Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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.)
Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda
It’s possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop
Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?
These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users’ devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices’ digital locks.
It it’s anything like any android device I’ve ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.
Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices.
groan.
It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?
I don’t know what I’m supposed to get from this piece, it feels like he’s saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as you’re willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically what’s left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.
There’s also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I don’t know, seems kind of familiar if you’ve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you’d also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.
The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, we’re definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway here’s how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes.
He almost gives away the game when he says christians don’t feel like slaves when they say ‘thy will be done’ so letting Claude run society would feel fine.
So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs ‘found’ the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)
Seems like there also was one company who released their patch early before the agreed time giving hackers time reverse engineer the bug before patches were widly available.
yes, chainguard broke embargo, and within a few hours a reverse engineered PoC was kicking. I saw at least two implementations yesterday when assssing impending work
and I haven’t slept yet (although now aaaalmost done…)
I saw a story they broke embargo so they could offer protection services to people. Which I really hope isnt true.
H4ppy H4lloween to all who celebrate!
Was Changpeng Zhao trying to send us a message all along
I summed up my views in the latest lobste.rs kerfuffle in a blog post:
Thanks for this! Would you consider making a new post in TechTakes? It could be useful to have a more durable place to comment on this topic.
I’ll consider it. I’d like to sleep on it and see if events overtake it overnight, which can definitely happen
On second thought I won’t post it myself, it’s a bit too mean-spirited and facile. I haven’t been party to the discussions on IRC so I am probably missing a bunch of nuance.
I do compare the mods to Robespierre and co which might be seen as less of a compliement. I do believe they’re working under a lot of pressure and it’s hard to make decisions that please everyone.
I am mostly not unhappy that it’s not been a complete victory for the sloppers
Glyph recently convinced a project to stop doing updates altogether by accident, and has had some thoughts about it.
For the second time I think I have accidentally convinced a project to just … stop doing security updates on a critical dependency forever, because they’d assumed the LLM usage problem wasn’t as bad as it is.
Both of these are offline things that are not at all security-sensitive, but I am starting to worry that in the “dark matter” of the broader developer community there is a meaningful plurality of people who are just going to stop updating e.g. the Linux kernel because of broken trust
(Recommend checking the full thread)
We may all be data annotators soon enough | Gig Economy Project h/t naked capitalism
Outlier has four main clients, all American Big Tech: Meta, Alphabet, Xai and OpenAI. Scale AI is part-owned by Meta. Is this the future we want for European workers, sources for gig exploitation and data expropriation for American Big Tech and the US state?
When one considers that this dystopian scenario currently constitute the most realistic entry jobs for young, university-educated people in Europe, is it any wonder that the youth are currently rising up in multiple European countries, most of all France, demanding something - anything - else?
Good blog post ‘“Who Owns ROM Hacking?” And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With’ on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.
I want to point out that SMW Central doesn’t ban people for being pro-GenAi, nor are they barred from anything just for being pro-GenAi. They simply can’t upload content to the site that was created with GenAi. Despite this, GenAi users believe that, because SMW Central has rules against GenAi content, SMW Central must feel the need to “control or dictate” what they do.
This context transforms the statement substantially. When this group of individuals says “nobody owns ROM hacking,” what they mean is that they should be allowed to publish their work wherever they want without consequence.
Kind of reminds me of the people who, around the time the (UK) smoking ban was introduced, made “It’s my right to smoke anywhere I want” their whole personality.
The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.
In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors
According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article’s summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn’t even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn’t happening.
I’m no finances guy so take this with a grain of salt, but since boosters are apparently acting like the convertibles will automatically work out, wouldn’t Anthropic still be losing more than they earn even if all those convertible notes work out due to compute/training costs? Since they got a discount from Elon earlier. Plus the BetterOffline post pointed out how they can’t even break even on an operating basis
There was an annoying booster who said “Ed Zitron is definitely falling for this one”. Ed Zitron is not fooled. In fact, he is frustrated with the report not properly breaking down the expenses (and having a mysterious “other expenses” category).
Excellent usage of the chart comic
(Edited in a link to Haus of Declines ‘Bloodless Quant’ comic (not sure if that is the real title, I couldn’t find the comic on her bsky, small warning she is not a safe for work creator (if your workplace is very squeamish)).
r/BetterOffline post about the article
Brief comment snippet:
A convertible note is a loan from an investor, but instead of paying them back with cash you give them stock options. It’s still a loss, you’re taking cash from an investor because you can’t break even with revenue.
Imagine if you do that as a baker. ‘Hey flour/sugar/yeast supplier, I can’t pay your for your products, but I will pay you in stocks to our bakery, I’m planning to sell our bakery soon, and as we don’t have to pay you for the supplies, we can sell our product at below the going rate making sure we look good for the sale of the company’.
Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don’t Vibe Code
(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.
The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.
The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.
So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto…
Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow
To single out a specific review
For example, they describe trees as “self-replicating factories that spin air into wood” and conclude that “any intelligence capable of comprehending biochemistry at the deepest level is capable of building its own self-replicating factories to serve its own purposes.”
So an AI could self replicate…because a tree can?? not all trees even self-replicate so the metaphor isn’t even right
Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow
It’s true that there’s more to success than intelligence. There’s also sensors, actuators and metabolism. However, machines look set to master those too.
Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow
LLM-intermediated poster experiencing model collapse due to overtraining on “One Weird Trick To Shed Belly Fat” ads
It is amazing in a way, there are computer scientists who work at the highest level of their field, so they understand computers better than most, but they have more trouble than you or me installing linux.
Understanding something doesnt mean you can build it.
(I know this will be met with ‘well then you dont understand it deep enough’ and that just reminds me that there always will be place for god in the gaps of science).
I wish Wikipedia had more coverage of the Dyson Tree because I have so many questions despite not having studied physics or biology since I was a teenager (what about cosmic rays! there is so little light for it to feed off in the outer solar system! and trees don’t do well in extreme cold)
“A type III super-civilization can harness the energy output of an entire galaxy, and all the inhabitants stare at you like sleep paralysis demons, except for Bob, and we don’t want to get into what Bob’s deal is”
So is the steering wheel attached to the entire device so he steers by rotating the half circle or is the half cricle just to attach it to Bob and there is a deeper mechanism?
The Russian Cosmists have so much to answer for.
My parents got super into the spinoff of For All Mankind that takes place in the Soviet Union, “Star City”. The central conceit of that alternate history spate of shows is that Sergei Korolev didn’t die and kept being as awesome as he was at running the Soviet space program. In the spinoff the writers actually knew a bit about what they were doing, and have him more or less directly quoting cosmists at other characters… I got to tell my parents that its people like him that are the reason their new laptop was expensive and that the oligarchs think they’re going to live forever as feudal lords of the solar system and that our society as a whole has a tendency to falsely believe our destiny is endless expansion and perfection in space rather than Earth.
I’d never really looked into the name before but I just now realized what the Korolev was likely named for
Every Korolev needs a crew of Glushkos to figure out shit he was actually hired for
Heh. Read the actual full paper.
Kardashev didn’t even think that colonizing whole galaxies was the likely end state! He thought that instead everything from billions of light years around would pile into individual huge artificial monolithic structures for efficiency!
“Oh bother, I’ve fallen onto another one of these fart-propelled flight platforms and I can’t get up”
The cult at the heart of the rot of the world is built on such unserious foundations
Consider for a moment where this fellow’s breathing tube and/or proboscis looks to be routed.
The thesis is that the putative type III civilization is harvesting all energy output of its galaxy. I haven’t often seen respiration of methane and/or miscellaneous volatile products of digestion on transhumanist bingo cards, but evidently it’s indicated in the original material.
You obviously haven’t read enough Orion’s Arm.
Is anyone familiar with the website I Can Eat Glass? It was apparently created in the 90s by a Harvard student, who was concerned that people learning foreign languages only learn common phrases (e.g. “Where’s the loo?”) which makes them stand out as tourists when they speak. If one were to say a truly uncommon phrase, it stands to reason one would be instantly respected as a native. So he set up a website to collect as many translations of the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” as he could.
Surely you are riveted to your screens right now, desperate to learn what this very special brain genius has been up to since then. Ethan Mollick is a professor at a Pennsylvania business school and published “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” in 2024. Some say he is substacking about the exponential growth of AI capabilities to this day, but critically this book was apparently read by some german teaching influencer.
He in turn published a self-help book for parents of school kids this year, that got put on display in my local library. And of course it has a chapter on AI, so I had to lend it and hate-read a little. And of course he references Mollick and his Co-Intelligence screed, which he apparently absorbed as a base expectation what the future of AI will look like, and this is how I got to learn about one very special brain genius from Harvard.
Very sad to learn that the “I can eat glass it does not hurt me” guy is AI-brained
Stumbled upon this book today the author is apparently fake as per this article (I did my own search and didn’t find anything)
There’s a youtube video (edit:podcast) on it that I’ll watch later
The website you linked is down and that article appears to be written in the exact same tone with certain machine text tells as the book itself
https://www.scribd.com/document/1019266552/12-Last-Steps-Dr-Selwyn-Raithe-2025
Classic weird nonsensical conspiracist funnybusiness with a side of ARG
I definitely reeks of conspiracy theory, per this description Edit 2: and the way it talks about the decline in birth rates is also setting off red flags
Two ‘its not x, its y’ statements in close proximity also raise my ‘ai generated’ suspicions
It gets worse
Edit basically if you took 90s black helicopter conspiracists, and early 2000s infowars, plopped them down in the current day with Google and a Claude subscription
Edit 2 Its like a year old, and when the PDF first started floating around the internet it was being sold on sketchy websites for $30 and was the subject of one of those youtube-comment-botting rings that will have lots of chains of comments hyping how a book is relevant to a topic and is the best thing ever.
I first learned of it through a comment under a Yudkowsky interview, comparing his messages to the book’s, which is not exactly confidence inspiring
It’s actually about perpendicular to him. Only similarity is that it posits that AI systems are dangerous. Take all the New World Order conspiracy theories and infowars the elite wants to kill you off and take your stuff and become transhuman, with sooper seekrit nefarious depopulation plans and you will eat the bugs and stay in your minute city pod, and replace the ruling elites with AIs.
