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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
Emails Show Even Epstein Thought Crypto Pumps are Unethical | Gizmodo
Crossover month for the epstein extended universe continues…
Someone has a program to steal people’s entire codebases using malicious ai coding assistant extensions.
(note, it is an ai firm posting this, compete with cutesy slop hero image)
The vscode extensions actually do exactly what they advertise, it’s just that they also take all your code and share it with a third party for whatever purpose.
In other news, Larry Garfield of GarfieldTech has had enough of the bullshit fountains, and put out a fury-filled sneer in response.
Don’t want to use AI because it’s built on copyright infringement and literally destroying the planet? Well, I guess you can’t work in software anymore, sorry. It is what it is.
Every time someone like Jeffrey Way says “it is what it is,” it makes it so. It is not inevitable just because Sam Altman tells his over-leveraged investors it is so. It becomes inevitable when you, you personally, decide that you just don’t want to think about the externalities or put in the work to find better alternatives.
We are making this choice. But really, that means you have already decided for me. And I curse you and the ground you walk on for it. No, I’m not joking or exaggerating. Burn in hell.
10/10 No notes.
The common clay of the new west:
transcription
Twitter post from @BenjaminDEKR
“OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren’t careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking “is it daytime yet?” every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude “no, it’s still night.” Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The “Heartbeat” cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, (“remind me tomorrow to get milk”)”
Continuation of twitter post
“1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied “HEARTBEAT_OK” 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:
- Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
- 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
- Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking “is it daytime yet?” every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude “no, it’s still night.” The problem is:
- Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
- Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
- Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking That’s $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.”
There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.
https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226
There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150
Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:
- Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must’ve done a bit more than that to get banned)
- Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
- Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.
Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it’s obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That’s not sustainable.
I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.
$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.
How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
They think it’s just that they’re early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who’s to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.
Tired: it’s required to taste
Wired: it’s an acquired taste
I guess I can check back in six months to see how they’re doing … wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, weren’t they? That’s a bummer.
they’re already pivoting to the narrative that “local models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run them”
The whole federation loves nolto.social, an open source, federated alternative to linkedin! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the noto.social is vibe-coded
I’m confused that anyone thinks that the world needs another linkedin…
Lots of people in IT have been fired and must find a new job.
Honest question, since I’m not on linkedin (and kinda looking for a new job): does it really help anyone find a job? It has been my impression from the outside that it’s mostly empty drivel.
Thanks everyone for the replies <3 Guess I should make an account there after all… bleeeh :/
In ~9 months of searching, I’ve gotten to two second-round interviews out of dozens of applications to LinkedIn listings. Take that as you will.
I think there might have been a golden age of recruitment on linked in, and it might have passed. A friend of mine has been a CTO at a couple of small places, and recruited a whole bunch of their employees via linkedin but now finds that there’s just too much genai bullshit now and it is becoming uneconomical to find real candidates there. The problem isn’t linkedin-specific, but I think it has been hit pretty had.
Anecdata here, I’ve been unemployed 2 times in the last 3 years and both times I mostly used LinkedIn to look for leads. Had some ok comms with recruiters too .
Depends on where you are and what kind of jobs you’re looking for but for computer janitoring like me it worked ok
Some suggestion here that notbyai.fyi is an ai industry op: https://social.treehouse.systems/@imbl/115978426251286619
Seems plausible. Notbyai seems pretty keen on ai, and is very relaxed about what counts as “not by ai”, and adds up to a scheme whereby you pay a pro-ai techbro a monthly subscription to advertise to ai firms that your website is ideal for scraping training data from.
but here’s the fucking kicker. the “founder”, allen hsu (notbyai.fyi/about), is the ux design lead at modo modo (modomodoagency.com/leadership), which is an ai design company (modomodoagency.com/about)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is cool and we embrace it. But when it comes to solving complex business problems, we don’t just press a few keys to generate answers with ChatGPT. We research, interview, brainstorm, and go through a human-centric process to come up with content and solutions that are tailored to your unique business need.
Called it, 2 years ago: https://lobste.rs/c/fhob3x
actually didn’t call, had forgotten all about it
The headline alone is worthy of upvoting. About halfway through the article, the author includes an embedded YouTube video of the Dilberito Flash game. Made me reflect that 20 years ago, they might simply have directly embedded the game itself. And contemplate what the Web might look like if/when external YouTube embedding craps out.
And goddamn:
his former syndicate, publisher, and professional organizations have all declined to pay tribute or even acknowledge his passing.
I didn’t realize it was quite that harsh, but so it goes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
once again, the facade of the “whoops, bad company” falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask
transcript
a quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: “So what’s the deal with this ghastly woman again? She’s a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?”
the quoted tweet by aella reads: “There’s apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?”
also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it’s a sock
i don’t find that name too strange, it’s a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth
Yeah, @XiWellWisher going up against Aella on X, The Everything App is well into late-SNL stages of unfunny parody
Freshly minted LWer does LLM-assisted analysis of LLM Facebook and concludes that the bots are conspiring to take over
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Et7dgiBjSj2zJnGuM/unicode-ekfv
No thought to the fact that (at least AFAIK) there’s no verification that the posting entity is actually an LLM, and not a cheeky human stirring things up
following up the previous thread about Eliezer in the Epstein files, he’s responded on reddit
Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation
Either deliberately whitewashing the situation or completely missing the point of why people are mad at Epstein, Yud really can’t help himself.
edit: Or depending on the timeline and the fact that ‘prison time for soliciting a 14 year old’ was on top of Epstein’s wiki as early a 2016 he’s explicitly saying they didn’t mind that part with 300k on the line.
Double-highlighting this choice bit:
Diligence is costly in executive attention,
Your periodic reminder that this man is considered a major influence by many of today’s working venture capitalists
I might be crossing a line into conspiracy theory nut over here, but is it weird that both this and his response to the zizzian’s rape allegations have undertones of “i don’t know/im not completely sure”??
It’s possible it just means the responses aren’t vetted by a lawyer, and will be revised as neccessary.
Lots of ‘this isn’t a big deal’ shrieking in that thread.
Ammon Bundy has his own little hillbilly elegy in The Atlantic this week. See, while he’s all about armed insurrection against the government, he’s not in favor of ICE. He wants the Good Old Leppards to be running things, not these Goose-Stepping Nazi-Leopards. He just wanted to run his cattle on federal lands and was willing to be violent about it, y’know? Choice sneer, my notes added:
Bundy had always thought that he and his supporters stood for a coherent set of Christian-libertarian principles that had united them against federal power. “We agreed that there’s certain rights that a person has that they’re born with. Everybody has them equally, not just in the United States,” he said. “But on this topic [i.e. whether to commit illegal street violence against minorities] they are willing to completely abandon that principle.”
All cattle, no cap. I cannot give this man a large-enough Fell For It Again Award. The Atlantic closes:
And so Ammon Bundy is politically adrift. He certainly sees no home for himself on the “communist-anarchist” left. Nor does he identify anymore with the “nationalist” right and its authoritarian tendencies.
Oh, the left doesn’t have a home for Bundy or other Christofascists. Apology not accepted and all that.
Oh, the left doesn’t have a home for Bundy or other Christofascists
I’m willing to accept him if he converts to Communist Anarchism in his heart of hearts and writes a long treatsie on what he thinks that even is.
i think it’s when you and a bunch of other vegans live in a group home together and argue over who does the dishes
So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein
But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so
How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?
Similarly, what’s going on with Charles Murray (Bell Curve) ???
He converted to christianity? https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Religion-Seriously-Charles-Murray/dp/1641774851
But now supports euthanisia? https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-i-changed-my-mind-on-assisted-suicide/
Over in the epstein files, Jim Watson tried to make an intro but Murray never replied? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA00475960.pdf
Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.
Also, looks like Harris also deliberately side-stepped the dinner bait but I don’t know how much of that was because of Chomsky’s presence. Epstein tried again a year later without the Chomsky attendee name-drop, but Harris might have just not replied.
At least there are no surprises with Dawkins, even his sleazy friend Brockman seemingly finds him tiring
Glib jibes aside, I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at many of the docs that aren’t just quasi-celeb emails, the few I did see were far too much for me. I’m horrified at nearly everyone from all ideological stances on a number of different levels I never considered. I can only hope the remaining victims someday are able to find some peace, and some kind of huge systemic reform can come from this. What a vile world we live in.
being a member of the old boy club beats ideological differences.
