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 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.
(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Bay Area rationalist Sam Kirchner, cofounder of the Berkeley “Stop AI” group, claims “nonviolence isn’t working anymore” and goes off the grid. Hasn’t been heard from in weeks.
Article has some quotes from Emile Torres.
Is it better for these people to be collected in one place under the singularity cult, or dispersed into all the other religions, cults, and conspiracy theories that they would ordinarily be pulled into?
just one rationalist got lost in the wilderness? that’s nothing, tell me when all of them are gone
The concern is that they’re not “lost in the wilderness” but rather are going to turn up in the vicinity of some newly dead people.
hi please hate this article headline with me
please hate this article headline with me
I’m right there with you
They somehow misused every word in that sentence.
Chicken penne is now rivaling spaghetti Bolognese as a core layer of pasta infrastructure.
If TCP/IP stack had feelings, it would have a great reason to feel insulted.
hi hi I am budweiser jabrony please join my new famous and good website ‘tapering incorrectness dot com’ where we speculate about which OSI layers have the most consciousness (zero is not a valid amount of consciousness) also give money and prima nocta. thanks
Tcp/ip knew what it did, with its authoritarian desire to see packets in order. Reject authority embrace UDP!
But yes, they are using ‘layer’ wrong
Well that and “core”. I could consider social media and even chatbots parts of internet infrastructure, but they both depend on a framework of underlying protocols and their implementation details. Without social media or chatbots the internet would still be the internet, which is not the case for, say, the Internet Protocol.
Yeah, it is just a part of the application layer, and not even the whole one.
Ah but, you see, the end goal of the internet is serving slop and ads
the article headline: “Chatbots are now rivaling social networks as a core layer of internet infrastructure”
Counterpoint: “vibe coding” is rotting internet infrastructure from the inside, AI scrapers are destroying the commons through large-scale theft, chatbots are drowning everything else through nonstop lying
The real infrastructure is the friends we made along the way
Nicky Case posted the ending to her AI Safety for Fleshy Humans series and gosh I miss when I thought she was cool 🫠
linking to Rob Miles and an EA longtermist fund at the end of the outro really gives the game away lol
(interestingly this also involves Hack Club, which is the org that Ghostty is now part of from @gerikson@awful.systems’s post earlier today? I wonder what’s up with them)
I was annoyed at the start lumping in ai ethics with all the ai doom stuff, and then basically stopped reading.
Do think it is interesting that Miles is part of a collaborative yt tech channel and they recently released an ai slop episode. (Which I have not watched yet either, things need to slow down for a bit please).
It’s even way too long a read and full of footnotes, as is tradition!
Heck it’s even long enough that I just came across the second flashcard break, and I’m 1/4th of the way through part 1…
I am not familiar with Case or her work, but based on my shallow research, she’s part of the cohort of internet stuff-communicators including people like Vi Hart or the Oatmeal etc. Not casting aspersions on anyone here, but I’d be interested to know who amongst them have revealed their chud nature and who has remained pristine (…for now).
I’m a bit more familiar with Case - I mainly knew her for making web games like :the game: trilogy, Nothing to Hide and We Become What We Behold.
Fucking sucks to see she’s bought into this shit.
Last I checked Vi Hart still seems like a good egg (idk if the closeted teenaged self hiding in the recesses of my brain could take it otherwise 😭)
Dexerto has reported on an unnamed Japanese game studio weeding out promptfondlers (by having applicants draw something in-person during interviews).
Unsurprisingly, the replies have become a promptfondler shooting gallery. Personal “favourite” goes to the guy who casually admits he can’t tell art from slop:
Pam Samuelson (UC Berkeley) has a nice explainer on AI copyright - https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/does-using-in-copyright-works-as-training-data-infringe/
More grok shit: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/grok-doxxing it in contrast to most other models, is very good at doxing people.
Amazing how everything Musk makes is the worst in class (and somehow the Rationalists think he will be their saviour (that is because he is a eugenicist)).
(thinks) groxxing
the base use for LLMs is gonna be hypertargetted advertising, malware, political propaganda etc
well the base case for LLMs is that, right now
the privacy nerds won’t know what hit them
@gerikson @Soyweiser i think they know, and that it’s already reflected on their alcohol and other drug bills.
can confirm
A lobster wonders why the news that a centi-millionaire amateur jet pilot has decided to offload the cost of developing his pet terminal software onto peons begging for contributions has almost 100 upvotes, and is absolutely savaged for being rude to their betters
https://lobste.rs/s/dxqyh4/ghostty_is_now_non_profit#c_b0yttk
bring back rich people rolling their own submarines and getting crushed to death in the bathyal zone
all things aside, is current ghostty any good, or still an
audiophileconsolephile-ware?i’m generally reluctant to try something which reeks of intensive self-promotion, but few months ago i decided to finally see what’s the hype about, and, well, it’s a terminal emulator.
wezterm does much more, and with a much cleaner ui, and it’s programmable, and the author doesn’t remind me that hashicorp is a thing that exists.
second person today I saw mentioning wezterm, guess I should look sometime for familiarity
ghosTTy is the username of a schizoposter on Something Awful who only shows up to post bitcoin price charts and get mocked into oblivion. I wonder if there’s any connection?
enter hashimoto. cringe intensifies
(note: out-of-order to linked post for comment cohesion)
Terminals are an invisible technology to most
what a fucking sentence
…that are hyper present in the everyday life of many in the tech industry.
hyper? like this?
But the terminal itself is boring, the real impact of Ghostty is going to be in libghostty and making all of this completely available for many use cases. My hope is that through building a broadly adopted shared underlayer of terminals around the industry we can do some really interesting things.
oh good so the rentier bridgetroll wants to do just a monopoly play? that’s fine I’m sure. note: I don’t think there’s a more charitable reading of this. those shared underlayers already exist, in the form of decades of protocol and other development. many of them suck and I agree about trying to do better, but I (rather strongly) suspect hashi and I have very different ideas of what that looks like
I’ve already addressed the belittling of the project I really find useful and care about. So let’s just move on to the financial class.
Regardless of my financial ability to support this project, any project that financially survives (for or non-profit) at the whims of a single donor is an unhealthy project
“uwu, think of the poor projects. yes sure I could throw $20m at this in some kind of funny trust and have it live forever but that wouldn’t allow me to evade the point so much!”
I paid a 9-figure tax bill and also donated over 5% of my other stuff to charity this year
“I’m not as bad as the other billionaires I promise”
I’m too fucking old to care about hipster terminals, so I had no idea ghostty was started by a (former) billionaire. If forced to choose a new terminal I will certainly take this fact into consideration.
I took psychic damage by scrolling up and seeing promptsimon posting a real doozie:
I have been enjoying hitting refresh on https://fuckthisurl/froztbyte-scrubbed-it-intentionally throughout today and watching the number grow - it’s nice to see a clear example of people donating to a new non-profit open source project.
“oooh! look at the vanity project go! weeeee, isn’t having a famous face attached to it fun?” with exactly no reflection on the fucking daunting state of open source funding in multiple other domains and projects
A second post on software project management in a week, this one from deadsimpletech: failed software projects are strategic failures.
A window into another it disaster I wasn’t aware of, but clearly there is no shortage of those. An australian one this time.
And of course, without having at least some of that expertise in-house, they found themselves completely unable to identify that Accenture was either incompetent, actively gouging them or both.
(spoiler alert, it was both)
Interesting mention of clausewitz in the context of management, which gives me pause a bit because techbros famously love the “art of war”, probably because sun tzu was patiently explaining obvious things to idiots and that works well on them. “On war” might be a better text, I guess.
I associate Clausewitz (and especially John Boyd) references more with a Palantir / Stratfor / Booz / LE-MIC-consulting class compared to your typical bay area YC techbro in the US, and a very different crowd over in AU / NZ where grognards probably outnumber the actual military. LWers never bring up Clausewitz either but love Sun Tzu. But as far as software strategy posts go, I’d much rather read a Clausewitz tie-in than, say, Mythical Man Month or Agile anything.
Much of the content of mythical man month is still depressingly relevant, especially in conjunction with brooks’ later stuff like no silver bullets. A lot of senior tech management either never read it, or read it so long ago that they forgot the relevant points beyond the title.
It’s interesting that clausewitz doesn’t appear in lw discussions. That seems like a big point in favour of his writing.
If you liked Brooks, you might give Gerald Weinberg a try. A bit more folksy / less corporate.
u wot m8???!!
Show HN: I analyzed 8k near-death experiences with AI and made them listenable
psychic damage warning, obviously
Hat tip to the person who wants to try and include DMT and other hallucinogens and psychedelics. How many of these experiences are gonna be tagged “Machine Elves” by the time anyone starts asking wtf we’re doing here?
/r/SneerClub discusses MIRI financials and how Yud ended up getting paid $600K per year from their cache.
Malo Bourgon, MIRI CEO, makes a cameo in the comments to discuss Ziz’s claims about SA payoffs and how he thinks Yud’s salary (the equivalent of like 150.000 malaria vaccines) is defensible for reasons that definitely exist, but they live in Canada, you can’t see them.
Guy does a terrible job explaining literally anything. Why, when trying to explain all the SA based drama, does he choose to create an analogy where the former employee is heavily implied to have murdered his wife?
S/o to cinnaverses for mixing it up in there.
Cinnas
The Rolling Stone article is a bit odd (it appears to tell the story of the ex-employee who created Miricult twice, the first time without names and the second naming the accuser) but I trust them that MIRI did pay the accuser. Rolling Stone are a serious news organization which can be sued.
“Nah, salary stuff is private”, starting to think this sort of stuff is an idea introduced to protect capital and nobody else.
I was teasing this out in my head to try come up with a good sneer. First thought: for an organisation that tries to appeal to EAs, you’d think that they would do a good job of being transparent about why so much money is being spent on someone with such low output. But immediate rebuttal: the whole point of the TESCREAL cult shit is that yud get free tuocs because he’s the chosen one to solve alignment.
Was thinking more about how the radical, dont fall to biasses think for yourself and cone here to really learn to think (so we can stop the paperclipmachine and resurrect the dead) defend a half million dollars salary with a ‘thats private’.
But that is the same conclusion. The prophet must be protected.
saw this elsewhere. the account itself appears to be a luckey stan account, but the next
There’s more crust than air or sea or land… so a vehicle that moves through the crust of the earth is going to be a huge deal
I have built working prototypes of this
so are we talking mining, or The Core (2003)? it feels like he’s trying to pitch it as though it’s Tiberian Sun style subterrean APC, but I can’t be sure whether I’m reading into it
hey crazy idea, what if we made a vehicle that moves across the habitable surface of the crust instead
it would need to be organized somehow, make it big and electric to be efficient. people go to the same places every day so you can just put a durable track of some kind in right place,
Don’t forget he made a prototype of a gaming helmet with shotgun shells aimed to kill the wearer.
I’m thinking nydus worms from SC2 or the GLA tunnel system in C&C generals.
right? like, is felon finally getting competition for unhinged billionaire gamerposting?
announcing “leeroy jenkins” mode for grok where it just posts your tweet drafts and you can’t delete them
there’s some more cursor fun too. no sneers yet, I’ve barely started reading
saw it via jonny who did do some notes
oh I just saw this is almost a month old! still funny tho
(and I’ve been busy af afkspace)
Major RAM/SSD manufacturer Micron just shut down its Crucial brand to sell shovels in the AI gold rush, worsening an already-serious RAM shortage for consumer parts.
Just another way people are paying more for less, thanks to AI.
This seems like a bit of a desperation pivot while the bubble money is still flowing. I’ve heard they struggled a bit with shipping PCIE CXL memory that’s capable of memory sharing between rackmount nodes, so they’re probably taking everything from the consumer channel and cramming it into the enterprise channel in a bid to be the low-cost/high-volume provider. I would expect them to eventually come limping back into the consumer market to much marketing fanfare, alongside trying to set a higher price floor there, similar to Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican pizza.
Bleugh, I’ve been using crucial ram and flash for a hell of a long time, and they’ve always been high quality and reasonably priced. I dislike having to find new manufacturers who don’t suck, especially as the answer seems to be increasingly “lol, there are no such companies”.
Thanks to the ongoing situation in the us, it doesn’t look like the ai bubble is going to pop soon, but I can definitely see it causing more damage like this before the event.
Nice rant in the entry on OSNews about this… love the phrase “MLMs for unimpressive white males”.
I can see it making sense, what with CPUs moving to integrated RAM, and probably CPU-integrated flash, to maximize speed. The business of RAM and flash drive upgrades will become a very large but shrinking retrocomputing niche probably served by small Chinese fabs.
what with CPUs moving to integrated RAM
Can I blame Apple for this
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/michigan/miedce/4:2025cv11168/384571/176/
Consistent with Magistrate Judge Patti’s warning that each AI citation might incur a cost of $200 per citation, the court adopts that amount and imposes a fine of $300 per Plaintiff (a total of $600) for three misrepresented, AI-generated citations.
lol
Dang that judge was angry.
Here’s docket #170: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.384571/gov.uscourts.mied.384571.170.0.pdf – the complaining about not being allowed to use AI is on page 14 and 16 (it’s pretty awful reading I almost gave up before reaching that point)
a pro se litigant should not be threatened with per-citation fines before any violation.
lmao
…I will freely admit to not knowing the norms of courtroom conduct, but isn’t having preestablished penalties for specific infractions central to the whole concept of law itself.
