- 9 Posts
- 102 Comments
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Tokenmaxxing: “How much did you spend in tokens?” — CEO of tokensEnglish
0·17 days agoHow much does he think an engineer spends on CAD tools, anyway? Altium is like, what, $2500 / year? Very “how much can a banana cost”.
It’s all capital costs for tools, pretty much, anyway, maybe CAD should start charging per net lmao.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Claude Code rate limits: Anthropic AI squeezes the customersEnglish
0·25 days agoOh they are going to charge per token for github copilot? That thing is a money waste for everyone, I’m pretty sure. I get a mix of inane mildly good suggestions, irrelevant stuff, and an occasional suggestion of super evil sabotage. Due to mild OCD about issues, I tend to have to fix said mildly good suggestions, but from the objective perspective that nitpickery is not worth it, everything was fine without, we had compiler warnings, coverity, etc.
edit: the difference being that the old stuff was deterministic and you just ran it on the whole codebase and had it pass. Unlike gh copilot that’ll just make up new shit. And as for the times it caught some bad bug that you made… add more tests instead.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•GitHub Copilot puts ads into pull requestsEnglish
0·2 months agoI wouldn’t be too surprised if they really don’t, they’re just advertising the advertising lol.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI coding is so good … where are the performance numbers?English
0·4 months agoIt makes every bad programmer into a 10x bad programmer (equivalent to 10 bad programmers).
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Vibe nuclear — let’s use AI shortcuts on reactor safety!English
0·6 months agoI think it’s not very difficult to construct a really shitty small reactor that is horrendously expensive per watt. Can probably be built in a year if you get rid of NRC and just half ass it completely.
I mean, Demon Core was a small reactor. You pretty much have to do a lot of work to ensure you won’t create a small reactor when a truckload of fresh fuel falls into a river.
What’s difficult is making a safe reactor that is actually making electricity at somewhat reasonable price per watt.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Vibe nuclear — let’s use AI shortcuts on reactor safety!English
0·6 months agoNuclear already makes 9% of world’s electricity.
diz@awful.systemsOPto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Cory Doctorow: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nighEnglish
1·8 months agoShorting the market requires precise timing. Being early is just as bad as being wrong.
Exactly. It is not enough to know that a company stock will go down. It is necessary to know that it will never go higher than a certain point above the current value (not even momentarily) before it goes down. If you have a fuckload of other people’s money you can just keep double-or-nothing-ing it, that’s what banks were doing to gamestop, except that this can sometimes cause the stock to go even higher (a short squeeze), which would make you (who doesn’t actually have a fuckload of other people’s money) lose all of your money.
edit: also the other concerning possibility is that stock prices can go up simply due to the dollar going down.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Microsoft Copilot AI tries faces instead of a pearly blobEnglish
5·8 months agoThe only thing that is allowed to tell good art from slop is the AI which needs to consume good art and not slop.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Peter Thiel Antichrist lecture: We asked guests what the hell it isEnglish
5·8 months agoIts spelled “masterdebating”.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)English
3·8 months agoHyping up AI is bad, so it’s alright to call someone a promptfondler for fondling prompt.
I mostly see “clanker” in reference to products of particularly asinine promptfondling: spambot “agents” that post and even respond to comments, LLM-based scam calls, call center replacement, etc.
These bots don’t derive their wrongness from the wrongness of promptfondling, these things are part of why promptfondling is wrong.
Doesn’t clanker come from some Star Wars thing where they use it like a racial slur against robots, who are basically sapient things with feelings within its fiction? Being based on “cracker” would be alright,
I assume the writers wanted to portray the robots as unfairly oppressed, while simultaneously not trivializing actual oppression of actual people (the way “wireback” would have, or I dunno “cogger” or something).
but the way I see it used is mostly white people LARPing a time and place when they could say the N-word with impunity.
Well yeah that would indeed be racist.
I’m seeing a lot of people basically going “I hate naggers, these naggers are ruining the neighborhood, go to the back of the bus nagger, let’s go lynch that nagger” and thinking that’s funny because haha it’s not the bad word technically.
That just seems like an instance of good ol anti person racism / people trying to offend other people while not particularly giving a shit about the bots one way or the other.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)English
4·8 months agowe should recognize the difference
The what now? You don’t think there’s a lot of homophobia that follows “castigating someone for what they do” format, or you think its a lot less bad according to some siskinded definition of what makes slurs bad that somehow manages to completely ignore anything that actually makes slurs bad?
I think that’s the difference between “promptfondler” and “clanker”. The latter is clearly inspired by bigoted slurs.
Such as… “cracker”? Given how the law protects but doesn’t bind AI, that seems oddly spot on.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•If AI coding is so good … where are the little apps?English
21·8 months agoNote also that genuine labor saving stuff like say the Unity engine with Unity asset store, did result in an absolute flood of shovelware on Steam back in the mid 2010s (although that probably had as much having to do with Steam FOMO-ing about the possibility of not letting the next Minecraft onto Steam).
As a thought experiment imagine an unreliable labor saving tool that speeds up half* of the work 20x, and slows down the other half 3x. You would end up 1.525 times slower.
The fraction of work (not by lines but by hours) that AI helps with is probably less than 50% , and the speed up is probably worse than 20x.
Slowdown could be due to some combination of
- Trying to do it with AI until you sink too much time into that and then doing it yourself (>2x slowdown here).
- Being slower at working with the code you didn’t write.
- It being much harder to debug code you didn’t write.
- Plagiarism being inferior to using open source libraries.
footnote: “half” as measured by the pre-tool hours.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)English
51·8 months agoAnd yet you are the one person here who is equating Mexicans and Black people with machines. People with disabilities, too, huh. Lemme guess next time we’re pointing and laughing at how some hyped-up “PhD level chatbot” can’t count the Es in dingleberry, you’ll be likening that to ableism.
When you’re attempting to humanize machines by likening the insults against machines to insults against people, this does more to dehumanize people than to humanize machines.
edit: Also I never seen and couldn’t find instances of “wireback” being used outside pro-bot sentiments and hand-wringing about how anti bot people are akhtually racist. Had you, or is it all second or third hand? It’s entirely possible that it is something botlickers (can I say that or is that not OK?) came up with.
edit: especially considering that these “anti-robot slurs” seem to originate in scifi stories where the robots are being oppressed, whereby the author is purposefully choosing that slur to undermine the position of anti robot characters in the story. It may well be that for the same reason that author has in choosing these slurs, they are rarely used (in the earnest).
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)English
91·9 months agoTo be honest, hand wringing over “clanker” being a slur and all that strikes me as increasingly equivalent to hand wringing over calling nazis nazis. The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I’d prefer the new so called slur to be “chatgpt”, genericized and negative connotated.
If you are in the US, we’ve had our health experts replaced with AI, see the “MAHA report”. We’re one moron AI-pilled president away from a less fun version of Skynet, whereby a chatbot talks the president into launching nukes and kills itself along with a few billion people.
Complaints about dehumanizing these things is even more meritless than a CEO complaining that someone is dehumanizing Exxon (which is at least made of people).
These things are extension of those in power, not some marginalized underdogs like cute robots in scifi. As an extension of corporations, it already got more rights than any human - imagine what would happen to a human participant in a criminal conspiracy to commit murder and contrast that with what happens when a chatbot talks someone into a crime.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•SoftBank needs OpenAI to stay alive — no matter whatEnglish
3·9 months agoI think this is spot on. I had that same thing happen at my former employer, which bought a lot of entirely pointless startups in 2010s instead of investing in core business equipment and processes.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•AI brings huge enterprise efficiencies! Except in making moneyEnglish
7·9 months agoEven to the extent that they are “prompting it wrong” it’s still on the AI companies for calling this shit “AI”. LLMs fundamentally do not even attempt to do cognitive work (the way a chess engine does by iterating over possible moves).
Also, LLM tools do not exist. All you can get is a sales demo for the company stock (the actual product being sold), built to impress how close to AGI the company is. You have to creatively misuse these things to get any value out of them.
The closest they get to tools is “AI coding”, but even then, these things plagiarize code you don’t even want plagiarized (because its MIT licensed and you’d rather keep up with upstream fixes).
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•DEFRA says: delete your emails to … save water?!English
5·9 months agoBut just hear me out: if you delete your old emails, you won’t be roped into paying for extra space, and Microsoft or Google will have a little less money to buy water with!
Switch to Linux and avoid using any Microsoft products to conserve even more water.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Cybersecurity ‘red teams’ to UK government: AI is rubbishEnglish
16·9 months agoThe problem is that to start breaking encryption you need quantum computing with a bunch of qubits as originally defined and not “our lawyer signed off on the claim that we have 1000 qubits”.
diz@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Hack a smart home with a calendar invite! And Google GeminiEnglish
4·9 months agoI wonder if the weird tags are even strictly necessary, or if a sufficiently strongly worded and repetitive message would suffice.

Oh, by far. There’s only 80 decimal places in that at most.
It got to be a quantum sweatshop: a quantum computer for AGI (a guy instead)