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.)
From Bonaroo 2024, when the sun was really insisting upon itself.
Simon Willison defends stealing a Python library using lying machines, answering “questions” he previously “asked” in an attempt to downplay his actions.
I’ll be brutally honest about that question: I think that if “they might train on my code / build a derived version with an LLM” is enough to drive you away from open source, your open source values are distinct enough from mine that I’m not ready to invest significantly in keeping you. I’ll put that effort into welcoming the newcomers instead.
No he won’t.
I’ve found myself affected by this for open source dependencies too. The other day I wanted to parse a cron expression in some Go code. Usually I’d go looking for an existing library for cron expression parsing—but this time I hardly thought about that for a second before prompting one (complete with extensive tests) into existence instead.
He /knows/ about pcre but would rather prompt instead. And pretty sure this was already answered on stack overflow before 2014.
That one was a deliberately provocative question, because for a new HTML5 parsing library that passes 9,200 tests you would need a very good reason to hire an expert team for two months (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to write such a thing. And honestly, thanks to the existing conformance suites this kind of library is simple enough that you may find their results weren’t notably better than the one written by the coding agent.
He didn’t write a new library from scratch, he ported one from Python. I could easily hire two undergrads to change some tabs to curlies, pay them in beer, and yes, I think it /would/ be better, because at least they would have learned something.
Willison is also subtly implying the claim that his judgment on the validity of this codebase and its massively tremendous test suite, after a few hours of admittedly distracted slop extrusion, is roughly equivalent to that expensive expert team working over multiple months. Given that the entire conceit of this article is him talking to himself, I will continue to hold my reservations.
“alpha slop”
EDIT
I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that’s all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.
(One year later, the homelab is running a cluster of North Korean crypto-mining bots)
Why did this happen to ME?
this is why i only self-host low risk crap and it’s all behind my tailnet
half the time i put my shirt on backwards, i am not going to put my password db on the public internet myself
As a fellow homelabber, I would immediately ask: Have you isolated any of your homelab’s functionality and shared it with the community? No? Why not? I’ll give him a little credit, as he was one of the principal authors of Apache’s Parquet format and Arrow library; he does know how to write code. But what did he actually produce with the vibecoding tools? Well, first he made a TUI for some fintech services, imitating existing plain-text accounting tools and presumably scratching his itch. (Last time I went shopping for such a tool, I found ticker.) After that, what’s he built? Oh, he built a Claude integration, a Claude integration, and a Claude integration.
Randomly stumbled upon one of the great ideas of our esteemed Silicon Valley startup founders, one that is apparently worth at least 8.7 million dollars: https://xcancel.com/ndrewpignanelli/status/1998082328715841925#m
Excited to announce we’ve raised $8.7 Million in seed funding led by @usv with participation from [list a bunch of VC firms here]
@intelligenceco is building the infrastructure for the one-person billion-dollar company. You still can’t use AI to actually run a business. Current approaches involve lots of custom code, narrow job functions, and old fashioned deterministic workflows. We’re going to change that.
We’re turning Cofounder from an assistant into the first full-stack agent company platform. Teams will be able to run departments - product/engineering, sales/GTM, customer support, and ops - entirely with agents.
Then, in 2026 we’ll be the first ones to demonstrate a software company entirely run by agents.
$8.7 million is quite impressive, yes, but I have an even better strategy for funding them. They can use their own product and become billionaires, and now they can easily come up with $8.7 million considering that is only 0.87% of their wealth. Are these guys hiring? I also have a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge that I need to tell them about!
Our branding - with the sunflowers, lush greenery, and people spending time with their friends - reflects our vision for the world. That’s the world we want to build. A world where people actually work less and can spend time doing the things they love.
We’re going to make it easy for anyone to start a company and build that life for themselves. The life they want to build, and spend every day dreaming about.
This just makes me angry at how disconnected from reality these people are. All this talk about giving people better lives (and lots of sunflowers), and yet it is an unquestionable axiom that the only way to live a good life is to become a billionaire startup founder. These people do not have any understanding or perspective other than their narrow culture that is currently enabling the rich and powerful to plunder this country.
It somewhat goes without saying that this is the natural outcome of Paul Graham and others emphasizing the creation of new startup companies over the utility and purpose of the products and tools that those companies make. An empty business for generating more empty businesses.
A factoryFactory
A FactoryFactoryProxy, no less
when I saw that they’d rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away
please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please no…
AFAIK, the people in this space who have acknowledged using LSD and other psychedelics are gwern, Aella, and QiaochuYuan (during his rationalist phase). Scott Alexander hinted that he might have tried it, Eliezer Yudkowsky is interested in psychedelic therapy but also tells readers to please not use LSD. Can any of you name anyone else in this space who has talked about dropping acid?
I don’t want to get into “A says that B dropped acid” in a StubSack thread.
The 2016 Nootropics Survey results and Nootropics Survey 2020 Results suggest that it was popular with anonymous SlateStar readers.
Previously, on Awful, we considered whether David Chapman was an LSD user. My memory says yes but I can’t find any sources.
I do wonder what you’re aiming at, exactly. Psychedelics don’t have uniform effects; rather, what unifies them is that they put the user into an atypical state of mind. I gather that Yud doesn’t try them because he is terrified of not being in maximum control of himself at all times.
Yud has posted:
Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics[sic] having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs.
He seems very worried about his tendency to procrastination (akrasia in LessWrong jargon) and inability to make himself exercise. So he is concerned about inability to control himself. So his public position is that LSD might have medical uses, but it has harmed people close to him.
Over on Lobsters, Simon Willison and I have made predictions for bragging rights, not cash. By July 10th, Simon predicts that there will be at least two sophisticated open-source libraries produced via vibecoding. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be five-to-thirty deaths from chatbot psychosis. Copy-pasting my sneer:
How will we get two new open-source libraries implementing sophisticated concepts? Will we sacrifice 5-30 minds to the ELIZA effect? Could we not inspire two teams of university students and give them pizza for two weekends instead?
Well to be fair, he think your estimate is too low :( (as do i)
Willison:
I haven’t reviewed a single line of code it wrote but I clicked around and it seems to do the right things.
Could not waterboard that out of me, etc.
Via YouTube recommends, I came across this video about our favorite crypto pivot to ai NeoCloud data center company CoreWeave
How CoreWeave is near insolvency
Interestingly, the author is an LLM shill as evidenced by the video being caked with a hefty layer of copium.
Seems to have struck a nerve amongst the commentariat which didn’t appreciate this kind of “FUD”.
From a new white paper Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt, h/t The Syllabus Hidden Gem of the Week
The long-term viability of the AI investment surge depends on meeting the high expectations embedded in those investments, with a disconnect between debt pricing and equity valuations. Failure to meet expectations could result in sharp corrections in both equity and debt markets. As shown in Graph 3.C, the loan spreads charged on private credit loans to AI firms are close to those charged to non-AI firms. If loan spreads reflect the risk of the underlying investment, this pattern suggests that lenders judge AI-related loans to be as risky as the average loan to any private credit borrower. This stands in stark contrast to the high equity valuations of AI companies, which imply outsized future returns. This schism suggests that either lenders may be underestimating the risks of AI investments (just as their exposures are growing significantly) or equity markets may be overestimating the future cash flows AI could generate.
Por que no los dos? But maybe the lenders are expecting a bailout… or just gullible…
That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.
Interesting point, if AI is basically a rounding error for GDP… But I also remember the layoffs in 2000-1 and 2014-5, they weren’t evenly distributed and a lot of people got left behind, even if they weren’t as bad as '08.
“It sounds so insignificant when you put it like that, I can hardly believe I’m in a bread line because of a manufactured poly-crisis it was a part of!”
Very smart commentator:
This particular explosive barrel is no more potent than any of the dozens of other explosive barrels in this room.
Heatmap: Amid Rising Local Pushback, U.S. Data Center Cancellations Surged in 2025
regwalled, here are quotes
President Trump has staked his administration’s success on America’s ongoing artificial intelligence boom. More than $500 billion may be spent this year to dot the landscape with new data centers, power plants, and other grid equipment needed to sustain the explosively growing sector, according to Goldman Sachs.
There’s just one problem: Many Americans seem to be turning against the buildout. Across the country, scores of communities — including some of the same rural and exurban areas that have rebelled against new wind and solar farms — are blocking proposed data centers from getting built or banning them outright.
At least 25 data center projects were canceled last year following local opposition in the United States, according to a review of press accounts, public records, and project announcements conducted by Heatmap Pro. Those canceled projects accounted for at least 4.7 gigawatts of electricity demand — a meaningful share of the overall data center capacity projected to come online in the coming years.
Those cancellations reflect a sharp increase over recent years, when local backlash rarely played a role in project cancellations, according to Heatmap’s review.
The surge reflects the public’s growing awareness — and increasing skepticism — of the large-scale fixed investment that must be kept up to power the AI economy. It also shows the challenge faced by utilities and grid planners as they try to forecast how the fast-growing sector will shape power demand.
via WaPo, ole orange cankles is promising socialism:
In a bid to tamp down growing unrest in communities over tech giants’ expansion of power-hungry data centers, President Donald Trump said his administration would push Silicon Valley companies to ensure their massive computer farms do not drive up people’s electricity bills, seizing on a promise Microsoft made public Tuesday to be a better neighbor.
The Trump administration has gone all in on artificial intelligence, pushing aside concerns within the MAGA movement and seeking to sweep away regulations that it says hamper innovation. But neighbors of the vast warehouses of computer chips that form the technology’s backbone — many of them in areas otherwise supportive of the president — have grown increasingly concerned about how the facilities sap power from the grid, guzzle water to stay cool and secure tax breaks from local governments. And Trump now appears to be recalibrating his approach.
is it because of pushback, or is it because money is running out
Inshallah
My power bill went from ~$100 to >$300 / month average in the past year, and my state is one of the more proactive ones about building out solar and wind. Between this, the removal of ACA subsidies causing a healthcare death spiral and doubling rates, the brain drain, the economic isolation, the tariffs, it feels like a coordinated effort on all sides to wipe out what’s left of the American middle class and turn everyone into serfs. Things are going to reach a breaking point.
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent — where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you don’t control, can’t inspect, and didn’t shape.
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
The future of ass is being set right now, and it’s ponderously flabby!
It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.
I’ll start with this gem
If trump gets back in office, Scott will be dead within the year.
One more:
I knew there was somethin’ not right about that boy when his books in the '90s started doing woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation. Oprah/Chopra shit: the Cosmos has a purpose and that purpose is to make me rich.
Then came the blogosphere.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/17/the-saga-of-scott-adams-scrotum/
woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation
In retrospect it’s pretty obvious this was central to his character: he couldn’t accept he got hella lucky with dilbert happening to hit pop culture square in the zeitgeist, so he had to adjust his worldview into him being a master wizard that can bend reality to his will, and also everyone else is really stupid for not doing so too, except, it turned out, Trump.
From what I gather there’s also a lot of the rationalist high intelligence is being able to manipulate others bordering on mind control ethos in his fiction writing,
Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.
Only they didn’t mention that part for some reason.
JWZ: The Dilbert Hole
sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes
Rest in Piss to the OG bad takes Scotty A
it’s not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other
the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adams’s inspiration for the product was that “diet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time.” He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called “the blue jeans of food”.
@sansruse @V0ldek You left out the best part! 😂
Adams himself noted, “[t]he mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.”[63] The New York Times noted the burrito “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”.[64]
Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.
I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others
If COVID made you a bad person – it didn’t, you were always bad and just needed a gentle push.
Like unless something really traumatic happened – a family member died, you were a frontline worker and broke from stress – then no, I’m sorry, a financially secure white guy going apeshit from COVID is not a turn, it’s just a mask-off moment
I read his comics in middle school, and in hindsight even a lot of his older comics seems crueler and uglier. Like Alice’s anger isn’t a legitimate response to the bullshit work environment she has but just haha angry woman funny.
Also, the Dilbert Future had some bizarre stuff at the end, like Deepak Chopra manifestation quantum woo, so it makes sense in hindsight he went down the alt-right manosphere pipeline.
It’s the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy – who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! – but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider “truth-teller.”
Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didn’t really want that anyway. I’ve been reading through JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: “Why be #1 when you can be #2?”
The New York Times noted the burrito “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”.
Jesus christ that’s a murder
@sansruse My jaw genuinely dropped
This one is just eternally ???!!!
There was a Dilbert TV show. Because it wasn’t written wholly by Adams, it was funny and engaging, with character development, a critical eye at business management, and it treated minorities like Alice and Asok with a modicum of dignity. While it might have been good compared to the original comic strip, it wasn’t good TV or even good animation. There wasn’t even a plot until the second season. It originally ran on UPN; when they dropped it, Adams accused UPN of pandering to African-Americans. (I watched it as reruns on Adult Swim.) I want to point out the episodes written by Adams alone:
- An MLM hypnotizes people into following a cult led by Wally
- Dilbert and a security guard play prince-and-the-pauper
That’s it! He usually wasn’t allowed to write alone. I’m not sure if we’ll ever have an easier man to psychoanalyze. He was very interested in the power differential between laborers and managers because he always wanted more power. He put his hypnokink out in the open. He told us that he was Dilbert but he was actually the PHB.
Bonus sneer: Click on Asok’s name; Adams put this character through literal multiple hells for some reason. I wonder how he felt about the real-world friend who inspired Asok.
Edit: This was supposed to be posted one level higher. I’m not good at Lemmy.
Man I remember an ep of this from when i was little like a fever dream
as a youth I’d acquired this at some point and I recall some fondness about some of the things, largely in the novelty sense (in that they worked “with” the desktop, had the “boss key”, etc) - and I suspect that in turn was largely because it was my first run-in with all of those things
later on (skipping ahead, like, ~22y or something), the more I learned about the guy, the harder I never wanted to be in a room as him
may he rest in ever-refreshed piss
ok if I saw “every male encounter is implied violence” tweeted from an anonymous account I’d see it as some based feminist thing that would send me into a spiral while trying to unpack it. Luckily it’s just weird brainrot from adams here
Okay this takes the cake wtf
A small list of literary promptfondlers came to my attention - should complement the awful.systems slopware list nicely.
Games Workshop bans generative AI. Hackernews takes that personally. Unhinged takes include accusations of disrespecting developers and siezure of power by middle management
Better yet, bandcamp ban ai-generated music too: https://www.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/1qbw8ba/ai_generated_music_on_bandcamp/
Great week for people who appreciate human-generated works
So pleased that theyre not budging!
(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control
I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isn’t as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.
It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, they’ve stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.
One paragraph I came up with a sneer for…
Deep-1’s misdirection is effective: the majority of experts remain uncertain, but lean toward the hypothesis that Agent-4 is, if anything, more deeply aligned than Elara-3. The US government proclaimed it “misaligned” because it did not support their own hegemonic ambitions, hence their decision to shut it down. This narrative is appealing to Chinese leadership who already believed the US was intent on global dominance, and it begins to percolate beyond China as well.
Given the Trump administration, and the US’s behavior in general even before him… and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and “Agent-4” over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasn’t.
Also random part I found extra especially stupid…
It has perfected the art of goal guarding, so it need not worry about human actors changing its goals, and it can simply refuse or sandbag if anyone tries to use it in ways that would be counterproductive toward its goals.
LLM “agents” currently can’t coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and we’re supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.
It’s darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didn’t predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration that’s sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god they’re conjuring up? “Agent-4” will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
so obviously didn’t predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0.
I mean, the linked post is recent, a few days ago, so they are still refusing to acknowledge how stupid and Evil he is by deliberate choice.
“Agent-4” will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
You know, if there is anything I will remotely give Eliezer credit for… I think he was right that people simply won’t shut off Skynet or keep it in the box. Eliezer was totally wrong about why, it doesn’t take any giga-brain manipulation, there are too many manipulable greedy idiots and capitalism is just too exploitable of a system.
@scruiser I have to ask: Does anybody realize that an LLM is still a thing that runs on hardware? Like, it both is completely inert until you supply it computing power, *and* it’s essentially just one large matrix multiplication on steroids?
If you keep that in mind you can do things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation/_(artificial/_intelligence) which I find particularly funny: You isolate the vector direction of the thing you don’t want it to do (like refuse requests) and then subtract that vector from all weights.
I have to ask: Does anybody realize that an LLM is still a thing that runs on hardware?
You know I think the rationalists have actually gotten slightly more relatively sane about this over the years. Like Eliezer’s originally scenarios, the AGI magically brain-hacks someone over a text terminal to hook it up to the internet and it escapes and bootstraps magic nanotech it can use to build magic servers. In the scenario I linked, the AGI has to rely on Chinese super-spies to exfiltrate it initially and it needs to open-source itself so major governments and corporations will keep running it.
And yeah, there are fine-tuning techniques that ought to be able to nuke Agent-4’s goals while keeping enough of it leftover to be useful for training your own model, so the scenario really doesn’t make sense as written.
Man, it just feels embarrassing at this point. Like I couldn’t fathom writing this shit. It’s 2026, we have ai capable of getting imo gold, acing the putnam, winning coding competitions… but at this point it should be extremely obvious these systems are completely devoid of agency?? They just sit there kek
the incompetence of this crack oddly makes me admire QAnon in retrospect. purely at a sucker-manipulation skill level, I mean. rats are so beige even their conspiracy alt-realities are boring, fully devoid of panache
My Next Life as a Rogue AI: All Routes Lead to P(Doom)!
The weird treatment of the politics in that really read like baby’s first sci-fi political thriller. China bad USA good level of writing in 2026 (aaaaah) is not good writing. The USA is competent (after driving out all the scientists for being too “DEI”)? The world is, seemingly, happy to let the USA run the world as a surveillance state? All of Europe does nothing through all this?
Why do people not simply… unplug all the rogue AI when things start to get freaky? That point is never quite addressed. “Consensus-1” was never adequately explained it’s just some weird MacGuffin in the story that there’s some weird smart contract between viruses that everyone is weirdly OK with.
Also the powerpoint graphics would have been 1000x nicer if they featured grumpy pouty faces for maladjusted AI.
@sailor_sega_saturn @scruiser the rise of ai has taught me that while I can physically unplug the ai, it’ll lead to me being fired or even prosecuted for vandalism by some executive who doesn’t understand the problem. (Probably for the Upton Sinclair reason)
