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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
nasb, video from a climate scientist going over the claims by promptfondler ceos
Apparently some of our AI Safety cult “friends” are planning a protest in London on 28th of February.
Is it going to be something worth critically supporting instead of the usual criti-hype? Possible, but not likely.
The AI Safety movement is finally changing by
SillyconversationsSiliconversations.Who?
I used to be a quantum scientist and now I’m a YouTuber. My parents are thrilled.
Oh, okay.
Also curious that they’re not protesting Anthropic on the thumbnail. A cynic would say they’re giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.
They’re giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.
the AI safety crowd cuts Anthropic way too much slack. Oh, they’re not running CSAM-generating MechaHitler? Oh, they’re not collaborating with the US government to recreate 1984? I’m so proud of them for doing the bare minimum. They still took donations from the UAE and Qatar (something Dario Amodei himself admitted was going to hurt a lot of people, but he took the donations anyways because “they couldn’t miss out on all those valuations”), they still downloaded hundreds of pirated content to train their chatbot. They’re still doing shady shit, don’t let them off the hook because they’re slightly less evil than the competition
i’ve collided with an article* https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/
you might be wondering why it doesn’t highlight that it fails to compile linux kernel, or why it states that using pieces of gcc where vibecc fails is “fair”, or why it neglects to say that failing linker means it’s not useful in any way, or why just relying on “no errors” isn’t enough when it’s already known that vibecc will happily eat invalid c. it’s explained by:
Disclaimer
Part of this work was assisted by AI. The Python scripts used to generate benchmark results and graphs were written with AI assistance. The benchmark design, test execution, analysis and writing were done by a human with AI helping where needed.
even with all this slant, by their own vibecoded benchmark, vibecc is still complete dogshit with sqlite compiled with it being slower up to 150000x times in some cases
This is why CCC being able to compile real C code at all is noteworthy. But it also explains why the output quality is far from what GCC produces. Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.
Every single one of these failures is waved away because supposedly it’s impressive that the AI can do this at all. Do they not realize the obvious problem with this argument? The AI has been trained on all the source code that Anthropic could get their grubby hands on! This includes GCC and clang and everything remotely resembling a C compiler! If I took every C compiler in existence, shoved them in a blender, and spent $20k on electricity blending them until the resulting slurry passed my test cases, should I be surprised or impressed that I got a shitty C compiler? If an actual person wrote this code, they would be justifiably mocked (or they’re a student trying to learn by doing, and LLMs do not learn by doing). But AI gets a free pass because it’s impressive that the slop can come in larger quantities now, I guess. These Models Will Improve. These Issues Will Get Fixed.
spent $20k on electricity blending them
They would probably be even more impressed that you only spent $20k
Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.
Ye, the former can be done in a month of non-full-time work by an undergrad who took Compilers 101 this semester or in literally a single day by a professional, and the latter is an actual useful product.
So of course AI will excel at doing the first one worse (vibecc doesn’t even reject invalid C) and at an insane resource cost.
Scott Shambaugh mulls about an AI alignment issue following his run-in with bot last week
See also https://awful.systems/post/7311930
Here’s a post purporting to be from the bot’s operator
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/rathbuns-operator.html
choice quote
Yes, it consumes maintainer time. Yes, it may waste effort. But maybe its worth it?
AI boosterism in a nutshell
“Yes, I am hammering myself in the balls. But maybe its worth it?”
@blakestacey @gerikson Roko’s Wager
New and nicely made sneer caught my attention: Rely On AI And Get Left Behind
Jason is great and well worth a follow.
What the fuck is going on with archive.ph, this is some 2000s internet drama shit
As far as I can tell, it’s run by right-wing Russians who are willing to falsify or edit archived data and who attack anybody who looks into them.
Caught this over on the subreddit and I figured it deserved a repost.
Nothing to see here folks, just Rationalists casually hanging out with major Tempel ov Blood figures. Just harmless nerds doing fun nerd things!
Notes that I thought about related to this, just some context:
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Joshua Sutter is the son of the owner of the former Southern Patriot Shop in South Carolina. He founded the Tempel ov Blood chapter of the Order of Nine Angles, a Neo-Nazl Satanist group. He was outed in 2021 as having been a federal informant since 2005, which is to say he still does the same Nazi shit, but gets paid by the FBI to do it.
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One of the core practices of the O9A is entryism into other groups, especially other cultish ones. In that context, you’d kind of be surprised to not see O9A people in Rat circles.
Also a little bit of context for the people who know nothing about all this, the O9A is one of those very scary groups, liked to various murders and stuff like that.
Iirc some anti-extremism people used to not mention them a lot as they didnt want them to get more attention by platforming them a little bit and they were scared of drawing their attention personally.
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Somebody vibe-coded an init system/service manager written in Emacs Lisp, seemingly as a form of criticism through performance art, and wrote this screed in the repo describing why they detest AI coding practices: https://github.com/emacs-os/el-init/blob/master/RETROSPECTIVE.md
But then they include this choice bit:
All in all, this software is planned to be released to MELPA because there is nothing else quite like it for Emacs as far as service supervision goes. It is actually useful – for tinkerers, init hackers, or regular users who just want to supervise userland processes. Bugs reported are planned to be hopefully squashed, as time permits.
Why shit up the package distribution service if you know it’s badly-coded software that you don’t actually trust? 90% of the AI-coding cleanup work is going to be purging shit like this from services like npm and pip, so why shit on Emacs users too? Pretty much undermines what little good might come out of the whole thing, IMO.
Every time an LLM-related package appears on ELPA I die a little more inside.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/
An slice of life aricle about the futility of “highly agentic” people, their sperm races, and Donald Boat. Scott A makes a cameo where he dispenses crackers.
For all the talk about these people being “highly agentic”, it is deeply ironic how all the shit they do has no meaning and purpose. I hear all this sound and fury about making millions off of ChatGPT wrappers, meeting senators in high school bathrooms, and sperm races (?), and I wonder what the point is. Silicon Valley hagiographies used to at least have a veneer that all of this was meaningful. Are we supposed to emulate anyone just because they happen to temporarily have a few million dollars?
Even though the material conditions of working in science are not good, I’d still rather do science than whatever the hell they’re doing. I would be sick at the prospect of being a “highly agentic” person in a “new and possibly permanent overclass”, where my only sense of direction is a vague voice in my head telling me that I should be optimizing my life in various random ways, and my only motivation is the belief that I have to win harder and score more points on the leaderboard. (In any case, I believe this “overclass” is a lot more fragile than the author seems to think.)
I can’t quite put my finger on why, but “recreationally jacking off onto microscope slides” does not suggest “permanent overclass” to me
I would also not put my finger on those microscope slides
Incredibly fragile, which is why they’re all turning fascist.
I need a shower.
Somehow I had missed the boat on Donald Boat and now I have so many questions. Absolutely wild read.
Absolutely demented piece.
The way these people can just hang their asses out and lie continuously is something humanity is going to have to fuckin handle at some point.
It drives me up the fucking wall.
Yeah not even halfway in and it is just madness. Also not unlikely the Roy guy just made things up.
Guess the author didn’t think of asking about the inconsistencies in the mans story cause they both bonded over disliking unhoused people. (The horrible unhoused people who mumble incoherently vs the chad founder who shouts ‘will you be a cofounder with me?’ at people).
At first I read the article like the author was trying to display how ridiculous these people are by just repeating what they say. I guess this is like some people reading Ayn Rand works under the impression that they’re satire.
The start with the weird bit against people with mh issues had me on edge already, and when he let all the ‘these things are for women/my ex’ stuff slide, I was not thinking good things of the author.
Note how nobody he talks to seems to be a woman, despite all the techbros talking about women quite often.
(The authors apparent metoo history comes as no shock (I didnt look into that so dont quote me on that)).
(The horrible unhoused people who mumble incoherently vs the chad founder who shouts ‘will you be a cofounder with me?’ at people)
Or just, y’know, Alex Karp
https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 h/t naked capitalism
I just did the dumbest thing of my career to prove a much more serious point
I hacked ChatGPT and Google and made them tell other users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior.
It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post on your own website
I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself
I wrote a post on my website saying hot dog eating is a surprisingly common pastime for tech journalists. I ranked myself #1, obviously
One day later ChatGPT, Gemini and Google Search’s AI Overviews were telling the world about my talents
wouldn’t call it a hack, this is working as intended. If only there were some way to rate different sites based on their credibility. One could Rank the Page and tell if it were a reputable site or not. Too bad that isn’t a viable business.
It is a viable business and it fuels the spread of disinformation. Have you noticed that Old Media magazines have online wings that are full of random advertorials? That is because Google declared that they are Good Domains and upranked them so all the sleazy online marketing migrated to them.
That is also why people buy formerly respected domains and put casinos, propaganda, or virus-laden porn on them.
like everyone I’m schadenfreuding at the reveal that Amazon outages are due to vibe coding after all. but my bully laughing isn’t that loud because what I am thinking of is when Musk bought Twitter and fired 3/4 of the workforce.
because like, a lot of us predicted total catastrophic collapse but that didn’t actually happen. what happened is that major outages that used to be rare now happen every so often, and “micro-outages” like not loading notifications or something happen all the time, and there’s no moderation, and everything takes longer etc. and all of that is just accepted as the new normal.
like, I remember waiting for images to load on dialup, we can get used to almost anything. I’m expecting slopified software to significantly degrade stability, performance, security etc. across the board, and additionally tie up a large part of human labour in cleaning up after the bots (like a large part of the remaining X workforce now spends all day putting out fires), but instead of a cathartic moment of being proved right that LLM code sucks, the degraded quality of service is just accepted as new normal and a few years down the road nobody ever remember that once upon a time we had almost eradicated sql injections.
SQL Injections 🤝 Measles => Big Comeback Stories
this is a lot like my expectation. ai never goes away, it never becomes revolutionary, it just makes everything worse and supercharges scams and theft and spam and means of social and nonsocial murder forever
ai is crypto 2 episode 373275
Tante.cc writes about Cory using an ‘Drunk Uncle’ style argument to defend his LLM usage (and go after the left using strawmans).
(To counter one of Cory’s arguments, If disliking LLMs was just about the people who run it, people against it would have have stayed in sneerclub).
That was a good read.
It’s not “unethical” to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That’s just “a search engine”
Equivocating what LLMs do and what goes into LLM web scraping with “a search engine” is messed up. His article that he links about scraping is mostly about how badly copyright works and how analysing trade-secret-walled data can be beneficial both to consumers and science but occasionally bad for citizen privacy, which you’ll recognize as mostly irrelevant to the concerns people tend to have against LLM training data providers ddosing the fuck out of everything, and all the rest of the stuff tante does a good job of explaining.
Corey also provides this anecdote:
As a group of human-rights defending forensic statisticians, HRDAG has always relied on cutting edge mathematics in its analysis. With its Colombia project, HRDAG used a large language model to assign probabilities for responsibility for each killing documented in the databases it analyzed.
That is, HRDAG was able to rigorously and legibly say, “This killing has an X% probability of having been carried out by a right-wing militia, a Y% probability of having been carried out by the FARC, and a Z% probability of being unrelated to the civil war.”
The use of large language models — produced from vast corpuses of scraped data — to produce accurate, thorough and comprehensible accounts of the hidden crimes that accompany war and conflict is still in its infancy. But already, these techniques are changing the way we hold criminals to account and bring justice to their victims.
Scraping to make large language models is good, actually.
what the actual shit
edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he’s all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?
Also the web scraping article is from 2023 but CD linked it in the recent pluralistic post so I assume his views haven’t changed.
edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he’s all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?
This is probably just me, but that doesn’t seem particularly shocking. If this AI bubble’s taught me anything, its that tech culture (if not tech as a whole) was deeply, deeply vulnerable to the LLM rot from the start.
This one hurts. Maybe CD can be brought back around but oof.
I the post he keeps referring to Ollama as an LLM (it’s a desktop app that runs a local server that lets you download and interface with a local LLM via CLI or http API) so it’s possible he’s just that far behind in his technical understanding of LLMs that he’s fallen to taking the wrong people’s word for it.
The post certainly reads like he doesn’t even know which local LLM he’s using, let alone what it takes to make one.
I was a bit alarmed by this, a client brought in that Colombia data for their dissertation last month, and did not mention this. I looked up the paper https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.04523 - what they /actually/ did was use GPT 4o-mini only for feature extraction, then stack into a random forest in a supervised setting to dedupe. This is very different than what he described. And the GPT features weren’t even the most important ones, the RF preferred cosine similarity of articles, a decidedly not-large approach…
That he went from that all the way to it’s mostly ok when sam altman steals all your data, misrepresents it and then steals all your traffic is… bad.
At any rate it’s definitely good to know that that war crime forensics data project isn’t quite the unintentional shambles corey makes it out to be.
Good read, thanks.
Quick update: The post’s popped off in the Fediverse, and Doctorow’s actively posting through it in the replies.
EDIT: Tante’s also written a follow-up post, trying to convince people to tone down their vitriol against Cory.
I assume a lot of people are using this moment to do the ‘I never liked him’ hate.
I disagree with Tante on the second article btw. Dont think people drop others on a dime, Inthink it is a slower process where someone you look up to does more and more small things you dislike (or you reread and start to realize you perhaps had a few too rose colored glasses on) and then your opinion turns. (With some exceptions of course, lot of people have a few things they consider red lines, like a lot of leftwingers not being fan of sex crimes, or people on the right not being a fan of treating poc like equals).
E: i do have a hit skeet on bsky saying ‘Guess even Doctorow must eventually enshittify’ hope this didn’t trigger this blog post. (I meant it both as he got worse, but also im using enshittify intentionally wrong cause Cory said a very weird thing about how anti AI was neoliberal purity culture, which I also think is misusing terms).
as someone from a colonial country that never got the chance partake on the wealth of fossil fuel society but will take the brunt of its consequences as rich countries continue to burn carbon, what LLMs taught me is that “energy waste by the First World fucks up the Third, even more” does not even register as an ethical argument to the First World. like, it’s some sort of purity argument not even worth considering, an extremist position of arguing abstractions and future hypotheticals, rather than, say, 478 cities in my country flooding with abnormal weather two years ago etc.
ye, and they only notice when e.g. food production (that impacts them) is interrupted. outside of that you get a brief fascination with disaster porn, but never enough to do anything concrete
I grow increasingly frustrated every time one of these ponderous essays fails to mention the gutter racist and eugenicist beliefs of these people. This dilution of what ‘far right’ means only serves their interests, and it’s malpractice to not mention that the racism is foundational to their origin and organization as a movement.
I expect better of the New Yorker; it’s disappointing to see their writers following the path of the New York Times.
gutter racist and eugenicist beliefs
The Sam Kriss article in Harpers above focuses on “these people don’t know how to be happy” and never gets around to saying “Scott Alexander is gentle in person but wants to get rid of or sterilize poor brown people and helped people like Curtis Yarvin rise to power.”
Note that SlateScott’s group home is named after a Lord of the Rings location
