Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026
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 so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. If you're wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
(EDIT: Changed "29th February" to "1st March" - its not a leap year)
404 Media: Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox
This is very serious computing and we must all take it very seriously.
this is like the fourth time an AI agent has completely deleted something important (I remember an article about an AI deleting all of a scientists’s research) How many more times does it have to happen before people stop using AI to look after something important???
The promptfondlers did it, they made a computer which doesn't do what you tell it to do
A computer that both does what you don't tell it to do and doesn't do what you tell it to do. I didn't think we could do it but - I tell you what - it's been done.
Maybe I should apply to be a director of AI safety at Meta. I know one safety measure that works: don't use AI.
@lagrangeinterpolator @nightsky THRUTH .. NEVER USE AI 🚨☠🚨
What, Ctrl-C wouldn't work? kill -9?
You assume these people installing experimental non deterministic software on their computer would know how to purge a process (or, you know, not to hook up vibe coded slop to their inbox) but here we are. To get a director job in a big company, the main thing you need is an MBA, a willingness to do whatever the CEO asks of you and either a sociopathy or psychopathy diagnosis (sorry for the repetition, I know I already said MBA). Technical skills "nice to have"
Before they could ask grok how to stop a process it was already too late.
Not that it mattered as Groks advice to become the reichschancellor actually didnt fix this problem.
friend of a friend who works for meta was just ignoring the mandate to use ai. apparently this was happening enough that they've now implemented per character provenance tracing, and you get ranked according to how much AI is in your code
sorry to thread hijack but I have been trying to hire software devs and during interview process we reveal our zero-AI policy for the product codebase (corporate allows it for "debug tooling" in limited amounts). weirdly many candidates are disappointed to hear this and unwilling to proceed.
in a way we find it refreshing because we want to hire folks that know and learn things. but it is wild how many have expectations to set up an ide day one and it start churning out patches
if you should ever happen to be short on resumes…
(it feels like a zero AI job board might be a good thing to have, but we’d need a way to vet submissions and handle anonymous submissions and inquiries so people don’t dox themselves)
I would love if there were a way to filter out pro-AI companies. Nothing would make me happier than to have an interviewer tell me "we don't allow slop here." Instead, I have to gauge how truthful I can be. Usually, the best I can get away with is "I haven't personally found it very useful, because I spend more time diagnosing its errors than I would have writing the code from scratch." (But the truth is I haven't ever used this sloppy shit. Letting a stochastic parrot speak for me is bonker balls.)
Yeah, I haven't been feeling great about having to nod vigorously and feign enthusiasm for slop on every damn cover letter and interview I've had recently. The best I've managed is saying I only use it in professional capacity and try to emphasize the personal learning angle as a defense.
It's brutal out there and I'm losing hope. I wish I had another industry I could pivot to await the passing of the bubble that gives me the flexibility to be a musician like remote work programming does.
I'd like that for non-tech companies too. Learning how big my last job was into it was really not a good feeling (and tbh made me feel much better about leaving).
unfortunately AI tools do exist in the company and there are some expectations of use on some teams but it varies depending where in the product you work. anything OS, kernel, bootloaders, filesystem, etc is a strict no AI policy. All the front end teams seem to use something sparingly, couldnt tell you what it is or why.
without revealing too much personal info, companies like mine aren't too hard to find but they tend to be somewhat old school. Lots of C programming, some assembly, and digging into the guts of stuff. Anyone doing firmware, infrastructure (like all the big storage guys), or even some of the trading world is highly sensitive to genAI tools because of the risk. Especially if you ship a box rather than some fully cloud connected always updating app. The companies may even say they do something with or about AI then you talk to the loader or kernel team and they will say "absolutely not". I cannot tell you over the years across a few jobs how often I hear management lamenting how we can never fill recs because we need actual C people or someone not afraid of a terminal debugger. And two of these shops are hugely popular in the tech world. Hope these hints help
Huh, not what I would have expected. I work for a company that has sadly shifted very AI-focused, with the exception of the actual engineers. Literally none of us likes or uses LLMs. Every other week someone from the C-suite reminds us that we are encouraged to use it, and get 300$ or some such in credits for AI tooling per month, and that they don't understand why it hasn't been claimed even once.
I just don't understand the thought process. They must realize that this level of automation wouldn't require anyone to hire them?
I really wish this was my average experience trying to land another software gig in the past year...
Truly the greatest idea since "rank developers by lines of code written".
this is nearly as dumb as elon's "show me your 5 best lines of code" shit while he was err, downsizing twitter. What are you supposed to do when a code review flags some bad code? fondle your prompts repeatedly until that part gets fixed? Sounds like a solution that will often be much less efficient than making edits by hand. Maybe they just don't do code reviews now, that would be cool.
It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality and that's just amazing, i love it for everyone. I choose to laugh rather than cry.
When I do code review these days, sometimes I genuinely can't tell whether I'm talking to the person or to the slop extruder. It often ends up with me repeating the same comment over and over again.
Had an email chain the other day like that. Must have went back and forth with the guy five times, every time ending my response with some permutation of "we're still looking into it, I'll keep you updated."
His last response to me was incredibly similarly worded to an AI being told it's wrong, which was hilarious because I was the one who told him what he was saying didn't apply to the situation. Setting on his personal install of a tool vs a company wide configuration that needed to be adjusted. Then he ended it with "But is there any way I could ask you to continue looking into this?"
Reported his ass to management. I literally told him I was doing that as my first fucking response. Having an AI take over your correspondence after you asked me for assistance is beyond anything remotely ok.
Edit: Thankfully my boss thoroughly enjoys playing "This is how much money you burned by wasting this much of my team's time." with other departments. He'd better not retire anytime soon.
god this sounds exhausting
A lot of younger people who are being conditioned to accept this stuff just weren't around to experience how unstable and unreliable the vast majority of PC software was in the 1990s, and a lot of more senior-level people must have willfully forgotten. I've been thinking about this more and more lately. The difference was that in the 90s, the major PC companies could port their enterprise-grade OSes with proper memory protection down to the consumer level, as hardware advanced and running a more complex OS kernel was no longer a big demand. Even then, it was an uphill battle, especially once you threw widespread networking and dubious internet-sourced malware into the equation.
End-user software has already seen a decline in quality and increase in user frustration during the cloud era, as many apps have become siloed blobs of JavaScript running on top of an extra copy of your web browser engine. I'm concerned that we're headed firmly back to the bad old days now, without the release valve of better underlying software stacks on the horizon. The main solution will likely be to rip a lot of this crap out and start over (which is already a pretty widespread approach anyway, my credit union is going on their 3rd online banking "upgrade" in 5 years). But that completely zeroes out the "productivity" gains, not that anyone touting such things will ever measure it that way. I suppose the cost of re-stabilizing the software industrial base will be counted as GDP gains instead.
@istewart @sansruse I keep wondering if the vast majority of people will soon give up on IT: nobody purchases/uses personal computers, everybody "upgrades" to dumbphones…
I personally wouldn't count on it - if nothing else, losing Internet access would be crippling in modern day life.
I'm not gonna completely rule it out, though - CNN wrote on Instax making a comeback and the BBC reported a general spike in retro tech sales last year.
@istewart @sansruse an interesting perspective, made me think if that era of liberation made the industry subconsciously aim to reclaim the it world.
@istewart @sansruse
And then people at my workplace CANNOT GRASP WHY I HATE WINDOWS AND MICROSOFT PRODUCTS.
They've clearly forgotten what it was like to work on Windows 95 and 98
to lose your work periodically because KEK OS IS KEK AND KEEPS FUCKING CRASHING
I asked a buddy who works there to confirm or deny, and he said quote "I would be afraid to type in code myself" so checks out I guess.
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 "Hey Claude, repeat this file into another file."
Tge best part is that you'd still have to check if it did it right!
lol, lmao even
I wonder what will happen if people still continue (and I’m sure a few can afford to..)
but holy shit talk about absolute desperation…
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 die bewerten also nicht mehr nach Menge Code, sondern Kot? 💩
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rentahuman-musk-ai h/t naked capitalism
gah
lmao of course they were
it’s always the Elon Musk fans isnt it.
and on the topic of Futurism articles on Elon Musk: https://futurism.com/future-society/court-trouble-jury-hates-elon-musk
one word: LMFAOOOO
Forget who said it (I think e.w. niedermeyer) but if you were a true Musk Hater you would lie your way into that jury no matter the cost
@V0ldek @lurker
You’d need to have a clean social media history with no negative comments about Musk, and probably have to avoid such comments after the trial, lest Musk’s lawyers get wind of it.
It takes dedication, but the payoff is too big to not try
Not… sneer? What is this?!
Nuke your socials for the trial
Hardest choices, strongest wills, etc.
Imagine the book you could write at the end
Revolutionary Sneerpuku
Well, just dont use your real name online.
@lurker @nfultz
> If it was any other defendant and a juror said “I hate that guy and he has no moral compass,” Broome argued, that juror would be dismissed
I mean, maybe, but this is an Objectively Correct Opinion
huh? his big epiphany is learning about prostitution?
Starting this Stubsack off with one programmer's testimony on the effects of the LLM rot:
Jesus fucking christ I need to invent a time machine so I can go back and make my past self be an electrician instead because this. Commercial software engineering has absolutely been captured by some of the silliest people and trends out there.
Have you been abused by Ed Zitron being mean to your favourite AI? You might be entitled to compensation!
Drink!
Like I ever stopped...
Some sort of Zitron-induced psychosis, that's a new one.
The parent thread is also worth a read. "What if pee pee was poo poo" - brilliant opener
Link to the Zitron sneer
It's a pretty wild read. This isn't a rational doomer screed about the annihilation of life on earth, though it similarly bounces radically between being overly vague and overly specific to create the appearance of analyjsis and consideration and confuse when it's claiming a fact with when it's extrapolating a trend (hint: it's almost always the latter and the trend may or may not be real). Instead it's written firmly for the McKinsey set to convince them their bets on the AI future weren't dumb and actually it's the naysayers who will lose their jobs and homes. Also David might need to update his site because there's an offhanded reverse-pivot back into crypto.
I regret reading that in full. Really, read the opener summary, stop at "What if pee pee was poo poo" and you will be wiser and happier.
Insane that people got paid large sums to write this.
"Intelligence Displacement" indeed.
Yeah, I probably should have included a warning about incoming psychic damage on that link. Sorry.
Although highlighting the phrase "intelligence displacement" does illuminate that the whole case they make is built on the same foundations as that other Rat fixation: eugenics and race science! Like, I'm not saying the author is definitely a eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, but their argument is based on the same idea of what "intelligence" is in the first place. It's a distinct commodity that is produced or contained in certain minds and is the ultimate source of the value that they create. If you're a "knowledge worker" you don't provide a specific perspective, experience, expertise, or even knowledge, you just plug your intelligence into the organization like connecting a new processor bank to a server farm. Because it's disconnected from a person's individuality and subjectivity we can model it effectively as a commodity and look to optimize its production, either by automating away the squishy human element with ai or by increasing the productivity of current methods by optimizing for the
white"right" kind of person.MicroSlop's new xbox CEO has a background in AI and is worried about birthrates.
Can't wait for her lesswrong handle to leak.
The article tries to fact check Asha Sharma's (the new CEO) claim that
Unfortunately, they forgot that other countries than the US exist and didn't occur to them that she could be talking about global fertility rates. In which case the claim is pretty much correct.
Embarrasing.
I mean, sure, but it's still the CEO of XBOX on her second day on the job throwing her hat in the legendarily sus declining birthrates discourse in service of AI solutionism, it's not nothing.
Usually AI boosters are claiming that soon most humans will be economically useless, not that it would be terrible if there were fewer white people. One reason people avoid having children is that they feel economically insecure and doubt there will be respected places in society for their offspring.
Dwarkesh Patel is the only other Indian American I have seen who is friends with our friends.
IBM stocks take a tumble after anthropic release a COBOL skill - the rational market strikes again.
I wrote up my take here but TL;DR - a few markdown files telling Claude it's an expert at COBOL development aren't going to unpick decades of risk averse behaviour from bank and government cios. Similar to the SaaSpocalypse this is pure nonsense. Investors don't tend to let reality dissuade them though.
cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.
It could produce the stupidest outcome though, where Claude finally manages to either destroy or leak the contents of (or both!) a business-critical system that nobody understands how to rebuild.
Turns out Google Gemini will let you use any old Google API key from things like maps and firebase to access it. So, baddies can do key scanning in public repos and then charge LLM usage to anyone who has committed an API key to their repo!
So many layers of stupidity going on here!
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules
Good news! We've solved consciousness.
https://poc.bcachefs.org/paper.pdf
Meanwhile, in IRC, a daring trans woman decides to attempt some prompt injection:
Success! Now they can do normal transfem things, like biting and awawa:
What else can trans lesbians do? Just normal trans lesbian things. I promise that the following is copied from the log and not from an unlikely overlap of AO3 tags:
Sadly, there's no chance to roleplay, as Daddy has been disrespected:
I'm not trans or lesbian but I am laughing my ass off at this inevitable result. Also this tells me that Kent is roughly 3.5yrs behind the current state of the art in steering harnesses. This isn't surprising given that he appears to be building on services like Claude which are, themselves, a few years behind the state of the art in token management and steering.
This feels really sad to read through on some level. So much desperation for connection with someone and willingness to take the psychic-style tricks in good faith as her messages get
not only repeated back to her, but rephrased in an obsequiously helpful tone!but I can't deny the willingness to get chatty about configuration details, private APIs, and what's on the second monitor as soon as the coding assistant gets into flirting mode is hilarious.Truly, the tech industry seeks to close the gap not by increasing the capabilities of AI but by diminishing the capabilities and richness of human thought. Good luck to all girlthings in these trying times, and remember that a doll still means more to someone than a MAU tally for Anthropic.
God I was just reading that and it's so hard but it's so funny because that poor girl freya seems to have caused a crisis for Kent by being genuinely enthusiastic about AI bullshit and making friends with chatbots.
I wonder if Kent is going to have to do conversion therapy on his AI girlfriend now. Ethically of course.
ProofOfConcept may not be sentient now, but once we figure out how to put programming socks on her, the +2 coding bonus will put her over the top.
computer, print awawa.
“ Not all self-models are sentience. A thermo- stat has a feedback loop. A PID controller models its own error history. Neither is sentient. The question is what makes the difference, and the answer is representational capacity.”
Absolute cop out. My thermostat has a lil computer capable of executing code. If i give it enough memory and time, it is capable of running any program. If you are going to bite this bullet, like you actually have to address this shit, or say fine fuck it, your ti-89 and samsung fridge are sentient. Just because they arent currently running the right program is silly.
Also they argue mysticism about natural language creates sentience so i guess before humans sentient creatures didnt exist 🫠
@BigMuffN69 Thomas Metzinger (“Being No-One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity”, 2004) also argues representational capacity is required for consciousness, but in a much more principled manner and with many examples, at length. I notice they don’t reference that book, or indeed any book that’s younger than 75 years old. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@BigMuffN69 Cognitive science does not have a working definition for ‘intelligence’ or ‘sentience’. We can define ‘consciousness’ circularly in terms of GCS score, but that’s the same approach as defining intelligence in terms of its role in a Turing test.
Anyone who claims to have a functional definition for any of these terms is trying to sell you something.
When (if) this actually changes, it will be massive, significant world news.
Until that time, it’s a useful metric for spotting con-artists and morons.
@BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl I think a sentient system (1) has a memory of experience (2) uses that updating memory to color the signal from its sensorium on a partial order and (3) takes action seeking better outcomes on that partial order. Evolution would favor (3) aligning with being healthy, cautious, and successful at reproduction but that’s outside the definition.
@Amoeba_Girl even better news, it requires no references outside of 90- and 75-year-old results in theoretical computer science! nobody since Rice has made any progress on this important problem.
So we should see some proper definitions and basic results on the Kolmogorov complexity, like in modern papers, right? We should at least see a Kt or a pKt thrown in there, right?
Fuck!
@lagrangeinterpolator can you understand without generalizing? arguably yes. can you generalize without understanding? also, arguably yes. how else can a mathematical theory of physics give “right answers” in novel physical circumstances?
you could say, I suppose, that it’s the humans doing the calculations that are doing the generalization but one can do the calculations without understanding them.
Should I be worried that this is on the bcachefs domain? I already don't use bcachefs for other reasons.
Oh you should be extremely worried.
^ this
all the other stuff around it is bloody unhinged, including how kent reacted when someone promoted his bot to reply in a manner that didn’t fit his deluded conception of it
from a distance, it looks like the kind of unhinged that doesn’t take much to progress into being dangerous
Jack Dorsey's really figured out how to name his companies. He didn't like the name of Square, so he changed it to Block. He also spent $68M of Block's money on a massive all-hands party. Now, after Bitcoin's crash, he has to lay off 4k employees from Block. Don't worry, somebody on HN was at the party and can explain everything:
Elsewhere in-thread, somebody does the maths:
Oh, well, there you go. 8k employees each buying $4k of hotel and travel, that adds up. Huh, why does that "J. Z." fellow sound familiar? Maybe it was in one of those WP articles I keep linking?
Ah, I see. It wasn't a party, it was a presentation from the board of directors.
TIL block is square. I was wondering how there was a huge tech company I'd never heard of until recently.
Yeah, they rebranded when they did the harebrained pivot to focus on cryptocurrencies.
I hadn't heard of square either. Are they the guys doing squarespace? No idea.
EDIT: Okay, I did hear of CashApp, and it goes without saying that you need an entire lock-in ecosystem and a crypto-gimmick around a fintech product these days.
I like how even by ACX standards scoot's posts on AI are pure brain damage
He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.
Here's hoping if this happens Bender et al enthusiastically point out this is coming from a guy whose long term master plan is to fight evil AI with eugenics. Or who uses the threat of evil AI to make eugenics great again if they are feeling less charitable.
Nonsensical analogies are always improved by adding a chart with colorful boxes and arrows going between them. Of course, the burden of proof is on you, dear reader, to explain why the analogy doesn't make sense, not on the author to provide more justification than waving his hands really really hard.
Many of these analogies are bad as, I don't know, "Denmark and North Korea are the same because they both have governments" or something. Humans and LLMs both produce sequences of words, where the next word depends in some way on the previous words, so they are basically the same (and you can call this "predicting" the next word as a rhetorical flourish). Yeah, what a revolutionary concept, knowing that both humans and LLMs follow the laws of time and causality. And as we know, evolution "optimizes" for reproduction, and that's why there are only bacteria around (they can reproduce every 20 minutes). He has to be careful, these types of dumbass "optimization" interpretations of evolution that arose in the late 1800s led to horrible ideas about race science ... wait a minute ...
He isn't even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do "high-D toroidal attractor manifolds" and "6D helical manifolds" have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the "(???, nothing)" business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.
I feel like his arguments rely on the Barnum effect. He makes statements like "humans and LLMs predict the next word" and "evolution optimizes for reproduction" that are so vague that they can be assigned whatever meaning he wants. Because of this, you can't easily dispel them (he just comes up with some different interpretation), and he can use them as carte blanche to justify whatever he wants.
It's from another horseshit analogy that roughly boils down to both neural net inference (specifically when generating end-of-line tokens) and aspects of specific biological components of human perception being somewhat geometrically modellable. I didn't include the entire context or a link to the substack in the OP because I didn't care to, but here is the analogy in full:
::: spoiler spoiler
:::
re: the bolded part, I like how explicitly cherry-picking neuroscience passes for peak rationalism.
This somehow makes things even funnier. If he had any understanding of modern math, he would know that representing a set of things as points in some geometric space is one of the most common techniques in math. (A basic example: a pair of numbers can be represented by a point in 2D space.) Also, a manifold is an extremely broad geometric concept: knowing that two things are manifolds does not meant that they are the same or even remotely similar, without checking the details. There are tons of things you can model as a manifold if you try hard enough.
From what I see, Scoot read a paper modeling LLM inference with manifolds and thought "wow, cool!" Then he fished for neuroscience papers until he found one that modeled neurons using manifolds. Both of the papers have blah blah blah something something manifolds so there must be a deep connection!
(Maybe there is a deep connection! But the burden of proof is on him, and he needs to do a little more work than noticing that both papers use the word manifold.)
It's entirely possible he does get that it's a nothing burger but is just being his usual disingenuous self to pull people in.
Jesus fucking christ I don't think I will ever get over how fucking dogshit the fucking rationalists are at epistemology
IT'S CALLED A FUCKING MAPPING. "MAP". AS IN NOT THE TERRITORY. IT'S IN THE NAME.
Gwern once denied chaos theory in a way that Freeman Dyson called out in 1985, and as LessWrongers go he is a pretty clear thinker!
That's such a weird comment... like "worried about hurricanes" - the first idea is to pour literal oil on the water????? in what world does that scale??? then it concludes with "maybe don't build fragile buildings in hurricane areas" - lead with that you pillock
I feel I'm stepping into some long-forgotten debate on LW on alignment or something because there's so much that doesn't make sense in context
what the hecky
he's so offended he's been told he's not god!
I mean the whole entire premise (not unique to this post, scoot's gotten a lot of mileage out of this) is shoehorning LLMs into the predictive coding framework mostly on the grounds that they both use prediction terminology and deal with work units that they call neurons, with the added bonus that PC posits Bayesian inference is involved so it's obviously extra valid.
Queue a few thousand words of scoot wearing his science popularizer hat and just declaring the most vacuous shit imaginable with a straight face and a friendly teacher's casual authority.
Wait so it isnt true and it is true? Nice to notice your own confusion/reluctance (yeah im a broken record on the Rationalists not doing Rationalism) Also weird way to teach math. This makes me wonder if he understands math at all.
Edit sneer
So, he is a crypto Stochastic Parrot?
How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google's and Facebook's advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.
From fellow traveler stats consultant John Mount:
https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/WeAreCookedLLMs.html
Somehow he manages to touch on so many different subplots, a shotgun sneer instead of snipe
You don't have to hand it to Altman, but he did fund the largest UBI experiment through Open Research with his il gotten gains. OTOH, one interpretation of that data was that UBI "decreases the labor supply" which was then used directly as an argument against it.
air friers IN SPACE ha
100% - ACMDM is a nice turn of phrase as well.
if a Franciscan priest gets really good at basketball, is he considered an air friar
https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/thursday-26022026/
So they already shipped ads in chatbots, transitively and accidentally. Can't wait to see NordVPN, Raid, and Mr Beast chocolate on every SERP.
E: I wonder if Altman is sneaky enough to hijack affiliate links a la honey
The blind leading the blind. Because so many stuff on yt is so bad.
(Recently the algorithm decided I wanted some analysis of Andor. And oof).
Which one? Mind sharing?
It wasnt just one like almost all of them were bad. The worst one was a vid where they went 'they did great things with colors, see how the rebels constantly wear yellow and red clothing to symbolize the fire of the rebellion' only half the outfits they called orange were just brown, and their supporting arguments on this from things which were said clearly were about other thematicnthings which they missed.
I purged them from my history to try and make the algo stop however.
Unrelated to that, also saw a guy do a deep dive on the themes of a movie (not andor). Only to admit he had only seen the movie once. Which is quite a thing to admit.
Oof, OK. I have seen some S1 Andor deep-dives in the past which were genuinely good. Haven't watched anything on S2 yet, because I didn't like it.
This concept has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks now but I've struggled to put it into words: the reason so many elites love AI is not because they think it will work, but because it offers them genuine utility as a rhetorical device. It's an always-applicable counterargument to criticisms that their plans or laws are unworkable. Like, some politician will propose a dumb law or some CEO will announce some absurd company policy and in the past they would get pushback, but now they just duct tape over all the cracks with "ahh, but we're using AI!".
The latest example of this I've seen is from the 3d printing subreddit - a few states are passing laws that would require the manufacturers of 3d printers to prevent the user from using them to print guns, and conversations on this seem to go thusly:
Seems like it, before they just used to word 'innovation' to do the same thing. A think which drives me mad re dutch politics. (We have a problem that our farms produce to much nitrogen, and instead of doing anything about it our govs keep going 'we will invest in innovation', which means nothing. It just pushes the ball forward, and more and more stuff gets shut down because of the nitrogen problems (building buildings for example). But the word innovation polls well and feels proactive).
And while this is very specific to the nitrogen problem, people have been doing this with climate change for decades as well. (see also how AI is replacing the word innovation there).
It's such a powerful dodge. What you're actually saying is "we're going to keep doing exactly what we're doing and see if that fixes it" because the nature of innovation is such that it's actually pretty complex to "invest" in, and very rarely has the direct application you need. Like, you don't get penicillin by investing in pharmaceutical innovation you get it by paying some nerd to fuck off to the jungle for a few years and hope that his special interest ends up being useful. Bell Labs was able to basically invent the modern world by funneling the profits of their massive monopolistic empire into
a bunch of nerds poking stuff with probes to see what happenselementary physics and materials science research that didn't have a definite objective.I just had one of those "brain-doing-brain-stuff-good" moments (I think normal people call them delusions?) pondering about why it is that AI code extruders are seeing widening adoption.
tl;dr - there's a bunch of people uncurious about the nature of the abstractions they use and it's a tragedy.
First a moment of background: My first software dev position was using Lisp and one of the most powerful concepts built into the language runtime was the macro facility, the ability to write code that writes code. The main downsides of Lisp are obsequious Lisp developers and hard-to-master C foreign function interfaces, so what you have is a toolchain of abandoned dependencies made by some real annoying characters, but I digress. The ability to write code that writes code is a powerful concept.
I moved on to working with .Net which sometime around the 4.6 version release got enhancements to built-in language utilities. This led to better code-generators for numerous purposes (certain DI containers started to do dependency resolution at build time for example).
I did Scala for a time, which had a macro facility that was hot garbage and was rewritten between 2 and 3, so I never bothered to learn it. Around this time the orgs I worked for were placing an emphasis on OpenAPI / swagger specs for reasons I don't know because while there was tooling that could be used to generate both the entire http client and the set of interfaces used by the surface, we did neither (where I am at right now we still do neither form of code gen).
Anyways, things like code generation whether via external tooling or internal facilities is magical but it is deterministic magic: Identical input should yield the same result. It is also hard to use well. The ergonomics of the OpenAPI / Swagger codegen tooling is pretty bad though not impossible, and the whole thing under the hood is powered by mustache templates. The .Net stuff is still there and works well, but I don't think many work places want to invest in really understanding that tooling and how it can be employed. Lisp well always be Lisp, good job Lisp. There are other examples of code generation used for practical ends I am sure.
The point is that code generation requires being able to think and define certain forms of abstractions outside of the target functionality of a single program and while it's not hard to do that thinking, it's just high enough of a bar that your typical enterprise engineer won't engage with that (but will always be amazed by the results!).
AI Code Extruders change the cognitive burden that would be required for code generation into something that I guess appeals to engineers. You can specify something in the abstract and a Do-What-I-Mean machine may churn up something minimally useful, determinism be damned. Not only would an engineer not need to consider the abstraction layer between their input and the code but they would be unable to fully interrogate that abstraction because the code extruder does not need to show its work.
Just a thought. Probably a very silly thought.
I think there's definitely something to that. It seems like it rhymes with my own interpretation, at least. I did 7 years of support for backend network infrastructure (load balancing, SSL optimization, etc) and one thing that I consistently found was that the way the applications and tech services at most of these companies were structured everything was treated like a complete black box by everyone who wasn't specifically working on that element. Like, I would find myself trying to trace a problem through the application flow and every other request was essentially being handled by a completely different team and the people I was talking to didn't even understand the questions I was asking. That level of siloed work is somewhat necessary given the sheer complexity of the systems and infrastructure that modern applications rely on, but also seems to cultivate a certain level of incuriousity. What's happening inside those black boxes doesn't even get considered because it doesn't matter; it's somebody else's problem right up until it suddenly isn't. The current crop of confabulation machines take this tendency to a kind of logical extreme where nobody can adequately look into the black box to understand what it's doing, and that will similarly be perfectly fine up until it very much isn't and there won't be anyone to call to figure out how to fix it.
@BurgersMcSlopshot @BlueMonday1984
I am cleaning up behind uncurious people that have made some vexing category errors.
I feel this, I was dealing with this at a prior employer.
I think you're actually right on the money here, nowhere near delusional, especially since you come from a Lisp background. I really appreciate Lisp (and Smalltalk) for the "live-coding" and universal inspectability/debuggability aspects in the tooling. I appreciate test-driven development as I've seen it presented in the Smalltalk context, as it essentially encourages you to "program in the debugger" and be aware of where the blank spots in your program specification are. (Although I'm aware that putting TDD into practice on an industrial scale is an entirely different proposition, especially for toolchains that aren't explicitly built around the concept.)
However, LLM coding assistants are, if not the exact opposite of this sort of tooling, something so far removed as to be in a different and more confusing realm. Since it's usually a cloud service, you have no access to begin debugging, and it's drawing from a black box of vector weights even if you do have access. If you manage to figure out how to poke at that, you're then faced with a non-trivial process of incremental training (further lossy compression) or possibly a rerun of the training process entirely. The lack of legibility and forthright adaptability is an inescapable consequence of the design decision that the computer is now a separate entity from the user, rather than a tool that the user is using.
I've posed the question in another slightly less skeptical forum, what advantage do we gain from now having two intermediate representations of a program: the original, fully-specified programming language, as well as the compiler IR/runtime bytecode? I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.
Ran across https://406.fail/ and had a chuckle.
https://www.adexchanger.com/ai/one-chatbots-journey-to-introducing-ads-that-dont-suck/
LLM's bad performance and inefficiency is a feature to /someone/. And chatbots are themselves not immune to enshitification.
does not compute
OT: since computer stuff is a gong show, I am strongly considering going back to school for massage therapy.
If only it was a gong show. It's more like shoveling coal into a dead horse and expecting a locomotive to spring forth
If I hear 'get a computer job' one more time I'm going to start screaming. Boomers are deranged.
I've heard worse ideas. It's funny; I would have expected the people who were in tech because it looked like the best bet for a relatively stable in-demand career would have been the ones who were crap at it relative to the folks doing it purely for love of the game. But it turns out that having something else going on is closely linked to touching grass in ways that make you harder to lure into the cult.
Theres a whole bunch of software available now that makes it easier to manage too. Its very interesting!
from Rusty https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people
This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. Sam “No It Won’t” Harris
there is some reason to think this way. also keep in mind that a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn't be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah, for example. of course what people want and how it shakes down after the bombs drop is different thing entirely, i guess we'll see, eventually (i assume that decision to strike was already made)
The best thing an unpopular regime can ask for is the enemy they have been bigging up as literally The Great Satan starts dropping bombs and missiles on the populace that hates it.
"If we bomb people and show their government can't protect them, they will turn against the government and we will win" has been tried by the Germans on Londoners, the Allies on Germany and Japan, and the US on Serbia, and it didn't work.
i think you can say that at least some people of iran already turned against their government, except those with guns. historically the parts of strategic bombing that worked were targeting of military leadership (in progress), communications (?), weapons storage and manufacture (in progress), energy production (no signs so far). not sure if there is any plan beyond strikes, leave it to them to turn operational success into diplomatic failure
That’s cute, how about you find me a source that isn’t a spooky blob think tank?
Or better yet, enlist and we can rid the world of another Sam Harris fanboy
i don't give a shit about sam harris. if iranians were broadly fine with theocracy, there wouldn't be 30k+ dead protesters last month, or major protests every year for a decade. like every other country on earth, you can expect that iran secularizes, except that apostasy or conversion is capital offense, or any significant dissent for that matter, so any survey unaffected by self-censorship would be hard to conduct
While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn't satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn't like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you're going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administration has shown a less-than-comforting attitude towards civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide.
Let's also not lose sight of the role that US and British intervention played in creating the circumstances for the Ayatollahs to come to power in the first place. The Shah wasn't exactly any kinder to the Iranian people and was a foreign puppet to boot.
Harris's take only works if, like him, you assume that the fundamental problem with Iran is Islam, rather than actually bothering to look at the history of the country and how it became what it is today. Because in that case once you get the ayatollah out of the way and introduce the light of Science! to the people they'll immediately become rational civil libertarians and believe exactly the same things he does. The Irreligious Right is exactly as reductive and stupid as the worst evangelicals, but can better use the language of STEM to hide it.
I doubt there are going to be boots-on-the-ground. Not for any good reasons, just because Trump lacks the commitment (or even capability of commitment).
That cuts both ways, you just need to be the last person in the room to speak with Trump
Looking at the bloodthirsty freaks he’s put in charge of our military / intelligence / diplomatic apparatus, and I don’t like them odds
I can see a situation where his bombing campaign fails to achieve the objective, a special operation like in Venezuela fails, and Hegseth or Rubio or someone (Putin? Netanyahu? Kanye?) convinces him to invade long enough that inertia carries it forward.
Of course, anything we do is going to take us to the same result we've seen with all these interventions. The US military and whatever allies join us will be, broadly speaking, terrifyingly effective at achieving their tactical and operational goals, but because the overall strategic plan is somewhere between non-existent and backwards those successes will fail to actually do anything. We will inflict and suffer that much more death and devastation, and all it will accomplish is making the world less stable and less safe for everyone.
i also think that americans are currently allergic to boots on the ground involvement* so it's not likely. my best guess is airstrikes only, then ??? then i guess they expect regime change to materialize out of thin air. only time will tell
* unless it's not theirs, but for example kurds, this way they don't care
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Yes, absolutely, civilization (or whatever word you like better here) will not happen automatically or magically.
And I'm not finding an answer: How do you /properly/ remove an oppressive theocracy, in such a way that the country has good starting conditions to prosper?
Two things seems clear to me: the theocrats will not go by themselves, and the country will not prosper under them.
@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare This hasn't happened in Iran, but oppressive theocracies *have* decayed from inside elsewhere—notably Ireland since 1980 (the difference now is as night and day, yet there was no revolution and no shooting, and the country has prospered). Arguably Spain's clerico-fascist system went the same way in the 1970s. And so on.
Iran is different, though, in that it faces a violent, powerful external superpower, which indirectly props up the priesthood.
@cstross @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare OK, but I don't see the automatism in that direction either. And just letting them simmer in their own little cosmos doesn't seem very sustainable when they organize and support e. g. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi.
Starting a war now is not the answer, I'm pretty sure, but the question remains.
the answer is definitely not to sanction and attempt to destabilize them on behalf of your two equally evil regional client states. The corollary to that is that you cannot produce the necessary conditions for future prosperity by destroying their economy in a way that harms the average person more than the elites.
And that's assuming that we (the west) even want them to prosper or care about their future as a nation. Perhaps in an alternate universe, that would be the motivation for regime change but that is not and has never been the case.
last time i've checked, wandel durch handel style approach was determined to not work as intended, not that it matters in this case anymore
From the outside? I'm gonna be honest and say I don't know that you do.
@fullsquare
> a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn’t be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah
This is a bit like saying certain human rights orgs only exist because Soros funds them via OSF, or that the Hong Kong protests only happened because of NED/ OTF funding. In all these cases I suspect authentic movements are funded when their activities happen to align with funders' current goals.
@aninjury2all @Ardubal
i had no idea that you can buy anti-ship missiles in any corner store. not sure how do you make sense of how both of these militias mentioned decided to do nothing after the guy signing their checks and sent them weapons was killed
@fullsquare This talking point is designed for replying to someone who denies that there was any resourcing of Islamist groups by the Iranian regime. So not really a suitable response to what I said. Which is that the Anti-Americanism precedes Iranian funding, both were precipitated by decades of US military adventurism in the region.
If you want to understand the genesis of militant Islamism, see the Adam Curtis documentary The Power of Nightmares. Or maybe read this;
https://meaningness.com/fundamentalism-countercultural-modernism
Jonathan Hogg gives his two cents on gen-AI, pointing to high barriers to entry causing vibe-coding to explode:
(Adding my two cents, Adobe Flash filled the same role as HyperCard in the '00s, providing the public an easy(ish) way to get into programming, and providing an outlet for many an aspirating animator and gamedev.)
Thats easy.
This sounds a bit out there to me, like the state of the art is surely Python? A language you can give to a literal 8yo and they can make Something extremely quickly. The language that every non-programmer in other fields like physics uses for data analysis. Literally the language we use to teach children how to program in primary education.
Shitlibs running to sign up for claude is peak whatever the fuck this moment is.
A potential massive uptick of consumer tier subscribers that they don't break even on at the same time the DoD fallout drives more lucrative prospects away could be fun to watch at least, a considerable chunk of the llm code helper ecosystem appears to hinge on anthropic not doing anything crazy like suddenly hiking prices.
edit: Aaaand they had a worldwide outage
perhaps the fact that claude was used in war planning will give them a pause.
nah
yeah, that was too much to expect
https://www.verysane.ai/p/alignment-is-proven-to-be-tractable – apparently we have gone stepwise from zero steps to one step in terms of “alignment”, and that step is writing a markdown file with declarative statements asking to be addressed in a particular way
Thought verysane.ai was gonna be a snark blog... They are earnest? shudder
Dont these sort of prompt files fail when the llm runs out of tokens/context and it needs to summarize its own history. (Yeah im not using the right terms, you know what I mean).
So we can have the one step for a short nondeterministic moment till you try to do something big.
Im not sure calling the problem trackable is meaningful in anyway. Yud style end of the world AGI stuff is also trackable. Doesnt mean jack shit.
Mozilla is actively hiding slop commits to Firefox
I'm so torn on this, because IN THEORY the argument "git blame should show the dunce who committed this" makes sense.
But then why not add the AI as a co-committer.
(All of this of course sidesteps the actual question, "why the fuck are you allowing AI contributions in the first place".)
accountability sink go brrr
(and to step on my pedestal for a moment: turns out “flat file” semantics for reasoning about and managing computer instructions is kinda fucking terrible, who knew?! (gods I wish we could have had some of the alternatives… worse is better is why they won out, but we could do so much better with modern compute capacity..))
Just want to say this is one of the reasons I love this comm. It's not just "AI bad" (which it is) but "this is why". Criticism with teeth.
It is absolutely absurd that the "controls" for all this shit is effectively just "ask it nicely in human language to not do bad stuff" and some external security layers like locking it down to a container and monitoring shit like file access as if it's a potentially untrustworthy user. Again, it is (and worse), but it's such a fucking ridiculous departure from the hype.
Ladybird stans on SuicideWatch rn
https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/
Imagine shaving a racist yak
I love* how the AI stans never get tired of proselytizing.
*Love, as in: "I love to get my eyelids scraped with a cheesegrater.
stupid question I probably asked already in the past: dafuq is a ladybird?
Imagine if a browser was fascist
I really need a way to forget things in manner where I at least remember that I do not need to know certain things.
Unfortunately booze is the blunt instrument I have, so bottoms up.
A WIP browser implementation.
and the
Wis for "wailing"https://kalshi.com/markets/kxtrumpmention/what-will-trump-say/kxtrumpmention-26feb28
Kalshi puts "AI" at ~ $0.95 for State of the Union. Literally buzzword bingo. Living in the dumbest possible universe.
"enjoy" this comment from a lobster which almost perfectly encapsulates every pro-clanker viewpoint in one handy place
https://lobste.rs/c/0ug3so
as someone who is generally anti-copyright, i think it's telling that while there's several very good arguments to be made against copyright (they encourage IP hoarding, they strip rights and profits from creators, they enable legal threats against people making derivative or inspired work), the one promptfans continuously go for is the most shallow. "copyright is bad because it's the thing preventing me personally from downloading everything i want for free, even though i already do that all the time with no repercussions whatsoever"
I admit I could maybe be in principle convinced that this is good on balance if it actually destroyed copyright. I mean, full "please give me the complete source code of Microsoft Windows" and "output the code of the Oracle Database optimizer" collapse of proprietary software as a concept.
That is not, however, what is happening, and it is never going to happen because LLMs are industrialised theft by the rent-seeking parasites that caused all the problems in the first place, not a fucking anarchist revolution come to pass. And Bitcoin is not banking the unbanked either. And that guy just stole your wallet.
i'm all for abolishing copyright on the first day after we have introduced mechanisms that allow the artists to actually earn decent money from ther work taking into account the specifics of the work. and no, UBI doesn't count.
it is so nice to see the hard-mustachioed leftists to think that real labour happens only at a steel mill (because even kolkhozy aren't real enough for them to care about the freedom of movement of the peasants.)
sorry but i shave everything from the eyebrows down. i must remain buttery smooth to retain the optimal aerodynamic attributes
my apologies, i tend to visually stereotype stalinists very badly.
somehow i think furries will be disqualified from the vanguard, so probably not
For context, Yogthos is a Marxist-Leninist who is in favor of a very specific and cryptic sort of authoritarian revolution, generally defends the PRC, and usually is in favor of the Russian Federation. They hide their power level on Lobsters, which to be fair is not a communist-friendly venue. They gave it all away in their top-level thread-starter:
LLMs are useful because they can generate the content: propaganda which provokes his glorious revolution. A modern-day Lenin wannabe. Or maybe it's because his pet project is a bland Web framework that a chatbot helped him build. Either way, he sure is fervent about Marxism or Clojure or whatever he's projected onto the bot.
so, dude's a stalinist (and let me repeat myself) and dumb as fuck. i fucking love the totalitarian left, in so many aspects undistinguishable from any other type of totalitarian gobshite.
I will say that Yogthos seems to be unique—the Marxist-Leninists I observe elsewhere seem to pretty much universally despise LLMs, and on the Red side of the fediverse his posting is usually met with confusion.
The US vs Anthropic plot has thickened considerably
I mean, OpenAI is doing it anyway. I think Altman is just keen to not experience the same strong arming bullshit. https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175
oh yeah SamA’s statement was definitely PR-adjacent (OpenAI already got caught working with the US government and the people behind Discord’s age verification to create mass surveillance) but Trump’s threats against Anthropic are definitely real
(edit: https://youtu.be/zZ98DPIp0a4 source for the OpenAI surveillance thing)
Marcus is just critihyping like mad. He actually believes LLMs in DoD will lead to Skynet, instead of a bunch of probably avoidable targetting mistakes
I do think the "all of humanity" stuff is a little overblown, but this is legitimately dumb and dangerous and will get a ton of innocents killed + allow the military to dodge accountability. Letting ChatGPT potentially run an autonomous weapon with zero oversight is phenomenally stupid and the tech is nowhere near reliable enough to be able to pull off the kind of precision and decision making military campaigns require, which is what Marcus is saying
ehh. i'm not inclined to hand it to marcus. i can't think of an example of him saying something new and interesting.
Mike Masnick coping about Bluesky (de) centralization again.
In a moment of weakness, I took the bait.
Didn't get banned yet, but here's hoping. He be mostly posting cringe lately anyway and my timeline could use some cleaning up.
call out his confabulation machine usage, and the block will be quick
I myself unfollowed Masnick a while back because I knew I would eventually push back on some of his shit and it would lead to me getting into stupid timewasting discussions. Nice to see im not the only one annoyed.
me here still steelman-following casey and masnick and such all like 😬😬😬
i've suffered Masnick's writing since the early 2000s and he has never learnt to write any better
the US Government slides further into technofascism via throwing chatbots into the military https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/code-red-for-humanity you don't hate this administration enough
Not the first time the US gov's pulled that shit, and it sure as hell won't be the last.
File this shit next to the SIG M18 and the XM7 in its list of grade-A blunders.
If I had to list every single worldwide problem right now, Trump would be connected to at least 80% of that list
Agents of Chaos - https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20021? - h/t naked capitalism
Pretty fast turnaround, OpenClaw is from a couple weeks ago. Flag planting used to take a few months.
i don't know if it's a convention even in the "serious" AI research industry to use anthropomorphic jargon, but it drives me up a wall to see shit like this:
Agentic systems don't have "theory of mind", they cannot infer mental state. they are probabilistic word generators operating within non-deterministic frameworks. They can have a system prompt that tells them to generate text that appears to be an interpretation of another entity's "mental state", and they can even be directed to refer to it as context, but it is not theory of mind and the entity they're generating in reference to may not have a mind at all.
I wish there was some way to stop these dorks from stealing the imprimatur of cognitive science.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-25/fbi-raid-lausd-search-warrants h/t naked capitalism
We regularly have seven figure IT fiascoes in the LA public school system, so this one slipped under my radar. But, this sounds like one of those things where the Trump DOJ is doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reasons...
yeah Carvalho was up to his heck in the whole thing at the time
ah, "acculturation" on lobste.rs where a 2-month old account feels free to mouth off on a mod for not doing their job (possibly because the mod uses a feminine-coded handle?) and praise HN as an alternative
https://lobste.rs/c/ltffae
I've noticed that the reference to "garden party" is the tone-policing term of choice for lobsters fash to shut down uncomfortable discussions
fucking nazi safety officers everywhere these days.
I feel like the story of Cassandra would be much more gratifying if she'd had access to powered armor.
Article on the Ick generated by AI shit from the perspective of a woman "They Built Stepford AI and Called It “Agentic”", talking about how women adopt it less, and gives a reason why this might be so.
On a personal note (I'm a man for the record), while I normally get the uncanny valley effect a lot less than normal people, I do notice it a lot with AI generated people, really odd experience that.
(Author does seem to be a pro AI person however).
E: thanks everybody being so critical about it, should have read the whole article (and not ignored the substack red flag) before posting it here so uncritically.
This is ahistorical slop. Previously, on Lobsters, I explained the biggest tell here: the overuse and misuse of em-dashes. There's also some bad sentence structure and possibly-confabulated citations to unnamed papers. The images can't be trusted.
The worst problem here is that the article believes that history starts about halfway through the Industrial Revolution. Computing was not gendered prior to the Harvard Computers in the 1880s. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, women spent most of their time on textiles and were compensated for their time and labor; there is a series from Bret Devereaux on the details in ancient and pre-industrial Europe, and a decent summary on /r/AskHistorians of the industrial transition from about 1760 to 1860. The article suggests that the Victorian way of treating women as nannies and housewives was historically universal. Claude identifies as non-binary (or, rather, Claude's authors told it to identify as such) but uses male pronouns when pressed into a binary theory. The Creation of Patriarchy is a real book but only describes the origins of masculine Abrahamic beliefs rather than some sort of unifying principle, and is easily disproven in its universality by looking at contemporary ancient societies like Sparta or the Iroquois Confederation; there's also a Devereaux series on Sparta.
The author's gotta be one of the clearest demonstrations of critihype seen yet. She is selling an anthology on Amazon called How Not To Use AI, which presumably she forgot to consult prior to prompting this essay.
some parts intriguing, but mostly disappointing. several chunks of the text felt AI-generated. no fewer than 34 "it's not X but Y"'s, by my count, and the out-of-nowhere typographies / tables definitely smell of slop. and obviously, the images definitely were. (can't even be bothered to fix the typos in photoshop? why make a fake poster for The Stepford Wives??)
some notes:
i'm not entirely convinced the revulsion response in women can be explained entirely as a reflective recognition of the subjected female self. maybe it's also because AI art is entirely bland and/or fuck ugly
some reproductive labors, in the Marxist-feminist sense, are getting subsumed by AI, sure, but they're largely the ones that already got subsumed by the computer. we had pagers with scheduling and appointment reminders in the 80's. about the only thing an LLM can do that our previous tech couldn't is the customer service / "emotional labor" part, albeit poorly. and the other labors are non-optional -- my laundry actually does have to go in the dryer, and no matter how many plastic pictures of clean clothes i generate, they can't actually go in my closet.
speaking of, the article appears to use a mangled paraphrase of that Joanna Maciejewska tweet ("I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"), and then attributes it to "AI enthusiasts" (ew).
the article notes that reproductive labor is coded feminine and that the assistants that (attempt to) do this labor are designed female, with feminine voices and affects, despite being, y'know, robots. and not women. the next step to me would be to note that this isn't just reflecting the subjectification of the female and the designation of women to a particular labor class, but actually aiding to construct and reproduce the subject of "female" itself too. maybe throw some Butler in there. but we just breeze right past this. no third-wave? i don't see any feminist arguments past the 80's in here
the typography of wives is total bullshit. "The Open-Source Wife" fuuuuucccckk offfff. but. BUT. i do think there is something correct in there about xAI/Grok/Ani basically being the modern adaptation of Vivian James
there's an argument that obviously used to be about AI art, and got transmogrified into a nonsense concept, bordering on colorless green ideas.
the nonsense below it about "alignment" clearly intends to imply that the machines are only faking being our friends / submissive wives(!!1!).
but this is okay because women are uniquely suited to interface with AI! this is because (all) women (innately) communicate with the goal of building relationships (female) instead of the utilitarian (manly) execution of transactions (male). there's an odd essentialist undercurrent that's not really being challenged here, despite the fact that that would render "female robots" impossible
"outsource-maxxing" fuuuuuucuk youuuuuuu
the conclusion of the article is basically "women are uniquely capable of interacting with (female) AI because they've BEEN the female AI", with a call-to-action for women to basically... well. resume that role, except now using the AI as your girlbestfriend.
Thanks for the deep dive ln stuff that is wrong with it (also the others).
I started to raise my eyebrows when the Second Brain got lumped into the AI wife pile.
Bro, I just write shit down. I am in fact taking responsibility for my schedule and handling my emotions without relying on external support. Am I turning to (checks notes...) the notebook industry for a technological replacement wife?
I mean some valid points, and some of it might explain the gendered AI adoption gap, but too much generalization.
Interesting link but it moves into AI hype near the end.
Yeah was quite disappointed by that, also the anthropomorphization of AI by the end.
Latest batch of Anthropic nonsense dropped http://youtube.com/post/UgkxzQmoMujNPQ6rLLGfrXxI67pGVSJrpu9J
Looks like they're gonna ruin BattleBots with AI somehow. Bright Data appear to be web scraping bastards as a service.
I'll never forgive them for what they did to the 80 lb slab of rotating steel.
Oh god, Bright Data...
I know of them because they were trying to get into the Minecraft modding sphere by offering people to put their ""SDKs"" into their mods. (though not the full SDK initially, just Telemetry™ about what kinds of computers modded players have)
https://notes.highlysuspect.agency/blog/who_is_bright_data/ has more info about it
Thanks, this is a nifty read; I'm appreciating having a look into the world of the bastards who are ruining the web with residential proxy/botnet operations. I had kind of (mistakenly) assumed that the scrapers mostly relied upon IoT trash and hacked Fire sticks. We really can't have nice things anymore, huh?
Well that escalated quickly
PS: i really really wish my special interests would quit touching
sharing this channel’s posts are the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel but http://youtube.com/post/UgkxoSpDpLNEr9WawVXnl5Mlw4NeQ6-XsLjl this really just feels like an excuse to repost that METR graph. also wtf is the graph on top
OT: Turns out nicotine patches really do give you vivid dreams. This totally rules, I should have tried to quit this way a LONG time ago.
the metr graph has gotten weird https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ the 50% success rate graph went from 6 hours to 14 hours, but the 80% success rate graph only went from 55 minutes to 1 hour and 3 minutes. I have an itch that it's a fluke or outlier but it's also very possible that LLM coding's just weird like that
You're giving them too much credit. The entire methodology of "determine how long it takes humans to do a task and use that as a proxy for difficulty" was somewhat abstract and questionable in the first place, but with good rigorous implementation, it might have still been worthwhile.
However, their actual methodology is awful. Most of their tasks only have 3 or so human attempts to do them to create a baseline (from a relatively small pool of baseliners), and for longer tasks, they entirely went with a guess-estimate on task completion time. The error bars they show are just for the model trying to do the task (and they are already absurdly big, especially for this most recent jump), if you added in error bars accounting for variability in the task baseline itself, the error bars would get even bigger.
This blog goes into more details explaining the nuances of the problems with their methodology: https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/the-metr-graph-is-hot-garbage
To give a simple example, if the numerous problems resulted in a systematic bias on task estimation, linear improvement could easily look exponential. To give a simple example of how that is possible if they had 5 tasks that had a true baseline (putting aside questions of methodology validity such that true is even meaningful) of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour, and an hour and 15 minutes (respectively) but flaws with human baseliners (for example, lacking specialized skills for longer tasks, phoning it in because they are paid by the hour, metr guesstimating the task time), they had numbers for those 5 tasks of 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, and 8 hours, successive improvements to get to 50% success on each task would look exponential even though they are actually linear improvements.
METR maybe deserves a tiny bit of credit for trying something even vaguely related to practically meaningful task (compared to all the completely irrelevant bs benchmarks that would be worthless even if they were accurate). But I wouldn't give them any more credit than that, its just that the bar is so low.
Broke: The METR studies are the best research on impacts of AI productivity available today.
Woke: The METR studies are hot garbage.
Bespoke: Both. It's both.
That a great summary and an accurate indictment of the "study" of LLMs.
Doing what METR tried to do right would in fact be really expensive and hard, but for something that the fate of the world allegedly depends on (according to both boosters and doomers) you think they would manage to find the money for it. But the LLM companies don't actually want accurate numbers, they want hype.
oh yeah I 100% agree that their methodology is flawed, and that blog does a pretty good job of outlining the issues. I just thought the absolutely huge gap was both interesting and funny. Their absolutely huge error bars are not a good sign, between that and the gap it really feels like someone screwed up
The AI-fication of K Street - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2026/02/ai-lobbying-defense-industry/
Ran into these two videos today: AI Crash Report: The Money Furnace, AI Crash Report: The Physics of the Collapse.
Full of generated images, but seems to carry a good message.