Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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 soo 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.)
So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs ‘found’ the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)
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 haven’t slept yet (although now aaaalmost done…)
H4ppy H4lloween to all who celebrate!
Was Changpeng Zhao trying to send us a message all along
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.
I’ll consider it. I’d like to sleep on it and see if events overtake it overnight, which can definitely happen
On second thought I won’t post it myself, it’s a bit too mean-spirited and facile. I haven’t 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 they’re working under a lot of pressure and it’s hard to make decisions that please everyone.
I am mostly not unhappy that it’s not been a complete victory for the sloppers
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 … stop doing security updates on a critical dependency forever, because they’d assumed the LLM usage problem wasn’t 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 “dark matter” 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 ‘“Who Owns ROM Hacking?” And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With’ 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 doesn’t ban people for being pro-GenAi, nor are they barred from anything just for being pro-GenAi. They simply can’t 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 “control or dictate” what they do.
This context transforms the statement substantially. When this group of individuals says “nobody owns ROM hacking,” 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 “It’s my right to smoke anywhere I want” 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 article’s 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 doesn’t 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 isn’t happening.
I’m no finances guy so take this with a grain of salt, but since boosters are apparently acting like the convertibles will automatically work out, wouldn’t 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 can’t even break even on an operating basis
There was an annoying booster who said “Ed Zitron is definitely falling for this one”. Ed Zitron is not fooled. In fact, he is frustrated with the report not properly breaking down the expenses (and having a mysterious “other expenses” category).
Excellent usage of the chart comic
(Edited in a link to Haus of Declines ‘Bloodless Quant’ comic (not sure if that is the real title, I couldn’t find the comic on her bsky, small warning she is not a safe for work creator (if your workplace is very squeamish)).
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. It’s still a loss, you’re taking cash from an investor because you can’t break even with revenue.
Imagine if you do that as a baker. ‘Hey flour/sugar/yeast supplier, I can’t pay your for your products, but I will pay you in stocks to our bakery, I’m planning to sell our bakery soon, and as we don’t 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 company’.
Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don’t Vibe Code
(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)
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 onto…
Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow
To single out a specific review
For example, they describe trees as “self-replicating factories that spin air into wood” and conclude that “any intelligence capable of comprehending biochemistry at the deepest level is capable of building its own self-replicating factories to serve its own purposes.”
So an AI could self replicate…because a tree can?? not all trees even self-replicate so the metaphor isn’t even right
Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow
It’s true that there’s more to success than intelligence. There’s also sensors, actuators and metabolism. However, machines look set to master those too.
Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow
LLM-intermediated poster experiencing model collapse due to overtraining on “One Weird Trick To Shed Belly Fat” ads
It is amazing in a way, there are computer scientists who work at the highest level of their field, so they understand computers better than most, but they have more trouble than you or me installing linux.
Understanding something doesnt mean you can build it.
(I know this will be met with ‘well then you dont understand it deep enough’ and that just reminds me that there always will be place for god in the gaps of science).
I wish Wikipedia had more coverage of the Dyson Tree because I have so many questions despite not having studied physics or biology since I was a teenager (what about cosmic rays! there is so little light for it to feed off in the outer solar system! and trees don’t do well in extreme cold)
“A type III super-civilization can harness the energy output of an entire galaxy, and all the inhabitants stare at you like sleep paralysis demons, except for Bob, and we don’t want to get into what Bob’s deal is”
So is the steering wheel attached to the entire device so he steers by rotating the half circle or is the half cricle just to attach it to Bob and there is a deeper mechanism?
The Russian Cosmists have so much to answer for.
My parents got super into the spinoff of For All Mankind that takes place in the Soviet Union, “Star City”. The central conceit of that alternate history spate of shows is that Sergei Korolev didn’t die and kept being as awesome as he was at running the Soviet space program. In the spinoff the writers actually knew a bit about what they were doing, and have him more or less directly quoting cosmists at other characters… I got to tell my parents that its people like him that are the reason their new laptop was expensive and that the oligarchs think they’re going to live forever as feudal lords of the solar system and that our society as a whole has a tendency to falsely believe our destiny is endless expansion and perfection in space rather than Earth.
I’d never really looked into the name before but I just now realized what the Korolev was likely named for
Every Korolev needs a crew of Glushkos to figure out shit he was actually hired for
Heh. Read the actual full paper.
Kardashev didn’t even think that colonizing whole galaxies was the likely end state! He thought that instead everything from billions of light years around would pile into individual huge artificial monolithic structures for efficiency!
“Oh bother, I’ve fallen onto another one of these fart-propelled flight platforms and I can’t get up”
The cult at the heart of the rot of the world is built on such unserious foundations
Consider for a moment where this fellow’s breathing tube and/or proboscis looks to be routed.
The thesis is that the putative type III civilization is harvesting all energy output of its galaxy. I haven’t often seen respiration of methane and/or miscellaneous volatile products of digestion on transhumanist bingo cards, but evidently it’s indicated in the original material.
You obviously haven’t read enough Orion’s Arm.
Is anyone familiar with the website I Can Eat Glass? It was apparently created in the 90s by a Harvard student, who was concerned that people learning foreign languages only learn common phrases (e.g. “Where’s the loo?”) which makes them stand out as tourists when they speak. If one were to say a truly uncommon phrase, it stands to reason one would be instantly respected as a native. So he set up a website to collect as many translations of the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” as he could.
Surely you are riveted to your screens right now, desperate to learn what this very special brain genius has been up to since then. Ethan Mollick is a professor at a Pennsylvania business school and published “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” in 2024. Some say he is substacking about the exponential growth of AI capabilities to this day, but critically this book was apparently read by some german teaching influencer.
He in turn published a self-help book for parents of school kids this year, that got put on display in my local library. And of course it has a chapter on AI, so I had to lend it and hate-read a little. And of course he references Mollick and his Co-Intelligence screed, which he apparently absorbed as a base expectation what the future of AI will look like, and this is how I got to learn about one very special brain genius from Harvard.
Very sad to learn that the “I can eat glass it does not hurt me” guy is AI-brained
Stumbled upon this book today the author is apparently fake as per this article (I did my own search and didn’t find anything)
There’s a youtube video (edit:podcast) on it that I’ll watch later
The website you linked is down and that article appears to be written in the exact same tone with certain machine text tells as the book itself
https://www.scribd.com/document/1019266552/12-Last-Steps-Dr-Selwyn-Raithe-2025
Classic weird nonsensical conspiracist funnybusiness with a side of ARG
I definitely reeks of conspiracy theory, per this description Edit 2: and the way it talks about the decline in birth rates is also setting off red flags
Two ‘its not x, its y’ statements in close proximity also raise my ‘ai generated’ suspicions
It gets worse
Edit basically if you took 90s black helicopter conspiracists, and early 2000s infowars, plopped them down in the current day with Google and a Claude subscription
Edit 2 Its like a year old, and when the PDF first started floating around the internet it was being sold on sketchy websites for $30 and was the subject of one of those youtube-comment-botting rings that will have lots of chains of comments hyping how a book is relevant to a topic and is the best thing ever.
I first learned of it through a comment under a Yudkowsky interview, comparing his messages to the book’s, which is not exactly confidence inspiring
It’s actually about perpendicular to him. Only similarity is that it posits that AI systems are dangerous. Take all the New World Order conspiracy theories and infowars the elite wants to kill you off and take your stuff and become transhuman, with sooper seekrit nefarious depopulation plans and you will eat the bugs and stay in your minute city pod, and replace the ruling elites with AIs.
On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.
So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I’m thinking locksmithing.
If you’re interested in locksmithing I’ve got bad news. It got harder after WFH, waaaay more people home in rich neighbourhoods
Quick Q, from where does the weird term “abliteration” come from? I’ve seen it used for “jailbroken” GenAI models.
Sounds like a marketing tagline for a failed “As Seen on TV” sort of gadget, tbh
With a bit of google searching by date it seems like this guy (https://huggingface.co/failspy/Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct-abliterated-v3.5) claims ownership of the coining, which I find plausible, based on the list of released weights and their timing.
As far as “abliteration”: it’s just a fun play-on-words using the original “ablation” term used in the original paper to refer to removing features, which I made up particularly to differentiate the model from “uncensored” fine-tunes. Ablate + obliterated = Abliterated.
The paper being referred to being: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction which seems to have somehow started out on the “AI alignement forum” of LessWrong https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in-llms-is-mediated-by-a-single-direction first posted 27th of April 2024. In general it’s a method of weight alteration so only really applicable to some opensource (or i guess leaked) models.
First model with abliterated in the name by “failspy” on 8th of May 2024.
Thanks!
wiktionary claims it is a blend of “ablate” and “obliterate”, it does not list an origin (at this point in time)
edit: looking a little more into this, knowing the etymology requires reading about AI discussions which I am not prepared for at this point in time but it is out there in the internet
