Just two weeks tilā Halloween now.
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 soo 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.)
Havenāt seen this guy in a while but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails
The banks are having an AI problem
ā These are generally situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a humanās account with the userās permission and login credentials. Even if permitted by the user, this goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.ā
āIn other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents ā programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a userās behalf ā contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said.ā
The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work
Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda
Itās possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop
Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?
These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify usersā devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devicesā digital locks.
It itās anything like any android device Iāve ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.
Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices.
groan.
It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?
I donāt know what Iām supposed to get from this piece, it feels like heās saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as youāre willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically whatās left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.
Thereās also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I donāt know, seems kind of familiar if youāve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then youād also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.
Itās Doctrow. If you had a magic wand powered by orphan tears that jail broke IOT devices he would already have written a blog post about it before you finished the incantation.
Thereās also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it
Which assumes people actually want to deal with slop code. An assumption that can be proven wrong by simply looking at the slopnamiās effect on the open source ecosystem. Speaking of which:
which, I donāt know, seems kind of familiar if youāve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then youād also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.
Honestly, Iād be willing to bet good money on the ecosystemās collapse at this point - the slopnami has tanked software quality across the board, the plague of scraping has made sharing source code deeply unattractive, the flood of LLM bug reports has crippled FOSSās ability to find and fix bugs/vulnerabilities (which combos nicely with LLMs increasing bugcounts), and, as Baldurās noted, the labour surplus FOSS relied upon has gone down the shitter.
On top of that, senior devs are burning out and deciding to GTFO en masse, and junior devs are getting deskilled, burnt out and/or laid off, crippling FOSSās ability to replace any maintainers they lose.
Quick follow-up, for the sake of furthering my argument:
Baldur, whilst talking about the aforementioned loss of FOSS surplus, laid out a worst-case scenario, where a vicious cycle collapses the FOSS ecosystem:
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Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
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Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they canāt relay[sic] on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
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OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable. [This drives away users as a result.]
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That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back. [return to step 1]
As a consequence of the slop-nami, Iād argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:
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The slopnami has done plenty to exacerbate existing burnout in current maintainers - slop bug reports, scrapers and AI bros DDoSing services, AI bros in general and the myriad other negative externalities of this bubble have been utterly draining to deal with.
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As (indirectly) mentioned before, the slopnami has given a variety of serious bugs and security issues - rsyncās broken backups, the rise of slopsquatting and prompt injection attacks, Linuxās recent race condition mishap, the list goes on.
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Iād be willing to bet good money on the ecosystemās collapse at this point
What does Doctrow care? as far as he is concerned itās done itās job. It was never about the people or their labor for him.
The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, weāre definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway hereās how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes.
He almost gives away the game when he says christians donāt feel like slaves when they say āthy will be doneā so letting Claude run society would feel fine.
Article next to it is an anonymous review of JĆ¼ngerās In Stahlgewitter, which is certainly A Choice.
(JĆ¼nger wasnāt a card carrying Nazi, but served in the Wehrmacht in WW2 and is kind of a right-wing ideal of an aesthete)
Scott will literallyā¦
Instead of reviewing a book by a woman.
Native English speakers might recognise it as Storm of Steel; for the unfamiliar itās JĆ¼ngerās memoir of WWI and arguably a celebration of war.
JĆ¼ngerās an interesting character. He had different politics to the Nazis but it would be fair to call him a fascist in the period from 1918-45. After the war he revised some of his works to step away from some of his previous views, and had a big falling out with his private secretary Armin Mohler (an unrepentant fascist) over it. By the 1980s he was publicly denouncing the āideology of warā contained in Storm of Steel.
If anyone is interested, I highly recommend the series on Mohlerās book The Conservative Revolution in Germany by the anti-fascist podcast The Empire Never Ended. First ep on YouTube. JĆ¼nger is discussed in the episode on the National Revolutionaries.
how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president
Did he forget Claude is owned by people? But yeah sure let corporations be president.
He specifies Claude 10, so itās after the ??? in the checklist, and spicy autocomplete will be widely accepted to qualify for sentience by then I guess.
Sentient but still owned by Anthropic.
This is just slavery with extra steps!
So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs āfoundā the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)
Once again, slop machines only work āwellā when you can externalise the pain and costs onto someone else (in this case, millions of stressed-out sysadmins and webmasters)
Seems like there also was one company who released their patch early before the agreed time giving hackers time reverse engineer the bug before patches were widly available.
yes, chainguard broke embargo, and within a few hours a reverse engineered PoC was kicking. I saw at least two implementations yesterday when assssing impending work
and I havenāt slept yet (although now aaaalmost doneā¦)
I saw a story they broke embargo so they could offer protection services to people. Which I really hope isnt true.
I summed up my views in the latest lobste.rs kerfuffle in a blog post:
Thanks for this! Would you consider making a new post in TechTakes? It could be useful to have a more durable place to comment on this topic.
Iāll consider it. Iād like to sleep on it and see if events overtake it overnight, which can definitely happen
On second thought I wonāt post it myself, itās a bit too mean-spirited and facile. I havenāt been party to the discussions on IRC so I am probably missing a bunch of nuance.
I do compare the mods to Robespierre and co which might be seen as less of a compliement. I do believe theyāre working under a lot of pressure and itās hard to make decisions that please everyone.
I am mostly not unhappy that itās not been a complete victory for the sloppers
H4ppy H4lloween to all who celebrate!
Was Changpeng Zhao trying to send us a message all along
Glyph recently convinced a project to stop doing updates altogether by accident, and has had some thoughts about it.
For the second time I think I have accidentally convinced a project to just ā¦ stop doing security updates on a critical dependency forever, because theyād assumed the LLM usage problem wasnāt as bad as it is.
Both of these are offline things that are not at all security-sensitive, but I am starting to worry that in the ādark matterā of the broader developer community there is a meaningful plurality of people who are just going to stop updating e.g. the Linux kernel because of broken trust
(Recommend checking the full thread)
We may all be data annotators soon enough | Gig Economy Project h/t naked capitalism
Outlier has four main clients, all American Big Tech: Meta, Alphabet, Xai and OpenAI. Scale AI is part-owned by Meta. Is this the future we want for European workers, sources for gig exploitation and data expropriation for American Big Tech and the US state?
When one considers that this dystopian scenario currently constitute the most realistic entry jobs for young, university-educated people in Europe, is it any wonder that the youth are currently rising up in multiple European countries, most of all France, demanding something - anything - else?
Good blog post āāWho Owns ROM Hacking?ā And Other Questions AI Poisons Us Withā on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.
I want to point out that SMW Central doesnāt ban people for being pro-GenAi, nor are they barred from anything just for being pro-GenAi. They simply canāt upload content to the site that was created with GenAi. Despite this, GenAi users believe that, because SMW Central has rules against GenAi content, SMW Central must feel the need to ācontrol or dictateā what they do.
This context transforms the statement substantially. When this group of individuals says ānobody owns ROM hacking,ā what they mean is that they should be allowed to publish their work wherever they want without consequence.
Kind of reminds me of the people who, around the time the (UK) smoking ban was introduced, made āItās my right to smoke anywhere I wantā their whole personality.
The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.
In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors
According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the articleās summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesnāt even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isnāt happening.
Iām no finances guy so take this with a grain of salt, but since boosters are apparently acting like the convertibles will automatically work out, wouldnāt Anthropic still be losing more than they earn even if all those convertible notes work out due to compute/training costs? Since they got a discount from Elon earlier. Plus the BetterOffline post pointed out how they canāt even break even on an operating basis
There was an annoying booster who said āEd Zitron is definitely falling for this oneā. Ed Zitron is not fooled. In fact, he is frustrated with the report not properly breaking down the expenses (and having a mysterious āother expensesā category).
r/BetterOffline post about the article
Brief comment snippet:
A convertible note is a loan from an investor, but instead of paying them back with cash you give them stock options. Itās still a loss, youāre taking cash from an investor because you canāt break even with revenue.
Imagine if you do that as a baker. āHey flour/sugar/yeast supplier, I canāt pay your for your products, but I will pay you in stocks to our bakery, Iām planning to sell our bakery soon, and as we donāt have to pay you for the supplies, we can sell our product at below the going rate making sure we look good for the sale of the companyā.
Excellent usage of the chart comic
(Edited in a link to Haus of Declines āBloodless Quantā comic (not sure if that is the real title, I couldnāt find the comic on her bsky, small warning she is not a safe for work creator (if your workplace is very squeamish)).
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.
The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.
The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.
So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance ontoā¦
Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Donāt Vibe Code
(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)
