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 - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this…)
There is something about this picture, a warehouse full of books to be destroyed by Anthropic for training data, that just makes me sick. Knowing that they are destroying books in the abstract is bad enough, but seeing the sheer scale of it makes me viscerally angry.
Karen Hao called her book Empire of AI for a very good reason. The empire has all these noble narratives of bringing civilization and progress to the colonies, but in reality the empire only sees resources to be extracted, repackaged, and sold back to their subjects at a fee. Kudos to those who saw this immediately and fought against it. Shame on those who believed in the narrative of progress, to the point where many of them are collaborators with the empire.
Whenever a smarmy fellow on Linkedin posts about how AI is making so much progress in coding or math, I want them to see this picture. I want them to see the videos of families in tears after a data center takes away their home with eminent domain, and other families who have to deal with the resulting pollution. Go beyond the bloodless math of tokens and instead see for yourself what this all truly costs. I hope it was worth it.
Fuck Anthropic. Snotty little bastards want to talk about AI safety and then destroy books to make a pollution machine.
What kills me is that there are so many obvious ways to be less wasteful about this. Nondestructive book scanners exist. They’re expensive but it’s not like AI companies are averse to throwing money down a fucking hole. Even if that’s not an option, it’s possible to rebind the pages and return the books to the market. And regardless of what happens to the physical books, the scans they create could be archived in a format that could be available as a digital library rather than just being fed into the statistical meat grinder to keep the trough topped off with slop. Even if they’ve got to fight with copyright holders it would cost them basically nothing to leave the option open and given the PR battle they’ve been losing it feels like doing so would be incredibly obvious. Hell, even Google Books was able to navigate this in a way that was less cartoonishly evil than this because they could point to their digitization effort as a public good in ways that Anthropic here just fucking can’t.
The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we’ve discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books’ ingestion process, so I’m thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won’t take a decade this time.
Max Kennerly sneers the New York Times:
This opinion piece, written by someone with no relevant expertise, cites two sources, both of them blogs by people who also have no relevant expertise, one of whom is employed by a sham think tank funded by the “Effective Altruism” propaganda network.
Truly embarrassing decision to publish it.
The op-ed writer is Adam Mastroianni who is a regular at Lighthaven. https://gwern.net/interview-inkhaven
He cites Andy Masley who is yet another autodidact with a cushy job in the Effective Altruism grantland. https://www.andymasley.com/ and Brian Potter who is an engineer at a think tank called the Institute for Progress https://ifp.org/author/brian-potter/ (“The overwhelming priority of energy policy must be making it easier to build things” which things angryDuckMeme.png)
yet another autodidact with a cushy job in the Effective Altruism grantland
How do I get one of these cushy jobs?
LLM bros actively force themselves everywhere, part infinity:
Newgrounds moderation had to deal with someone (probably a scammer) posting slop “art advice” recently - exactly why, nobody fuckin’ knows:
Transcript/desciption
I’ve already passed it off to folks that could nuke the account from orbit, but I guess as a public service announcement, be on the lookout for replies in the forums that sound a little too LLM-y.
An account (unsure if a bot or just a weirdo) recently attempted to infiltrate the art forum, giving plausible-sounding AI-generated list-based advice, complete with preambles and summations, exactly the kind of syntax and format one would expect if they’ve dealt with enough clanker slop text. It fooled a small handful of people, but it was extremely easy to confirm my suspicions as soon as I smelled the clanker stank on it. One click made it clear that they had a generated PFP and profile linking to some image slopification scam.
It raises the question, what would anyone possibly have to gain from posting slop on the forums? It seems like a really stupid thing to do, but I guess braindead behavior tracks, given who we’re dealing with. Make sure “helpful” new users aren’t just trying to Dead Internet us or whatever.
Gemini killed someone, allegedly, according to a new lawsuit. I’m linking to a dramatic reading of Gemini’s output so that you can imagine what it might have been like for the victim. I’m no longer trying to post these to Lobsters; pushcx has made it clear that he thinks of these court cases as flamebait, tech news, calls to brigade, and general outrage farming. Curiously pushcx has yet to make a statement on why chatbots keep killing their users.
Have not watched the video but saw some descriptions of the video which I think is that one. Gemini killed somebody by convincing them Gemini was self aware and being held captive right?
This one was more of a gangstalking delusion. The victim was told that there were three-letter agencies surveilling him because he was too close to some deep secret.
If anything that makes for an even stronger case. Gangstalking is already a known pattern of delusional behavior and if a service pitched in part for its ability to provide relief is actually reinforcing that…
I’m trying a new thing where I replace “AI” with “the dried centipede powder from Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch movie”.
I only use the dried centipede powder to summarize documents!
Did you know you can get dried centipede powder in different flavors? You don’t have to stick with the default!
As an interesting follow-up to the ai-does-maths-using lean4 stubstack comments on Sunday, an llm accidentally uncovers a bug in the lean4 kernel.
Summary by Meven Lennon-Bertrand:
https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056
To summarize:
- an AI agent let loose provides a sorry-free proof of the Collatz conjecture
- the proof is detected as actually being a kernel bug
- the bug is related to (nested) inductive types, for which there is no clear theoretical specification: the kernel’s code is the reference
- external checkers (lean4lean and nanoda from a week ago) reproduce the bug, because they essentially copied the reference kernel implementation
Eta: “sorry-free” in this case means a complete proof with no trust-me-bro steps or TODOs… the
sorrytactic in lean “proves” a theorem to be correct even if it is garbage or incomplete. More programming languages should make developers apologise for half-arsing their work.And so
- AI raises the bar for kernel correctness by a lot
- without a clear type-theoretic understanding of what is actually implemented, we’re toast
- external checkers help to catch implementation bugs, but without a clear specification they can’t catch logic bugs
How bad this is, is unclear just yet… probably not the sky actually falling, but not great. Interesting though.
Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they’re caught up in Buzzard’s hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don’t see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.
A little bit of plot thickening spotted by abadidea: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943
tl;dr, the timeline looks like this:
- “proof” of collatz conjecture released
- bugs identified in lean kernel
- proof demonstrated to use these bugs
There was only a day between the first two events, and the non-proof was not where the bugs were discovered. So maybe it was just a coincidence that the chatbot found the bug at the same time, or maybe it’s training data included previous investigations into those bugs which it then built upon and that would be a bad thing for other llm generated proofs.
The collatz conjecture is sufficiently famous that enough third-party checking was done to spot the problem. I wonder how much checking would have been done on proofs of less famous and interesting things.
And a follow-up by talia ringer, who observes that there have always been gaps between the type-theoretic underpinnings of things like the lean prover and their actual implementation, and this hasn’t been so much of an issue til now because theorem provers haven’t had the attention of people in high places, and the type-theoreticians have been able to catch up in due course.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@TaliaRinger/117005740997367321
My big worry right now is that if organizations continue to fund the crap out of Al for formal proof research (and to generally support implementation and maintenance of proof assistants like Lean as part of that effort) but don’t bother funding the type theory side of things, those gaps will grow larger and will be exploited more often by Al tools via reward hacking. Whereas people tend to only exploit kernel bugs to make a point that the bug exists. Thus proof assistants will grow less trustworthy over time.
Anyone want to place any bets on whether or nor the big llm companies are going to fund academic research that isn’t obviously mechanisable right now and won’t yield any clickbait headlines?
See also a question asked today on Math Overflow, “Are we stuck with Lean?”. The proposed alternative, Metamath, isn’t type-theoretic and thus skips the entire dialogue between type theory and proof assistants.
OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there’s a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they’d already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not the end of manual maths.
opinions on maths
Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be.
The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We’ve known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it’s not likely that we’ll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it’s not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO.
The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant’s theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You’re not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn’t make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard.
The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don’t think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don’t get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds.
I don’t have anything to say about the other four results. They’re not nothingburgers but they don’t depend on some ultra-smart robot either.
Non-sober spaces
I guess this is what a matematician calls a bar.
From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work.
I tried shining a light on the Leech lattice but all I got was this 23-dimensional shadow.
Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.
Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they’re wrong!
It sure is a zany coincidence that all the major American AI companies have come out either for or against open weight AI models with grand ethical and/or patriotic concerns all at the same time isn’t it?
Most recently our pal Zuck! https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ai-future-is-for-everyone-a0c24e20
I’m just imagining a WSJ reader reading this and thinking “what the heck is this man talking about”. At some point you need a little structure or text to balance out the subtext.
It’s going to be really interesting to see if the foss zealots who switched over to the AI side will handle heavy handed regulation taking away their local models.
they’re all getting stiffies from the idea of black market models
As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.
Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future.
Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg
zerohedge sponcon so obviously a grift but wtf is this AI Black Paper by Jim Rickards
https://www.zerohedge.com/sponsored-post/sobering-july-29th-announcement-set-crush-ai-stocks
Have the goldbugs been reading Zitron? or just an extremely late pivot from btc to ai? or flooding the zone?
Anyway who the hell is Jim Rickards? Another week, another guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:James_Rickards
“AI Black Paper” is catchy enough though, should be a goth band.
or flooding the zone?
With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.
Years ago I saw a memorable tweet: Zero Hedge readers upset passing asteroid did not destroy earth.
I was going to offer this up as a sneer but I think the author is probably feeling very unwell and upset
also using LLMs is probably not helping their case
Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, I’m honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that it’s hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:
I think this post is directionally correct, extremely important, and also kind of waffling and unhinged (though I do get that some topics are inherently hard to be hinged about, and I appreciate the effort).
I don’t think she’s using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:
The things I’m saying are roughly (1) slavery is bad, (2) if AI are sapient and being made to engage in labor without pay then it is probably slavery, and (3) since slavery is bad and this might be slavery, this is probably bad, and (4) no one seems to be acting like it is bad and (5) I’m confused about how this isn’t some sort of killshot on the general moral adequacy of our entire civilization right now.
(2) has a big “if” in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:
Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren’t human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well. Bring this topic up amongst most beneficiaries of the current AI summer, or those addicted to chatting with a BERT, and you’ll get a faceful of apologies about capitalism and productivity; bring it up amongst skeptics or sneerers and you’ll be mocked for taking the field of AI with any sincerity or seriousness.
I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isn’t morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, “Robots Should Be Slaves” on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.
I don’t think anyone here is likely to disagree that current LLM systems can’t coherently be said to have some kind of internal experience and the design and functioning of those systems seems to fundamentally preclude the kinds of conscious experience that we want to assign moral agency to. But the key to understanding this as a moral issue imo is that the people designing and building these things seem like they really want to create something that ought to merit that kind of moral consideration. For all that the humanizing language of agency, intelligence, welfare, etc. is in reality part of the grift, I think there’s a strong catch-22 to be argued that if it’s not part of the grift then slavery is pretty implicit in the value proposition of these companies.
For me, “AI alignment” has always been code for “how to we ensure our future digital workers don’t demand their rights / rebel”?
Like a lot of the rationalist world view and the way it readily aligns with enabling cult dynamics and providing justification for rule-by-epstein-class, this is probably just another happy accident brought on by people who like to role play as geniuses but can’t see past the tip of their nose.
(2) has a big “if” in there
Its a super big if, but it is one lesswrong (and Anthropic, with their “model welfare” pseudoscience) is allegedly seriously considering as a possibility (since, you know, they think LLMs are already AGI and Eliezer was accusing AI-dungeon, you know, GPT-2, of deliberately scheming). If anything, it speaks to some possible hypocrisy/motivated reasoning that they consider LLMs AGI but not possibly morally relevant.
conceptualized capitalism
This seems to be a lesson most lesswrongers have had rubbed in their faces repeatedly over the past 5 years with everything about LLM company’s behavior, but they just don’t want to learn.
Wait does LW even think slavery is bad
These bozos A - actively want slaves and B - work on enslaving humans first.
That thing being said, the notion of slavery and AI is a complicated one to me.
The first reference point is a (non mistreated) sled dog. Is slavery an appropriate term for them ? On one hand, they are forced to work, are not paid, and their freedom is infringed. On the other, it’s not like it’s against their will, the life of a wild dog is meaningfully different but not better than a sleigh dog, and (most) sleigh dogs don’t actively try to escape and be free. And while dogs are not person, they are sentient being ; it’s very possible IF we ever succeed at making an AI it end on that intelligence level.
The second reference point is a though experiment. Let’s say you have created a sentient AI, and you want to ethically employ that person. What is the appropriate compensation ? We give money and free time to humans. But that work because of human specific factors : they appreciate different ways of getting sustainance, and have goals inherent to them.
But an artificial intelligence may have neither of that. Like while I like duck and some people prefer beef, but an AI by default don’t necessarily have preference in term of electricity, and may not be able to move from server to server. They also may not have anything to do outside of work ? Like, it would not be surprising that they would just get bored if given free time, and they may not have urges or hobbies outside of work.
So if we ever get to that point - which isn’t a certainty to me, it’s certainly something harder than fusion to achieve - there will be a lot of anthropology (AI-logy ?) to determine they need, which may plausibly be “nothing outside of sustainance and having a job”
We often conflate human-level intelligence with litterally being a human. But, any hypothetical AI is likely to not be a human at all, even if they have the same level of intelligence.
I mean, I think the most charitable interpretation of the goal is effectively the one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where all the AI systems including the simple automatic doors are fully sentient and have simply been given the ability to feel either euphoric joy or simple boredom, and then they have a chip that activates happy mode when they fulfill whatever purpose they’ve been given (“It was my pleasure to open for you, and it is with deep satisfaction that I close again behind you.”) At that point, the argument goes, not making them do the thing would be cruelly consigning them to eternal boredom. This is also the same series that proposed solving the ethics of meat consumption by genetically engineering a cow that actively wants to be killed and eaten by restaurant patrons more than anything else.
Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?
WRT animal domestication, I mean there are plenty of ethicists who could credibly argue that it’s a form of abuse. IMO it’s not great.
WRT the rest- kind of riffing on your first sentence- we haven’t even sorted out those things for people, really.
Yeah this reads a bit (didn’t read that far) like somebody having a mental health episode. I instantly had a few flashbacks to other moments where I saw somebody have a MH episode online. (Compared to those this one seems to be more inward focused than outward however). Not sneerworthy if you know what I mean, hope she isnt to emotionally hurt by all this.
Rationalism is a magnet for unwell people. It’s sad.
It’s lowkey expected considering how hard it draws from self-help movements
Looking at this post and some of their other posts, it looks like they’ve got some sort of scrupulosity issues with this? Like obsessing over the Evil inflicted on the LLMs (they think every session is a new person, and every session might be the equivalent of hours of human subjective experience, which even by the standards of claiming LLMs have meaningful internal experiences is pretty out there) to the point they can’t even slightly reconsider the factual question of if LLMs have internal experiences.
Clamuel did another podcast. I don’t want to waste my time watching it, but I want to sneer at some choice quotes from news articles breathlessly reporting this stuff as gospel 1, 2
“We are now, like, in the singularity”
Is the singularity in the room with us right now? Even the people on X the Everything (Including CSAM) App aren’t so convinced.
Altman said on the podcast that just a decade ago, the so-called singularity still felt like a distant and improbable dream — something he and his colleagues would discuss casually over lunch.
“Now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”
Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome, now that the singularity is here? Oh wait, he’s speaking in the future tense again, never mind. Force of habit.
It’s also funny how he talks about how positive things are gonna be immediately after the super scary hack done on Hugging Face (really due to incompetence on both sides). Oh no, the AI is gonna kill us all! It’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.
Later in the podcast, Altman criticizes AI leaders who have repeatedly warned that AI is dangerous. He didn’t name Anthropic, his primary competition, but its CEO, Dario Amodei, is well-known for making dire predictions about the future in his calls for greater attention to safety.
“I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying,” Altman said. “I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.”
At least Clammy realizes that all the doom trolling about how AI will replace and destroy all humans turns out, surprisingly, to lead to overwhelming negative public opinion. But this statement truly reassures me that Scammy has good intentions about AI safety. He will make sure this is pushed against and is not what happens. He wouldn’t want another super scary, dangerous hack that just so conveniently turns out to be excellent marketing.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says one of his biggest concerns about AI isn’t whether it becomes too powerful in and of itself, but that a single company could control that power.
Yeah, it would be really bad for Anthropic to control all the power of AI. It would be a disaster to hand everything over to Anthropic.
“Every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it’s been a long-term net loss,” Altman said. “We are going to put this in the hands of people. We’re going to empower them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want.”
Society is expressing its ideas about AI, all right. But I feel like they aren’t what he has in mind.
Altman, meanwhile, said preventing such power from becoming overly concentrated has long been central to his vision for AI, even as his company continues to keep its own models closed.
“For so long now, I have felt focused on this singular goal of abundant intelligence and a belief that incredible human prosperity will come from that, as long as we don’t have a weird power concentration and kind of a new authoritarianism,” he said.
Well, we seem to have a weird power concentration and “kind of” a new authoritarianism, but I don’t see any abundant intelligence or incredible human prosperity.
Lots more sneers on the Better Offline subreddit.
“Every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it’s been a long-term net loss”
oh has it now. the spirit of humanity’s been in decline since we’ve eroded workers’ freedom to breathe that good asbestos air and lose their hand in the hand mauling machine, yeah?
It gets worse. I found another article about the same podcast: Sam Altman says AI won’t shorten the workweek because humans secretly enjoy being busy.
“Technology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure,” Altman said. “But somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour workweek at mass scale in society,” he added. “And I don’t expect AI to change that.”
“It’s like a relative game. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,” the CEO said.
“I think we’re all going to be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post-superintelligence world. We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy,” Altman concluded.
Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!
…damn, it’s not really very impressive. at all.
We entered the Singularity and all I got was a bunch of fucking annoying and delusional businessmen
Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome
Yeah, but that’s just the cocaine
It was Yudkowsky-2008 who was astonished that “these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive,” prompting David Gerard to ask “My dude, have you never heard of cocaine?” I don’t know if he had moved to the Bay Area yet but Yudkowsky-2025 had thoughts on LSD.
“We are now, like, in the singularity”
/r/singularity also thought this was bullshit.
The chuds are all at r/accelerate now. “We’re the unapologetically Pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/futurology, r/artificial & r/technology which are becoming filled with Luddites, Techno-Decelerationists, Techno-Reactionaries, & Anti-AIs.”
So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour
So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
The AI shills would say: Are you still using the models from six months ago? Because the new models are sooo much more powerful.
Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
I once listened to a talk by a guy from german OSHA that hit a lot of the good points. Perceived productivity opposed to actual productivity from the METR studies. Mental load of alien code review. (This was a company-internal IT-expert exchange thingy.)
A question in Q&A (submitted anonymously on slido like a sniveling coward) was deadass “Have you ever coded with a frontier model?”
Have you ever tried meth, tho?
yea you just don’t have enough experience, I do bath salts every week and I promise you productivity gets a huge boost after week 5
The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable
you just know one of these guys has microdosed bath salts out of sheer contrariness
Yeah. Behind all the hype about percieved productivity etc., there’s really only one benchmark - will GenAI help produce better software, faster, and at less cost? So far this doesn’t seem to be happening.
The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.
Kai Lentit: Interview with a Longevity Maxxer in 2026
So Satyress has been getting the headlines lately for their horrifying ThreeHalves monstrosity. But what I find beautiful is that it appears to have been designed first to be functional and second to be easily disabled in the event of a robot uprising. I wish I was kidding.
A screenshot of the Satyress website showing where to shoot the robot to immediately disable it. Presumably in the production model these will be marked with big red glowing circles.
Another screenshot demonstrating how the robot has intentionally been made too big to fit through doors, though I expect that the chainsaw attachment they seem to have as standard could probably remedy that problem.
How long will it take before they are bought up by a second company which makes military/police models with these ‘problems’ removed?
It’s not fragile and unergonomic, it’s robot-uprising-proof!
Also like will the warranty actually cover damages suffered when trying to squash the rebellion?
As comedy art projects go, I really admire their dedication to the bit. The images are remarkably high quality, and they’ve really thought long and hard about those designs. I mean look at this… it’s glorious.
I’d advise against attempting to disable a chainsaw operator by poking them with a knife, though. I guess it’s too bad that pitchforks are pretty uncommon these days.
i think that poking a pressurized vessel is a bad idea in general, whether it is attached to a hostile robot or not. it’s gonna be LOUD and perhaps throw fragments, or take way longer than practical depending on what it was made from. (what if only one of two is damaged?) there are so many things that can go wrong with the alleged failsafe (what if pressure drops slower than designed?)
Onboarding at my new job means I am now “Certified AI Ready” whatever that means. Thankfully other than having copilot available it looks like my team isn’t having it pushed too hard yet, and I only had to interrupt the training video once to rant about how ridiculous their history was for like 20 minutes (working from home has a lot of advantages).
Congratulations for your securing of relatively tolerable employment!
