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nfultz

@ nfultz @awful.systems

Posts
3
Comments
176
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • Scott Alexander replies to comments Re: Scott Adams

    Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you.

    Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it.

    ha.

    Other than that, further testimonials of the Dilbert -> NRx pipeline.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • The pro-natalism book Quiggin is responding to is After the Spike; I got a free copy at work and read it on the plane over break. Mostly longtermism / utilitarianism, but left-pro-natalism is a little different. One of them came to campus to do a book talk last week, most of the audience remained pretty skeptical. Word on the street is that Musk gave them a pretty hefty grant, enough that I got a dead tree apparently...

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • This is a lot more common than you'd think, several posts about abuse like this over at the academia stack exchange. If you think he used your writing, you could file a copyright claim on it since you are the author, not him. Do not waste your time with HR or honor committees, they will not do anything for you, their job is to cover the universities ass, not help. I honestly can't think of a case where going public led to anything more than a footnote on the persons wikipedia page, although it might be good for warning the incoming cohort of students.

    If you're really sure about finishing your phd, it's probably pretty hard to xfer to a new school without LoRs, a strong publication record or bringing your own grant, but you might be able to switch depts if they're close enough, eg math <=> stats <=> CS. They might make you do comps / quals again though. But there's a pretty big diminishing returns to years 4+ of a phd, honestly, and I can assure you that there's assholes everywhere. Deans will yell at you too, and I've heard of a couple dept chairs that throw staplers. The tenure track does not incentivise not-being-an-asshole, at all, it is a rigidly hierarchical system and accompanying world view, at least in the R1s anyway.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter

    It's a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.

    The hostility to AI tools within parts of our community is understandable. But it's also strategic malpractice. We've seen this movie before, with Wikipedia itself. Institutions that tried to ban or resist Wikipedia lost years they could have spent learning to work with it. By the time they adapted, the world had moved on.

    AI isn't going away. The question isn't whether to engage. It's whether we'll shape how our content is used or be shaped by others' decisions.

    Short of wikipedia shipping it's own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it's not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • Wes McKineny - Why Not

    EDIT

    I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that's all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • I’ll be brutally honest about that question: I think that if “they might train on my code / build a derived version with an LLM” is enough to drive you away from open source, your open source values are distinct enough from mine that I’m not ready to invest significantly in keeping you. I’ll put that effort into welcoming the newcomers instead.

    No he won't.

    I’ve found myself affected by this for open source dependencies too. The other day I wanted to parse a cron expression in some Go code. Usually I’d go looking for an existing library for cron expression parsing—but this time I hardly thought about that for a second before prompting one (complete with extensive tests) into existence instead.

    He /knows/ about pcre but would rather prompt instead. And pretty sure this was already answered on stack overflow before 2014.

    That one was a deliberately provocative question, because for a new HTML5 parsing library that passes 9,200 tests you would need a very good reason to hire an expert team for two months (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to write such a thing. And honestly, thanks to the existing conformance suites this kind of library is simple enough that you may find their results weren’t notably better than the one written by the coding agent.

    He didn't write a new library from scratch, he ported one from Python. I could easily hire two undergrads to change some tabs to curlies, pay them in beer, and yes, I think it /would/ be better, because at least they would have learned something.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • From a new white paper Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt, h/t The Syllabus Hidden Gem of the Week

    The long-term viability of the AI investment surge depends on meeting the high expectations embedded in those investments, with a disconnect between debt pricing and equity valuations. Failure to meet expectations could result in sharp corrections in both equity and debt markets. As shown in Graph 3.C, the loan spreads charged on private credit loans to AI firms are close to those charged to non-AI firms. If loan spreads reflect the risk of the underlying investment, this pattern suggests that lenders judge AI-related loans to be as risky as the average loan to any private credit borrower. This stands in stark contrast to the high equity valuations of AI companies, which imply outsized future returns. This schism suggests that either lenders may be underestimating the risks of AI investments (just as their exposures are growing significantly) or equity markets may be overestimating the future cash flows AI could generate.

    Por que no los dos? But maybe the lenders are expecting a bailout... or just gullible...

    That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.

    Interesting point, if AI is basically a rounding error for GDP... But I also remember the layoffs in 2000-1 and 2014-5, they weren't evenly distributed and a lot of people got left behind, even if they weren't as bad as '08.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_generativeai-gartner-ibm-activity-7415515266849124352-W2n5

    I’ve finally cracked how Gartner’s “Features” axis works.

    It’s not latency.

    It’s not context windows.

    It’s definitely not “can this thing form a coherent thought.”

    It’s Enterprise Friction™.

    By that metric, Gartner has ranked IBM—a company whose flagship product is currently “billable hours in a trench coat”—ahead of Anthropic, the people who actually build the models IBM is desperately trying to resell with a logo swap.

    Ranking IBM over Anthropic in 2025 is like ranking a library card catalog over Google Search because the library has better governance, stronger controls, and more shelves you can lock.

    Anthropic is building the frontier.

    IBM is building a PowerPoint about the frontier that requires a three-year commit, seven steering committees, and a ceremonial blood sacrifice to Red Hat.

    Gartner analysts: blink twice if the blue suits are in the room with you.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • nice find there:

    A progressive campaign, "The Great Slate", was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I've been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that, as of March 2018, over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[32]

    Oh I saw that name before - https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • Since someone linked to Bergstrom above, I wanted to mention his Marshack Colloquium talk from last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxn40xiK9g0 - basically the idea is we are all "information foragers" but the "information environment" has shifted radically around us all in a really short amount of time. In "information abundance" the right strategy is to visit a lot more different sites instead of just a few, if the model / analogy works for people about as good as it does for ant eaters. If vibes are off, on to the next tab, it will broaden your worldview too.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • When I took my mom last week, they were blasting We Built This City.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • https://securityaffairs.com/186460/ai/french-authorities-investigate-ai-undressing-deepfakes-on-x.html

    French lawmakers Arthur Delaporte and Eric Bothorel alerted prosecutors on January 2 after thousands of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes were generated by Grok and shared on X. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the reports were added to an existing investigation into X, noting the offense carries penalties of up to two years in prison and a €60,000 fine.

    two years of prison for whom exactly?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • From the new Yann LeCunn interview https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2

    Meta made headlines for trying to poach elite researchers from competitors with offers of $100mn sign-on bonuses. “The future will say whether that was a good idea or not,” LeCun says, deadpan.

    LeCun calls Wang, who was hired to lead the organisation, “young” and “inexperienced”.

    “He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know . . . There’s no experience with research or how you practise research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”

    Wang also became LeCun’s manager. I ask LeCun how he felt about this shift in hierarchy. He initially brushes it off, saying he’s used to working with young people. “The average age of a Facebook engineer at the time was 27. I was twice the age of the average engineer.”

    But those 27-year-olds weren’t telling him what to do, I point out.

    “Alex [Wang] isn’t telling me what to do either,” he says. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”

    OR, maybe nobody /has/ to tell a researcher what to do, especially one like him, if they've already internalized the ideology of their masters.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • Anti-A.I.-relationship-sub r/cogsuckers maybe permanently locked down by its mods after users criticize mod-led change of the subreddit to a somewhat pro A.I.-sub (self.SubredditDrama)

    The mods were heavily downvoted and critiqued for pulling the rug from under the community as well as for parallelly modding pro-A.I.-relationship-subs. One mod admitted:

    "(I do mod on r/aipartners, which is not a pro-sub. Anyone who posts there should expect debate, pushback, or criticism on what you post, as that is allowed, but it doesn’t allow personal attacks or blanket comments, which applies to both pro and anti AI members. Calling people delusional wouldn’t be allowed in the same way saying that ‘all men are X’ or whatever wouldn’t. It’s focused more on a sociological issues, and we try to keep it from devolving into attacks.)"

    A user, heavily upvoted, replied:

    You’re a fucking mod on ai partners? Are you fucking kidding me?

    It goes on and on like this: As of now, the posting has amassed 343 comments. Mostly, it's angry subscribers of the sub, while a few users from pro-A.I.-subreddits keep praising the mods. Most of the users agree that brigading has to stop, but don't understand why that means that a sub called COGSUCKERS should suddenly be neutral to or accepting of LLM-relationships. Bear in mind that the subreddit r/aipartners, for which one of the mods also mods, does not allow to call such relationships "delusional". The most upvoted comments in this shitstorm:

    "idk, some pro schmuck decided we were hating too hard 💀 i miss the days shitposting about the egg" https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsuckers/comments/1pxgyod/comment/nwb159k/