6d ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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 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. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)

127 comments

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2025-share
- did they use ai to make the image? "wood of of year"
  
  It's most obvious on the cat which is all around nightmare material.
  The image also comes with alt text:
  a bizarre collection of ai-generated illustrations including a sign that reads wood of of year and a chyron that reads breaking news
- Can I just take a moment to appreciate Merriam-Webster for coming in clutch with the confirmation that we're not misunderstanding the "6-7" meme that the kids have been throwing around?

Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindsey's video about deaccenting in English language and how "AI" speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, it's usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesn't use destressing.
It reminded me of a particular line in Portal
- To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.
  Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated "without changing its stress".
  
  That's interesting. If I weren't going for a comical effect I'd try and rephrase the sentence, probably with a relative pronoun or something similar, but if unable to do so* I'd probably deemphasize the whole phrase the second time I say it. Though in terms of multi-word phrased, I think intonation would be the more accurate word to use than stress per se.
  *"To do so" would be another way to avoid repetition

Why is my home directory gone Claude?
See that ~/ at the end? That's your entire home directory.
This just keeps happening...
Previously, Previously Previously
- Sir a NaNth deletion has hit the home directory.
- Oh god, reddit is now turning comments into links to search for other comments and posts that include the same terms or phrases.
  
  A few people on bsky were claiming that at least reddit is still good re the AI crappification, and they have no idea what is coming.
  
  it shows up only when logged out
- You see, tilde marks old versions of files, so Claude actually made you a favour by freeing some disk space
  
  ……snrk
  iykyk. this comment is sublime
- ~/? More like ¯(ツ)_/¯
- @e8d79 @BlueMonday1984 is this even reversible?
  Assuming that, and Apple makes it real easy, you have a Time Machine backup: Yes, of course!

This is old news but I just stumbled across this fawning 2020 Elon Musk interview / award ceremony on the social medias and had to share it: https://www.youtube.com/live/AF2HXId2Xhg?t=2109
In it Musk claims synthetic mRNA (and/or DNA) will be able to do anything and it is like a computer program, and that stopping aging probably wouldn't be too crazy. And that you could turn someone into a freakin' butterfly if you want to with the right DNA sequence.
- This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.
  And just think, he's been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.
  
  be elon musk
  binge ket, adderall, and ST: Voyager one weekend
  burst into monday morning SpaceX board meeting after 3 nights of no sleep
  crash into table
  get a nasty wound on scalp
  it's bleeding pretty bad
  stand atop board room table and shout "We must RETVRN TO AMPHIVIAN"
  also we're naming the next crew Dragon capsule "Admiral Janeway"
  everybody claps
- this is not even wrong lol
  
  It certainly comes across a little different when said by someone who thinks cisgender is a slur and that changing one's sex is some sort of great moral evil.
  Turning into a butterfly is a cool sci-fi future but those trans people are a bridge too far.
  Also like it's just hard to listen to, being drug hazed ramblings-- I want some actually fun sci-fi speeches!

More on datacenters in space
https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
N.B. got this via HN, entire site gives off "wouldn't it be cool" vibes (author "lives and breathes space" IRONIC IT'S A VACUUM
Also this is the only thermal mention
Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed
riiiiight....
- I also enjoy :
  Radiation/shielding impacts on mass ignored; no degradation of structures beyond panel aging
  Getting high-powered electronics to work outside the atmosphere or the magnetosphere is hard, and going from a 100 meter long ISS to a 4 km long orbital data center would be hard. The ISS has separate cooling radiators and solar panels. He wants LEO to reduce the effects of cosmic rays and solar storms, but its already hard to keep satellites from crashing into something in LEO.
  Possible explanation for the hand waving:
  I love AI and I subscribe to maximum, unbounded scale.
  
  "Your mother shubscribed to makshimum, unbounded shcale last night, Trebek."
  
  He knows the promo rate on the maximum, unbounded scale subscription is gonna run out eventually, right?
- Author works for something called Varda Space (guess who is one of the major investors? drink. Guess what orifice the logo looks like? drink) and previously tried to replicate a claimed room-temperature superconductor https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-diy-race-to-replicate-lk-99/
  Some interesting ethnography of private space people in California: "People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren't. "
  Page uses that "electrons = electricity" metonymy that prompt-fonding CEOs have been using
  
  The electrons is turning into an annoying shibboleth. Also going to age oddly if more light based components really kick off. (Ran into somebody who is doing some phd work on that, or at least that is what I got from the short description he gave).
- Him fellating musk re tesla is funny considering the recent stories about reliability abd how the market is doing. And also the roadster 2, and the whole pivot to ai/ROBOTS!
  (The author being positive on the theoretical SpaceX going public vs a little bit later the reactions of the spacex subreddit on Musk actually saying they will go public later is a funny split of opinions. The subreddit saw it as a betrayal https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3ma4hvbajns2d).

Ryanair now makes you install their app instead of allowing you to just print and scan your ticket at the airport, claiming it's "better for our environment (gets rid of 300 tonnes of paper annually)." Then you log in into the app and you see there's an update about your flight, but you don't see what it's about. You need to open an update video, which, of course, is a generated video of an avatar reading it out for you. I bet that's better for the environment than using some of these weird symbols that I was putting into a box and that have now magically appeared on your screen and are making you feel annoyed (in the future for me, but present for you).
- chat is this kafkaesque
  
  New conspiracy theory: Posadist aliens have developed a virus that targets CEOs and makes them hate money.
- ….this made me twitch

An academic sneer delivered through the arXiv-o-tube:
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational system that recursively generates hierarchical thought structures. The language system grows with minimal external input and can readily distinguish between real language and impossible languages.
- Sadly, it's a Chomskian paper, and those are just too weak for today. Also, I think it's sloppy and too Eurocentric. Here are some of the biggest gaffes or stretches I found by skimming Moro's $30 book, which I obtained by asking a shadow library for "impossible languages" (ISBN doesn't work for some reason):
  
  I think that Moro's strongest point, on which they spend an entire chapter reviewing fairly solid neuroscience, is that natural language is spoken and heard, such that a proper language model must be simultaneously acoustic and textual. But because they don't address computability theory at all, they completely fail to address the modern critique that machines can learn any learnable system, including grammars; they worst that they can say is that it's literally not a human.
  
  Plus, natural languages are not necessarily spoken nor heard; sign language is gestured (signed) and seen and many, mutually-incompatible sign languages have arisen over just the last few hundred years. Is this just me being pedantic or does Moro not address them at all in their book?

https://kevinmd.com/2025/12/why-ai-in-medicine-elevates-humanity-instead-of-replacing-it.html h/t naked capitalism
Throughout my nearly three decades in family medicine across a busy rural region, I watched the system become increasingly burdened by administrative requirements and workflow friction. The profession I loved was losing time and attention to tasks that did not require a medical degree. That tension created a realization that has guided my work ever since: If physicians do not lead the integration of AI into clinical practice, someone else will. And if they do, the result will be a weaker version of care.
I feel for him, but MAYBE this isn't a technical issue but a labor one; maybe 30 years ago doctors should have "led" on admin and workflow issues directly, and then they wouldn't need to "lead" on AI now? I'm sorry Cerner / Epic sucks but adding AI won't make it better. But, of course, class consciousness evaporates about the same time as those $200k student loans come due.
- Why do they think they are going to have any input in genAI development either way?
  Anyway seeing a previous wave of shit burden you with a lot of unrelated work after deployment isnt the best reason to now start burdening yourself with a lot of unrelated work before the new wave of shot is here. But sure good luck learning how LLMs work mathematically Kevin.

just came across a wild banger:
(An aside — In their official docs, Apple refers to the menu bar always in lowercase, because it’s just a menu bar. The ‘desktop’ is the same way. This is interesting, because we live in an era where everything is a branded product whose name is a proper noun– see the Dock– and we are not allowed to merely use things, we are forced to experience using them and you legally can’t ‘experience’ a regular ‘ol noun. Everybody knows it’s gotta be a proper noun in order to be experienced. The Las Vegas Demon Orb Experience. The Microsoft Windows Desktop Experience. The ESPN Experience Brought To You By Sports Gambling. The 6th Street Hostel Bathroom Experience. But our friends “menu bar” and “desktop” are just two things, average, normal, unobtrusive. This says something about how the people who created these things thought about them.)
- I wish this attitude was more pervasive at Apple, my phone actually autocorrects to "Lock Screen" when I type it out in lower case.

Orange site mods retitled a post about a16z funding AI slop farms to remove the a16z part.
The mod tried to pretend the reason was that the title was just too damn long and clickbaity. His new title was 1 character shorter than the original.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305113
- I don’t love the title but it’s the best I could come up with to fit within the 80 character limit.
  A half dozen people might still be reading hackernews on punchcards so they ha-
  ve no choice but to argue about how to shorten "long" titles every day.
  
  Good to know that Orange Website is being considerate of us VT220 users. I knew there was a reason why mine has the amber phosphorus.
  
  I went down a punch-card history rabbit hole today on the empirical software engineering discord. TIL:
  IBM leased machines, didn't sell them
  Lease required using IBM branded punchcard (Razor and Blade Model)
  
  Until "The Consent Decree of 1956" forced them to unbundle https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/09/business/ibm-and-the-limits-of-a-consent-decree.html
  The competing punch card standard of the time had 90 columns
  We have been living in a world 10 columns too short. Think of all the HN headlines we could have had instead...
  I imagine it was like VHS vs Beta only with pocket protectors.
  
  80 character limit
  Lot of roguelike development in the past was still obsessed with that. Was a bit amusing, think even they have dropped this now.

Here’s a substack post (sorry) with a quote I found both neat and pretty funny:
Integrity comes from the Latin "integer," meaning whole or complete. A person with integrity is "whole" in the sense that their words, actions, and values are unified rather than fragmented or contradictory. They understand themselves; they have integrated the warring parts of themselves; and they respect and act on the values that their parts can agree upon.
Rationalists in shambles

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Extensions-Block-AI
Now they just need to add a slider for touchpad scroll speed.

new polemics.md: The Crypto Lotus Mystery feat. Sam Bankman-Fried

a16z funds 1000+ strong phone farm and uses it for mass manufacturing tiktok ai influencers, security turns out to be not good enough https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-the-a16z-backed-phone-farm-flooding-tiktok-with-ai-influencers/
the usecase is spam:
The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them. It’s not clear if the other 200 accounts ever promoted products or were being “warmed up,” as Doublespeed describes the process of making the accounts appear authentic before it starts promoting in order to avoid a ban.
I’ve seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.

Lol talk about mixed messages.
Mozilla's CEO yesterday:
[Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser
Firefox's social media account today:
Firefox is not becoming an AI browser.
- What the fuck would an "AI browser" even be, let alone a modern one. I know what a web browser is, basically a combined HTTP client and HTML renderer. An AI browser is not something that has a commonly understood meaning, so to claim Firefox or anything else will be one without elaboration is just wankery.
  I can't help but do their dirty work for them and try to imagine what the hell an AI browser would be. Maybe you develop a standard protocol for prompting chatbots and a markup format for displaying responses and an AI browser is a client for that? Or maybe you just put an LLM in the search bar so Mozilla's bullshit machine can give you wrong answers before pressing the return key and having Google's bullshit machine give you wrong answers. Maybe there's an about:chatbot page. I think all of these are bad bullshit ideas, but at least they're ideas and not just "what if we added
  <latest fad>
  into
  <product>
  ".
  AI Browsers. Metaverse fast food. Blockchain sneakers. Gigwork apartments. Cloud toilets. Big Data headphones. AR chairs. Military grade pianos. 3D books. App drugs. Dotcom condoms. Cyberspace bicycles. Wireless jump ropes. Video silverware. WYSIWYG carpets. Transistor fanny packs. Electromechanical ladders. Atomic flooring. Radio saunas. Horseless glue. Steam pens. Water powered masturbation.
  I assume some mesolithic asshole said shit like "we are transforming our hunter-gatherer settlement to a 'cave painting first' society" and neighboring community leaders gave that guy like a hundred animal skins each for his insight.

Introducing the Palantir shit sandwich combo: Get a cover up for the CEO tweaking out and start laying the groundwork for the AGI god's priest class absolutely free!
https://mashable.com/article/palantir-ceo-neurodivergent
TL;DR- Palantir CEO tweaks out during an interview. Definitely not any drugs guys, he's just neurodivergent! But the good, corporate approved kind. The kind that has extra special powers that make them good at AI. They're so good at AI, and AI is the future, so Palantir is starting a group of neurodivergents hand picked by the CEO (to lead humanity under their totally imminent new AI god). He totally wasn't tweaking out. He's never even heard of cocaine! Or billionaire designer drugs! Never ever!
Edit: To be clear, no hate against neurodivergence, or skepticism about it in general. I'm neurodivergent. And yeah, some types of neurodivergence tend to result in people predisposed to working in tech.
But if you're the fucking CEO of Palantir, surely you've been through training for public appearances. It's funnier that it didn't take, but this is clearly just an excuse.
I strongly feel that it's an attempt to start normalizing the elevation of certain people into positions of power based off vague characteristics they were born with.
Lemmy post that pointed me to this: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51704917
- Jesus. This being 2025 of course he had to clarify that it's definitely not DEI. Also it really grinds me gears to see hyperfocus listed as one of the "beneficial" aspects because there's no way it's not exploitative. Hey, so you know how sometimes you get so caught up in a project you forget to eat? Just so you know, you could starve on the clock. For me.
- I feel bad for the gullible ND people who spend time applying to this thinking they might have a chance and it isn't a high level coverup attempt.
  Otoh, somebody should take some fun drugs and tape their interviews, see how it works out. Are there any Hunter S Tech journalists around?

The ACM has fallen
https://types.pl/@wilbowma/115733550130706711
https://types.pl/@arjen@idf.social/115736432049018026
- ACM is now showing an AI “summary” of a recent paper of mine on the DL instead of the abstract. As an author, I have not granted ACM the right to process my papers in this way, and will not. They should either roll back this (mis)feature or remove my papers from the DL.
  https://infosec.exchange/@hovav/115731038692335809
  
  Relatedly:
  As is typical for educators these days, Heiss was following up on citations in papers to make sure that they led to real sources — and weren’t fake references supplied by an AI chatbot. Naturally, he caught some of his pupils using generative artificial intelligence to cheat: not only can the bots help write the text, they can supply alleged supporting evidence if asked to back up claims, attributing findings to previously published articles. [...] That in itself wasn’t unusual, however. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals. [...] That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations.
  https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/
- I became a member this year! and then immediately got to notice how it’s oozing out every pore
  what’s kinda wild for me is that there’s also an ethics pledge involved, and I do not understand how they square that with the mass theft all LLM services and progress are/is based on
  them automatically fucking with authors’ papers….ew

Somebody wrote an article that seems to be especially designed to piss people like us off. https://testdouble.com/insights/anyone-can-code-software-is-having-its-ratatouille-moment
I saw it and I'm spreading my pain around. (As an additional bonus, the site jumps back upwards in the text for me constantly).
- Not even one paragraph in and I already see an "it's not X, its Y".
  When I look at the cast, I don't just see a rat and a bunch of chefs. I see the archetypes of our modern tech landscape
  
  @e8d79 @Soyweiser already missed one 🥴
- Oh god, I'd be so happy to see these people prove their point by actually shipping stuff that works instead of sitting in the corner throwing insults at how everyone else is dumb and are going to be left behind any day now.
- Dave Mosher is a Principal Consultant at Test Double, and has experience in legacy modernization, agentic coding, and explaining CORS poorly to people who didn't ask.
  What legitimate experience does he possess? I can only assume legacy modernization means throw spaghetti microservice buzzword architecture at the client. And he admits he doesn't really know CORS. I see these blogs about how LLMs are so much better than humans for programming yet never written by someone who has put together anything more complex and bigger scale than their myspace page in '05.

John Scalzi:
I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/

Today, in fascists not understanding art, a suckless fascist praised Mozilla's 1998 branding:
This is real art; in stark contrast to the brutalist, generic mess that the Mozilla logo has become. Open source projects should be more daring with their visual communications.
Quoting from a 2016 explainer:
[T]he branding strategy I chose for our project was based on propaganda-themed art in a Constructivist / Futurist style highly reminiscent of Soviet propaganda posters. And then when people complained about that, I explained in detail that Futurism was a popular style of propaganda art on all sides of the early 20th century conflicts… Yes, I absolutely branded Mozilla.org that way for the subtext of "these free software people are all a bunch of commies." I was trolling. I trolled them so hard.
The irony of a suckless developer complaining about brutalism is truly remarkable; these fuckwits don't actually have a sense of art history, only what looks cool to them. Big lizard, hard-to-read font, edgy angular corners, and red-and-black palette are all cool symbols to the teenage boy's mind, and the fascist never really grows out of that mindset.
- It irks me to see people casually use the term "brutalist" when what they really mean is "modern architecture that I don't like". It really irks me to see people apply the term brutalist to something that has nothing to do with architecture! It's a very specific term!
  
  "Brutalist" is the only architectural style they ever learned about, because the name implies violence

A bunch of big hollywood people have started “creator’s coalition on AI”. A snarky summary of their mission: “let’s figure out how we can work with the fascists!”

ModRetro, retro gaming company infamous for being helmed by terrible person Palmer Luckey, has put out a version of their handheld made with "the same magnesium aluminum alloy as Anduril’s attack drones" (bluesky commentary, the linked news article is basically an ad and way too forgiving).
So uhh... they're not beating those guilt by association accusations any time soon.
- a version of [the ModRetro Chromatic] made with “the same magnesium aluminum alloy as Anduril’s attack drones”
  Obvious moral issues aside, is that even an effective marketing point? Linking yourself to Anduril, whose name is synonymous with war crimes and dead civs, seems like an easy way to drive away customers.
  
  yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.
  
  I'm holding out for the Lockheed-branded Atari Lynx clone thats made from surplus R9X knife missile parts.
- Obviously, if they've got magnesium alloy to divert into Game Boy ripoffs, the attack drone contract must not be going particularly well
  
  i think that some of these are meant to be disposable
- Time Extension's decided to wash their hands of ModRetro after seeing the news. Good call on their part.

Purdue mandating AI to graduate: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/purdue-unveils-comprehensive-ai-strategy-trustees-approve-ai-working-competency-graduation-requirement/
I'm looking for the actual curricula / docs signed off by the trustees. Looks like another domino falls.
- Purdue and Google recently expanded their strategic partnership, emphasizing the importance of public-private partnerships that are essential to accelerating innovation in AI.
  https://www.purdue.edu/ai/
  Translation: somebody's getting paid off
  🎶 Money makes the world go 'round 🎶
- Boilermakers gonna boil water i guess
- I learned yesterday that Helsinki’s uni is also on the list: prompts not only tolerated, but encouraged
  been starting to wonder whether these are like the google etc plays there: “suuuuure you can get a sweetheart deal for our systems” [5y later and much storage on the expensive rentabox] “hey btw we’re renewing prices, your contracts are going up 400%. oh and also taking data out of the system is $20/TB. just..in case you wanted to try”

Ben Williamson, editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology:
Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird... So this was the non-existent paper I searched for:
Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication. European Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 279–296.
But the search result I got was a bit different...
Here's the paper I found online:
Williamson, B. and Piattoeva, N. (2022) Education Governance and Datafication. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 3515-3531.
Same title but now with a coauthor and in a different journal! Nelli Piattoeva and I have written together before but not this...
And so checked out Google Scholar. Now on my profile it doesn't appear, but somwhow on Nelli's it does and ... and ... omg, IT'S BEEN CITED 42 TIMES almost exlusively in papers about AI in education from this year alone...
Which makes it especially weird that in the paper I was reviewing today the precise same, totally blandified title is credited in a different journal and strips out the coauthor. Is a new fake reference being generated from the last?...
I know the proliferation of references to non-existent papers, powered by genAI, is getting less surprising and shocking but it doesn't make it any less potentially corrosive to the scholarly knowledge environment.
- Relatedly, AI is fucking up academic copy-editing.
  Meanwhile,
  One of the world’s largest academic publishers is selling a book on the ethics of artificial intelligence research that appears to be riddled with fake citations, including references to journals that do not exist.

Larian Studios founder/CEO Swen Vincke is posting through it on Twitter, after the studio's use of plagiarism machines caused significant backlash (to the shock of everyone except Swen).
This is probably Pivot to AI material.
- Ah yes, I love the smell of burning bridges in the evening. Fuck. And I was getting excited about Divinity! Well, guess that means more money to spend on other things.

article in large part about our friends
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/
some of the people involved with kernel are pretty unhappy about this and claim the piece is in bad faith/factually wrong (see the replies to https://bsky.app/profile/kellypendergrast.bsky.social/post/3ma55xfq7d22y )
- Shit like Palladium is going to be absolutely hilarious to dig up in the back of a used bookstore 20 years from now
- That link can't be viewed without a bluesky account, btw.
  
  here you go https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Fkellypendergrast.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3ma55xfq7d22y
- Reminder Tivy was the guy behind Phalanx (back in his polyamory microblogging days)~
  
  Made all the funnier by the fact that probably my favorite Hacker News thread of all time is on Tivy's article about how he abandoned his job to "court" his wife:
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830743
  If even the orange site is willing to roast you this hard, I guess your only response has to be pulling up stakes to go live in a neofascist social bubble instead.

https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru/issues/1454#issuecomment-3652003263.
Rust is terrible, rewrite in jai (?)
- tf is jai
  Why is Jai ground-breaking? Jai is so important because it is an effort to build a modern systems programming language from the ground up by a very gifted and experienced developer.
  programmers. programmers never change.
  With his knowledge of all C/C++ shortcomings, he rethought every one of these problems to give them an easier to use, more elegant and more performant solution. In this way Jai really is a better and modern day C, and also a C++ done right.
  "14 competing 'modern take on C' languages? Ridiculous! We need to develop one definitive alternative that fixes all the problems with C++"
  
  a very gifted and experienced developer.
  Don't forget the most crucial part. The very gifted and experienced developer ... is Jonathan Blow.
- Getting mad because developers have not had time to update a piece of code that wraps another piece of code and blaming it on the language is in interesting choice.
  Telling a whole project 'your language sucks you should rewrite it in my pet language' is always a nice classic of the nerd genre. (Happy I never got a big language hangup like that. (Apart from a short bit of a dislike of functional programming languages, but that was just due to a bad early experience)).
- who tf is zerophase (apart from a lunduke fan)

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ucla-replace-teaching-assistants-ai
Miller’s team also recently used software from startup StackAI to develop an AI-powered app that writes letters of recommendation, saving faculty members time. Faculty type basic details about a student who has requested a letter, such as their grades and accomplishments, and the app writes a draft of the full letter.
AI is “one of those things that you might worry could dehumanize the process of writing recommendation letters, but faculty also say that process [of manually writing the letters] is very labor intensive,” Miller said. “So far they’ve gotten a lot out of” the new app.
Anyone using this thing should be required to serve on the admissions committee. LoRs aren't for generic B+ students that you don't even remember, just say no.
I googled stackai, saw their screenshots and had ptsd flashbacks of mid 2000s alteryx. why do we keep reinventing no-code drag-and-drop box-and-arrow crap.

So, I’m taking this one with a pinch of salt, but it is entertaining: “We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.”
The whole exercise was clearly totally pointless and didn’t solve anything that needed solving (like every other “ai” project, i guess) but it does give a small but interesting window into the mindset of people who have only one shitty tool and are trying to make it do everything. Your chatbot is too easily lead astray? Use another chatbot to keep it in line! Honestly, I thought they were already doing this… I guess it was just to expensive or something, but now the price/desperation curves have intersected
Anthropic had already run into many of the same problems with Claudius internally so it created v2, powered by a better model, Sonnet 4.5. It also introduced a new AI boss: Seymour Cash, a separate CEO bot programmed to keep Claudius in line. So after a week, we were ready for the sequel.
Just one more chatbot, bro. Then prompt injection will become impossible. Just one more chatbot. I swear.
Anthropic and Andon said Claudius might have unraveled because its context window filled up. As more instructions, conversations and history piled in, the model had more to retain—making it easier to lose track of goals, priorities and guardrails. Graham also said the model used in the Claudius experiment has fewer guardrails than those deployed to Anthropic’s Claude users.
Sorry, I meant just one more guardrail. And another ten thousand tokens capacity in the context window. That’ll fix it forever.
https://archive.is/CBqFs

OT: Lurasidone is neat stuff.

A rare W for the Tennessee General Assembly:
https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-politics/bill-targets-ai-hurt-manipulate/

For more lighthearted gaming-related news, Capcom fired off a quick sneer, whilst (indirectly) promoting their their latest Mega Man game:

(alt text: "As a reminder for those entering the Mega Man: Dual Override Boss Design Art Contest, please remember the rules posted at bit.ly/MMDORobotMaster. Entrants must follow this account, and please leave the AI to the robots: generative AI is prohibited for this contest.")
- This was a prime opportunity to trot out bad box art megaman and they didn’t take it

Came across this gem with the author concluding that a theoretical engineer can replace SaaS offerings at small businesses with some Claude and while there is an actual problem highlighted (SaaS offerings turning into a disjoint union of customer requirements that spiral complexity, SaaS itself as a tool for value extraction) the conclusion is just so wrong-headed.

The monorail salespeople at Checkmarx have (allegedly) discovered a new exploit for code extruders.
The "attack", titled "Lies in the Loop", involves taking advantage of human-in-the-loop """safeguards""" to create fake dialogue prompts, thus tricking vibe-coders into running malicious code.

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