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.)
Anyone got “open software dev slander” on their 2026 bingo cards?
Transcript
I hope that this thing with “AI” has taught everyone that software developers are overall an awful bunch and they don’t have our backs, and that they’re much closer to the managerial class than actual workers.
And the idea that anybody who earns a wage is a worker is nonsense, the old divisions between white collar and blue collar are firmly in place. Boundaries being negotiated, indeed, yes, but not gone.
OP definitely has a kernel of a point, and there’s a lot to discuss regarding it, but he sprints right past it all to uselessly compress the conversation into the ~~ timeless dialectic of class consciousness ~~. The acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class is, if anything, still under-analyzed! You come into the industry already propagandized that if you just join the right startup and bust your ass, you’re gonna hit it big! In this way, it’s important to understand, and describe to others, Hacker News as a propaganda tool to shape and condition technical discussion, rather than the common perception of a neutral, focused technical discussion forum.
And the end circumstance is, even if you are awarded stock options at most of the big Silicon Valley firms, thanks to multi-class share structures, you’re given a booby-prize version of ownership! Your decision is binary, cash out or hold, you have no effective decision-making power over the future of the enterprise. There’s a lot of persuasive points here that still aren’t widespread in the public dialogue! But no, I guess it makes more sense to continue the same old tactic of labeling everyone we hate and fear with an obscure, difficult-to-spell French loanword. The rhetorical tactic that has been pretty demonstrably ineffective for over a century now.
There are, of course, equally valid reasons to be pessimistic. The historically-contingent development of computer programming has mainly been along lines that are obfuscatory rather than accessible, subject to continuous framework and API churn, fetishizing rapid delivery of “new features” over stability. All these aspects help create a false sense of mastery on the part of those who pass through the firewall of skill and tedium, then further combine with the class-mobility propaganda to create a false sense of security. And the interposition of uninspectable, poorly-replicable AI systems is the culmination of the rot, approaching the point where even the supposedly masterful programmer doesn’t really know what their system is doing, let alone the end user. In this way, I have to agree that there is far greater potential for solidarity with the users on whom this crap is imposed rather than the sunk-cost dead-enders who keep crapping it out.
But even then, I still don’t trust OP’s conceptual framework to build that solidarity. This is precisely the genre of Marxist argument that is most tedious and least effective, the kind that approaches religious fundamentalism. Dude’s writing seriously reads like Christian fundamentalist bullshit papered over with Marxist jargon. Later in the thread, we get bangers like
The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line, that line being drawn by the rich, the haute bourgeoisie.
Replace “righteousness of the proletariat” with “grace of the saved,” “privileged status” with “fallen nature,” “haute bourgeoisie” with “liberal elite” etc. and you’d have the exact output of somebody in a Texas megachurch. Dude’s a Jesus freak, his Jesus just happens to be named Karl.
fortunately the account (that i never interacted with) has my account blocked, so i couldn’t make them angry by pointing out they’re engaging in typical intelligentsia behaviour of assuming that only heavy industry workers are workers.
I don’t really agree with the second part, but the first part rings true. It seems to me that most software devs are arrogant assholes who think they are the shit because they know some javascript. As it stands now, I would have to think for a long time about whether I consider the collective work of my profession in the last few years a net positive for the world.
i’m not a fan of military industry, but that doesn’t make me claim the workers there are not proletariat.
I really don’t get that angle by the original poster. Plenty of people who are firmly in their worker category are genuinely awful people who vote against their collective interests as if it where their religion.
the reasons he thinks programmers aren’t workers seem to be threefold (a) they earn too much, (b) they don’t sweat enough and © they align with their bosses. and – to me at least – is obvious, that he only deigns to use the word “worker” for people who do (hard enough) manual labour.
this – from a dude who has a baccalaureate in italianistics, magisterium in linguistics and studies for phd in history – is an obvious intelligentsja stereotyping. lad thinks he’s punching up, and in reality he’s punching down.
Class consciousness in software is in the abyss, I have worked with people who didn’t know that sick leave was won through the labour movement and not something that “just made sense” to do.
That doesn’t change their class interests, it just means they behave ignorantly (in a way that hurts other workers but that’s why they need education, not isolation).
This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out…
The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line […].
Once you accept that you can begin to think about how to overcome that.
Or you may choose to ignore that and pretend they’re just blue collar workers and the very obvious tendencies they display are just because they’re temporarily deceived or lack class consciousness. No, they understand who they are, and yearning for proletariat righteousness is part of that understanding. It’s one component of a discourse of merit and authenticity, of rationalising their distinct social status.
https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932
Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it’s coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you’ve noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn’t affect you, as you’re so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.
Misusing a defined term (petty bourgeois) to make your argument look more tied to historical ones is kinda fucking fail for a historian
is the “managerial class” in the room with us right now
i’m not gonna pretend to be the communist understander, but the idea that capitalists would pay workers to work against their own class interests (and against other workers) is a feature of capitalism
Most managers are still primarily reliant on selling their own wage labour and do not own the means of production. Their power is highly constrained (literally just where they work, limited ability to control the circumstances of their work) and they are subject to the whims of those who own the means of production.
Getting more favourable terms to keep other workers in line does not fundamentally change your class interests but it does give you peverse incentives to harm your own class (which in the long run fucks you, e.g. you need sick leave too).
Deceiving workers about their class interests to divide us is a tactic of the capitalists and we don’t need to help them with that.
Hailey on bluesky has never had a good ai take, but here they are reinventing roko’s basilisk to kill all their enemies without the need for super intelligent ai.
https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3mtwjoqdvik26
alt text
bsky isnt ready for this but, if you need a reason to not use words like “clanker” that isn’t “well its kinda not a great thing to do” (it isn’t) imagine this:
future model that has you in its training data, knows you posted that word online with joy, and denies your insurance claim as a result
This isn’t giving me a reason to stop using edgy anti-AI words, this is giving me a reason to believe programmers are dogshit at resisting brainworms.
future model that has you in its training data, knows you posted that word online with joy, and denies your insurance claim as a result
Given dataset construction hasn’t developed much since the days of Tay AI, I strongly doubt this is gonna happen.
The implication that Murica will implement roko’s basilisk before universal healthcare…
Blaise Pascal rolling in his grave rn
This is firmly in the ‘what if in the future there is a boot so big that we must start licking it now’ school of hot takes, like literally arguing for a future where the AI sucks at its job and you can’t do anything about it.
quisling take
What if the insurance bot were actually biased? Wouldn’t you feel silly then? Surely it wouldn’t be the fault of the insurer using biased software to deny claims.
I didn’t note who said it, but one response suggested “roko’s mangione” and I guess that’s ai alignment solved! 🤗
Here’s someone who really does not know what they’re talking, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(it’s how to build opinion against AI)
Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what I’d call “human-potential technologies” - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
The movement against nuclear power was significantly helped along by the movement against nuclear weapons, which was particularly potent at the height of the cold war. AI freaks seem to hold a certain amount of contempt for the left? Which gets in the way of spreading their message. And in any event their message is “eugenics” which isn’t likely to be received well on the left these days
It’s also fascinating to see them use nuclear vs renewable energy as their case study given that renewable energy has been having a hell of a time properly replacing fossil fuels even though everyone mostly agrees it’s a good idea. Like, whatever hypot rrtherrrrr see drdrr try r the t6 ty to r the rthetical rradvantagre they got from their opposition to the nuclear boogr the rrrrrreyman (their idiotic framing, not mine), renewables havr guy off bute still been facing some for trightand political headwinds that are only being magnified by the unceasing growth in demand for electrical power (including but not exclusively driven by AI compute).
last time rationalists tried to touch medical field we got metamed
I mean there already is a thriving public movement which despises AI, don’t think you’ll be getting to those people if you start supporting eugenics
OK so the “problem” these people (EAs) are facing is that they are strongly pro-“progress”, in that they are very much against any sort of criticism of existing capitalism, but they have identified one specific outcome of this (rampant AI) as very very bad.
That, and only that.
Climate change? Not a problem. Technological neo-feudalism? Not a problem. Global thermonuclear war? Not a problem, will not kill everyone after all. Global pandemic? Same thing, what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger.
So a reasonable person will look at current energy demands of GenAI, look at the existing benefits, and make the reasonable conclusion that this is bad and we should stop it. But that’s WRONG. Stopping it for those reasons is anti-progress. You can only stop it if it prevents AI takeover.
Cf. smarm-meister Zvi, who can’t understand why people don’t want datacenters when they don’t want coal plants slightly less, and cites fuckin’ Cremieux as a lede:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EDKw7KyonrvskqZ7o/the-american-people-really-hate-data-centers
Here’s an example
Transmission Lines Are The Control Group
Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.
Transmission lines polling remarkably close to coal plants, when the coal plants actively not only cook the planet but poison the people around them, is crazy. This one absolutely is straight up moral panic.
Well yeah transmission lines are fucking ugly, and most people, when asked if they want something fucking ugly built near them will say “heck no”. Sure, imagining that transmissions lines cause cancer is false, but it’s an easy thing to believe when the people building the lines are energy companies, who people hate because they’re expensive and cause wildfires. Also I bet dollars to donuts that Zvi doesn’t live near a transmission line.
He “knows” transmissions lines are good, because they get power to his home, and he figures because he wants power, it’s good, and everyone should just be happy to have a high-voltage line near their home because that brings him power. It’s remarkably un-empathetic.
But let’s take a step back. Isn’t opposition to data centers good for preventing AGI? NO, it’s not, it’s Luddism! You have to accept data centers because they are good for capitalism now, but IF they start to produce the Robot God, THEN they’re bad.
It’s an incoherent position and it’s so fun to watch these people turn themselves into pretzels over it.
zvi citing a self described “jewish nazi” almost right at the top is already impressive, but there’s a chaser in that that guy’s post starts with him saying he’s being paid to write this by an ai company
Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.
Dude hasn’t been around. I’ve noticed quite a bit of anxiety around even terminal-supply transmission lines adjacent to new-build neighborhoods in wildfire risk zones. I’ll agree that this is irrational; the big problem is people were persuaded to buy a house in a fire zone because a big landowner and a developer wanted to cash out some marginal land, but there is a degree of actual rationality here. People feel that a big, most likely the biggest, chunk of their personal wealth is at risk. Calling that “straight up moral panic” is ignoring how real people actually rationally calculate risks, and ignoring potential opportunities to help them improve, if that’s really what you want to do.
But we already knew that Zvi was a disingenuous idiot, so I digress.
RIP XCancel, it was good while it lasted
On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
I got so much use out of xcancel. I feel bad now that I never donated €5 or something
RIP XCancel you let me look at the abyss without giving Muskrat my money
So, this is something a little different, and I almost think it’s worth a top level post. It’s not directly about our friends the Rationalists, the current delusional billionare vortex infesting the US government with religious psychosis, or any of that. It’s an analysis of some collaborative fiction and what it tells us about the zeitgeist behind the mythological core of singulatarian/endless-progress thought.
Anyone here ever hear of the Orion’s Arm universe collaborative worldbuilding project? https://www.orionsarm.com/
I, for one, love it. Single weirdest and most expansive scifi worldbuilding thing ever, I think. It seems to have been founded by some old-school extropian types around the turn of the millennium. It is bonkers. Click through links on pages, start here, do a random walk: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b170f9e0941 .
It’s ultimately structured kind of like the SCP wiki but from before wikis were a thing, an utterly enormous interlinked compendium of encyclopedia style articles about a 10,000+ year future history of the post-singularity “Terragen sphere” expanding outwards at the speed of light. A few key figures have exerted editorial control to enforce an approximate history and a set of core ideas to keep it coherent. There have been retcons at multiple points to bring things into coherence, some of which I will get to later because they actually tell you something fascinating.
Rather than point out my favorite parts of it though, going through it, I have noticed something.
Early work was typically extropian-optimistic and exuberant. Immortal Transhumans and uplifted animals and ahuman AIs and robots expanding through the universe near the speed of light and diversifying and building interweaving empires, wormhole networks. Six successive singularities that become available to intelligent systems that pass the previous one, each one of which renders the intellect past it incomperehensible to those at lower levels, with the highest ones dependant on multiple stars converted into computronium linked by wormholes into massive processors.
But you can tell the work is a palimpsest. Newer stuff superimposed over older. Retcons occasionally not quite erasing the old. And you can tell the whole project has been slowly slowly taking a turn. Early work is SUPER extropian, SUPER libertarian, and SUPER weirdo-esoteric. Only people forged in 1980s Extropianism would invent the Tranquility Calendar as the core timekeeping method of the project, time measured from the apollo 11 landing with months of the year named after scientists and philosophers. The 12 greatest high-singularity powers are literally called the Sephirotic empires. It makes no bones about its exuberant transcendant idea of progress and expansion.
But something strange has happened over time. Over time, the authors seem to have realized the fundamental contradiction of a world in which this endless expansion and consumption and rebuilding of the universe in your image is possible. People call it the Fermi paradox but its not a paradox, its an observation: if it were possible to expand through the universe, why hasnt something already expanded here? Early work had more aliens, more high weirdness that was not terragen. But I can track down different examples of the galactic map - it has narrowed down the map of ‘high energy emission civilizations’ (things exuberantly using the energy of whole stars like the terragen sphere) from many to 2 in our galaxy, and the whole universe is now mostly ‘dead’ - most other galaxies do not have high energy civilizations, and there are multiple ancient ‘optimized galaxies’ that are stagnant, things expanding like the terragen sphere visible over cosmological distances are super rare and they even saw one vanish. Works involving aliens have started taking on an almost lovecraftian tone, evidence of erased ruins on planets only visible in vague impressions in the mantle, an ancient slow-liviging civilization with evidence of terrible secrets from millions of years in the past that they refuse to talk about or risk terrible consequences (the Muuh Taboo), civilizations that dont vanish ossifying into something that does not expand like their optimistic early ideas. Factions looking at all of this, going dark, and launching stealth seeds at the speed of light to other galaxies because they think the Terragen sphere is doomed.
With all this, recent retcons and recent writings are starting to take on a tinge of almost cosmic horror. Here you have this optimistic exuberent explosion of posthumanity, looking out into a universe that is otherwise almost dead and full of strange old things and wondering why the rest of the universe doesn’t look like them, what is going to go wrong to destroy them just like must happen to others.
This trajectory seems intrinsic to any singulatarian, endless-progress ideology. It always has to come to grips with the fact that the universe just doesn’t look like the kind of place where their ideas would actually work, and they have to posit weird things - the Great Filter, Mass-Effect style reapers, super weird transubstantiation out of this universe - to keep it going. All this optimism must eventually always collapse, into paranoia and despair or insanity. I find this FASCINATING.
The quirkiness of the Tranquility Calendar is mildly beautiful, between the second man on the moon getting snubbed with the every four year leap day (which for no good reason still happens around Feb 29!), [I guess Collins gets even more snubbed by not appearing at all] to the more diverse than expected list of honored “scientists/scholars”, until you realize the main reason is just to keep the ABCD naming pattern for the months.
I mentioned the calendar because it really captures the tone of the explicitly Extropian-derived writing of the early days. Which seems like it has to always break or change upon contact with reality.
I don’t necessarily think the idea of a past great filter means paranoia/despair/insanity, the Lovecraftian horror element mainly enters in when you try to reconcile ideas about transhuman expansion throughout the universe with space opera style visions of intelligent aliens being reasonably common. It might just be that the laws of nature make it very unlikely that star systems/planets suitable for the evolution of intelligent life will ever arise, and unlikely that evolution will hit upon various milestones even if the planet is suitable. People have made speculative arguments about such unlikeness for reasons that are not primarily about the Fermi paradox, like the “Rare Earth” book by a geologist/paleontologist and an astronomer. It’s also sort of a natural extension of certain kinds of anthropic reasoning that our own existence shouldn’t count as evidence against Rare Earth style ideas.
As an aside, I wish there was some sort of terminological distinction between “transhumanism” as a form of belief in/advocacy for the imminent possibility of “superintelligent AI” or “enhanced” humans (a la Kurzweil, or what the rationalists really want as soon as we ‘solve alignment’), vs. SETI style speculations about the typical fate of intelligent life in the universe and the idea that this might tend to involve a major role for AI and self-replicating machines in societies that don’t destroy themselves (for example the speculations by J.D. Bernal, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, none of which presupposed that it would happen anytime soon or that there would be any sudden ‘intelligence explosion’ leading to immediate doom/paradise). The latter I find interesting to think about (and I like some SF stories set in worlds where this is true like Banks’ Culture stories or Egan’s Diaspora) but these days it’s kind of tainted by association with the former.
I recently re-read Accelerando after more than fifteen years. I appreciated it so much more this time around. Me being me I particularly appreciated that apparently the default state of a G-type star transitioning into a post-tech state was it being overrun with selfish replicators and grinding down into malthusian competition, but a few apparently underwent an evolutionary transition to higher levels of organization…
MAPLE sounds kind of Maoist or like a printed-out email about an atheist professor on a fundamentalist church’s pinboard:
In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE), a writer named Sam Kriss came to MAPLE. In the last hours of his visit, Soryu Forall guided the community in a workshop on mindful decision making.
Mid-way through the workshop, Sam Kriss shifted the topic of focus from decision making to structures of domination, e.g. hierarchies, with a particular emphasis given to the lens of Marxism. He asked: “What creates mechanisms of domination?” and “In environments [e.g. MAPLE] where people are trying to clear out the attachment to thinking, are there fewer structures of domination?”
To the first question, the community answered: “Attachment to thinking.” Vimoksha engaged with Sam in detail on this to open a way for him to see how structures of domination are caused by mind.
To the second question, the community answered: “There are fewer structures of domination here than in the mainstream.”
As these points were made and as Sam Kriss was beginning to engage with the points more directly, the community sat in agreement and clarity, happy with these teachings.
As these points were made, I felt a sense of appreciation and celebration for this community of leader-sages-in-training.
Kriss, who is British, has interviewed Rationalists and is the kind of loud feminist whose Wikipedia page would have a section titled “sexual assault allegations” if he had one. It is possible that MAPLE and LessWrong evolved independently but I have a feeling that Soryu is leaving out some lines from his intellectual CV.
Edit / the chela who published a parody video about the abuse allegations wrote “I spent years moving through the communities that publicly claim to be addressing the destruction of life on Earth and the disconnection between people. I spent time in Silicon Valley, in effective altruism, and in adjacent rationalist and existential-risk circles, starting companies and consulting and looking for the place where these problems were being met at the root.” The chela is an Internal Family Systems coach which was popular at CFAR. Last two links are to YouTube.
Good lord it’s a wannabe advertising executive trying to write a Zen fable
In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE)
You came up with your own calendar system centered around your institution and you want to tell me you’re not a cult???
Mario Draghi, Italy’s (and the EU’s) éminence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uh… Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europe’s economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/
Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi Lütke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.
That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.
definitely want this guy to be an important part of overhauling europe’s economy
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/leopold-aschenbrenners-hedge-fund-is-facing-steep-ai-losses.html
The fucking Collisons again! I guess they’ve given up on building their own city in Northern California now they realise they can just awe politicians into giving them money and doing what they want.
The BT Young Scientist Competition was a mistake
Patrick Collison
Boy this fella sure gets around. I’m sure he dutifully attends all the meetings, too; a high-level operator like him can’t just be an open checkbook available to be bilked by any old troglodyte
Google is seemingly experimenting with replacing their help articles with LLM text.
I was searching for how to use multiple profiles on Chrome and found https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop in the search results, which used to look like a normal useful help article, however it’s now been replaced by an LLM that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load, will randomly just refuse to answer the question, and produces significantly worse output than the existing (now inaccessible to me) technical writer written article.
This may be being A/B tested, so if you can’t reproduce it here is one of the worse results I got:
slop
Here the “source” it gave me was the same URL it was hosted on. When I clicked through to it it just gave me different slop.
I’ve seen some bad decisions in the AI mania, but “let’s take our entire corpus of professionally written technical writing and replace it with slop” managed to surprise me.
LOLmarchy allows all users to eacalate to root.
I can’t believe millions in funding, a bunch of vide-coded bash scripts, and a desire to promote fascist ideology has resulted in a trash fire.
Wouldn’t you be so grateful that your modular repairable upgradeable laptop that you probably sunk at least $2k into, and probably plan on owning for the long term, has specifically funded support for this steaming pile of crap?
edit:
As AI is increasingly producing high severity CVEs against core infrastructure, security needs to be top of mind for all developers, but especially authors of distributions targeted at developers. Lately there have been innumerable reports of developer machines being compromised and their access used to contaminate the software supply chain or exploit production systems. Developers are high-value targets because of the level of access they are often granted. Developer machines typically disable security guardrails for convenience, store credentials in plain-text dotfiles, and accumulate access to systems. This must change.
I’ll microwave a surplus Funko Pop doll if this paragraph wasn’t cut-n-pasted straight from chatbot output
It might be overoptimistic, but I think the fashware problem may solve itself.
As expected, bespoke twee “coding forge” Sourcehut has decided, like Codeberg, that LLM slop is not welcome. Just as expected, this has made the promptfondlers absolutely beside themselves, and they can’t but help Streisanding the service on lobste.rs
https://lobste.rs/s/iqgrsx/changes_sourcehut_s_terms_service
N.B. Sourcehut is a paid service. The idea that a young naive open sourcer would just wander in, set up their repos and then be hounded out for innocently using Claude is ludicrous, but this is the best victim scenario SimonW and friends can come up with.
You’d think LLM enthusiasts would be content with just outcompeting everyone with their superior
prompt engineeringagentic coding harnesses but apparently time must be taken out from productivity to tell Drew DeVault he will never become Sergey Brin if he continues on this misguided path.it’s been a day and as expected some really shitty takes have surfaced among the comments
I especially enjoy the person stating they willingly paid money to Drew Devault and are surprised and upset he made decisions they disagree with.
(I respect Drew as a person but he’s probably one of the most opinionated people online. To expect him to just take your money and cater to your every whim is… naive)
Between doing marketing for OpenAI and Anthropic whilst pretending to be “impartial” and wasting massive amounts of time and energy having clankers generate twee pictures of pelicans on bicycles, I thought SimonW would be too busy to even notice this story.
He is responding to the Thiel-signal going up against the sky - there is anti-AI sentiment afoot!
I am personally deeply offended that an independent vegan restaurant in my town recently banned meat eaters from bringing in their burgers from next door and passively aggressively eating them in the restaurant whilst making eye contact with the other customers. Whilst I appreciate that there are a huge number of burger joints that cater to meat eaters, I am troubled by the idea that a young fledgling meat eater who accidentally stumbled into the vegan restaurant with a double quarter pounder and bacon meal under his arm could be berated and asked to leave. That might upset him and put him off eating burgers which would be a terrible outcome. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here. I’m no carnivore. I don’t work for the beef industry. In fact, I am an omnivore and I have a friend who sometimes eats salads. I’m just saying that if little Timmy wants to enjoy a burger in the middle of a private space owned by people that hate burgers, that should be his god-given right.
*This post is about indie code forges banning slop
I would prefer they turn them off
Maybe this is just me being slow to put things together, but why exactly is that startup for AI cheating overlay for zoom job interviews now putting out workplace / startup humor shorts? They seem to have paid a host of clippers too. Ling Long is everywhere. Did the AI thing not work out for cluely?
I’m pretty sure this kind of marketing has been their thing from the start
Hadn’t seen this discussed previously and/or I missed it, but I guess this is one way they’ll juice metrics for their IPO.
yolo mode for all will certainly get that avg token burn up.
Anthropic announced earlier in the week that they were going to set the default mode on Claude Code to auto, that same week, not wasting any time. What that means is, as you build the thing you’re building with Claude Code, instead of stopping at various points (many, many, many points) and asking your permission to do things, it’ll just do them and maybe tell you about them later.
links back to https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/anthropic-is-turning-claude-codes-auto-mode-on-by-default/
Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review — in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps that’s because “manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.”)
Which links back to https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code
Auto mode is designed to balance users’ desire not to be interrupted with a system that helps avoid harmful actions: instead of prompts, it routes each tool call through a classifier targeted at blocking actions that are irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your environment. When the classifier blocks something, Claude usually finds a safer way to proceed on its own or asks you directly for the go-ahead; if it can’t make progress—three blocks in a row, or twenty across a session—Claude Code falls back to manual approvals.
Fucking just use the classifier with manual mode then instead of flooding people in cursed skinner loops with garbage permission popups. This isn’t anything special to yolo or anthropic. It’s like all the tech industry learned from Windows Vista or the EU cookie law was the dark patterns.
Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review — in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps that’s because “manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.”)
having just yesterday had the displeasure of reading a PR (just shy of 2000 lines) made by Fable 5 (which the promptfondler felt it was most necessary to be specific about), a definite real other problem is simply the literal fucking overwhelm resulting from the slop tsunami
also “harmful” actions sure is doing a lot of legwork there
Yeaaaaah. And in the end, no-one can be bothered to read the slop, and everything ships broken.
I’d be curious to see how they defined “harmful” in their test, since it looks like Claude code’s technically-not-yolo mode is looking for “actions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environment” which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in “your environment”.
And yes, I’m sure that the fact that the flow of operations they’re outline will massively increase the number of times that the system automatically retries things, this increasing token usage, is going to be fully accounted for when they review the financials on how many tokens people are paying for.
I’d be curious to see how they defined “harmful” in their test, since it looks like Claude code’s technically-not-yolo mode is looking for “actions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environment” which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in “your environment”.
I think more than half the issues would be solved with a well placed
git stashand the rest .And yes, I’m sure that the fact that the flow of operations they’re outline will massively increase the number of times that the system automatically retries things, this increasing token usage, is going to be fully accounted for when they review the financials on how many tokens people are paying for.
I was talking with a few friends last weekend who work at different companies, all of us have been getting a lot more trouble getting databricks and AWS spot instances over the last month. I think letting yolo mode of the leash means that they’re slamming other systems also that normal people need for boring non-ai jobs. I just need to pull a sales report ffs. Its a literal god damn bot net.
I really need to pick Simulacra and Simulation back up off the reading pile
