Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 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 so 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. If you’re wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
(EDIT: Changed “29th February” to “1st March” - its not a leap year)
Jack Dorsey’s really figured out how to name his companies. He didn’t like the name of Square, so he changed it to Block. He also spent $68M of Block’s money on a massive all-hands party. Now, after Bitcoin’s crash, he has to lay off 4k employees from Block. Don’t worry, somebody on HN was at the party and can explain everything:
Describing it as a “party” feels misleading. It was a company-wide offsite for an essentially fully remote organization. Was it necessary? Probably not. But I found the in-person time valuable, especially with teammates I’d never met face to face.
Elsewhere in-thread, somebody does the maths:
The three-day festival in downtown Oakland featured performances by Jay-Z, Anderson .Paak, T-Pain, and Soulja Boy, and brought 8,000 employees from around the globe.
Oh, well, there you go. 8k employees each buying $4k of hotel and travel, that adds up. Huh, why does that “J. Z.” fellow sound familiar? Maybe it was in one of those WP articles I keep linking?
On March 2, 2021, Square reached an agreement to acquire majority ownership in Tidal. Square paid $297 million in cash and stock for Tidal, with Jay-Z joining the company’s board of directors. Jay-Z, as well as other artists who currently own stock in Tidal, will remain stakeholders. On December 1, 2021, Square announced that it would change its company name to Block, Inc. on December 10. The change was announced shortly after Dorsey resigned as CEO of Twitter.
Ah, I see. It wasn’t a party, it was a presentation from the board of directors.
TIL block is square. I was wondering how there was a huge tech company I’d never heard of until recently.
I hadn’t heard of square either. Are they the guys doing squarespace? No idea.
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I mean, OpenAI is doing it anyway. I think Altman is just keen to not experience the same strong arming bullshit. https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175
oh yeah SamA’s statement was definitely PR-adjacent (OpenAI already got caught working with the US government and the people behind Discord’s age verification to create mass surveillance) but Trump’s threats against Anthropic are definitely real
(edit: https://youtu.be/zZ98DPIp0a4 source for the OpenAI surveillance thing)
I’m so torn on this, because IN THEORY the argument “git blame should show the dunce who committed this” makes sense.
But then why not add the AI as a co-committer.
(All of this of course sidesteps the actual question, “why the fuck are you allowing AI contributions in the first place”.)
accountability sink go brrr
(and to step on my pedestal for a moment: turns out “flat file” semantics for reasoning about and managing computer instructions is kinda fucking terrible, who knew?! (gods I wish we could have had some of the alternatives… worse is better is why they won out, but we could do so much better with modern compute capacity…))
friend of a friend who works for meta was just ignoring the mandate to use ai. apparently this was happening enough that they’ve now implemented per character provenance tracing, and you get ranked according to how much AI is in your code
lol, lmao even
I wonder what will happen if people still continue (and I’m sure a few can afford to…)
but holy shit talk about absolute desperation…
sorry to thread hijack but I have been trying to hire software devs and during interview process we reveal our zero-AI policy for the product codebase (corporate allows it for “debug tooling” in limited amounts). weirdly many candidates are disappointed to hear this and unwilling to proceed.
in a way we find it refreshing because we want to hire folks that know and learn things. but it is wild how many have expectations to set up an ide day one and it start churning out patches
Huh, not what I would have expected. I work for a company that has sadly shifted very AI-focused, with the exception of the actual engineers. Literally none of us likes or uses LLMs. Every other week someone from the C-suite reminds us that we are encouraged to use it, and get 300$ or some such in credits for AI tooling per month, and that they don’t understand why it hasn’t been claimed even once.
if you should ever happen to be short on resumes…
(it feels like a zero AI job board might be a good thing to have, but we’d need a way to vet submissions and handle anonymous submissions and inquiries so people don’t dox themselves)
unfortunately AI tools do exist in the company and there are some expectations of use on some teams but it varies depending where in the product you work. anything OS, kernel, bootloaders, filesystem, etc is a strict no AI policy. All the front end teams seem to use something sparingly, couldnt tell you what it is or why.
without revealing too much personal info, companies like mine aren’t too hard to find but they tend to be somewhat old school. Lots of C programming, some assembly, and digging into the guts of stuff. Anyone doing firmware, infrastructure (like all the big storage guys), or even some of the trading world is highly sensitive to genAI tools because of the risk. Especially if you ship a box rather than some fully cloud connected always updating app. The companies may even say they do something with or about AI then you talk to the loader or kernel team and they will say “absolutely not”. I cannot tell you over the years across a few jobs how often I hear management lamenting how we can never fill recs because we need actual C people or someone not afraid of a terminal debugger. And two of these shops are hugely popular in the tech world. Hope these hints help
I would love if there were a way to filter out pro-AI companies. Nothing would make me happier than to have an interviewer tell me “we don’t allow slop here.” Instead, I have to gauge how truthful I can be. Usually, the best I can get away with is “I haven’t personally found it very useful, because I spend more time diagnosing its errors than I would have writing the code from scratch.” (But the truth is I haven’t ever used this sloppy shit. Letting a stochastic parrot speak for me is bonker balls.)
Yeah, I haven’t been feeling great about having to nod vigorously and feign enthusiasm for slop on every damn cover letter and interview I’ve had recently. The best I’ve managed is saying I only use it in professional capacity and try to emphasize the personal learning angle as a defense.
It’s brutal out there and I’m losing hope. I wish I had another industry I could pivot to await the passing of the bubble that gives me the flexibility to be a musician like remote work programming does.
many have expectations to set up an ide day one and it start churning out patches
I just don’t understand the thought process. They must realize that this level of automation wouldn’t require anyone to hire them?
I really wish this was my average experience trying to land another software gig in the past year…
ranked according to how much AI is in your code
Truly the greatest idea since “rank developers by lines of code written”.
this is nearly as dumb as elon’s “show me your 5 best lines of code” shit while he was err, downsizing twitter. What are you supposed to do when a code review flags some bad code? fondle your prompts repeatedly until that part gets fixed? Sounds like a solution that will often be much less efficient than making edits by hand. Maybe they just don’t do code reviews now, that would be cool.
It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality and that’s just amazing, i love it for everyone. I choose to laugh rather than cry.
When I do code review these days, sometimes I genuinely can’t tell whether I’m talking to the person or to the slop extruder. It often ends up with me repeating the same comment over and over again.
Had an email chain the other day like that. Must have went back and forth with the guy five times, every time ending my response with some permutation of “we’re still looking into it, I’ll keep you updated.”
His last response to me was incredibly similarly worded to an AI being told it’s wrong, which was hilarious because I was the one who told him what he was saying didn’t apply to the situation. Setting on his personal install of a tool vs a company wide configuration that needed to be adjusted. Then he ended it with “But is there any way I could ask you to continue looking into this?”
Reported his ass to management. I literally told him I was doing that as my first fucking response. Having an AI take over your correspondence after you asked me for assistance is beyond anything remotely ok.
Edit: Thankfully my boss thoroughly enjoys playing “This is how much money you burned by wasting this much of my team’s time.” with other departments. He’d better not retire anytime soon.
god this sounds exhausting
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 die bewerten also nicht mehr nach Menge Code, sondern Kot? 💩
Jonathan Hogg gives his two cents on gen-AI, pointing to high barriers to entry causing vibe-coding to explode:
We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.
You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
(Adding my two cents, Adobe Flash filled the same role as HyperCard in the '00s, providing the public an easy(ish) way to get into programming, and providing an outlet for many an aspirating animator and gamedev.)
ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
This concept has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks now but I’ve struggled to put it into words: the reason so many elites love AI is not because they think it will work, but because it offers them genuine utility as a rhetorical device. It’s an always-applicable counterargument to criticisms that their plans or laws are unworkable. Like, some politician will propose a dumb law or some CEO will announce some absurd company policy and in the past they would get pushback, but now they just duct tape over all the cracks with “ahh, but we’re using AI!”.
The latest example of this I’ve seen is from the 3d printing subreddit - a few states are passing laws that would require the manufacturers of 3d printers to prevent the user from using them to print guns, and conversations on this seem to go thusly:
Anti: “A 3d printer doesn’t know what the thing it’s printing is, any more than a regular printer knows whether it’s printing a recipe or a death threat. This can’t work.”
Pro: “We’ll require manufacturers to install verification chips in their printers, then users will verify their 3d files using AI before printing.”
Anti: “Putting aside for now the privacy concerns and the fact that this kind of DRM approach to force users to only use authorized files has been tried before and has literally never worked, how will the AI know if the 3d file is a gun or not?”
Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”
Anti: “…Even if you have some magical algorithm that can tell a 3d model is a working gun from first principles, it would be easy to bypass; a firearm isn’t one descrete object, it’s a mechanical device made up of components that are not dangerous by themselves. The user can always break the file up and print it one piece at a time.”
Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”
Anti: “It doesn’t matter how smart the AI is, it can’t know by looking if a spring is part of a pistol magazine or part of a pen!”
Pro: “I told you, we’ll use AI!”
Seems like it, before they just used to word ‘innovation’ to do the same thing. A think which drives me mad re dutch politics. (We have a problem that our farms produce to much nitrogen, and instead of doing anything about it our govs keep going ‘we will invest in innovation’, which means nothing. It just pushes the ball forward, and more and more stuff gets shut down because of the nitrogen problems (building buildings for example). But the word innovation polls well and feels proactive).
And while this is very specific to the nitrogen problem, people have been doing this with climate change for decades as well. (see also how AI is replacing the word innovation there).
It’s such a powerful dodge. What you’re actually saying is “we’re going to keep doing exactly what we’re doing and see if that fixes it” because the nature of innovation is such that it’s actually pretty complex to “invest” in, and very rarely has the direct application you need. Like, you don’t get penicillin by investing in pharmaceutical innovation you get it by paying some nerd to fuck off to the jungle for a few years and hope that his special interest ends up being useful. Bell Labs was able to basically invent the modern world by funneling the profits of their massive monopolistic empire into
a bunch of nerds poking stuff with probes to see what happenselementary physics and materials science research that didn’t have a definite objective.
https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/thursday-26022026/
According to GEO company BrightEdge, LLMs now rely on YouTube as a top source for citations – and that includes sponsored creator content.
LLMs favor YouTube because it’s “highly machine-readable,” with defined transcripts, metadata and chapters, Ómar Thor Ómarsson, CEO and co-founder of Optise, an AI platform that helps B2B companies improve search performance, tells Digiday.
Standard ad units on YouTube are labeled as such and, as a result, LLMs steer clear of them. But creators aren’t required to disclose their paid brand partnerships in video metadata, so AI considers them to be worthy sources.
BrightEdge’s research shows that YouTube is cited even more frequently than Reddit within Gemini and ChatGPT, and also shows up in 29.5% of Google AI Overviews. An audit conducted by media agency Brainlabs, meanwhile, suggests that YouTube shows up as a source in nearly 60% of AI Overviews.
So they already shipped ads in chatbots, transitively and accidentally. Can’t wait to see NordVPN, Raid, and Mr Beast chocolate on every SERP.
E: I wonder if Altman is sneaky enough to hijack affiliate links a la honey
The blind leading the blind. Because so many stuff on yt is so bad.
(Recently the algorithm decided I wanted some analysis of Andor. And oof).
Which one? Mind sharing?
It wasnt just one like almost all of them were bad. The worst one was a vid where they went ‘they did great things with colors, see how the rebels constantly wear yellow and red clothing to symbolize the fire of the rebellion’ only half the outfits they called orange were just brown, and their supporting arguments on this from things which were said clearly were about other thematicnthings which they missed.
I purged them from my history to try and make the algo stop however.
Unrelated to that, also saw a guy do a deep dive on the themes of a movie (not andor). Only to admit he had only seen the movie once. Which is quite a thing to admit.
Oof, OK. I have seen some S1 Andor deep-dives in the past which were genuinely good. Haven’t watched anything on S2 yet, because I didn’t like it.
Mike Masnick coping about Bluesky (de) centralization again.
In a moment of weakness, I took the bait.
Didn’t get banned yet, but here’s hoping. He be mostly posting cringe lately anyway and my timeline could use some cleaning up.
call out his confabulation machine usage, and the block will be quick
I myself unfollowed Masnick a while back because I knew I would eventually push back on some of his shit and it would lead to me getting into stupid timewasting discussions. Nice to see im not the only one annoyed.
me here still steelman-following casey and masnick and such all like 😬😬😬
I like how even by ACX standards scoot’s posts on AI are pure brain damage
One level lower down, your brain was shaped by next-sense-datum prediction - partly you learned how to do addition because only the mechanism of addition correctly predicted the next word out of your teacher’s mouth when she said “three plus three is . . . “ (it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true). But you don’t feel like you’re predicting anything when you’re doing a math problem. You’re just doing good, normal mathematical steps, like reciting “P.E.M.D.A.S.” to yourself and carrying the one.
The most compelling analogy: this is like expecting humans to be “just survival-and-reproduction machines” because survival and reproduction were the optimization criteria in our evolutionary history. […] This simple analogy is slightly off, because it’s confusing two optimization levels: the outer optimization level (in humans, evolution optimizing for reproduction; in AIs, companies optimizing for profit) with the inner optimization level (in humans, next-sense-datum prediction; in AIs, next-token prediction). But the stochastic parrot people probably haven’t gotten to the point where they learn that humans are next sense-datum predictors, so the evolution/reproduction one above might make a better didactic tool.
He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.
Here’s hoping if this happens Bender et al enthusiastically point out this is coming from a guy whose long term master plan is to fight evil AI with eugenics. Or who uses the threat of evil AI to make eugenics great again if they are feeling less charitable.
Nonsensical analogies are always improved by adding a chart with colorful boxes and arrows going between them. Of course, the burden of proof is on you, dear reader, to explain why the analogy doesn’t make sense, not on the author to provide more justification than waving his hands really really hard.
Many of these analogies are bad as, I don’t know, “Denmark and North Korea are the same because they both have governments” or something. Humans and LLMs both produce sequences of words, where the next word depends in some way on the previous words, so they are basically the same (and you can call this “predicting” the next word as a rhetorical flourish). Yeah, what a revolutionary concept, knowing that both humans and LLMs follow the laws of time and causality. And as we know, evolution “optimizes” for reproduction, and that’s why there are only bacteria around (they can reproduce every 20 minutes). He has to be careful, these types of dumbass “optimization” interpretations of evolution that arose in the late 1800s led to horrible ideas about race science … wait a minute …
He isn’t even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do “high-D toroidal attractor manifolds” and “6D helical manifolds” have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the “(???, nothing)” business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.
I feel like his arguments rely on the Barnum effect. He makes statements like “humans and LLMs predict the next word” and “evolution optimizes for reproduction” that are so vague that they can be assigned whatever meaning he wants. Because of this, you can’t easily dispel them (he just comes up with some different interpretation), and he can use them as carte blanche to justify whatever he wants.
He isn’t even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do “high-D toroidal attractor manifolds” and “6D helical manifolds” have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the “(???, nothing)” business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.
It’s from another horseshit analogy that roughly boils down to both neural net inference (specifically when generating end-of-line tokens) and aspects of specific biological components of human perception being somewhat geometrically modellable. I didn’t include the entire context or a link to the substack in the OP because I didn’t care to, but here is the analogy in full:
spoiler
The answer was: the AI represents various features of the line breaking process as one-dimensional helical manifolds in a six-dimensional space, then rotates the manifolds in some way that corresponds to multiplying or comparing the numbers that they’re representing. You don’t need to understand what this means, so I’ve relegated my half-hearted attempt to explain it to a footnote1. From our point of view, what’s important is that this doesn’t look like “LOL, it just sees that the last token was ree and there’s a 12.27% of a line break token following ree.” Next-token prediction created this system, but the system itself can involve arbitrary choices about how to represent and manipulate data.
Human neuron interpretability is even harder than AI neuron interpretability, but probably your thoughts involve something at least as weird as helical manifolds in 6D spaces.I searched the literature for the closest human equivalent to Claude’s weird helical manifolds, and was able to find one team talking about how the entorhinal cells in the hippocampus, which help you track locations in 2D space, use “high-dimensional toroidal attractor manifolds”. You never think about these, and if Claude is conscious, it doesn’t think about its helices either2. These are just the sorts of strange hacks that next-token/next-sense-datum prediction algorithms discover to encode complicated concepts onto physical computational substrate.
re: the bolded part, I like how explicitly cherry-picking neuroscience passes for peak rationalism.
Jesus fucking christ I don’t think I will ever get over how fucking dogshit the fucking rationalists are at epistemology
IT’S CALLED A FUCKING MAPPING. “MAP”. AS IN NOT THE TERRITORY. IT’S IN THE NAME.
bad at epistemology
Gwern once denied chaos theory in a way that Freeman Dyson called out in 1985, and as LessWrongers go he is a pretty clear thinker!
That’s such a weird comment… like “worried about hurricanes” - the first idea is to pour literal oil on the water??? in what world does that scale??? then it concludes with “maybe don’t build fragile buildings in hurricane areas” - lead with that you pillock
I feel I’m stepping into some long-forgotten debate on LW on alignment or something because there’s so much that doesn’t make sense in context
what the hecky
he’s so offended he’s been told he’s not god!
I mean the whole entire premise (not unique to this post, scoot’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this) is shoehorning LLMs into the predictive coding framework mostly on the grounds that they both use prediction terminology and deal with work units that they call neurons, with the added bonus that PC posits Bayesian inference is involved so it’s obviously extra valid.
Queue a few thousand words of scoot wearing his science popularizer hat and just declaring the most vacuous shit imaginable with a straight face and a friendly teacher’s casual authority.
This somehow makes things even funnier. If he had any understanding of modern math, he would know that representing a set of things as points in some geometric space is one of the most common techniques in math. (A basic example: a pair of numbers can be represented by a point in 2D space.) Also, a manifold is an extremely broad geometric concept: knowing that two things are manifolds does not meant that they are the same or even remotely similar, without checking the details. There are tons of things you can model as a manifold if you try hard enough.
From what I see, Scoot read a paper modeling LLM inference with manifolds and thought “wow, cool!” Then he fished for neuroscience papers until he found one that modeled neurons using manifolds. Both of the papers have blah blah blah something something manifolds so there must be a deep connection!
(Maybe there is a deep connection! But the burden of proof is on him, and he needs to do a little more work than noticing that both papers use the word manifold.)
It’s entirely possible he does get that it’s a nothing burger but is just being his usual disingenuous self to pull people in.
How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google’s and Facebook’s advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.
it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true
Wait so it isnt true and it is true? Nice to notice your own confusion/reluctance (yeah im a broken record on the Rationalists not doing Rationalism) Also weird way to teach math. This makes me wonder if he understands math at all.
Edit sneer
He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.
So, he is a crypto Stochastic Parrot?
Turns out Google Gemini will let you use any old Google API key from things like maps and firebase to access it. So, baddies can do key scanning in public repos and then charge LLM usage to anyone who has committed an API key to their repo!
So many layers of stupidity going on here!
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-25/fbi-raid-lausd-search-warrants h/t naked capitalism
Joanna Smith-Griffin, the founder and former chief executive of AllHere, was arrested in 2024 and charged with securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. By then, the envisioned LAUSD chatbot — known as “Ed” — had been withdrawn from service.
Ed was an artificial intelligence tool billed by Carvalho in August 2024 as revolutionary for students’ education and the interaction between LAUSD and the families it serves. The tool was never fully deployed.
“The indictment and the allegations represent, if true, a disturbing and disappointing house of cards that deceived and victimized many across the country,” Carvalho said at the time. “We will continue to assert and protect our rights.”
The indictment and collapse of AllHere was an embarrassment for Carvalho and the school system, but did not appear to represent a major financial exposure. The school system had spent about $3 million with the company for work completed as part of a contract originally worth up to $6 million over five years. By comparison, the district’s budget this year is $18.8 billion.
A former AllHere senior executive has accused the now-collapsed company of inadequate security measures. Even if that allegation is true, there has been no evidence of a related security breach affecting student or employee data.
We regularly have seven figure IT fiascoes in the LA public school system, so this one slipped under my radar. But, this sounds like one of those things where the Trump DOJ is doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reasons…
Ran across https://406.fail/ and had a chuckle.
The AI-fication of K Street - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2026/02/ai-lobbying-defense-industry/
OT: since computer stuff is a gong show, I am strongly considering going back to school for massage therapy.
I’ve heard worse ideas. It’s funny; I would have expected the people who were in tech because it looked like the best bet for a relatively stable in-demand career would have been the ones who were crap at it relative to the folks doing it purely for love of the game. But it turns out that having something else going on is closely linked to touching grass in ways that make you harder to lure into the cult.
If only it was a gong show. It’s more like shoveling coal into a dead horse and expecting a locomotive to spring forth
If I hear ‘get a computer job’ one more time I’m going to start screaming. Boomers are deranged.
