samvines, samvines@awful.systems

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Waiting for Musk to turn up and announce “infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah” momentarily!

TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that’d do the trick…


Oh… Well that’s disappointing.

I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)


This has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren’t explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).

Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia


Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on… Come on guys it’s still architecture. Where are you going?


Missed this paper last week from Google

Funny how now that it’s widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their “it’s going to take your job” stance. Surely just a coincidence



So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour

So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?

All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.

It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)


Yeah exactly.

I want to pause ai because it’s a hypercapitalist project designed to further deskill and commoditise the middle class which coincidentally destroys the environment.

They want to pause ai because they believe that spicy autocomplete is intelligent and will one day soon manifest as a giant angry vengeful snek.

We are not the same.


I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags <thinking> </thinking> to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are “normal” output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like “what a human would expect to see in a thinking block” but it’s still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met with lethal force incredulous cynicism.

Just like any claim that “we don’t know how they work” - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we can’t comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observer’s belief is anything other than “you just got very lucky” most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin god…


they pinned his response as being an autistic defect.

I think it makes far more sense to pin the temporarily embarrassed millionaires over the orange site as psychopaths and cargo cultists.


Enjoyed Andrew Kelley’s rebuttal of the bun blog about moving from zig to rust

Some pretty good sneers in there like

Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs



The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven’t considered that if no-one has any income they won’t have any customers. However, they do value geese).


US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…


From the same presentation talk of an AI bubble is blasphemy

Giving strong “pay no attention that man behind the curtain” energy


Three scenes and a comment:

  1. Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.

  2. I see another story: some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.

  3. I’m still sweating and scrolling from my garden… I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI

We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it



Another explanation that feels likely to me is that all the monorail salesmen at the big corps know the gig is nearly up so they are rushing to IPO or raise new funds (Google did the same recently) to maximise the amount of $$$ in their bugout bags as they sail off into the sunset


Whitehouse gives anthropic "just draw the rest of the fucking owl" energy over Fable:

Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model’s guardrails can’t be circumvented. Security experts say that can’t be done.

With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days I’ve been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude


Wait anthropic are admitting that their model is basically the same as gpt 5.5 and the hype was undeserved?


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Absolutely but MeeMaw read in the paper that OpenAI is the future of all work and jobs and they’re gonna make $$$$$ so she’s investiging her 401k (sorry I’m bri’ish so I don’t know if that makes sense but the point I’m trying to make is that they will absolutely find bag holders in retail investors once they IPO)



Misaligned incentives. You read the news to be informed. Journalists write “news* to generate clicks and “try to go viral”

I agree though, It would be great if they didn’t provide oxygen to these flaming idiots


5 Tools You Can Vibe Code For Your Business In Under An Hour exactly the sort of slop from someone with a hard-on for AI, no understanding of the risks of vibe coding core parts of your business’ infrastructure and guest writes for Forbes would produce.

Starts with a sickening intro that leans into “pilled” to be “down with the kids”

If you haven’t joined the Claudepilled crowd, open an account and play.

Bright ideas include “copy and paste the source code from your home page into Claude” but overlooks the how to actually get those changes deployed part.

Wanna see my cool website. It’s at http://localhost:1234/ take that web developers!

Then she describes building a custom internal dashboard…

Open Claude Code and describe your business. List every software tool you use. Ask it to suggest the key metrics you’d want to see from each one. Go back and forth until the list feels right. Then give it your brand guidelines and ask it to build a dashboard that displays everything. Ask for it to be password protected.

Yes that sounds like a great idea and not a car crash waiting to happen

She also describes building a customer facing onboarding site

Build a custom client-facing dashboard instead. Tell Claude Code what your onboarding process looks like step by step. Describe what information you need to collect and what your clients need to access. Ask it to build a secure portal they can log into, with automations that send them what they need and follow up to collect what you need. This is a branded, professional experience that scales without you. The emotional design matters here too: you want clients to feel held, not herded. Tell Claude that.

Yes vibe coded customer facing tools are a fantastic idea and definitely not a vector for cyber attacks nuh-uh. I’m sure it will be fine if you ask for it to be “secure” right?

FML are we in the twilight zone here?




I hate the framing here “the risks outweigh.the benefits” is critihype. The survey maker shouldn’t be reinforcing the general population’s assumption that spicy autocomplete means that AGI is nigh.

Although I guess when framed as “spicy autocorrect trained on classic sci-fi tropes like terminator being in charge of making kill decisions” the risk framing makes more sense but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here to suggest that this is not how average Joe is going to mentally frame the question


They’re not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules.

  1. Yes they are

and

  1. It’s worse than that, they’re vibe coding critical operating system components

You’re an AI addict who has been one shotted and you are deeply in denial about the technology. DGerard is calling your favourite drug “a bad thing”


Different UV! Libuv is the event loop/scheduler that powers node.js. could be a funky new way to compromise a whole bunch of node applications

Edit: typo - although “nose applications” being compromised sounds bad too.


It turns out we didn’t need that list of AI-corrupted open source projects after all…

At this rate it’s actually going to be easier to make a list of projects that don’t have AI…

Systemd and libuv now on the slop hype train


Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation

These people are genuinely unhinged.

As the recent harpers article says:

“…people who should be in The Hague are giving [startups] twenty million dollars. Something bad is gonna happen here, something really fucking bad is gonna happen…”


I somewhat agree although when the “other shoe drops” and these things start impacting the money men they may start to realise AI isn’t the magic cure they thought it was (he says kind of hopefully)

6 hours of downtime for Amazon shopping. A very simple back of a napkin calculation. They made $213.4bn in sales in q4 2025. So divide that by 90 days and then 24 hours and multiply by 6… We are talking a $0.26bn loss for 6 hours downtime… That is not an insignificant amount of money. I imagine most bosses would be screaming for heads having lost that much money in sane non-hyper-scaled businesses.


The prickly prince has been around for a few years and is now completely one shotted. He is exactly the sort of talentless middle manager that probably could be replaced by AI and thus believes that it really is “that good”


Class action lawsuits by employees against employers that mandate AI tools when?


Think of all those poor billionaires who won’t be able to afford that 29th yacht if we made them pay their fair share instead of externalising their costs onto an already stretched general.public!


“We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy,” he wrote. “Good learning experience for me as we face higher-stakes decisions in the future.”

Yes of course this is just a learning opportunity… higher stakes decisions in the future…

Cuz making deals with the biggest military in the western world that involve autonomous use of weapons and possible escalation to all out nuclear war sounds pretty low stakes. /s

Fucking muppet


This preprint just shared by Gary Marcus is interesting.

People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique epistemic risk to how individuals come to see the world: unlike hallucinations that introduce falsehoods, sycophancy distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs…

These results reveal how sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt.

LLMs an addictive psychological hazard: confirmed?


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


Honestly whenever there’s a problem in business it’s usually MBAs.

MBAs are to businesses what Nazis are to a bar. The first time one turns up you’ve got to see them out the front door with a baseball bat asap or before you know it their mates and their mates’ mates will start turning up and you’ll all be talking about synergy and dynamism.

Make holding an MBA as unacceptable in society as pooping on the pavement