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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)
The Patrick Boyle video on Leopold Aschenbrenner mentions some names we know like Jane Street Capital (bid for his common shares) and Dwarkesh Patel (recorded a very long podcast with him in 2024). Boyle is a former finance worker who thinks that this hedge fund was basically a r/WallStreetbets profile (pick a story, bet everything on it being true).
Loved one just had an awful experience at a previously decent dentist. They’ve apparently started using something called Pearl AI that scanned the x-ray and highlighted things in bright red with a #/100 rating system, which they used to do high-pressure sales on her. Mind you, she’s only ever had one cavity and that was in a wisdom tooth. Checked the website, and it’s freshly slopped-up, too.
We’re getting a second opinion. I wish this garbage would just go away
I regret to inform you, that this garbage was run by The Register a while ago.
It shouts out several friends of the sub, including @self@awful.systems, PivotToAI, OpenSlopware, Robert Kingett & Ludicity.
The point of the piece is that all anti-AI folks should just get along, and if we are to stand a chance against corporate AI we need to get over our petty grievances and reach out a hand to the racists, homophobes and crypto-bros and work together in the spirit of Open Source!
Liam’s here, for what it’s worth.
Torvalds’ position is pragmatic: his interest is in whether it works or not.
But, of course, the chatbots do not work. In a pragmatic sense, they do not produce maintainable integrated code changes with low defect rates. In a societal sense, they do not replace human laborers, despite the delusions of management.
One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit, but it is closely entwined with cryptocurrencies. Urbit’s original creator, Curtis Yarvin, has reportedly espoused some extreme beliefs; The Nation called him The Reactionary Prophet of Silicon Valley.
Wild way to admit no knowledge of Arcan, Fuchsia, etc. Honestly, even a basic overlay network like Yggdrasil can win an apples-to-apples comparison with Urbit. I feel like this is an instance of critihype for fascist weirdos; similar stuff gets said about Justine Tunney, another cryptofascist developer whose projects are sometimes silly and weird. Doubly weird for those of us who know about Urbit’s internals; Urbit originally was not a cryptocurrency project and it used to have non-Yarvin/Tlon forks.
It’s an overly simplistic way to reduce a complex and nuanced situation, but one way to consider this is in terms of pro-AI and anti-AI, versus “woke” and “anti-woke.”
More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing. However, recognition of this dimension doesn’t negate the other dimensions and we shouldn’t work in cooperation with fascists.
One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit
So innovative, it even has a fandom!
https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Urbit
(snerk)
Liam’s here, for what it’s worth.
I almost wrote down, it sounded like it was written by a lurker on techtakes. The overlap of takes was just so damn high.
Yech, the comments…
We Need To Talk About Leopold | Patrick Boyle yt
My suspicion is that ‘Situational Awareness’ is the most referenced and least finished document in Silicon Valley since the Terms and Conditions.
The essay went viral among tech executives when it was released and Tim Ferrris crowned Leopold the Nostradamus of AI, which is more fitting than Ferris probably intended
New week new guy
It’s depressing how so many (pathetic) software devs are taking their hands off the steering wheel and letting LLMs do all the driving. If you think software quality was poor before LLMs, there’s no way it could have been worse than shit like this:
This became very apparent with GPT 5.6 Sol. It, too, was widely hailed to have near-Fable level intelligence. But I used it non-stop for a week and realized that they had mostly just dialed up the relentlessness meter to eleven, most likely via heavy RLHF.
Last week I gave it a small-sized auth ticket to work on, then stepped away. I came back later that afternoon and found that it had worked for 3+ hours and written 25,000+ lines of code. I skimmed over the code and it looked like a small fix followed by a massive number of additional checks around it, including static analysis tooling.
I gave it to another GPT 5.6 and said “check this code and see if it addresses the ticket”. It looked at it and said that 98% of it was garbage and should be thrown away (its own words). I then gave it to Fable, which said it was massively over-engineered. Fable’s theory was that the agent implemented the fix first, but then compacted and lost crucial context, forgot what the original task was about, and kept going. After many compaction cycles it was completely lost.
On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.
No for real it’s baffling. What happens when your profession doesn’t have a licensing board.
On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.
Before, sabotaging your competition was difficult and legally risky. AI fixes this - now, your competition shall sabotage themselves, leaving you free to focus on other things.
Amazon’s latest planned data centre is gonna be putting out as much emissions as an entire country
I cannot express how badly this AI bullshit needs to go
worse yet, Amazon actually has uses for that much data centre
Zuck - “look guys, us too, we are super relevant and super important… Over here guys… Please be my friend… 🥺”
My unrealistic sicko fantasy: that Torvalds pulling the big ol slop lever drives enough oppositionally defiant (positive) people away from Linux development that alternative OS devel gets a serious boost.
A question for the wise: what comes after Linux?
The irritating part of all of this is that after 20+ years we finally have a (very) few companies that sell machines with Linux pre-installed. The only thing I ever learned from installing OSes is that I hate installing OSes.
I would love to boycott all software that accepts garbage [1] contributions, but I do not think that is practical. I think I might have to settle with just refusing to use it myself, and wait until everyone realizes that gen AI is just a bad idea.
Note 1: Satya Nadella said he did not want people referring to AI as “slop”, so I will grant his request and refer to it as “garbage”.
That article is a ray of sunshine
plan9 on riscv(or sparc or subleq or whatever) is also truly what I want for the future. It obviously won’t be what happens(most likely linux will stay, maybe one of the less slopped bsds will take over) but please gods please
Would be cool if Redox os gets more popular, they have an explicitly anti-LLM policy. Microkernels are neat, and I enjoy Rust. I think it’s an unfortunate truth that everything in the future will still have to be Unix-y with compatibility layers to support existing software.
This looks rad as hell. I had no idea Redox was so far along!
Vindicate Tanenbaum in the greatest Usenet thread in os development: make it a microkernel.
Somebody writes a low-level kernel for Emacs and the revenge of the Lisp machines begins
maybe, but SBCL succumbed to the siren song of slop, who knows what will be next.
Yeah, seeing that gave me the black pill. I chose Common Lisp for personal projects to avoid techbro bullshit.
lisp went big in the leadup to the AI winter, which followed a lot of fraudulent nonsense that even the DoD would only buy for so long
so in that sense it’s in character
eyes copy of ANSI Common Lisp written by Paul Graham
Picard frowning at the mirror universe edition of the bible
Realistically a BSD
I am in fact moving back to NetBSD, but the ambiguity of their LLM policy makes me wary/tired.
My only hope is that NetBSD moves so slowly anyway that the devs’ traditional preference towards clean, minimalistic readable code above all else holds off any “slop commits verified by maintainers” long enough that the bubble pops before slop gets any of its clawdes in core code at least.
I want it to be plan 9.
We are not worthy
RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don’t plan to check the site regularly.
Rss to subreddits still work just case anyone cares
I see elsewhere on lemmy that it’s old reddit that gets loginwalled, not sneerclub specifically
either way still works for me
Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.
For a while now I’m being randomly login-walled on reddit.com on varying subreddits, in ways that seem nondeterministic. I hope they login-wall the entire thing, I’ll finally ditch my addiction then
Any reason why?
Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not “user #123456, ip address … credit card … just visited these pages and accidentally switched from her French keyboard to US-American”).
Thanks
The Carlson Lab has agreed on blanket-banning chatbots for writing. Why? Simple:
Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.
In a reasonable world, this would have probably sent everyone running for the hills. Moral issues of AI aside, a fancy way of committing career suicide is never worth whatever upsides it offers. We do not leave in a reasonable world.
Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AI | 404
lol of course it is. Sooner or later, we’ll have to come up with some way to label actual natural language in the marketplace, like certified organic like fruit or something.
The fake research company listed Dr. Elena Vasquez, one of the most commonly made-up AI names, on its staff page. I guess Elara Voss was too busy.
Perhaps we should page Dr Goblin.
so unless it’s a very clever ploy, it seems that jms has lost the plot:
The standalone book of Harlan Ellison’s I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM is taking preorders, with writing essays by Harlan, and since MOUTH was the first AI story, for fun we fed it into an AI system and asked for its opinion. The reply is fascinating.
I’ve seen a suggestion that it was a deliberately provocative marketing stunt to pump sales a little and keep the ellison estate healthy, and I kinda hope so but too many people are getting the brain worms for this to be a safe assumption 🫤
Wouldn’t an author know that the AI probably already ate the story in its training data? There was a lawsuit and everything?
i would be very, very happy to be fooled in this instance.
New book: superlawyers! how claude makes you the best lawyer in the room.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHYS5FC2
The author even shares his prompts for free!
https://github.com/danlorry/superlawyers-prompts
Every prompt here is designed for that pattern: Claude multiplies your judgment, never replaces it. The prompts are ready to paste into Claude. The book explains why they are structured the way they are.
The prompts mostly seem to be structured as “imagine you are an attorney. Now do this homework exercise”. There’s a passingly interesting idea around having the chatbot attempt to form a counter argument to your own claims, which you can then use to make your own position stronger, which seems like it might actually be a genuinely okay idea especially if you expect your opponents to be llm sock puppets, but everything else looks pretty much like garden variety “do my thinking for me”.
I’ll admit I didn’t read the prompts closely, so may be I’m being uncharitable, but I doubt there are many nuggets of gold hidden in there.
h/t to rahaeli
At least two other self-published books on Amazon with AI cover art have “super lawyer” in the title.
From the old SneerClub: There is a music video now
I’m speechless
this is impressively atrocious
also, I archive-mirrored it, incase you don’t want to give the youtube link clicks
(e: still busy uploading but should be there in 2min or so)
I went through the comments earlier. Nothing really stood out to me (aside from one person saying we should give AGI rights so it doesn’t go Skynet), as it was mostly just people saying the song was a banger and doomposting
Lesswronger argues skynet might still be a decade away… because they’d rather have the eugenics wars instead: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQzxxgJXXaAQjq7Jz/faq-isn-t-agi-coming-too-soon-for-reprogenetics-to-help
Comments are utterly mired in jargon
Humanity should count as actual AGI, but it remains slow.
It’s a weird middle ground, where it is fooming but pretty slowly. (I mean, as a human, I would think that, i.e. I would experience time on a scale that’s somewhat faster than humanity’s foom.)
I don’t think the term “FOOM” as ever been explicitely defined, it’s just verbal tic/shorthand for “intelligence explosion”. How can something explode slowly???
also nice save defining “AGI == humanity” => goal reached
I vaguely remember someone saying the term “foom” came from the sound of something blowing up/expanding quickly, could be wrong on that tho
But yeah “fooming slowly” is not fooming. That’s just it going slow
I mainly understand “foom” as a sound effect onomatopoeia from comic books. Which is totally appropriate given the foundational texts of LW
Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you can’t explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.
Stealing technical terms from other fields to make their fantasies feel more real.
why do they keep calling it *genics, as if everyone doesn’t immediately understand what you mean
They have a clause for “Most adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs).”
Something something used surgical equipment in Ziz’ van, something something they do like their pills.
