2026-11-02 00:20 UTC
Replies (40)
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@misterbngo@awful.systems 2026-11-02 03:05
Jepsen releases a barely contained sneer jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-11-02 03:41
Get into the Cheesecake Factory or get left behind!
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@nightsky@awful.systems 2026-11-02 10:51
I find it so so funny that the Proton AI manifesto asks why the productivity is not increasing despite LLM usage, and then it’s all like… you’re not prompting hard enough! I take it as a positive sign when even the biggest AI pushers realize it’s not working and turn to denial.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-11-02 15:20
Remember the episode of DS9 where the authors agree that creating a holographic simulation of someone without their permission for sexual purposes is shameful? Ten years later in The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil seems to say that in the glorious virtual future this will be routine and accepted (its a section with a lot of dialogue between characters with years in their names, not digging out a copy and checking the page).
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-11-02 17:29
Another entry in the weird “GPU world” writing competition (What kind of wonderful happy go lucky future is brought about by LLMs like those of today being ubiquitous and constantly used but unaccountably not leading to the Great Singularity) www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/gpu-world-submission This one is less messed up than the last. Instead of weird sex and graverobbing it features… uh, a guy being paid by an LLM to braid string as busywork?
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-02 19:00
Anthropic released amended IPO-aaand its even worse! reddit.com/…/anthropic_releases_amended_ipo_prosp… The artificial intelligence company said it generated $33.24 billion in revenue for the nine months ended Sept. 30, up roughly 1,200% from the same period last year. It reported a $104 billion net loss during the period, after losing $25.1 billion over the same stretch in 2025. ‘b-but the convertible notes!!!’
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-03 09:04
Got this recommended to me
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-11-03 12:54
LW and the more credulous parts of the general techsphere are going gaga over this rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming/ Is this the long foretold, mythical RSI??? RSI = recursive self-improvement, not repetitive strain injury
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-11-03 12:58
so there’s a new nber econometrics paper out, covering our favourite industry it has some bangers in it Paid adoption is substantially more common among younger and higher-income consumers: those earning more than $200,000 per year are 1.7 times as likely to pay as those earning less than $50,000, and those younger than 55 are 1.8 times as likely as those aged 55 or older starting strong! This force creates a dynamic incentive to set lower prices today: lower prices attract more users, improving future model quality and raising future demand I don’t entirely follow how setting lower prices today improves future model quality but sure I’ll go along with the ride Despite this limited horizontal differentiation, we find some degree of vertical differentiation across providers, consistent with observed market shares. At the end of our sample, the average consumer was willing to pay a $10 monthly premium for OpenAI products relative to Anthropic products. Part of this difference reflects model quality: our estimates indicate that consumers are willing to pay more for higher-quality models. For instance, moving from GPT-4’s capability level to GPT-5.5 Pro’s raises average willingness to pay for OpenAI products by approximately $25 per month We also use the model to examine how consumer preferences for AI services shape competition. We begin by considering substitutability across services. By the end of our sample, all pairs of AI services are substitutes on average “do you want tea or coffee?” “yes” OpenAI has the highest retention of all AI products we study, with 77% of people still paying after one month, 65% after three months, and 55% after six months. Anthropic and xAI are lower, but similar to each other: around 65%, 50%, and 40% after one, three, and six months, in the words of basement jaxx, down down downdown down downdown downdown chat is it good when your world changing ai god not getting picked for anyone’s team during lunch football
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-11-03 15:39
(Death comes for XSLT)[dbushell.com/2026/11/03/xslt-rip/] (article about google killing XSLT, or gunning for it, not my usual fair but it is bad, and I didn’t see much attention pointed at it so far).
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-03 20:21
Sam Altman is yapping some bullshit again And bonus OpenAI bullshit
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@mawhrin@awful.systems 2026-11-04 07:26
just a quick note that our very favourite mr. musk spent half a bil in us dollars on election shenanigans and all he got is blue texas, and i mean it, texas is now blue across the whole slate, including the governor and the u.s. senator. the very effective mr. musk!
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@e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-11-04 16:17
Looks like Brodie Robertson (one of the many weird Linux adjacent Youtubers) isn’t able to get any guests for his podcast anymore. Every episode since he invited DHH is a solo episode.
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@fnix@awful.systems 2026-11-04 16:40
Some more cheerworthy news today: EU Parliament President tells MEPs not to rely on AI when drafting laws “Drafting an amendment with the help of AI cannot replace fundamentally the constructive debate with a colleague,” she said at an event on AI use in the Parliament. “Doing legal research with the help of AI cannot ultimately replace the judgment and the critical thinking needed to make a tough decision.” Metsola said there must be “democratic accountability” in lawmaking and argued that “where AI is used, people should know.” A legislator who understands the basics of her job description! 😮
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-04 19:13
Bloomberg: the market is acting like the Blue Wave “represents the end of the AI buildout.” (sickos yes meme.png)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-04 22:32
the midterms made Scammy A loopy "OpenAI is against the notion that it would be acceptable for people to be relegated to a role of doing things that ‘AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans,'” he wrote. “People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.”
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-05 02:22
Found another ‘interesting’ website: aidoomsdaycountdown.com
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-05 07:43
The Tech Industry Went All in on Trump, and Now They’re in Serious Danger Now That Americans Have Turned on Him I hope they’re all pissing their pants right now
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-11-05 07:45
Any word on if Yarvin is running to Thiel’s south american mansion yet?
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-05 08:44
Okay yet another post about Yud’s book and its website but finally managed to find that one page I was looking for again. Also the main page appears to endorse Dwarkesh’s “AI civilisations” narrative and buys the Claude Mythos hype (its under a read more)
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-11-05 17:01
todays adexchanger had a lolworthy note that the binance hack began with a search ad. If you hadn’t heard, Binance was totally pwned in a $6 billion crypto heist last week, suspected to be a North Korean operation. Well, Binance has now published what amounts to a preliminary autopsy report of the incident. The heist began when a Binance Wallet DevOps team member accidentally downloaded a malicious copy of Homebrew – a popular open-source tool – from a mirror site promoted in a search ad. The malware was spotted, but not before the hackers had obtained the real identities of Wallet DevOps team members. Using those identities, the North Korean hacking unit spent months targeting Binance’s wallet team with covert schemes. One involved a prolonged fake job interview that lured a Binance DevOps engineer into downloading an “assignment” onto their work device. After taking control of the Binance DevOps engineer’s laptop, the hacker used an unnamed internal AI tool to log in to the devices of other engineers. Access to multiple credentials allowed the heist to go through. Binance guy fell for “top link is ads”. COME ON. Never understood why my employer would drop $30m on Crowdstrike but not add uBlock Origin to their company chrome profile for free.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-11-05 17:28
All the US markets are down today. Gary Marcus is declaring the GenAI bubble burst - I think that’s a little premature but I am smiling seeing Coreweave at -55% of their value at the start of the year.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-05 19:55
Tech industry is coping well with the midterms it seems “The results offer little evidence of a voter mandate to crack down on AI or data centers,” Kovacevich said, per Ars, noting that “Democratic gubernatorial candidates who opposed data center bans won at a higher rate than those who supported them. “Let’s not confuse an anti-Trump wave with an anti-tech mandate,” he added. Except every single anti-data centre measure made it through the ballot
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-06 03:22
r/singularity is coping too Very conveniently cropped out the 46% accuracy on their Mid 2026 China predictions. And the graph that shows every single data point is below AI 2027. (top comment says the tweet is from August, which makes this even funnier)
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-11-06 10:12
you unfortunately have to dig quite deep for sneers in this weird post about datacenter votes in the recent US elections, but they’re there www.lesswrong.com/…/stephen-martin-s-shortform?co… especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else, like Iceland (retracted after someone points out that Iceland is probably even more woke than, say, Vermont) and Paraguay (which recently had a digibank seized and closed, leading to the president stepping down). Then there’s this gem Data center inputs, unlike almost anything else are much more subsitutable than any other input, and can be built in places where humans don’t care to raise NIMBY concerns. So cutting through the jargon, “inputs” in this case means power cooling construction / planning the actual fucking contents in the racks data All of these are constrained in various ways. The places with abundant accessible power tend to be relatively developed parts of the world. Same with water which is the most efficient mode of cooling. Building your datacenter in Texas means you’re on familiar ground with local laws and regulations, and can draw on skilled manpower to actually construct the thing and keep it running. I’d wager that the actual hardware is cheaper than almost anywhere else. Once it’s built it’s in the security zone of the USA, which means property is efficiently defended by LEO and emergency services. Paraguay? You need to find a skilled workforce there, or import it. Same for all the bits and bobs needed. Then you probably have to pay more for the same, as well as having to deal with an unfamiliar planning process. Not to mention political instability. And you might have to build a shit-ton of supporting stuff yourself, like power generation and fiber comms. These people are delusional.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-11-06 10:13
“How to be Rational: Use Drugs”: lesswrong.com/…/help-your-friends-get-adhd-and-de…
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-11-06 22:33
Anthropic appears to be suffering from low $T
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-06 23:30
Struck some gold on slobstack
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-06 23:52
Anthropic is going ahead with their IPO This is looking like its going to be a bloody disaster but if the world wants to feed my schadenfreude by all means keep it coming
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-11-07 02:52
@istewart@awful.systems Dave Karpf is coming out with a book which will be of interest: Vapourware, Inc.: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present (W.W. Norton, In Press) bookshop.org - Amazon For thirty years, techno-optimists have promised dramatic technological innovation as long as we–the public, journalists, regulators, and policymakers–keep out of the way. The results have been great for Silicon Valley but haven’t gone so well for everyone else. They promise to stop climate change while building resource-intensive data centers, evade governmental regulations at our expense, and watch wealth inequality soar as they enjoy a permissive tax code. Venture capitalists and the companies they fund have amassed wealth, status, and political power, but their bold pronouncements have amounted to little more than vaporware. In Vaporware, Inc., political scientist and tech commentator David Karpf looks back at the history of the digital future to understand the ideological project of techno-optimism, and why it has gone so wrong for the rest of us. With sharp wit and keen insight, Karpf debunks the foundational myths of the techno-optimists and traces how tech billionaires amassed power by selling the idea of the future. Eye-opening and essential, Vaporware, Inc. is a critical reappraisal of how Silicon Valley works and how we can make it work better.
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-11-07 05:11
Maybe Telling Americans They’re Useless Eaters Who Must Perish for the Glorious AI Revolution Was a Bad Idea Too many good sneers in this one. Also, it was only yesterday that I learned that several great conservative thinkers on X thought that making a Harry Potter x Star Wars crossover with a genderbent character would be an exceptionally powerful cultural message that would greatly influence the outcome of the midterm elections. www.404media.co/republicans-learn-x-is-an-echo-ch…
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-11-07 07:35
Happy Saturday. Pleas enjoy a very schadenfreude GitHub issue
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-11-07 11:18
I am beginning to like the cut of this publications jib. defector.com/there-is-no-place-in-a-functional-so… The federal government is in tatters, the judiciary seeded with sneering MAGA goons like bear traps on a forest floor, the executive branch a metastatic growth of varyingly murderous criminal enterprises in unholy union with a psychotic, apocalyptic tech industry in suicide-cult thrall to bumbling chatbots.
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-11-07 14:13
An interesting question from mcc: I wonder if at this exact moment one could succeed in filing a issue against an open source project for an entirely ficticious vulnerability, get it assigned a CVE and a github score, and then get the upstream project to accept your patch for the vulnerability, with all these things presented as the issue, the CVE, and the PR being written by generative AI, but in fact you wrote them substantially by hand and the patch for your nonexistent vuln is actually a backdoor Very probably the more your submission appeared to be written by generative AI, the more likely it would be to be accepted. If some person came in with an ungainly, unreadable patch and was aggressively pushing a project to accept it you’d get suspicious and wonder why but if an AI did that you’d be oh well AIs are just like that and AI written code is just like that
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-07 19:09
Anthropic employee has had their brain destroyed by rationalist circlejerk ‘we need to make armageddon happen as fast as possible even though I dont think it will be very good. a trillion dollars please’
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-11-07 20:42
A tragedy in 3 acts. 2026-03-05 Why I Don’t Vibe Code Like many developers, I have a whole folder of draft hobby projects that have never been finished. […] From the LLM perspective, these are folders of failures and I could indeed use LLM to make an app a day or whatever challenge I want. However, the process was far more important than the product (again!). Not every whimsy needs to become a reality. Often, I get more from the fun of brainstorming and the process of learning enough to know that I don’t need to continue and finish the job. 2026-04-29 The LLM Is Not a Junior Engineer Contrary to how I might seem at times, I do think there could be a place for LLM models in modern software development. I do understand why some developers are entranced with the ability to create applications in hours and turn prototypes into products. I see how it could be highly useful for home hobbyists, back-office bureaucrats and expert engineers to build the low-stakes software they’ve never had the time or skill for. 2026-10-25 My Local LLM Stack And yet, as a developer, I do feel like I need to work with these tools to understand their potential for augmenting my own software development work. There are some cases (basically as a limited coding assistant) where a LLM can be useful. Some recent examples I have used across several projects: Look through this codebase and find all the areas where I have # FIXME comments. Collect them in a report and analyze if any no longer apply. Improve the test coverage for this file to be above 90% Update the openapi spec for this project in the repo to match what the API actually implements today Look through the data here and find all cases where there are likely errors. For instance, if a person has an end date before their start date. sneer tangent > Now that I had a machine, the next step was finding an ethical model for coding purposes. Apparently IBM Granite is the most ethical model out there (read “ethical” as “least likely to get you in legal trouble by using its output”.) With all this agentic power at our fingertips, what are we going to use it for? > The 8B model can do many simple programming tasks (like searching through syntax trees or renaming functions). Who needs birdshot when we can aim 16-inch cannons at every sparrow? This reminded me of @rhamph@awful.systems’s post last week. Is this an archetype of guy that is concious of the harms of LLMs, but cannot trust his own gut enough to see they are fundamentally wrong. So they try to come up with their own super-ethical spin on the beast and try to change the rotting carcass from within. But was anything gained here? I feel that an ideal of simple, elegant, and empowering code was lost.
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-11-07 20:46
A tragedy in 3 acts. 2026-03-05 Why I Don’t Vibe Code Like many developers, I have a whole folder of draft hobby projects that have never been finished. […] From the LLM perspective, these are folders of failures and I could indeed use LLM to make an app a day or whatever challenge I want. However, the process was far more important than the product (again!). Not every whimsy needs to become a reality. Often, I get more from the fun of brainstorming and the process of learning enough to know that I don’t need to continue and finish the job. 2026-04-29 The LLM Is Not a Junior Engineer Contrary to how I might seem at times, I do think there could be a place for LLM models in modern software development. I do understand why some developers are entranced with the ability to create applications in hours and turn prototypes into products. I see how it could be highly useful for home hobbyists, back-office bureaucrats and expert engineers to build the low-stakes software they’ve never had the time or skill for. 2026-10-25 My Local LLM Stack And yet, as a developer, I do feel like I need to work with these tools to understand their potential for augmenting my own software development work. There are some cases (basically as a limited coding assistant) where a LLM can be useful. Some recent examples I have used across several projects: Look through this codebase and find all the areas where I have # FIXME comments. Collect them in a report and analyze if any no longer apply. Improve the test coverage for this file to be above 90% Update the openapi spec for this project in the repo to match what the API actually implements today […] Look through the data here and find all cases where there are likely errors. For instance, if a person has an end date before their start date. tangential sneer > Now that I had a machine, the next step was finding an ethical model for coding purposes. Apparently IBM Granite is the most ethical model out there (read “ethical” as “least likely to get you in legal trouble by using its output”.) With all this agentic power at our fingertips, what are we going to use it for? > The 8B model can do many simple programming tasks (like searching through syntax trees or renaming functions). Who needs birdshot, when we can aim 16-inch cannons at every sparrow? This reminded me of @rhamph@awful.systems’s post last week. Is this an archetype of guy that is concious of the harms of LLMs, but cannot trust his own gut enough to see they are fundamentally wrong. So they try to come up with their own super-ethical spin on the beast and try to change the rotting carcass from within. But was anything gained here? I feel that an ideal of simple, elegant, and empowering code was lost.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-08 07:09
AI 2027 tracker updated again -Late 2026 predictions have all been filled out -For some reason they’re measuring the unreleased Anthropic models based off that METR report
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-08 07:41
AI 2027 tracker has updated again -On the main page chart, they decided to map the Anthropic unreleased models from the METR report for some reason. Setting aside how mapping unreleased models is inherently flawed because we don’t have the full picture, the METR report also said that their measurements come with a high uncertainty Onto the list of predictions -Late 2026 is at 84% -Still doing that weird thing where 80% is both partially accurate and confirmed accurate -The stock market prediction should be lower, since it didn’t get anywhere near 30% -Imo the AI narrative prediction should also be lower, since theres conflicting reports about AI being amazing/AI being trash all over mainstream news -One prediction got a 100% score even though part of it didn’t happen Overall seems like they got a lot of ‘easy’ stuff right (ie business gurus shilling AI) but missed the harder stuff
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-11-08 18:51
Emacs and GNU can’t stop failing to uphold the mission of Free Software. This mailing-list post has been going around and I think that it is a very good indicator of how head-up-ass the GNU project has become. Note that this email is not from RMS; the problem can’t be blamed on a particular BDFL. The following quote from the email is sufficient to completely end my interest in contributing to GNU ever again: The Free Software movement doesn’t pursue the goal of “liberty for all humanity”. If you think it does, you are gravely mistaken. Our goals are different, and are well described elsewhere. While the topic is about accepting chatbot contributions, it could also e.g. be about accepting contributions from members of Suckless or other fascist organizations; in the email, our brave GNU hero says that they’d accept contributions made with slave labor, too.