- 2 Posts
- 153 Comments
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•AI: EU Member States approve “digital expropriation” for AI companiesEnglish
14·2 days agoAbsolutely ridiculous. There is no agreed definition for what AI means so anyone could do profiling and data mining on your data - all the stuff GDPR was supposed to protect against - and just say “well I used AI”
So now we still have the bureaucracy and overhead of GDPR and the hostile front ends that ask you in terse language if you are happy for your data to be processed for legitimate interests with none of the actual benefits
FML
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026English
7·2 days ago“Look the thing is, I am still planning to walk away from Omelas but it turns out they believe DRM is ethically and morally wrong here - I need to spend some time here to focus on my next book ‘Making Children Miserable Might Be Ok in some Circumstances’”
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026English
8·2 days agoWhy the f*** would anyone give a non deterministic madlib generator their bank account details. Even with some (hypothetical)impressive benchmark like “99% accurate at decision making in financial scenarios” that spells disaster for millions at the scale of all of Facebook’s users using muse for example.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•One Torment Nexus, hold the liabilityEnglish
1·3 days agoDisney character ai experience coming to a theme park near you. Wait in line with 1000 other lonely men and husbands abandoned by their families who went to see space mountain. Admits one at a time - the “ride” lasts 30 seconds but in between each run there’s a 15 minute cleanup time.
Coming soon the Lonnie Boo experience - completely fictional AI character. Any likeness to real people is a coincidence.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•CoreWeave founders cash out — the rest is mop-upEnglish
6·5 days agoSuper weird that Dan Luu still hasn’t apologised to Ed yet.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
7·8 days agoCan we just revoke these peoples’ internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with “Bob, 57, drinks his own piss daily” as a peer.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
4·10 days agoNah I think it was earlier than that… Markov chain models!
In fact you could probably do better by building script that pseudo-randomly picks words from categories containing “intelligent sounding” words and “lewd” words and “edgelord” words
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
9·12 days agoCouldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame they’re probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
7·12 days agoSorry I thought this updated comment was a better one 😅
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I can’t decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, they’ve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
19·12 days agoMalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin
Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn
Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.
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9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.
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Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.
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Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.
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Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.
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Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.
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Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.
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Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.
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I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.
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samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
12·12 days agoThis is proper cult membership credibility testing stuff. “If you really believe, you’ll drink the koolaid”
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
12·13 days agoIt’s just such a clichéd remark from AI bros now that I cringe whenever I hear it along with “sure the current model can’t do X but the next one will be able to bro… Just one more model bro”
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026English
10·14 days agoSaw a matte green Tesla with a late 2024 registration plate and a bumper sticker saying “I bought this before we knew Elon was nuts”
My man, in 2024 musk had already destroyed twitter, was already promoting the far right AfD party in germany, Tommy Robinson in the uk, bribing voters for Trump in swing states, talking about what DOGE would do when Trump won the election… Like why bother with the pretense?
TBF I was visiting the south coast of the UK a few miles away from the recent Balaklava protests over migrants in dinghies so perhaps none of the above qualify as “nuts” from this particular genius’ perspective.
What a tool.
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026English
8·14 days agoSpotted this the day it came out. It’s largely reporting Dwarkesh Patel’s blog post about the different “civilisations” of agents as if it were fact.
Very disappointed in Kurzgesagt who previously seemed pretty “with it”. But then, as someone with a formal background in compsci, stats, NLP and machine learning, perhaps this is Gell-Mann Amnesia/Knoll’s Law of Media literacy at work…
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026English
12·20 days agoYou don’t need to feel empathy for the LLM to think this is a terrible idea. The desire to torture anything, simulated or not, is such an incredible red flag that I don’t even know what to say…
Also what a waste of time and energy that would be better spent doing pretty much anything else
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th October 2026English
5·22 days ago“well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” - this guy, probably
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th October 2026English
5·23 days agoAt least LeCun is still relatively compos mentis (if you ignore his little 10yr stint at one of the most evil companies going…)
samvines@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Someone ‘Torturing’ LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI YetEnglish
12·24 days agowhile True: n= random.randint(0,2) if n==0: print("oww stop it") if n == 1: print("You're hurting me") if n == 2: print("I don't like it")Omg someone should stop them torturing that computer program.


Absolutely. They don’t care about anyone except themselves and getting rich. Maybe some of them enter politics with honourable intentions but by the time they get into power they are corrupted to hell
On the one hand
Oh the other hand