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.)
Haven’t seen this guy in a while but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails
The banks are having an AI problem
” These are generally situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human’s account with the user’s permission and login credentials. Even if permitted by the user, this goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.”
”In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents — programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user’s behalf — contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said.”
The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work
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.
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 assumes people actually want to deal with slop code. An assumption that can be proven wrong by simply looking at the slopnami’s effect on the open source ecosystem. Speaking of which:
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.
Honestly, I’d be willing to bet good money on the ecosystem’s collapse at this point - the slopnami has tanked software quality across the board, the plague of scraping has made sharing source code deeply unattractive, the flood of LLM bug reports has crippled FOSS’s ability to find and fix bugs/vulnerabilities (which combos nicely with LLMs increasing bugcounts), and, as Baldur’s noted, the labour surplus FOSS relied upon has gone down the shitter.
On top of that, senior devs are burning out and deciding to GTFO en masse, and junior devs are getting deskilled, burnt out and/or laid off, crippling FOSS’s ability to replace any maintainers they lose.
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.
Article next to it is an anonymous review of Jünger’s In Stahlgewitter, which is certainly A Choice.
(Jünger wasn’t a card carrying Nazi, but served in the Wehrmacht in WW2 and is kind of a right-wing ideal of an aesthete)
Native English speakers might recognise it as Storm of Steel; for the unfamiliar it’s Jünger’s memoir of WWI and arguably a celebration of war.
Jünger’s an interesting character. He had different politics to the Nazis but it would be fair to call him a fascist in the period from 1918-45. After the war he revised some of his works to step away from some of his previous views, and had a big falling out with his private secretary Armin Mohler (an unrepentant fascist) over it. By the 1980s he was publicly denouncing the “ideology of war” contained in Storm of Steel.
If anyone is interested, I highly recommend the series on Mohler’s book The Conservative Revolution in Germany by the anti-fascist podcast The Empire Never Ended. First ep on YouTube. Jünger is discussed in the episode on the National Revolutionaries.
how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president
Did he forget Claude is owned by people? But yeah sure let corporations be president.
He specifies Claude 10, so it’s after the ??? in the checklist, and spicy autocomplete will be widely accepted to qualify for sentience by then I guess.
Sentient but still owned by Anthropic.
This is just slavery with extra steps!
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)
Once again, slop machines only work ‘well’ when you can externalise the pain and costs onto someone else (in this case, millions of stressed-out sysadmins and webmasters)
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.
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
H4ppy H4lloween to all who celebrate!
Was Changpeng Zhao trying to send us a message all along
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?
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’.
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.
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…
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)
