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diz

@ diz @awful.systems

Posts
6
Comments
93
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Copilot prompt injection goes viral in your documents

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  • "But I thought chatbots were great at security! They hacked huggingface and also fable will fix all security bugs in firefox".

  • GDP Growth in Second Quarter Slows to 1.5%, No Evidence of AI Productivity Boom

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  • I think even if development at an instant is some % faster to start with, it writes the same functionality in more lines of code which will rapidly lead to a cumulative slowdown.

    Imagine you are traveling the oregon trail in a wagon and a devil offers you an extra horse but all of its manure has to go into the wagon. Initial speed up followed by a cumulative slowdown. If you keep accepting devil’s deals as your wagon keeps slowing down to a crawl, the progression is governed by a horseshit version of Tsiolkovsky’s equation.

  • The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech

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  • Well, the big issue is that there's only this much demand. How many web browsers is there genuine end user demand for, worldwide? Probably just 1. Several are made thanks to other demands by large corporations. How much value does a web browser provide, to billions of people who use it? What ever the number may be, it's orders of magnitude more than it costs to develop.

    Why is software observably hard for companies? When 90% of people are working on projects that are going nowhere, that creates a situation where competence is quite rare. Because in most projects it is objectively unnecessary (would make no difference). Where majority of software engineers never seen a successful project all the way from the start to the finish line.

    Then there's startups, these are (predominantly) mere vehicles for moving money from the coffers of large publicly traded corporations into pockets of VCs (who sell startups to said corporations). Whole world of pretend software engineering.

    Then there's large corporations, where CEOs want to get paid more and to be able to get paid more they need to add more layers to the hierarchy underneath them, which they need to fill somehow, and they can't fill on merit because they just don't have enough stuff happening that they could measure merit in.

    edit: basically the management always wants to do the equivalent of having hired a dozen heart surgeons to work on one heart and a "heart surgery architect" as well, the more layers the better because the more layers the higher is the pay their layer can get.

  • The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech

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  • As a software engineer, all of the free portion of the article is 100% correct about software engineering dysfunction.

    There's another reason why it is that way, though. A software engineer who is competent and productive and working under competent leadership making an useful product, would make a very large multiple of their salary in profits.

    That permits all sorts of utter dysfunction while still breaking even on the average. You can have incompetent leadership in 90% of projects, you can saddle your developers with any kind of bad practices, you can impose all sorts of productivity damaging nonsense and yet still break even.

    The dysfunction can be presented as relentless innovation and pursuit of new, uncertain opportunities, as a shrewd strategy.

    If you fall below break-even, the consequences will not be visible for many years. And up until it becomes impossible to recover, on the technical level it is extremely cheap to recover: it's easier to do nothing than to convert your OS's start menu to React. Tech companies don't fail because of tech.

    This also relates to using AI to write code. You already can have a human write your code and pay them $1 for $10 you would make from it - or $0 you would make if you fucked up. You want it to become $0.5 with AI coding tools? Then you're multiplying your probability of success by what's left after the probability that you get some unmaintainable slop . It's simply not worth it.

  • Sam Altman: Guys, we’re in the Singularity now

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  • Into a black hole.

  • Google kills AlphaFold — so much for AI curing cancer

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  • Who needs cures when you can instead simply replace doctors with chatbots?

  • The AI 2040 "not how this works" supercut

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  • Yeah I have to admit I don't have the energy to gaze into that particular idiotic abyss. How do they even write that kind of fiction, in a world where AI companies routinely use critihype to obtain more investments? The least unhinged CEO: "we caught our AI trying to start a nuclear war, it's almost skynet, please give us another trillion dollars", the least unhinged investors: "shut up and take our money".

  • The AI 2040 "not how this works" supercut

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  • I thought it was 2027. What, the timelines slip or something?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • Yeah... I think the core point is, LLM's shit is generated artifacts, which need to be kept separate from sources. That you can't actually re-generate the same artifacts, is just a dingleberry on top of the shit pile.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • Perfect for when your workplace will fire you if you dont use enough tokens, I’m sure.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • I think there’s something to the compilers analogy, in the sense that if you used a C compiler through a chat interface with one liners to insert snippets into assembly without keeping the source code in source files as such, it would probably be slower than just writing in assembly yourself.

    That LLMs have a number of extremely undesirable properties as “compilers” (from nondeterminism to plagiarism) does not make the dumb ass chat interface any less fundamentally shit. It just makes them shit in other ways too.

  • Use Gemini AI to send messages from someone else’s locked phone

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  • I just love how they are adding the absolutely fucking most stupid exploits ever to everything, and then trying to whitewash it with all that bs about Fable or whatever the fuck.

  • Office workers are spending way too much on AI too

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  • There could be but it would be difficult to implement - something a bit like putting together a shredded paper, heh.

  • rsync goes AI slop, breaks your backups

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  • It's a perfect example of how "using LLMs for test coverage" can also be harmful. He expected the tests to to prevent introduction of said regressions, probably based on a combination of the quantity of tests and their style (they look like what decent human written tests look like). But the tests are AI slop, and so they give a lot less value per line of code than he expects, hence a significant regression.

    It is literally useful to call these tests AI slop, and the problem is in part caused by not calling them AI slop, and having consequent inflated expectations. LLMs are not any better at writing tests than at writing other code! It is merely that the bar for tests can, legitimately, be a lot lower (in projects where there would otherwise be no tests at all). Making an exception to calling AI generated tests "slop" is thus counter productive, because it leads people to act as if LLMs are actually better at writing tests than at writing other code, and not just because the bar for tests is frequently very low.

    edit: actually scratch that I looked at the PR and those tests even look like dogshit and worse than the tests I seen claude write at a workplace that was into vibecoding (which i since quit).

  • Google unveils the number of remote Waymo operators

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  • Oh, by far. There’s only 80 decimal places in that at most.

    It got to be a quantum sweatshop: a quantum computer for AGI (a guy instead)

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Google unveils the number of remote Waymo operators

  • Tokenmaxxing: “How much did you spend in tokens?” — CEO of tokens

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  • How much does he think an engineer spends on CAD tools, anyway? Altium is like, what, $2500 / year? Very "how much can a banana cost".

    It's all capital costs for tools, pretty much, anyway, maybe CAD should start charging per net lmao.

  • Claude Code rate limits: Anthropic AI squeezes the customers

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  • Oh they are going to charge per token for github copilot? That thing is a money waste for everyone, I'm pretty sure. I get a mix of inane mildly good suggestions, irrelevant stuff, and an occasional suggestion of super evil sabotage. Due to mild OCD about issues, I tend to have to fix said mildly good suggestions, but from the objective perspective that nitpickery is not worth it, everything was fine without, we had compiler warnings, coverity, etc.

    edit: the difference being that the old stuff was deterministic and you just ran it on the whole codebase and had it pass. Unlike gh copilot that'll just make up new shit. And as for the times it caught some bad bug that you made... add more tests instead.

  • GitHub Copilot puts ads into pull requests

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  • I wouldn't be too surprised if they really don't, they're just advertising the advertising lol.

    edit: Basically what if you spent a trillion dollars so that you could beam ads to people's bathroom mirrors. And better yet, ads reflected from water down in their toilets. Then in the interest of expediency you just take random ads and put them there for free, and your actual product, shares, sells better.

  • If AI coding is so good … where are the performance numbers?

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  • It makes every bad programmer into a 10x bad programmer (equivalent to 10 bad programmers).

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Cory Doctorow: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

    pluralistic.net /2025/09/27/econopocalypse/
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Do leaders even believe that generative AI is useful?

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Meta was “allegedly” seeding porn to speed up their book downloads.

    arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2025/07/meta-pirated-and-seeded-porn-for-years-to-train-ai-lawsuit-says/
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems
    content warning: botshit

    AI solves every river crossing puzzle, we can go home now

    gemini.google.com /share/eeae3730726b
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    diz @awful.systems

    Google's Gemini 2.5 pro is out of beta.