i would say "backups" but these kind of people don't do backups. either way nothing of value was lost
~/? More like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@e8d79 @BlueMonday1984 is this even reversible?
Assuming that, and Apple makes it real easy, you have a Time Machine backup: Yes, of course!
More on datacenters in space
https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
N.B. got this via HN, entire site gives off "wouldn't it be cool" vibes (author "lives and breathes space" IRONIC IT'S A VACUUM
Also this is the only thermal mention
riiiiight....
I also enjoy :
Getting high-powered electronics to work outside the atmosphere or the magnetosphere is hard, and going from a 100 meter long ISS to a 4 km long orbital data center would be hard. The ISS has separate cooling radiators and solar panels. He wants LEO to reduce the effects of cosmic rays and solar storms, but its already hard to keep satellites from crashing into something in LEO.
Possible explanation for the hand waving:
"Your mother shubscribed to makshimum, unbounded shcale last night, Trebek."
He knows the promo rate on the maximum, unbounded scale subscription is gonna run out eventually, right?
And if you check the fliers, if you subscribe to premium California Ideology you get maximum unbounded scale for free!^1^ Read those footnotes and check Savvy Shopper so you don't over pay for your beliefs!
^1^ Offer does not apply to housing, public transit, or power plants
Author works for something called Varda Space (guess who is one of the major investors? drink. Guess what orifice the logo looks like? drink) and previously tried to replicate a claimed room-temperature superconductor https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-diy-race-to-replicate-lk-99/
Some interesting ethnography of private space people in California: "People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren't. "
Page uses that "electrons = electricity" metonymy that prompt-fonding CEOs have been using
The electrons is turning into an annoying shibboleth. Also going to age oddly if more light based components really kick off. (Ran into somebody who is doing some phd work on that, or at least that is what I got from the short description he gave).
Him fellating musk re tesla is funny considering the recent stories about reliability abd how the market is doing. And also the roadster 2, and the whole pivot to ai/ROBOTS!
(The author being positive on the theoretical SpaceX going public vs a little bit later the reactions of the spacex subreddit on Musk actually saying they will go public later is a funny split of opinions. The subreddit saw it as a betrayal https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3ma4hvbajns2d).
Eliezer is mad OpenPhil (EA organization, now called Coefficient Giving)... advocated for longer AI timelines? And apparently he thinks they were unfair to MIRI, or didn't weight MIRI's views highly enough? And doing so for epistemically invalid reasons? IDK, this post is a bit more of a rant and less clear than classic sequence content (but is par for the course for the last 5 years of Eliezer's content). For us sane people, AGI by 2050 is still a pretty radical timeline, it just disagrees with Eliezer's imminent belief in doom. Also, it is notable Eliezer has actually avoided publicly committing to consistent timelines (he actually disagrees with efforts like AI2027) other than a vague certainty we are near doom.
link
Some choice comments
Ah yes, they were totally secretly agreeing with your short timelines but couldn't say so publicly.
OpenPhil actually did have a belief in a pretty large possibility of near term AGI doom, it just wasn't high enough or acted on strongly enough for Eliezer!
Lol, someone noting Eliezer's call out post isn't actually doing anything useful towards Eliezer's goals.
Someone actually noting AGI hasn't happened yet and so you can't say a 2050 estimate is wrong! And they also correctly note that Eliezer has been vague on timelines (rationalists are theoretically supposed to be preregistering their predictions in formal statistical language so that they can get better at predicting and people can calculate their accuracy... but we've all seen how that went with AI 2027. My guess is that at least on a subconscious level Eliezer knows harder near term predictions would ruin the grift eventually.)
Yud:
The locker beckons
I'm a nerd and even I want to shove this guy in a locker.
The fixation on their own in-group terms is so cringe. Also I think shoggoth is kind of a dumb term for lLMs. Even accepting the premise that LLMs are some deeply alien process (and not a very wide but shallow pool of different learned heuristics), shoggoths weren't really that bizarre alien, they broke free of their original creators programming and didn't want to be controlled again.
There is a Yud quote about closet goblins in More Everything Forever p. 143 where he thinks that the future-Singularity is an empirical fact that you can go and look for so its irrelevant to talk about the psychological needs it fills. Becker also points out that "how many people will there be in 2100?" is not the same sort of question as "how many people are registered residents of Kyoto?" because you can't observe the future.
Yeah, I think this is an extreme example of a broader rationalist trend of taking their weird in-group beliefs as givens and missing how many people disagree. Like most AI researchers do not believe in the short timelines they do, the median (including their in-group and people that have bought the booster's hype) guess among AI researchers for AGI is 2050. Eliezer apparently assumes short timelines are self evident from ChatGPT (but hasn't actually committed to one or a hard date publicly).
Today, in fascists not understanding art, a suckless fascist praised Mozilla's 1998 branding:
Quoting from a 2016 explainer:
The irony of a suckless developer complaining about brutalism is truly remarkable; these fuckwits don't actually have a sense of art history, only what looks cool to them. Big lizard, hard-to-read font, edgy angular corners, and red-and-black palette are all cool symbols to the teenage boy's mind, and the fascist never really grows out of that mindset.
It irks me to see people casually use the term "brutalist" when what they really mean is "modern architecture that I don't like". It really irks me to see people apply the term brutalist to something that has nothing to do with architecture! It's a very specific term!
"Brutalist" is the only architectural style they ever learned about, because the name implies violence
This is old news but I just stumbled across this fawning 2020 Elon Musk interview / award ceremony on the social medias and had to share it: https://www.youtube.com/live/AF2HXId2Xhg?t=2109
In it Musk claims synthetic mRNA (and/or DNA) will be able to do anything and it is like a computer program, and that stopping aging probably wouldn't be too crazy. And that you could turn someone into a freakin' butterfly if you want to with the right DNA sequence.
This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.
And just think, he's been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.
Threshold was best episode imo.
There's a version animated in the style of the '70s Star Trek cartoon that makes it legitimately great.
For the love of god please hook me up.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=luEDui2zAUw
Oh my god.
Much like when the Voyager passed warp 13, our AI development is moving too fast with potentially magnitudinous consequences.
this is not even wrong lol
It certainly comes across a little different when said by someone who thinks cisgender is a slur and that changing one's sex is some sort of great moral evil.
Turning into a butterfly is a cool sci-fi future but those trans people are a bridge too far.
Also like it's just hard to listen to, being drug hazed ramblings-- I want some actually fun sci-fi speeches!
Semi-related, the SF author John Varley died the other day, and I remember how both transgressive and cool it was that his characters in Steel Beach and others could change gender basically at will. (Banks ripped this off in the Culture btw). I don't think he had a special insight into the lived experience of trans people, but at least he embraced the idea as part of humanity's future, not recoil from it like later epigones.
Michael Swanwick mini-obit: https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html
HN on Varley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991
He was doing the easy sex-swapping thing in The Ophiuchi Hotline, several years before Steel Beach.
So I gather but SB is the only book I’ve read
Ben Williamson, editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology:
Relatedly, AI is fucking up academic copy-editing.
Meanwhile,
https://kevinmd.com/2025/12/why-ai-in-medicine-elevates-humanity-instead-of-replacing-it.html h/t naked capitalism
I feel for him, but MAYBE this isn't a technical issue but a labor one; maybe 30 years ago doctors should have "led" on admin and workflow issues directly, and then they wouldn't need to "lead" on AI now? I'm sorry Cerner / Epic sucks but adding AI won't make it better. But, of course, class consciousness evaporates about the same time as those $200k student loans come due.
Why do they think they are going to have any input in genAI development either way?
Anyway seeing a previous wave of shit burden you with a lot of unrelated work after deployment isnt the best reason to now start burdening yourself with a lot of unrelated work before the new wave of shot is here. But sure good luck learning how LLMs work mathematically Kevin.
An academic sneer delivered through the arXiv-o-tube:
Sadly, it's a Chomskian paper, and those are just too weak for today. Also, I think it's sloppy and too Eurocentric. Here are some of the biggest gaffes or stretches I found by skimming Moro's $30 book, which I obtained by asking a shadow library for "impossible languages" (ISBN doesn't work for some reason):
::: spoiler book review of Impossible Languages (Moro, 2016)
I think that Moro's strongest point, on which they spend an entire chapter reviewing fairly solid neuroscience, is that natural language is spoken and heard, such that a proper language model must be simultaneously acoustic and textual. But because they don't address computability theory at all, they completely fail to address the modern critique that machines can learn any learnable system, including grammars; they worst that they can say is that it's literally not a human.
Plus, natural languages are not necessarily spoken nor heard; sign language is gestured (signed) and seen and many, mutually-incompatible sign languages have arisen over just the last few hundred years. Is this just me being pedantic or does Moro not address them at all in their book?
Here’s a substack post (sorry) with a quote I found both neat and pretty funny:
Rationalists in shambles
So, I’m taking this one with a pinch of salt, but it is entertaining: “We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.”
The whole exercise was clearly totally pointless and didn’t solve anything that needed solving (like every other “ai” project, i guess) but it does give a small but interesting window into the mindset of people who have only one shitty tool and are trying to make it do everything. Your chatbot is too easily lead astray? Use another chatbot to keep it in line! Honestly, I thought they were already doing this… I guess it was just to expensive or something, but now the price/desperation curves have intersected
Just one more chatbot, bro. Then prompt injection will become impossible. Just one more chatbot. I swear.
Sorry, I meant just one more guardrail. And another ten thousand tokens capacity in the context window. That’ll fix it forever.
https://archive.is/CBqFs
Why is WSJ rehashing six month old whitepapers? Slow news week /s
Anything new vs the last time it popped up? https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
EDIT:
Whats that word for doing the same thing and expecting different results?
Hah! Well found. I do recall hearing about another simulated vendor experiment (that also failed) but not actual dog-fooding. Looks like the big upgrade the wsj reported on was the secondary “seymour cash” 🙄 chatbot bolted on the side… the main chatbot was still claude v3.7, but maybe they’d prompted it harder and called that an upgrade.
I wonder if anthropic trialled that in house, and none of them were smart enough to break it, and that’s what lead to the external trial.
Introducing the Palantir shit sandwich combo: Get a cover up for the CEO tweaking out and start laying the groundwork for the AGI god's priest class absolutely free!
https://mashable.com/article/palantir-ceo-neurodivergent
TL;DR- Palantir CEO tweaks out during an interview. Definitely not any drugs guys, he's just neurodivergent! But the good, corporate approved kind. The kind that has extra special powers that make them good at AI. They're so good at AI, and AI is the future, so Palantir is starting a group of neurodivergents hand picked by the CEO (to lead humanity under their totally imminent new AI god). He totally wasn't tweaking out. He's never even heard of cocaine! Or billionaire designer drugs! Never ever!
Edit: To be clear, no hate against neurodivergence, or skepticism about it in general. I'm neurodivergent. And yeah, some types of neurodivergence tend to result in people predisposed to working in tech.
But if you're the fucking CEO of Palantir, surely you've been through training for public appearances. It's funnier that it didn't take, but this is clearly just an excuse.
I strongly feel that it's an attempt to start normalizing the elevation of certain people into positions of power based off vague characteristics they were born with.
Lemmy post that pointed me to this: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51704917
Jesus. This being 2025 of course he had to clarify that it's definitely not DEI. Also it really grinds me gears to see hyperfocus listed as one of the "beneficial" aspects because there's no way it's not exploitative. Hey, so you know how sometimes you get so caught up in a project you forget to eat? Just so you know, you could starve on the clock. For me.
I feel bad for the gullible ND people who spend time applying to this thinking they might have a chance and it isn't a high level coverup attempt.
Otoh, somebody should take some fun drugs and tape their interviews, see how it works out. Are there any Hunter S Tech journalists around?
Orange site mods retitled a post about a16z funding AI slop farms to remove the a16z part.
The mod tried to pretend the reason was that the title was just too damn long and clickbaity. His new title was 1 character shorter than the original.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305113
A half dozen people might still be reading hackernews on punchcards so they ha-
ve no choice but to argue about how to shorten "long" titles every day.
Good to know that Orange Website is being considerate of us VT220 users. I knew there was a reason why mine has the amber phosphorus.
I went down a punch-card history rabbit hole today on the empirical software engineering discord. TIL:
We have been living in a world 10 columns too short. Think of all the HN headlines we could have had instead...
I imagine it was like VHS vs Beta only with pocket protectors.
HACK THE PLANET
Lot of roguelike development in the past was still obsessed with that. Was a bit amusing, think even they have dropped this now.
just came across a wild banger:
I wish this attitude was more pervasive at Apple, my phone actually autocorrects to "Lock Screen" when I type it out in lower case.
new polemics.md: The Crypto Lotus Mystery feat. Sam Bankman-Fried
Lol talk about mixed messages.
Mozilla's CEO yesterday:
Firefox's social media account today:
What the fuck would an "AI browser" even be, let alone a modern one. I know what a web browser is, basically a combined HTTP client and HTML renderer. An AI browser is not something that has a commonly understood meaning, so to claim Firefox or anything else will be one without elaboration is just wankery.
I can't help but do their dirty work for them and try to imagine what the hell an AI browser would be. Maybe you develop a standard protocol for prompting chatbots and a markup format for displaying responses and an AI browser is a client for that? Or maybe you just put an LLM in the search bar so Mozilla's bullshit machine can give you wrong answers before pressing the return key and having Google's bullshit machine give you wrong answers. Maybe there's an about:chatbot page. I think all of these are bad bullshit ideas, but at least they're ideas and not just "what if we added into ".
AI Browsers. Metaverse fast food. Blockchain sneakers. Gigwork apartments. Cloud toilets. Big Data headphones. AR chairs. Military grade pianos. 3D books. App drugs. Dotcom condoms. Cyberspace bicycles. Wireless jump ropes. Video silverware. WYSIWYG carpets. Transistor fanny packs. Electromechanical ladders. Atomic flooring. Radio saunas. Horseless glue. Steam pens. Water powered masturbation.
I assume some mesolithic asshole said shit like "we are transforming our hunter-gatherer settlement to a 'cave painting first' society" and neighboring community leaders gave that guy like a hundred animal skins each for his insight.
The ACM has fallen
https://types.pl/@wilbowma/115733550130706711
https://types.pl/@[email protected]/115736432049018026
https://infosec.exchange/@hovav/115731038692335809
Relatedly:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/
I became a member this year! and then immediately got to notice how it’s oozing out every pore
what’s kinda wild for me is that there’s also an ethics pledge involved, and I do not understand how they square that with the mass theft all LLM services and progress are/is based on
them automatically fucking with authors’ papers….ew
a16z funds 1000+ strong phone farm and uses it for mass manufacturing tiktok ai influencers, security turns out to be not good enough https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-the-a16z-backed-phone-farm-flooding-tiktok-with-ai-influencers/
the usecase is spam:
ModRetro, retro gaming company infamous for being helmed by terrible person Palmer Luckey, has put out a version of their handheld made with "the same magnesium aluminum alloy as Anduril’s attack drones" (bluesky commentary, the linked news article is basically an ad and way too forgiving).
So uhh... they're not beating those guilt by association accusations any time soon.
Obvious moral issues aside, is that even an effective marketing point? Linking yourself to Anduril, whose name is synonymous with war crimes and dead civs, seems like an easy way to drive away customers.
I'm holding out for the Lockheed-branded Atari Lynx clone thats made from surplus R9X knife missile parts.
I have my eye on the McDonnell Douglas-branded Neo Geo, which will be a value-engineered trijet and a brick of explosive all while only running the version of worm that was on the nokia brick phone.
Be careful my pal says the engines tend to fall off!
yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.
The before-games-went-woke sector was large enough to bring us gamergate so there's definitely a sizable available crossover.
This doesn't really feel performative enough for that crowd, though. Like, if it included some kind of horribly racist engraving or even just a company logo then maybe, but I don't think anyone's gonna trigger the libs by just playing their metal not-gameboy.
Obviously, if they've got magnesium alloy to divert into Game Boy ripoffs, the attack drone contract must not be going particularly well
i think that some of these are meant to be disposable
In the case of loitering munitions (also known as kamikaze drones, or suicide drones), you'd be correct - by design, they're intended to crash into their target before blowing them up. Some reportedly do have recovery options built-in, but that's only to avoid wasting them if they go unused.
even in case where it isn't that, it has no pilot so at minimum even highly capable drone is more disposable than plane, which is like the entire point
Time Extension's decided to wash their hands of ModRetro after seeing the news. Good call on their part.
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn the colors on that Warcrime Boy (TM) kinda remind me of historic (wartime) flags of Germany 😳
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Extensions-Block-AI
Now they just need to add a slider for touchpad scroll speed.
John Scalzi:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/
Somebody wrote an article that seems to be especially designed to piss people like us off. https://testdouble.com/insights/anyone-can-code-software-is-having-its-ratatouille-moment
I saw it and I'm spreading my pain around. (As an additional bonus, the site jumps back upwards in the text for me constantly).
Not even one paragraph in and I already see an "it's not X, its Y".
@e8d79 @Soyweiser already missed one 🥴
Oh god, I'd be so happy to see these people prove their point by actually shipping stuff that works instead of sitting in the corner throwing insults at how everyone else is dumb and are going to be left behind any day now.
What legitimate experience does he possess? I can only assume legacy modernization means throw spaghetti microservice buzzword architecture at the client. And he admits he doesn't really know CORS. I see these blogs about how LLMs are so much better than humans for programming yet never written by someone who has put together anything more complex and bigger scale than their myspace page in '05.
A bunch of big hollywood people have started “creator’s coalition on AI”. A snarky summary of their mission: “let’s figure out how we can work with the fascists!”
article in large part about our friends
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/
some of the people involved with kernel are pretty unhappy about this and claim the piece is in bad faith/factually wrong (see the replies to https://bsky.app/profile/kellypendergrast.bsky.social/post/3ma55xfq7d22y )
Shit like Palladium is going to be absolutely hilarious to dig up in the back of a used bookstore 20 years from now
Reminder Tivy was the guy behind Phalanx (back in his polyamory microblogging days)~
Made all the funnier by the fact that probably my favorite Hacker News thread of all time is on Tivy's article about how he abandoned his job to "court" his wife:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830743
If even the orange site is willing to roast you this hard, I guess your only response has to be pulling up stakes to go live in a neofascist social bubble instead.
He worked in fuel cells (hence the palladium name) and I think he got a bunch of stock option shit. Also “court” lol.
That link can't be viewed without a bluesky account, btw.
here you go https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Fkellypendergrast.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3ma55xfq7d22y
Thanks.
I love the fact that this "decentralized billionaire-proof open network" needs a nitter clone.
i'll cut the coiners some slack on this one because requiring a login to view is an account level privacy option. i don't know what the option is supposed to accomplish. but that's what it is
It might help to know that Paul Frazee, one of the BlueSky developers, doesn't understand capability theory or how hackers approach a computer. They believe that anything hidden by the porcelain/high-level UI is hidden for good. This was a problem on their Beaker project, too; they thought that a page was deleted if it didn't show up in the browser. They fundamentally aren't prepared for the fact that their AT protocol doesn't have a way to destroy or hide data and is embedded into a network that treats censorship as reparable damage.
maybe it's a good thing that it's so fucking hard/expensive to selfhost bsky
you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
if bsky is supposed to be federated, then it does nothing, but as it is today with 99%+ of users on main instance, it only works as a recruitment tool for bsky
skill issue
it's the actual cite, you've been led to the water, come the fuck on it's not even a paywall
I didn't make the comment because I struggled bypassing it, but because calling out this UI dark pattern bullshit feels topical here and I wasn't sure if OP was aware it was in place.
Judging from votes, other people found the skyview link novel/useful, so it was constructive!
The latest poster who is pretty sure that Hacker News posts critical of YCombinator and their friends get muted like on big corporate sites (HN is open that they do a lot of moderation, but some is more public than others; this guy is not a fan of Omarchy Linux) https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/the-mysterious-forces-steering-views-on-hacker-news/
@CinnasVerses it's almost as if the people running ycombinator had some sort of vested interest in a particular framing of tech stories
Maciej Ceglowski said that one reason he gave up on organizing SoCal tech workers was that they kept scheduling events in a Google meeting room using their Google calendar with "Re: Union organizing?" as the subject of the meeting.
@CinnasVerses the valley is rife with these "wisdom is your dump stat" folks. can invert a binary tree on a whiteboard but might accidentally drown themselves in a rain puddle
(Detaches whiteboard from wall, turns whiteboard upside-down)
Inverted, motherfuckers
famous last words, "we are currently clean on opsec"
10x developers, 0.1x proletariat.
The stakhanov we have at home
maciej cegłowski is also a self-serving arse, so i'd take anything he says with a large grain of salt.
His talks are great, but his time as a union organizer and campaign fundraiser left him so disillusioned that he headed in a reactionary direction (and neglected the business that lets him throw himself at random projects). He is a case study why getting on twitter is a very bad idea.
he's also a self-important arse, which is kinda problematic when one tries to do organising. (one of the very important part is that doing the union work is not a social club, and you may need to work with and accommodate people whom you personally very much dislike.)
I have never met Ceglowski or talked to anyone involved in his movements. These days I am doing some local things rather than join in the endless smartphone arguments about "everyone should be an activist and organizer!" vs. "I tried that and the things that make me good at writing long essays about politics / viral social media posts make me bad at organizing to elect a city counselor."
again, my point here is that cegłowski is an unreliable narrator; you should not build an opinion based on his anecdotes (or his transphobia).
It's a power play. Engineers know that they're valuable enough that they can organize openly; also, as in the case of Alphabet Workers Union, engineers can act in solidarity with contractors, temps, and interns. I've personally done things like directly emailing CEOs with reply-all, interrupting all-hands to correct upper management on the law, and other fun stuff. One does have to be sufficiently skilled and competent to invoke the Steve Martin principle: "be so good that they can't ignore you."
I wonder what would have happened if Ceglowski had kept focused on talks and on working with the few Bay Area tech workers who were serious about unionizing, regulation, and anti-capitalism. It seemed like after the response to his union drive was smaller and less enthusiastic than he had hoped, he pivoted to cybersecurity education and campaign fundraising.
One of his warnings was that the megacorps are building systems so a few opinionated tech workers can't block things. Assuming that a few big names will always be able to hold back a multibilliondollar company through individual action so they don't need all that frustrating organizing seems unwise (as we are seeing in the state of the market for computer touchers in the USA).
A story of no real substance. Pharmaicy, a Swedish company, has reportedly started a new grift where you can give your chatbot virtual, "code-based drugs", ranging from 300,000 kr, for weed code, to 700,000 kr, cocaine.
editor's note: 300000 swedish krona is approximately 328,335.60 norwegian krone. 700000 SEK is about 766116.40.
To be more clear:
300000 swedish krona = ~672 690 czech koruna
700000 swedish krona = ~1 569 611 czech koruna
to be even clearer:
300k swedish krona = ~54k bulgarian lev = ~119k uae dirham
700k swedish krona = ~126k bulgarian lev = ~277k uae dirham
Thanks for the conversion. Real scanlation enjoyers will understand.
nor… norway!!!
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ucla-replace-teaching-assistants-ai
Anyone using this thing should be required to serve on the admissions committee. LoRs aren't for generic B+ students that you don't even remember, just say no.
I googled stackai, saw their screenshots and had ptsd flashbacks of mid 2000s alteryx. why do we keep reinventing no-code drag-and-drop box-and-arrow crap.
For more lighthearted gaming-related news, Capcom fired off a quick sneer, whilst (indirectly) promoting their their latest Mega Man game:
(alt text: "As a reminder for those entering the Mega Man: Dual Override Boss Design Art Contest, please remember the rules posted at bit.ly/MMDORobotMaster. Entrants must follow this account, and please leave the AI to the robots: generative AI is prohibited for this contest.")
This was a prime opportunity to trot out bad box art megaman and they didn’t take it
This had slipped under the radar for me
https://www.reddit.com/r/backgammon/comments/1k8nlay/new_chapter_for_extreme_gammon/
:(
Took me a second to realize you were actually talking about backgammon, and not using gammon (as in the british angry ham) as a word replacement.
This makes me wonder, how hard is backgammon? As in computability wise, on the level of chess? Go? Or somewhere else?
Backgammon is "easier" than chess or go, but it has dice, so it not (yet) been completely solved like checkers. I think only the endgame ("bearing off") has been solved. The SOTA backgammon AI using NNs is better than expert humans but you can still beat it if you get lucky. XG is notable because if you ever watch high stakes backgammon on youtube, they will run XG side by side to show when human players make blunders. That's how I learned about it anyway.
Thanks! Had not really thought about how dice would mess with the complexity of things tbh.
Purdue mandating AI to graduate: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/purdue-unveils-comprehensive-ai-strategy-trustees-approve-ai-working-competency-graduation-requirement/
I'm looking for the actual curricula / docs signed off by the trustees. Looks like another domino falls.
https://www.purdue.edu/ai/
Translation: somebody's getting paid off
🎶 Money makes the world go 'round 🎶
Boilermakers gonna boil water i guess
I learned yesterday that Helsinki’s uni is also on the list: prompts not only tolerated, but encouraged
been starting to wonder whether these are like the google etc plays there: “suuuuure you can get a sweetheart deal for our systems” [5y later and much storage on the expensive rentabox] “hey btw we’re renewing prices, your contracts are going up 400%. oh and also taking data out of the system is $20/TB. just..in case you wanted to try”
https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru/issues/1454#issuecomment-3652003263.
Rust is terrible, rewrite in jai (?)
tf is jai
programmers. programmers never change.
"14 competing 'modern take on C' languages? Ridiculous! We need to develop one definitive alternative that fixes all the problems with C++"
Don't forget the most crucial part. The very gifted and experienced developer ... is Jonathan Blow.
Getting mad because developers have not had time to update a piece of code that wraps another piece of code and blaming it on the language is in interesting choice.
Telling a whole project 'your language sucks you should rewrite it in my pet language' is always a nice classic of the nerd genre. (Happy I never got a big language hangup like that. (Apart from a short bit of a dislike of functional programming languages, but that was just due to a bad early experience)).
who tf is zerophase (apart from a lunduke fan)
Larian Studios founder/CEO Swen Vincke is posting through it on Twitter, after the studio's use of plagiarism machines caused significant backlash (to the shock of everyone except Swen).
This is probably Pivot to AI material.
Ah yes, I love the smell of burning bridges in the evening. Fuck. And I was getting excited about Divinity! Well, guess that means more money to spend on other things.
OT: Lurasidone is neat stuff.
Yeah, BP2. Replacing risperidone. Metformin can help with antipsych weight gain fwiw, some really fascinating studies out there.
I’m hoping I can switch to lamotrigine in the long term. Valproate is nasty stuff.
Hypomania sucks. I’m lucky that I just get terrible insomnia for about a week.
A rare W for the Tennessee General Assembly:
https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-politics/bill-targets-ai-hurt-manipulate/
The monorail salespeople at Checkmarx have (allegedly) discovered a new exploit for code extruders.
The "attack", titled "Lies in the Loop", involves taking advantage of human-in-the-loop """safeguards""" to create fake dialogue prompts, thus tricking vibe-coders into running malicious code.
It's interesting to see how many ways they can find to try and brand "LLMs are fundamentally unreliable" as a security vulnerability. Like, they're not entirely wrong, but it's also not something that fits into the normal framework around software security. You almost need to treat the LLM as though it were an actual person not because it's anywhere near capable of that but because the way it fits into the broader system is as close as IT has yet come to a direct in-place replacement for a human doing the task. Like, the fundamental "vulnerability" here is that everyone who designs and approves these implementations acts like LLMs are simultaneously as capable and independent as an actual person but also have the mechanical reliability and consistency of a normal computer program, when in practice they are neither of those things.
Does Checkmarx have any relation to infamous ring-destroying pro wrestler Cheex? https://prowrestling.fandom.com/wiki/Mike_Staples
If not, perhaps they should seek an endorsement deal!
That would be such a "we didnt know the dotcom bubble was popping a month later" move.
Came across this gem with the author concluding that a theoretical engineer can replace SaaS offerings at small businesses with some Claude and while there is an actual problem highlighted (SaaS offerings turning into a disjoint union of customer requirements that spiral complexity, SaaS itself as a tool for value extraction) the conclusion is just so wrong-headed.
an ex-crypto-and-nft-promoter, now confabulation machine promoter feels that the confabulation machine hate reached unreasonable levels. thread of replies is full of persecuted confabulation machine
promotersrealists.