2026-10-11 23:01 UTC
Replies (29)
-
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-11 23:02
Starting things off with a new(ish) and very well-crafted sneer from Iris Meredith: There’s little that’s “inevitable” about AI
-
@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-11 23:40
Anthropic has committed another crime: this time submitting a false tip to the police they also apparently tried to fill out visas on state department websites
-
@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-12 05:58
Potentially already posted here, but here’s a research paper on all the Lean translation errors in the Navier-Stokes proofs
-
@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-10-12 07:36
recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately turned into the hobby drama of all the havoc that generative “AI” is throwing into the community. a few months ago Hobbi, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love “AI” and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online. during the backlash the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this: While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind. My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or nålbinding by hand, for fun. What technology makes you think we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??
-
@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-10-12 07:36
furthering my previous guessing that there’s likely only appetite for 2, maybe 3, of these ridiculous IPOs, a number of analyst notes have started kicking around and they’re getting progressively more realistic in their outlook. saw this one this morning Red Flag #3: The IPO is Exit Liquidity, Not Growth Capital To justify a $2 trillion valuation, our model shows that Anthropic would have to: • immediately improve NOPAT margin to 10% and sustain it for the next 10 years (compared to -175% reported operating margin in 2025), • grow revenue by 1000% in 2026 and 100% in 2027, and • grow revenue 56% compounded annually from 2028-2035. sounds ambitious. sure hope they don’t have any material risks and systematic exposures that make that harder! In this scenario, Anthropic’s 1. revenue would reach $3.6 trillion (compared to $4.6 billion in 2025), which is 1.4x the combined TTM revenue of Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), NVIDIA (NVDA), Meta (META), and Oracle (ORCL). 2. NOPAT would reach $358 billion in 2035, compared to the company’s -$8 billion reported operating loss in 2025. For reference, $358 billion is 2.0x NVIDIA’s $184 billion and 2.6x Apple’s $136 billion in TTM NOPAT. good thing the cost of inference is going down! sure, qwen3.8-27b is already stale and everyone needs to throw another couple hundred million at another training update, but the cost of inference! /s
-
@NextElephant9@awful.systems 2026-10-12 12:27
Just listened to this and thought it was worth sharing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EY2QDfp2O4 “Are we on the verge of an AI apocalypse, or is Silicon Valley using doomsday fears to distract us from the damage AI is already doing? Tech insiders and Big Tech CEOs warn that superintelligence could wipe out humanity. Meanwhile, AI is already fuelling warfare and environmental destruction, with zero accountability. If the very people warning us about AI’s dangers also stand to profit from it, is existential doom a genuine warning or the ultimate marketing strategy? This week on The Tea, we’re joined by pioneering AI researcher Dr Timnit Gebru, former co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team. Timnit warned about the dangers of large language models years before the current AI boom. In this interview, she exposes the motives and the ideology behind Silicon Valley’s apocalyptic vision.”
-
@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-10-12 16:12
Viral AI-Generated Comedian Steals Jokes And Is Rewarded With Millions Of Views | Kotaku h/t naked capitalism On October 3, comedian George Brett Olson shared a video comparing one of Sloan’s jokes to an excerpt from his own performance, and it’s clear that someone was, at the very least, inspired by not only Olson’s joke, but his outfit, too. And the creator behind Sloan can easily whip up a few variants of the same joke using different clothing and actors to see which one the algorithm rewards more. And if you really, really like Sloan, “she” even has an OnlyFans account. jfc ofc “she” does.
-
@corbin@awful.systems 2026-10-12 17:32
While doing research on our friends, I found (a disowned Reddit comment which found) another banger from the guy who pointed out that pinball is too chaotic for superintelligences to predict (discussed previously, on Awful): whole-bird emulation requires quantum mechanics, or “WBE requires QM” for short. Apparently WBE was a minor meme inside the community at some point, but I’m not sure who first noticed the situation. In short, birds with certain chemicals in their eyes may have the ability to sense magnetic fields due to QM effects. (I’d normally recommend WP on this, but the relevant article is bizarrely skeptical about the situation, although it does include a decent diagram.) As such, our friends consider the possibility that their vaunted superintelligence tasks (ancestor simulations, Newcomb predictors, etc.) are harder than WBE, which itself is much harder than e.g. cracking classical cryptography with Shor’s algorithm or some other not-yet-reached quantum-computing task. The author left a great sneer in the comments: Adding a compass is unlikely to also make the bird disoriented when exposed to a weak magnetic field which oscillates at the right frequency. Which means that the emulated bird will not behave like the real bird in this scenario. You could add this phenomenon in by hand. Attach some detector to your compass and have it turn off the compass when these fields are measured. More generally, adding in these features ad hoc will likely work for the things that you know about ahead of time, but is very unlikely to work like the bird outside of its training distribution. If you have a model of the bird that includes the relevant physics for this phenomenon, it is much more likely to work outside of its training distribution. Ro-ro-rotate your model of the bird, rotate your model of the bird for science!
-
@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-10-13 03:00
A local sneer enthusiast sat through the Nashville Thiel lectures so that we wouldn’t have to: reddit.com/…/notes_from_the_room_peter_thiels_ant… It’s neat that there are two of us!
-
@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-10-13 04:44
I DO NOT LIKE THESE ROBOTS by Becky Chambers
-
@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-10-13 05:25
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says researchers have started smoking, believing AI will cure cancer via r/nottheonion The Palantir CTO said that researchers were now so confident in AI that they had started smoking. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Shyam Sankar told CBS. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will—I’m showing you my chips are all in.” Perhaps, the researchers think that there is no better way of showing faith in AI than to indulge in something that could cause them cancer – hopefully AI finds that cure before things get serious. ok way to snitch on them to health insurance bot. presumably all their CEO customers are prompting “hike premiums on dumbasses. make no mistakes no luigi”. happy open enrollment season. /s
-
@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-10-13 07:42
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell some assets for $20 million
-
@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-13 09:38
Looks like a Stanford philosophy professor either didn’t get invited to the orgies, or had a bad time, and took out his frustration by writing an op-ed in The Economist decrying the EAs for caring more about shrimp than people. An outraged green-leaf LWer took to the substacks to attack him, saying he cares less about shrimp than people. lesswrong.com/…/leif-wenar-s-takedown-of-effectiv…
-
@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-10-13 11:37
Anthropic has a new angle for trying to get local LLMs banned, apparently they’re about to be able to use your temu android tv to take over your smart toaster: Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested
-
@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-10-13 13:24
New Odium Symposium. We go through an episode of Loveline, a once wildly popular call-in radio show, then look at where its hosts Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew ended up. www.patreon.com/…/26-chudline-with-172120239 or www.odiumsymposium.com for all the usual rss sources
-
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-13 14:49
New Baldur Bjarnason: It’s not our job to fix our employers As a note, Baldur dedicates much of the first half to how general sentiment has shifted against the tech industry over the past decade.
-
@fnix@awful.systems 2026-10-13 15:29
A frustrating (and beware, long) post I came across: Coding is NOT solved Starts off with some good sneers: Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough: ❌ Haven’t written code in ages ❌ Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers! ❌ Have a low bar for what good looks like ❌ Don’t care about quality or NFR ❌ Have difficulty understanding an S-curve ✅ Are honest: AI genuinely writes better code than them But the author can’t get over their AI-centrism: Instead of following other people’s advice, build with AI, gain first hand experience and make up your mind. But whatever you do, please please please don’t fool yourself into believing this is a fad. AI is here to stay, and as I stated above there are some genuine use cases for it already.
-
@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-10-13 16:05
Via Kevin Bird (who has taken on the Rationalists before) a substack taking down Jordan Lasker/Crémieux Recueil
-
@e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-10-13 22:15
Lets spend 500 Billion tokens on reverse engineering an unspecified first person shooter. You ask how our agents communicate with each other? Obviously via a fucking Discord channel because that makes sense.
-
@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-14 09:40
Unconfirmed rumor says that a Swedish streaming service had to postpone the premiere of a new game show season because an “AI agent” deleted the completed cut of the show. Via SVT: svt.se/…/tekniskt-haveri-tv4-skjuter-upp-realitys… References Aftonbladet: aftonbladet.se/…/the-challenge-sverige-raderad-av… The streaming service (TV4) says it’s a “technical issue” (the Swedish term “haveri” is used for everything from a computer system crash to an airplane crash).
-
@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-10-14 12:21
More news about the character dot ai bankruptcy: as it turns out, the true economics of the company are disastrous. At their peak, their revenue was around $1M a month while their AI compute expenses alone were $14M a month! Their total expenses in 2025 were around $23M a month. All of this is for a pure text-based low power LLM (none of the “reasoning” business). Before AI boosters crow about how much cheaper AI is currently, they tried every trick in the book to enshittify: open models, ads, usage limits, etc. This allowed them to cut down their losses to a mere $9M a month. Surely this is all one big exception, everyone else in the AI bubble is doing just fine!
-
@Rinn@awful.systems 2026-10-14 14:35
Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic? I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me “wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies” I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.
-
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-14 14:48
(h/t david gerard) How much slop is in Linux now? You’re no longer allowed to know, so its probably all slop
-
@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-10-14 16:13
sfstandard.com/…/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged… h/t Naked Capitalism A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address. lol asking ChatGPT how to bug OpenAI from your wife’s account.
-
@corbin@awful.systems 2026-10-14 18:17
Previously, on Awful, Gutsick Gibbon spent an hour ripping apart T. Beale’s (VD’s) anti-evolution book. She was still angry though, so she got her prior collaborator and four friends to join her for a complete dissection of VD’s bullshit claims. Content warning for literally everything awful we discuss here, including sex crimes, neo-Nazis, Silicon Valley bullshit, and remarkably bad arithmetic. My choice sneer is her chosen video title, “Six Scientists Roast One Racist Loser (Heartwarming) (Four Hours) (Hopecore)”. GG’s requested that we not give VD any attention other than reminding him that he’s such a pathetic loser that even white nationalists disavow him as too boring and insipid, so I’m not posting this to a top-level topic, but I’m getting a lot of household chores done while listening to it in the background and maybe you will too.
-
@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-10-14 22:10
.
-
@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-10-15 12:26
Feel like this blog must have made the rounds but today is the first time I’m actually reading it and it’s sharp enough to cut with: Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.
-
@rmf@awful.systems 2026-10-15 17:58
-
@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-16 06:56
So I got bored and for some reason decided to look at the AI 2027 prediction grading doc again…and its Claude Mythos rank is just straight up wrong? To quote the doc: “ The current best 80% time horizon is Mythos Preview at 186 minutes (version 1.1; there is no measurement for version 1.0). The methodology change from TH1.0 to TH1.1 drops the best model as of AI 2027 publication (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) by 2/3 from 15 to 10 minutes. Because we care more about the pace of progress rather than the absolute values, we look at when the AI 2027 trajectory reaches 186*(3/2)=279 minutes. In a central AI-2027-speed trajectory from our AI 2027 timelines model, 279 minutes is achieved in May 2026.” Except Claude Sonnet wasn’t dropped to 10 minutes, it was dropped to 12. to play devil’s advocate maybe it was updated between then and now? but it doesnt seem like it.