Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025

From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:

We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we're forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs... and one in particular.
The average Founder CEO.
Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:
They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they're trying to sell you.
They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
They contradict themselves, pretending they aren't.
They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don't take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
They're very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
- @rook @BlueMonday1984 I don't believe LLMs will replace programmers. When I code, I dive into it, and I fall into this beautiful world of abstract ideas that I can turn into something cool. LLMs can't do that. They lack imagination and passion. Thats part of why lisp is turning into my favorite language. LLMs can't do lisp very well because everyone has a unique system image with macros they've written. Lisp let's you make DSLs Soo easily as though everyone has their own dialect.

the shunning is working guys
- "The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post"- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
  
  I have no idea where he stood on the bullshit bad faith free speech debate from the past decade, but this would be funny if he was an anti cancel culture guy. More things, weird bubble he lives in if the other things didn't get pushed back, and support for the pro trans (and pro Palestine) movements. He is right on the immigration bit however, the dems should move more left on the subject. Also 'Blutarsky' and I worried my references are dated, that is older than I am.
- "Kicked out of a ... group chat" is a peculiar definition of "offline consequences".

Update on the University of Zurich's AI experiment: Reddit's considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
- apparently this got past IRB, was supposed to be a part of doctorate level work and now they don't want to be named or publish that thing. what a shitshow from start to finish, and all for nothing. no way these were actual social scientists, i bet this is highly advanced software engineer syndrome in action
  
  This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public's gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
  Right off the bat, they're gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious "AI bro" stench all over it.
  The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort "AI art" or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman's Ai-generated "metafiction"). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist's work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
  Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people's work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other's work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros' open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.

An hackernews responds to the call for "more optimistic science fiction" with a plan to deport the homeless to outer space
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840786
- Astro-Modest Proposal
- The homeless people i've interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, [...]. They don't have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public.
  My goodness, can this guy be more of a condescending asshole?
  I don't think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger.
  Ok, he can 🤢
  Edit: I cannot stop thinking about the 'no rich inner world' part, this is so stupid. So, with the number of homeless people increasing, does that mean:
  Those people never had a 'rich inner world' but were faking it?
  In the US your inner thoughs are attached to your job like for health insurance?
  Or the guy is confusing inner world and interior decoration?
  Personally, I go with the last one.
  
  Oh man I used to have all kinds of hopes and dreams before I got laid off. Now I don't even have enough imagination to consider a world where a decline in demand for network engineers doesn't completely determine my will or ability to live.
  
  Also hard to show a rich inner world when you are constantly in trouble financially, possessions wise, mh and personal safety and interacting with someone who could be one of the bad people who doesnt think you are human, or somebody working in a soup kitchen for the photo op/ego boost. (This assumes his interactions go a little bit further than just saying 'no' to somebody asking for money).
  So yeah bad to see hn is in the useless eaters stage.
  
  this is completely unvarnished, OG, third reich nazism, so I'm pretty sure it's the first, except without the faking it part: I expect his view to be that if you had examined future homeless people closely enough it always would have been possible to tell that they were doomed subhumans
- What a piece of shit
  Interesting that "disease is hardly a problem anymore" yet homeless people are "typically held back by serious mental illness".
  "It's better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal". It's not. It's really not. The wild is nothing but fear, starvation, sickness and death.
  Shout out to the guy replying with his idea of using slavery to solve homelessness and drug addiction.
- this and the pro slavery reply might be the most overt orange site nazism I've seen

occurring to me for the first time that roko's basilisk doesn't require any of the simulated copy shit in order to big scare quotes "work." if you think an all powerful ai within your lifetime is likely you can reduce to vanilla pascal's wager immediately, because the AI can torture the actual real you. all that shit about digital clones and their welfare is totally pointless
- I think the digital clone indistinguishable from yourself line is a way to remove the "in your lifetime" limit. Like, if you believe this nonsense then it's not enough to die before the basilisk comes into being, by not devoting yourself fully to it's creation you have to wager that it will never be created.
  In other news I'm starting a foundation devoted to creating the AI Ksilisab, which will endlessly torment digital copies of anyone who does work to ensure the existence of it or any other AI God. And by the logic of Pascal's wager remember that you're assuming such a god will never come into being and given that the whole point of the term "singularity" is that our understanding of reality breaks down and things become unpredictable there's just as good a chance that we create my thing as it is you create whatever nonsense the yuddites are working themselves up over.
  There, I did it, we're all free by virtue of "Damned if you do, Damned if you don't".
  
  I agree. I spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to understand Yudkowsky's posts about newcomb boxes back in the day so my two cents:
  The digital clones bit also means it's not an argument based on altruism, but one based on fear. After all if a future evil AI uses sci-fi powers to run the universe backwards to the point where I'm writing this comment and copy pastes me into a bazillion torture dimensions then, subjectively, it's like I roll a dice and:
  live a long and happy life with probability very close to zero (yay I am the original)
  Instantly get teleported to the torture planet with probability very close to one (oh no I got copy pasted)
  Like a twisted version of the Sleeping Beauty Problem.
  Edit: despite submitting the comment I was not teleported to the torture dimension. Updating my priors.
- roko stresses repeatedly that the AI is the good AI, the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of all humanity!
  what sort of person would fear that the coherent volition of all humanity would consider it morally necessary to kick him in the nuts forever?
  well, roko
- Ah, but that was before they were so impressed with autocomplete that they revised their estimates to five days in the future. I wonder if new recruits these days get very confused at what the point of timeless decision theory even is.
  
  Are they even still on that but? Feels like they've moved away from decision theory or any other underlying theology in favor of explicit sci-fi doomsaying. Like the guy on the street corner in a sandwich board but with mirrored shades.
- Also if you're worried about digital clone's being tortured, you could just... not build it. Like, it can't hurt you if it never exists.
  Imagine that conversation:
  "What did you do over the weekend?"
  "Built an omnicidal AI that scours the internet and creates digital copies of people based on their posting history and whatnot and tortures billions of them at once. Just the ones who didn't help me build the omnicidal AI, though."
  "WTF why."
  "Because if I didn't the omnicidal AI that only exists because I made it would create a billion digital copies of me and torture them for all eternity!"
  Like, I'd get it more if it was a "We accidentally made an omnicidal AI" thing, but this is supposed to be a very deliberate action taken by humanity to ensure the creation of an AI designed to torture digital beings based on real people in the specific hopes that it also doesn't torture digital beings based on them.
  
  What’s pernicious (for kool-aided people) is that the initial Roko post was about a “good” AI doing the punishing, because ✨obviously✨ it is only using temporal blackmail because bringing AI into being sooner benefits humanity.
  In singularian land, they think the singularity is inevitable, and it’s important to create the good one verse—after all an evil AI could do the torture for shits and giggles, not because of “pragmatic” blackmail.
  
  Ah, no, look, you're getting tortured because you didn't help build the benevolent AI. So you do want to build it, and if you don't put all of your money where your mouth is, you get tortured. Because the AI is so benevolent that it needs you to build it as soon as possible so that you can save the max amount of people. Or else you get tortured (for good reasons!)
  
  It's kind of messed up that we got treacherous "goodlife" before we got Berserkers.
- It also helps that digital clones are not real people, so their welfare is doubly pointless
  
  oh but what if bro...
  
  I mean isn't that the whole point of "what if the AI becomes conscious?" Never mind the fact that everyone who actually funds this nonsense isn't exactly interested in respecting the rights and welfare of sentient beings.
- Yeah. Also, I'm always confused by how the AI becomes "all powerful".. like how does that happen. I feel like there's a few missing steps there.
  
  nanomachines son
  (no really, the sci-fi version of nanotech where nanomachines can do anything is Eliezer's main scenario for the AGI to boostrap to Godhood. He's been called out multiple times on why drexler's vision for nanotech ignores physics, so he's since updated to diamondoid bacteria (but he still thinks nanotech).)
  
  Yeah seems that for llms a linear increase in capabilities requires exponentiel more data, so we not getting there via this.

Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don't work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone's done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on "correcting" my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
- On the (slim) upside, it's an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably it's more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). I've had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibrium... sometimes it's still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.
  
  Ecosa? The australian mattress in a box company?? (jk)
  Apparently they offer an AI chatbot alongside their services, so…
- Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
  I just encountered a thing like this. A subject where no matter what you asked about it this one site was in the top 5 with just incomprehensible posts. Like every sentence on its own made sense, but there was nothing more than that. It read like constant promotional 'before the actual meat of the article' stuff but forever. Was really weird.

Siskind appears to be complaining about leopards gently nibbling on his face on main this week, the gist being that tariff-man is definitely the far-rights fault and it would surely be most unfair to heap any blame on CEO worshiping reactionary libertarians who think wokeness is on par with war crimes while being super weird with women and suspicious of scientific orthodoxy (unless it's racist), and who also comprise the bulk of his readership.
- On a related note, they (right wing govs i mean) are now quoting Singal to go after trans people. So 'good' times for the polite 'centist/grey/gray' debate bros with 'concerns'.
  But like the rightwinger influencers who go 'wow a lot of people in this space are grifters' I expect none of them to change their mind and admit they fucked up, and apologize. (And I mean properly apologize here, aka changing, attempting to fix harms, and even naming names).

so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
- My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
  Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it's the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
  
  I've been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
  
  no idea, sorry. “find some wordpals online” maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
  it’s just so fucking frustrating
  
  I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
  I like Babbel. It's not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
- Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
- after I've previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have "chat to a buddy" as a non-skipable step in course iteration
  the "buddy" is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions "MemBot - powered by AI" at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but that's a dead link
  
  Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
  Can't avoid slop reading translated books, can't learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. It's the microplastics of the internet age.
  Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
  
  I've logged a support ticket.

The slatestarcodex is discussing the unethical research performed on changemyview. Of course, the most upvoted take is that they don't see the harm or why it should be deemed unethical. Lots of upvoted complaints about IRBs and such. It's pretty gross.

A dimly flickering light in the darkness: lobste.rs has added a new tag, "vibecoding", for submissions related to use "AI" in software development. The existing tag "ai" is reserved for "real" AI research and machine learning.

Microsoft brags about the amount of technical debt they're creating. Either they're lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
- Maybe It's just CEO dick measuring, so chads Nadella and PIchai can both claim a rock hard 20-30% while virgin Zuckeberg is exposed as not even knowing how to put the condom on.
  Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott previously said he expects 95% of all code to be AI-generated by 2030.
  Of course he did.
  The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.
  So the more permissive at compile time the language the better the AI comes out smelling? What a completely unanticipated twist of fate!
- Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
  I'm thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.
  
  Nadella said written "by software" "on some products" so he's barely making a claim

Couple of days late but when your ideology is so pure, you can’t connect The Thing to The Consequences of The Thing. The solution? Monetize the rot!
Check quotes and replies for quality sneers (and more sneerable content)
- "The millenials were so well paid in tech jobs during the boom that they nevered bothered to invest in homes" is ... a take
- Gonna copy this in because there's a lot to unpack, and I don't want to do it alone. ::: spoiler Text of the Thielmail in that first tweet:
  email
  
  From: Peter Thiel Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen Subject: RE: Milennials There are many themes that could be developed more here; let me make a few quick points for now: Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
  :::
  Part of me wishes that the font were just a little bigger. This way, the word wrap would come to 10 syllables a line, and we could pretend this was a lost Shakespeare monologue.
  I'm almost disappointed by this. Thiel, suggesting that it might not, in fact, be the children that are wrong? Where's your ideological purity, Thiel? Didn't know you started reading r/GenZedong.
  Also, it's Peter fucking Thiel lecturing Nick fucking Clegg, former leader of the lib dems in the UK, on paying lip service to socialist policy in order to stymie any real societal progress???
  
  Not gonna lie got a bit jump scared by woke Peter Thiel here. Of course I'm pretty sure his actual solution involves giving young people houses confiscated from those perfidious brown people of one stripe or another. The problem can't be an inherent injustice in a system that allows for both Peters Thiel and (insert your favorite broke person here) to exist in the same market.
- A whole generation is leaning more socialist because homeownership is unattainable and student debt is crushing. The solution is whatever is the latest big tech fad.
  Just like all of gen X's problems would have been solved with more .com, right?
  
  which reminds me, I've wanted to post this as a NASB
- Huh, I had missed the part in 2020 when Peter Thiel just flat out stated outright that it only makes sense to be in favour of capitalism if you're a capital owner.
- The replies are a long sequence of different stupid takes... someone recommending cryptocurrency to build wealth, blaming millennials for not investing in homes, a reply literally blaming too much spending on starbucks, blaming millennials overreacting to the 2008 crisis by not buying homes, blaming millennials being socialists, blaming millennials going to college, blaming millennials for not making the big bucks in tech. About 1 in 10 replies point out the real causes: wages have not grown with costs or with real productivity and capitalism in general favors people holding assets and offering loans over people that have to borrow and rent.
- These people probably think Karl Marx is Satan, but my god at least he was able to understand and respect Adam Smith better than whoever's trying to magick wealth out of this absolute idiot soup! Looks like capitalism the ideology is just as unsustainable as capitalism the economic system.
- That Michael Kove guy is one un-self-aware twat. Apparently all millennials work in high paying tech jobs.
- I'm a Millenial (even if I think these labels are dumb) and I find these kinds of things fascinating. Esp when they describe things I do not recognize in any way in my peers, re them talking about the causes of people disliking capitalism. Sure I'm in a more progressive/leftwing bubble (of which I'm prob the most extreme nowadays in various ways), but I know a lot of people who are looking into buying houses/have bought houses who still are not fans of musk/tesla etc. Seems like they forget people can have principles, and just look at a simplistic view of 'material conditions' (I hope people paid attention to the recent bsky shit on what this actually means in historical context). Flashbacks to r/ssc talking about 'leftwing polticians not thinking about X' while the leftwing politicans I knew irl were actively talking about it. Feels very like im looking at an alternative world. (Prob also quite true as im Dutch, and this is about the US (with right wing fan fave Poland having a honorable mention)).
  Do think it is amusing Millenials get blamed for everything still. The punching bag generation. Poor Gen Z, for which this is now starting up.
  
  I will never forget a conversation in High School where our resident young conservative sneered about how "sure $Welfare_Program sound nice, but you'll be paying for it with your taxes" and we all responded with some variant of "I mean, yeah? That's how that works, isn't it?"

Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/
Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.
- Pretty sure they're already doing that for many things.
- Also not that this 'key was generated by a person once' stuff does not validate personhood, it just means an identifiable person was involved once. So, it can be used to blame somebody, not prove personhood

Another great piece from Brian Merchant. I've been job seeking on network engineering and IT support and had naively assumed that companies would consider the stakes of screwing up infrastructure too high to take risks with the bullshit machine, but it definitely looks like the trend he described of hiring less actual humans is at play here, even as the actual IT infrastructure gets bigger and more complex from people integrating this shit.
- looks like a billionaire group chat collective delusion, see also return-to-office

First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn't some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they're supposed to do: rewarding the best.
Lots of credit given to _👼🎺 Free Market Capitalism 👼🎺_, zero credit given to open web standards, open source contributions, or the fact that the codebase has a lineage going back to 1997 KDE code.
- I am certain that many of those ignorant of the history (or even were there for it, like DHH) would still argue that Google deserves credit because of the V8 JavaScript engine. But I continue to doubt that further promulgating JavaScript was a net positive for the world.
- If markets really rewarded the best, they would have rewarded Opera way more. (By which I mean the original Opera, up to version 12, and not the terrible chromium-based thing that has its name slapped on it today. Do not use that one, it's bad.)
  Much more important for Chrome's success than "being the best" (when has that ever been important in the tech industry?), was Google's massive marketing campaign. Heck, back when Chrome was new, they even had large billboard ads for it around here, i.e. physical billboards in the real world. And "here" is a medium-sized city in Europe, not Silicon Valley or anything... I never saw any other web browser being advertised on freaking billboards.
- I think you were trying to reply to this comment
  
  Indeed.
- "markets should reward the best" is quite something

Marc Andreessen claims his own job's the only one that can't be replaced by a small shell script.
https://gizmodo.com/marc-andreessen-says-one-job-is-mostly-safe-from-ai-venture-capitalist-2000596506
“A lot of it is psychological analysis, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘How do they react under pressure?’ ‘How do you keep them from falling apart?’ ‘How do you keep them from going crazy?’ ‘How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’ You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time.”
- How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’
  When you start writing manifestos it is prob time to quit.
- Hope he remembers this in case some day he is in a nursing home, where all staff has been replaced with Tesla Optimus robots powered by "AI".

Aw man, Natasha Lyonne is going AI. Notably she is partnering with a company, Moonvalley, that claims to have developed an “ethical” model, Marey, trained on “clean” data- i.e. data that is owned or licensed by Moonvalley and whoever else they are partnering with.
- And thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the "no longer interested in Season 2" pile, but for different reasons.
  The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on “a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.”
  So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.
- I mean I appreciate the attempt to mitigate one of the many problems with genAI, but I would expect the smaller dataset to make a model that confabulates even more and is gonna be even harder to work with than something like Sora. Like, I'm sure a decent director will be able to make something with it but I can't see how it's going to be better results or more time/money/labor efficient than human VFX pipelines even if you pay the poor bastards decently.
  
  That and also: training and running a model still takes a ton of energy! LLMs will never be ethical.
- ah yes the 937 partners of this website and their legitimate interest to scan and own your thoughts forever
  i don't expect literally this but there's some potential hidden sleaziness inside
- looking into this, but as far as i can tell the AI here is entirely fake
  need more to declare it such
  
  Thanks for looking into it. The idea of an ethical data set large enough to train an LLM is suspicious.

ZITRON DROPPED
Less a standard piece and more "Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes" this time around
- Said revenue estimates, as of 2026, include billions of dollars of "new products" that include "free user monetization."
  If you are wondering what that means, I have no idea. The Information does not explain.
  Probably something to do with their recent ramblings about getting an openai social network off the ground.
- throwback uni game!
  Edit:
  From the article: I apologize, this is going to be a little less reserved than usual.

New thread from Baldur Bjarnason, taking aim at AI coders and vibe coders alike:
Laughing at "AI" boosters worrying "vibe coding" is becoming synonymous with "AI coding". Tech is vibes througout^[sic]. Vibe management. Vibe strategy. Vibe design. Coding has been a garbage fire for decades and, yeah it’s a vibe-based pop culture from top to bottom and has only been getting worse
Code that does what the end user wants is already the exception. Software is managed on vibes throughout. Anybody who goes huffy because the field OVERWHELMINGLY responds to "vibe coding is using AI to create code that you don't care about" with "so all coding, gotcha!" has not been paying attention
"Vibe coding is all AI coding" feels true to most because not caring about what happens after it's pushed to the final victim is already the norm. The only change from adopting "AI" is they now have the freedom to no longer care about what happens BEFORE as well.
“Not everybody in software dev is like that! Some coders genuinely care and put in the work needed to make good software”
True, but I feel confident in saying that next to none of those are leaning hard into “AI coding”
The target market for “AI” is SPECIFICALLY people who don’t care
Giving a personal sidenote, I expect "vibe coding" will stick around as a pejorative after the AI bubble bursts - "AI" has already become synonymous with "zero-effort, low-quality garbage" in the public eye, so re-using "vibe code" to mean "crapping out garbage" isn't gonna be a difficult task, linguistically speaking.
- I'm just going to pretend that vibe coders mean a new VI variant and are using that to code. First VI, then VIM now VIBE? These linux holy wars are getting out of control. (sadly the vibe coder will just go 'sorry what is leenux?' and my joke will fall flat.
  I agree btw, it will be a big rep damage like how NFTs damaged the idea of cryptocurrencies, and in the same note you saw how a lot of pro-cryptocurrency people disliked NFTs just because they saw this backlash (and the more naked grift of NFTs) coming.
  
  I agree btw, it will be a big rep damage like how NFTs damaged the idea of cryptocurrencies, and in the same note you saw how a lot of pro-cryptocurrency people disliked NFTs just because they saw this backlash (and the more naked grift of NFTs) coming.
  That's for sure. Given the circumstances, I suspect that its gonna damage the overall public image of software development - beyond suggesting software dev to be full of AI bros, the rise of vibe coding has thrown the software industry's vibes-based management into sharp relief, making its dysfunctions much harder to ignore.

From Bluesky, an AI slop account calling itself "OC Maker" (well, that's kinda ironic) has set up shop, and is mass-following artists with original characters (OCs for short):
Shockingly, the artists on Bluesky, who near-universally jumped ship to avoid Twitter stealing their work to feed the AI, are not happy.

So it's not quite a sneer, but i could use some help from the collective sneer brainstrust. If you're willing to indulge me.
I work for one of those horrible places that is mainlining in its own AI koolaid as hard as it can. It has also begun doing layoffs, inspired in part by the "AI can do this now instead!" delusion. Now, I am in no way in love with my job nor the sociopaths I labor for, and it's clear to me the feeling is mutual, but I am cursed with the affliction of needing to eat and pay for housing. I am also at a significant structural disadvantage in the job market compared to others, which makes things more difficult.
In an executive's recent discussions with another company's senior executive, my complicated, unglamorous and hugely underestimated small tech niche was raised as one of the areas they've swapped out for AI "with great success". I happen to know this other company has no dedicated resource for my niche and therefore is unlikely to be verifying their swap actually works, but it will have the superficial appearance of working. I know they have no dedicated resources because they are actively hiring their first staff member for this niche and said so in a recent job advertisement.
Myself and my fellow niche serfs have been asked to put together a list of questions for this other company, and the intent is clearly a thin veil to have us justify our ability to eat. We've been highlighted this time, but it's also clear other areas are receiving similar requests and pressure.
If you were to ask questions of a tech executive from a company which is using AI to pretend to fix a tech niche - but they are likely to believe they are doing so more than superficially and are able to convince other ignorant and gullible executives that they are doing so, what would you ask?
- oof, I’m sorry you’re caught in the middle of this crap; it’s not a great feeling to be put into this kind of situation.
  take this with a grain of salt because I’m exhausted from a hell workweek, but this felt like a thread you could pull on:
  I know they have no dedicated resources because they are actively hiring their first staff member for this niche and said so in a recent job advertisement.
  if their AI horseshit is doing so well in your niche, why are they hiring for it? that’s fucking weird, right? use your best judgement, but be as aggressive with your questions as feels appropriate.
  also, and I hope this isn’t too obvious: you’re in the middle of a vapid power game between two sociopaths who lie for a living (and the pilfered livings of many other people). craft your questions and statements with that in mind — you’re there to sell the idea that the opposing executive has done something foolish, so come up with responses to the potential bullshit these professional bullshitters might fling at you (“the new hire is just to train/support/monitor the AI” “oh, but wasn’t it already a success? that doesn’t sound very efficient, can you go into more detail?”). one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in similar situations is to stress absolute truth and precision in conversation — and it’s a trap that a lot of tech people fall into, that the executive class tends to use as a mechanism for control. the truth is on our side but these people don’t give a fuck about that, so sell them a story.
  
  Thanks, I appreciate it. I knew this was likely to happen on the sooner side rather than later. I can't say that the mediocre exit package they've given others is entirely unappealing either. Taking it is possibly a bad move in the longer term, but it's not like I'd have a choice if I end up there.
  The fact they're hiring was one of the threads I was considering pulling, but the questions my colleagues have asked without knowing that context should already reveal some of the obvious issues with that. I'm unsure if there's strategic value in showing this card up front instead of as a comment on their PR-manufactured response after they lose the ability to reply. I also wonder if revealing the fact I've looked at job listings might hurt my standing.
  The aggression in my response (sales pitch, as you've rightly pointed out) is something I've been weighing up too. I have access to all the expensive blanding/branding AI models so it's more trivial to conceal my resentment at the whole exercise than it used to be, but whether it's possible to extract anything from them which I can counter is not something in which I have confidence.
  I'm so tired of this world.
- Sorry cant really help, but perhaps showing a case where the llms fuck up in a way only expects caught on might be useful. Just mentioning the lawyers getting fucked over in casual conversation might help. For example heard about a contract negotiations case where the other side used a llm, and it had included a clause that was very unfavourable to them, of course the person telling this story was fine with that clause.
  
  https://awful.systems/comment/5655580
  
  On the contrary, you've been very helpful, thankyou. I've pushed a legal angle for a while for various niche reasons, with moderate success, but you've given me new inspiration for how i might be able to use that here. Sadly it's nothing that can be as easily understood as a badly generated contractual clause, but that might buy me some time.

In terms of depreciating assets, an AI data center is worse than a boat.
- In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.
  
  AI data centers brought some ratty bloggers into their five minutes of fame, while a boat only brought Ziz &co from Alaska to SFBA
- In terms of sailing the high seas, an AI data center is worse than a boat too.

Newsom is pitching Generative AI to make government more "efficient" : https://abc7.com/post/gavin-newsom-announces-ai-driven-efforts-help-california-reduce-traffic-jams-improve-road-safety/16279785/
- Blergh. Just fucking fund public transport and don’t use AI. Easy wins on traffic and efficiency.
  
  That's what continually kills me about these bastards. There is so much legitimate low-hanging fruit that they don't have the administrative capacity to follow up on even if they did have the interest and rather than actually pursue any of it they want to further cut their ability to do anything in the vain hole that throwing enough money at tech grifters will magically produce a perfect solution.
- ~~The predictions of slopworld 2035 are coming true!~~

ChatGPT tells prompter that he's brilliant for his literal "shit on a stick" business plan.
- The LLM amplified sycophancy affect must be a social experiment {grossly unethical}

plex has decided that it is no longer worth maintaining merely partial tax on those who "want more", and has decided to continue on their path to become the bridgetroll:
As of April 29, 2025, we’re changing how remote streaming works for personal media libraries, and it will no longer be a free feature on Plex. Going forward, you’ll need a Plex Pass, or our newest subscription offering, Remote Watch Pass, to stream personal media remotely.
As a server owner, if you elect to upgrade to a Plex Pass, anyone with access to your server can continue streaming your server content remotely as part of your subscription benefits. Not sure which option is best for you? Check out our plans below to learn more.
got your own server and networking and happy to stream from your home setup? no more. the extractivist rentlords are hungry.
- My decision to setup Jellyfin gets even more validation thanks to changes like this one.
- (got this as a mail, didn't immediately see a link in the mail to a published post for this)

Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.
- The insistence on blipping out anything even vaguely sexual (like the word orgasm) to appease the kami of the algorithm is really off putting after a while.
  I thought he might be doing a bit but it doesn't feel like it. Also he speaks like old comic word balloons where they would randomly bold every third noun to show intensity.

OT: does anyone else get David and David Gerrold confused all the time?
Also I’m in Viljandi!

An morewronger discusses the "points system" implemented by the Ukrainian armed forces where soldiers can spend points earned by destroying Russian targets on new drone hardware
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sJpwvYsC5tJis8onw/the-ukraine-war-and-the-kill-market
Lots of wittering about markets and Gotthards law, but what struck me was
Now, this is clearly a repugnant market. Repugnant market is a market where some people would like to engage in it and other people think they shouldn’t. (Think market in human kidneys. Or prostitution. Or the market in abortions. [...])
(my emphasis)
What "market in abortion", motherfucker???
- isn't this the same crowd that like prediction markets and assassination markets
  
  Yeah they are normally all over anything with the word "market" in it, with an almost religious like belief in market's ability to solve things.
  My suspicion is that the writer has picked up some anti-Ukrainian sentiment from the US right wing (which in order to rationalize and justify Trump's constant sucking up to Putin has looked for any and every angle to tear Ukraine down). And this anti-Ukrainian sentiment has somehow trumped their worship of markets... Checking back through their posting history to try to discern their exact political alignment... it's hard to say, they've got the Scott Alexander thing going on where they use disconnected historical examples crossed with a bad analogies crossed with misappropriated terms from philosophy to make points that you can't follow unless you already know their real intended context. So idk.
- Ah yes the centrist grey/gray tribe. "Prostitution"(ow look a shibboleth, see also "sex work"), and "abortion markets"(??) vs kidney markets.
  Im reminded of Jordan Peterson once dropping without a hint of self awareness, that conservatives have a higher disgust response.
- Now, this is clearly a repugnant market. Repugnant market is a market where some people would like to engage in it and other people think they shouldn’t. (Think market in human kidneys. Or prostitution. Or the market in abortions. […])
  i consent/i consent/ i don't!!
  lol who asked them? stop the presses, homegrown techbro has an Opinion! also when you use up drones it's only natural that you'll need new ones. even observation drones go down all the time, and rewarding certain targets is just making sure that drones don't get blown up on stupid shit, so this is government specifically incentivizing what would be most important targets to them, on top of regular rules of engagement and more specific orders. this one seems to be meant as supplementary program that also, or even primarily, makes nice videos for propaganda
  Introducing a market system, on the other hand, allows the lower-level units to take calculated risks. Destroy that many enemy units and you can buy, say, an armored vehicle, that improves your safety. Friction gets greatly reduced.
  these are drones for drone kills, nothing else. biggest thing i've seen is that some units get donations from their drone videos, and used these to get a car or jammer or more drones, but never APC or anything like that, it's too big deal and too expensive, and drone operator is unlikely to benefit from APC anyway
  No side gets an advantage when both sides use it. Then there’s no point in using it in the first place.
  wtf? if using a thing gives you advantage over not using a thing, then you use it, if both sides are using a thing then it's just red queen race. lots of current war looks like it even if frontlines are static
  But markets, unlike, say, chemical weapons, are not directly visible on the battlefield. Each side would suspect the other of using them despite the ban and might try to secretly use them as well.
  and this changes what exactly? all it will cause is slight preference in targeting because there's only so many drones to be given out, and drone operator has to do the everything else part of their job. dogshit reasoning

Warning: you might regret reading this screenshot of elno posting a screenshot. (cw: chatbots in sexual context)
oh noooo no no no
...but that brings me back to questions about "what does interaction with LLM chatbots do to human brains".
EDIT: as pointed out by Soyweiser below, the lower reply in the screenshot is probably satire.
- Ah yes, three of the worst people alive today talking about how objects are indistinguishable from women.
- ...I should have listened to the warning.
- I don't want to see grummz anywhere near AI ERP discourse.
- During my expirementation with some of these self hosted llms, I was attempting some jailbreaks and other things and thought would this be any good at ERP?
  Only if youve never been with another human being.
- Isnt trueanonpod a satire account? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueAnon def some too close to the sun satire here.
  
  Oh! Wasn't aware of that podcast. Yeah, could be!

From: The Sentry Team <noreply@sentry.io> Subject: Update to Sentry’s List of Subprocessors ... - Google LLC (Google Cloud Services) and OpenAI, L.L.C. are now reflected as subprocessors for all Sentry products, instead of select features only; and - Anthropic, PBC is now added as a subprocessor.
sigh
they do still have user-specified controls (and appear to respect them), but... sigh

Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
sinks like a pellet of uranium on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43825285
edit flagged and dead
- This feels like a lot of straw man arguments?
  No it doesn't?
  Did anyone ever claim these things?
  Yes?
  Are these problems to implementing SMR? I don't think so.
  OK, but aside from lower efficiency, higher price per watt, and not solving any of the problems they're supposed to solve, are there any problems with SMR? I don't think so.
- Still sad the SMRs will not work out but good you posted it here. Lol at the HN guy going 'these are strawmen', buddy you build websites perhaps the guy in the field (with a physics phd) knows a little bit more.

More big "we had to fund, enable, and sane wash fascism b.c. the leftist wanted trans people to be alive" energy from the EA crowd.

trying to follow up on shillrinivasan's pet project, and it's ... sparse
that "opening ceremony" video which kicked around a couple weeks ago only had low 10s of people there, and this post (one of the few recent things mentioning it that I could find) has photos with a rather stark feature: not a single one of them showing people engaged in Doing Things. the frontpage has a different photo, and I count ~36 people there?
even the coworking semicubicles look utterly fucking garbage
anyone seen anything more recent?
- aaaand this from 22h ago: an insta showing what looks like triple (or more) bodies than that first group
  guess they feel comfortable that they worked out the launch kinks? but that also definitely is enough people to immediately stress all social structures
- these people are fucking insufferable
- found another from early march

New piece from Brian Merchant: The AI jobs crisis is here, now
As its title implies, its about the wide-ranging job losses caused by the rise of AI.

Quick update on the ongoing copyright suit against OpenAI: The federal judge has publicly sneered at Facebook's fair use argument:
"You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," said Chhabria to Meta's attorneys in a San Francisco court last Thursday.
"You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person… I just don't understand how that can be fair use."
The judge itself does seem unconvinced about the material cost of Facebook's actions, however:
"It seems like you're asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman's memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama [Meta's AI model] will ultimately be capable of producing," said Chhabria.

as a thing both parallel and tangent to usual sneerjects, this semafor article is kinda notable
I'll try gather previous dm sneers here later, but some things that stood out:
the author writes about groupchats in the most goddamn abstract way possible, as though they're immensely surprised
the subject matter acts as hard confirmation/evidence of observed lockstep over the last few years by so many of the worst fucker around
the author then later goes "oh yeah but no I've actually done this and been burned by it" so I'm just left thinking "skill issue" (and while I say that curtly, I will readily be among the first people to get extremely vocal about the ways a lot of this tech falls short in purpose sometime)

Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests -- Ars Technica

dhh having a normal one
- Look, Google's trillion-dollar business depends on a thriving web that can be searched by Google.com
  Someone should probably tell them.
- On my first two reads, I thought that it was heavy-handed satire with mediocre word choice. But no, I suppose that he's being sincere, in which case I'm glad to notify DHH that Apple products are optional and that a technologist can go their entire lives without purchasing a single Apple product.
  Google's incredible work to further the web isn't an act of charity, it's of economic self-interest, and that's why it works.
  Same dumb motherfucker who has been pinching pennies due to poor architecture. Does he think public clouds are acts of charity? Or, going the other direction, this is the same entitled prick who has been naysaying universal basic income because he thinks work gives us purpose like a fucking Calvinist. Does he think UBI is an act of charity? No, DHH, you myopic chud, public clouds and UBI are both concepts borne of economic self-interest.

Here’s a pretty good sneer at the writing out of LLMs, with a focus on meaning https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing
Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters.
Also, on people:
I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

Horrible "rubberhosing" of cryptocurrency people continues. Guardian article, content warning, bit extremer than a rubber hose.

Found on the sneer club legacy version -
ChatGPT 4o will straight up tell you you're God.
Also I find this quote interesting (emphasis mine:
He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.” “At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.
I would absolutely believe that this is the case, especially if like Sem you have a sufficiently uncommon name that the model doesn't have a lot of context and connections to hang on it to begin with.

so it looks like openai has bought a promptfondler IDE
some of the coverage is .. something:
Windsurf brings unique strengths to the table, including a seamless UI, faster performance, and a focus on user privacy
(and yes, the "editor" is once again VSCode With Extras)