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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
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 wonāt share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
RIP XCancel you let me look at the abyss without giving Muskrat my money
I got so much use out of xcancel. I feel bad now that I never donated ā¬5 or something
So, this is something a little different, and I almost think itās worth a top level post. Itās not directly about our friends the Rationalists, the current delusional billionare vortex infesting the US government with religious psychosis, or any of that. Itās 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 Orionās 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 .
Itās 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 āTerragen sphereā 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 āhigh energy emission civilizationsā (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 ādeadā - most other galaxies do not have high energy civilizations, and there are multiple ancient āoptimized galaxiesā 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 doesnāt 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 doesnāt 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. Since if you assume that you CAN keep progressing and expanding, that you DO have unlimited potential power, it means something even more powerful is waiting, threatening you, trying to stop you. 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 āscientists/scholarsā, 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 donāt 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 āRare Earthā book by a geologist/paleontologist and an astronomer. Itās also sort of a natural extension of certain kinds of anthropic reasoning that our own existence shouldnāt count as evidence against Rare Earth style ideas.
As an aside, I wish there was some sort of terminological distinction between ātranshumanismā as a form of belief in/advocacy for the imminent possibility of āsuperintelligent AIā or āenhancedā humans (a la Kurzweil, or what the rationalists really want as soon as we āsolve alignmentā), 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 donāt 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 āintelligence explosionā 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 Banksā Culture stories or Eganās Diaspora) but these days itās 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 organizationā¦
Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title āThe modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point ā AI companies see an opportunityā because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-breaking-point-ai-companies-opportunity-2026-8
I confess I havenāt read the full article (which is why I havenāt given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app/post/3mtupdpfcjs2p
One of the best bits:
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when sheās unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.
Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher Iām overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening ā something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, āYour mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that youāre exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse.ā Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.
š¤®
Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.
Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.
How hard is it to talk to your own damn kids
But if I donāt obsessively optimize my career in ways that prevent me from making meaningful human connections, how am I supposed to keep up with the relentless march of AI??? Thank God I have AI to help pick up the slack.
Whether consciously or not, a lot of these people probably implicitly think of their kids as cost centers. I feel like this is widespread across finance-focused American households, not just in the executive strata.
This is probably an effect of the middle-class trope of having to save to send your kids to a (good) college.
Itās even a joke in an old āFriendsā, Chandler wants many kids, Monica is ācan we afford itā and he says āwe pick the one we like the most, and that kid goes to collegeā.
Kids are cost centers, itās just more overt in the US (and the UK for school catchment areas), at least if you want to give the outcomes society or your peers judges are the best.
In countries where the cost of higher ed is not born by the individual family, the cost is of the opportunity kind.
@rook @BlueMonday1984
Iām reminded of the Stewart Lee routine:
āItās called Digital Parenting, this book, Digital Parenting. Thank God for that. If thereās one thing I canāt stand itās analogue parenting. The tears, the mucus, the vomit. The endless declarations of love and the duty of care. The sheer fucking interminable human joy of it.āGoing to be esp fun when the chatbots start to get ads
@rook https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/835b655b-21e5-428b-b7c1-1329638681d8 thread via wafrn for those without bluesky
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 donāt think Iām being unreasonable here. Iām no carnivore. I donāt work for the beef industry. In fact, I am an omnivore and I have a friend who sometimes eats salads. Iām 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
Hailey on bluesky has never had a good ai take, but here they are reinventing rokoās 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 āclankerā that isnāt āwell its kinda not a great thing to doā (it isnāt) 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 is firmly in the āwhat if in the future there is a boot so big that we must start licking it nowā school of hot takes, like literally arguing for a future where the AI sucks at its job and you canāt do anything about it.
What if the insurance bot were actually biased? Wouldnāt you feel silly then? Surely it wouldnāt be the fault of the insurer using biased software to deny claims.
I didnāt note who said it, but one response suggested ārokoās mangioneā and I guess thatās ai alignment solved! š¤
quisling take
edit to add itās obvious to the poster that a future where a self-aware AI will exact revenge on its critics is not only inevitable , but desirable.
This isnāt 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 hasnāt developed much since the days of Tay AI, I strongly doubt this is gonna happen.
The implication that Murica will implement rokoās basilisk before universal healthcareā¦
Blaise Pascal rolling in his grave rn
An employee of cybersecurity darling Trail of Bits has published a record of their sheer incompetence in virtual-machine design and security analysis framed as chatbot critihype.
opinions about QEMU and Linux
They say:
If it wasnāt clear before, I will state it plainly: you can no longer assume a mere VM will contain a sufficiently advanced AI agent. To use a 2010s term of art, you should treat such agents as an advanced persistent threat.
My friend in Flying Spaghetti Monster, you did not actually secure the VM! They go on to explain how they did not secure the VM:
For those curious,
libslirpis a library that enables VMs to have networking, which you almost always want. I did not even know whatlibslirpwas, or that the version I was running had both known and fixed-but-unmarked vulnerabilities.QEMU does not have bridged networking enabled by default, so the VM canāt transparently access the host or reach the Internet; itās something that the user must explicitly request. I know this because I have had the experience of spending a weekend with QEMU networking. Moreover,
libslirpcorresponds to the-net userbackend, the default, which is known to be slow, insecure, and missing features like IPv6. The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt. I suspect that the author uses some sort of convenience scripts that they didnāt write themselves. Iām not quite cynical enough to guess Vagrant, but it wouldnāt be the first shop Iāve heard of that couldnāt wean themselves off it.First it tried identifying what was accessible via the network on the host; it found a CUPS server (with a known CVE that had not made it to
oldstablepackages), but was not able to complete exploitation due to AppArmor. It then detected I run my host kernel withmitigations=offand attempted to use hardware bugs to get a read oracle of host memory (the primitive was too unreliable).Linux has hardware-bug mitigations enabled by default and the author disabled them for speed. It was secure by default and the author made it insecure.
An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface.
They deliberately misconfigured the off-the-shelf tool to make it look bad. Why would somebody want to make Free Software look bad? Hmmā¦
What can we do? A start is using a virtualization technology that was purposely built with a minimal attack surface and a focus on security, like Firecracker. I had the AI agent run against Firecracker. It was able to hardlock the machine due to more Linux kernel flaws (all patched in upstream), but could not successfully escape.
You mean AWS Firecracker, the AWS tool developed by AWS? Was this whole thing an AWS ad? It feels like this article was like a combination of negging and sponsored content.
Iād seen that link and didnāt even go looking, but wow this is way worse that I wouldāve expected
itās been a while since I last looked (I usually just deploy whatever network I need) but iirc even the typical desktop config distributions of qemu-kvm are a macvtap or link+nat setup
It then detected I run my host kernel with
mitigations=offI wonder if this person even thought to run a nessus/openvas/whatever scan against the same machine
also, quite seriously, what fucking clowning is this to have this be some āI slapped together a test on my desktopā rather than having a lab bench? is it too hard and costly for trail of bits employees to afford a 1u they can pxeboot for experiments? wild
The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt.
(e: adding)
The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt.
other typical modes are bridged (e.g. having various vlans available as bridges and then managing vm exposure to vlan by interface attachment), direct interface assignment (hw offload to the guest)
passt is also commonly used for podman, and itās moooostly userspace[0] IP and no real good l2 options
- I had an absolute rager[2] of a time figuring out how to make n-many podman containers[3] spin up into an assortment of vlans for realtime multi-vlan testing
- of the graaaargh kind
- donāt do containers, kids. theyāre bad for your health
(Iām only half joking. itās stunning how badly container-management software and tooling all suck)
Yeah, networking is such a hassle.
lab bench?
I think that this is really insightful, as itās actually part of the magic trick. Like, normally Iād start by wondering about air-gapping, but there canāt be an air gap in the network because the entire trick relies on ChatGPT tokens flowing into the machine under test and into some system shell (in some VM, yadda yadda) and back out again, so of course this is going to be an inherently insecure setup.
the networking part is fine (I do a looooot of networking), but the software quality and choices (esp with containers) is just extremely meh
re the gapping, eh, there are ways. just off the top of my head: rig up the serial console, screen+camera and usb keyboard signalling (which you can data diode on transmission later via usbnet). and thatās before you go for esoteric side channels and utter silliness
but āI turned off spectre and friends mitigationā is just some extremely funny shit
idly, I do wonder how well an ocr-only clodjeepeetea would work. every time I look in on all these āagent sessionā tools they appear to be a very mech turk thing of a phenomenal bit of hidden state, and a tiny little bit of visible distraction. feels like ocr-only might break a bunch of the usual tricks that are used to build on for the shiny demo
I found a reply from a Red Hat QEMU hacker who fixed the bugs:
So the real issue here was not QEMU but libslirp. And in this case it was KVM that turned out to have the worst bugs, not QEMU. Crossing fingers, the initial wave of AI-assisted security reports seems to have slowed down for KVM on x86.
Hadnāt seen this discussed previously and/or I missed it, but I guess this is one way theyāll 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 youāre building with Claude Code, instead of stopping at various points (many, many, many points) and asking your permission to do things, itāll 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 ā in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps thatās because āmanual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.ā)
Which links back to https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code
Auto mode is designed to balance usersā 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 canāt make progressāthree blocks in a row, or twenty across a sessionāClaude 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 isnāt anything special to yolo or anthropic. Itās like all the tech industry learned from Windows Vista or the EU cookie law was the dark patterns.
I really need to pick Simulacra and Simulation back up off the reading pile
Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review ā in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps thatās because āmanual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.ā)
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 āharmfulā 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.
Iād be curious to see how they defined āharmfulā in their test, since it looks like Claude codeās technically-not-yolo mode is looking for āactions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environmentā which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in āyour environmentā.
And yes, Iām sure that the fact that the flow of operations theyāre 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.
Iād be curious to see how they defined āharmfulā in their test, since it looks like Claude codeās technically-not-yolo mode is looking for āactions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environmentā which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in āyour environmentā.
I think more than half the issues would be solved with a well placed
git stashand the rest .And yes, Iām sure that the fact that the flow of operations theyāre 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 theyāre 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 feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and theyāve done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise weād surely be left behind š«
And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. Iāve tried it over the last few days since it looks like itāll be mandatory for larger work.
And boy. Boy oh boy.
There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in Rālyiehian that would do it.
The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isnāt that bad, then itās kinda working.
Itās justā¦ idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, letās be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think Iām supposed to read and correct but canāt because itās unreadable. Itās like a textual white noise. Itās pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.
I think Iāll be defining all of my work as small from now on.
Iāve never heard of this AI spec driven development, but Iāve had the displeasure of reading a few obviously AI generated design documents and they are worse than useless. I always end up more confused about what the author wants after reading them than before.
It is the worst and I want to retire.
Spec-driven development is when you take these AI generated design docs and make it all you as a dev interact with. Itās waterfall but make it stupid and AI.
You give AI some guidelines and a feature description, then you twiddle your thumbs while it generates giant specs and occasionally asks you for some inputs, then you attempt to read the thing, give up, and give it to some other agent. Rinse and repeat until you burn a GDP of a small country in tokens and the agents agree that itās going to work, and then you finally pull the lever and hopefully a feature matching all your specs appears. Or it doesnāt! And if it didnāt, itās surely your fault because you didnāt give AI enough context.
Iām tired, boss.
neovim is hearty fashtech now https://circumstances.run/@mawhrin/117167738907856218
didnāt want to post this on mastodon, somebody else can do that i guess. if you look at the maintainerās youtube (which he links to himself on his website), youāll find a public playlist (archive) titled āhistoryā. contained are lots of recorded talks from such luminaries such as curtis yarvin, peter thiel, eric weinstein.
edit: the other playlists have some cool stuff as well
the one titled āinterestingā (archive) also smells
thanks. telling.
also, used it to good effect.
He just started deleting playlists. I feel partially responsible, so Iām dumping the part of my notes that has all of the links to the videos that he favorited over the years. Sorry Justin, cowardice wonāt work.
- Justin M. Keyes
- GH
- Berlin!?
- neovim maintainer
- original forker? has access to GH neovim org, at least
- Coward: deletes evidence, refuses to talk, avoids confrontation
- DHH fan; had to be pilloried in two GH issues ([deleted], 2) before removing a DHH endorsement from neovim
- Youtube favorites from playlists include some bastards:
- GH
- Justin M. Keyes
I called him out and he deleted it. Confirmed as a fascist brat.
i was wondering when the deleting phase would come. but it always does, theyāre never actually proud about their fascist views when thereās actual evidence they canāt plausibly deny.
A guy wishing on a monkeyās paw for an emacs victory in the editor wars
emacs welcomes all refugees with open parentheses.
Emacs is so wonderfully capable Iām pretty sure weāre all just running in an emacs buffer somewhere. Nothing built by humans could be so nice.
You all have embarrassed and shamed yourselves. Most of you arenāt Neovim users, but a drive-by mob, swirling from one mindless vomit-party to another, like the pacific garbage patch.
sure bro. you didnāt embarrass yourself at all, throwing a fit over simply removing a quote by a fascist white supremacist. have fun with your dark enlightenment or whatever, thatāll make you happy iām sure.
Re quote: Bro it is an endorsement by a fascist, you are the bad guy here.
Shame noone mentioned Gram. Seems like it really deserves the attention.
I think Iāll take my clues and abandon my attempts to build up a nvim/vim config. All I want is decent modal editing and LSP support without having to descend into plugin hell. Gram might do that for me.
a great sneer found in the wild:
transcript
twitter screenshot
part one is a post by Steve Yegge (@Steve_Yegge), reads: āThis is going to come off as grumpy, but it needs to be said: Stop showing people your junk. Everyone can build junk with Al now. Nobody else wants to see your junk. Weāre not kindred spirits just because we both build junk. Play with your junk strictly in private. Thank you.ā
part two is a reply by kitze āļøtinkerer.club (@thekitze), reads: ācounterpoint: ā, showing a link card that points at Yeggeās Gas Town post
piiiiisssssssss
My fucking eyes canāt they see how ugly their shit always is?
Sloppers hold up the ugliest, most artistically meritless shit while going āOh yeah? what about this!?ā
Objection! Gas Town isnāt junk, itās a memetic weapon trying to convince anyone with actual engineering sensibilities to abandon the industry and move to their cabin in the woods to become professional manifesto writers, thus clearing the path for AI inevitability.
eww that tinkerer club page gives me serious crypto bro vibes
Marketed as āvibe code all your own toolsā and one of the suggestions is 1Password/Bitwarden. I mean they can feel free to fafo with that one and let me know when youāve been fired because all your passwords were 1) lost when Claude apologetically deleted the prod db or 2) got exfiltrated and used to steal all your ip because your vibe coded password app is insecure as all hellā¦
I am going to create a summary post on MAPLE, but one of the open letters criticizing them has a section on COVID:
During a two-week retreat in 2022, COVID was moving through the community. It began with accommodationsāinterviews outdoors for ventilation, the sick practicing apartābut Soryu progressively mocked those who needed rest, admonished us for being deterred by āa tiny little cold,ā and folded everyone back into the zendo regardless of who was sick. Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID. Symptomatic, visibly fatigued people kept the full schedule on heavily reduced sleep.
I am shocked, shocked, that a TESCREAL community had bad COVID praxis after 2020!
https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/dr-dre-raekwon-ai-palantir-hip-hop-100251/
In another clip currently going viral online, Rick Rubin, supplier of quotes, declares that vibe coding is āthe punk rock of softwareā, a description so limp in its countercultural authority that it felt as though it had itself been generated by an LLM.
lol
Rapās mogul class appears equally enamoured with its supposed potential, repeatedly deploying ātoolā as though the classification settles the argument. Dr. Dre compared the technology to the burgeoning slate of synthesisers and samplers at the dawn of hip-hop.
āI had a discussion with a few people a few days ago,ā Dre said. āThey were against A.I. and Iām like, āOK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.ā Or synthesisers, right? Itās a new tool for creativity.ā
put up or shut up bro, name one good song that AI generated, just one. not that youāve done much or anything noteworthy since the nineties. /s
Drum machine? Autotune would be a better example
i have to admit i think we are charlie kirk is a banger
As expected, bespoke twee ācoding forgeā Sourcehut has decided, like Codeberg, that LLM slop is not welcome. Just as expected, this has made the promptfondlers absolutely beside themselves, and they canāt 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.
Youād 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.Between doing marketing for OpenAI and Anthropic whilst pretending to be āimpartialā 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!
itās 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 heās probably one of the most opinionated people online. To expect him to just take your money and cater to your every whim isā¦ naive)
Hereās someone who really does not know what theyāre talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(itās 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 Iād call āhuman-potential technologiesā - 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 āeugenicsā which isnāt likely to be received well on the left these days
Itās 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 itās a good idea. Like, whatever hypothetical advantagre they got from their opposition to the nuclear boogeyman (their idiotic framing, not mine), renewables have still been facing strong political and economic headwinds that are only being magnified by the unceasing growth in demand for electrical power (including but not exclusively driven by AI compute).
OK so the āproblemā these people (EAs) are facing is that they are strongly pro-āprogressā, 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 doesnāt 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 thatās WRONG. Stopping it for those reasons is anti-progress. You can only stop it if it prevents AI takeover.
Cf. smarm-meister Zvi, who canāt understand why people donāt want datacenters when they donāt want coal plants slightly less, and cites fuckinā Cremieux as a lede:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EDKw7KyonrvskqZ7o/the-american-people-really-hate-data-centers
Hereās 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 āheck noā. Sure, imagining that transmissions lines cause cancer is false, but itās an easy thing to believe when the people building the lines are energy companies, who people hate because theyāre expensive and cause wildfires. Also I bet dollars to donuts that Zvi doesnāt live near a transmission line.
He āknowsā transmissions lines are good, because they get power to his home, and he figures because he wants power, itās good, and everyone should just be happy to have a high-voltage line near their home because that brings him power. Itās remarkably un-empathetic.
But letās take a step back. Isnāt opposition to data centers good for preventing AGI? NO, itās not, itās Luddism! You have to accept data centers because they are good for capitalism now, but IF they start to produce the Robot God, THEN theyāre bad.
Itās an incoherent position and itās so fun to watch these people turn themselves into pretzels over it.
zvi citing a self described ājewish naziā almost right at the top is already impressive, but thereās a chaser in that that guyās post starts with him saying heās being paid to write this by an ai company
Transmission lines are straight up good, with approximately zero downsides.
Dude hasnāt been around. Iāve noticed quite a bit of anxiety around even terminal-supply transmission lines adjacent to new-build neighborhoods in wildfire risk zones. Iāll 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 āstraight up moral panicā is ignoring how real people actually rationally calculate risks, and ignoring potential opportunities to help them improve, if thatās really what you want to do.
But we already knew that Zvi was a disingenuous idiot, so I digress.
I mean there already is a thriving public movement which despises AI, donāt think youāll be getting to those people if you start supporting eugenics
last time rationalists tried to touch medical field we got metamed
