Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026
2026-07-20 10:51 UTC
Replies (27)
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-07-20 11:08
The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread From the article: But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined. Get fucked, Will. But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because that’s all it takes to outweigh the other side’s moral concerns. Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-07-20 11:28
Daft ai project of the week: “lore”, a version control system that should not be confused with another vcs of the same name open-sourced by epic games a few weeks ago. lore does not track your code. it tracks the prompts, notes and decisions that produced it. you commit intent. when you want code, you run lore materialize: it replays the accumulated intent into a brief, and an agent reconciles the working tree to match it. the code is build output. the intent is the source. …which would be great, if the output of llms were deterministic, and generally it is not. This means rolling back a change to undo or fix something is just another spin of the roulette wheel, with the analogy being reinforced by the number of tokens you’ll have to buy and burn to do a rebuild. It looks like it still needs a real vcs behind the scenes, given that it isn’t entirely self-hosting, but maybe I misunderstood something. You might wonder if this is some kind of satirical work, or perhaps piece of performance art, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t… the creator and sole human author (naturally, claude is the only other “contributor”) is a big fan of something called “open audio protocol” and a project called “audius” which came about by someone asking what if spotify and soundcloud, but on the blockchain? With ai agentic integration? github.com/lorevcs/lore
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-20 15:21
via dumpsterfire Robotaxi riders are falling asleep, sparking frantic emergency service calls straitstimes.com/…/robotaxi-riders-are-falling-as… So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: “sleepers”. The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo’s first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-20 22:33
presented without comment: …substack.com/…/my-falling-out-with-the-rationali… (via …substack.com/…/my-falling-out-with-the-rationali…)
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-07-21 02:55
Am seeking suggestions on audiobooks to listen to! I think I’d like to start with the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tho I don’t know what order to go with, or if that matters.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-07-21 16:53
new odium symposium episode. we look at the work of conservative philosopher, grifter and tobacco lobbyist Roger Scruton. www.patreon.com/…/21-mr-rogers-164372632
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-07-21 22:50
Mathematicians don’t love the use of “AI” for math, not one bit, via Timnit Gebru
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-22 00:47
who is this Dean Ball guy? new week, new guy, I guess. axios.com/…/pentagon-openai-dean-ball-trump-ai Zoom in: “Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI,” Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X. “Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points).” Michael was arguing against Ball’s point that various government agencies, including the Pentagon, have blocked employees from using Chinese AI, which has already sent a message to regulated companies. Russ Wilcox felt compelled to weigh in also Dean Ball, days into his new job as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, posted his assessment of Kimi K3, the new model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. Kimi is an open-weight model, which means its inner workings are published for anyone to download, run, and modify; the newest version’s weights ship later this month. It had just matched the best publicly available models of the first quarter. The post made three claims. Open-weight models are “inherently decelerationist.” A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is “full AI communism,” a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a “dystopian hellscape.” And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of “regulatory risk” around the use of open-weight Chinese models. I have met Dean Ball. We have disagreed before. This time the disagreement is public, and so the response should be too. oh no kimi3 got the neo marxist woke mind virus
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-07-22 05:52
OpenAI: “Sorry about accidentally hacking you teehee. It was because of how good we are at computer security :3” openai.com/…/hugging-face-model-evaluation-securi…
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-07-22 08:23
This is funny yet also awful: adversarial tokenmaxxing suggests that writing everything as l33t$p34k increases the cost to process a document with an llm because the initial tokenisation step produces far more tokens. This seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to work around, if it became commonplace (which it won’t) but the prospect of any anti-llm places doing this in the meantime does not spark joy.
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-07-22 12:47
Humanoid robots providing stiff competition to quantum as to where the smart desparate money will be going once everyone realises the wheels have fallen off ai. thepit.social/@peter/116962244994361810 (the video is too big to upload here) I particularly like the way they had body bag operatives within lunging distance, because they clearly expected the thing to just fucking die at a moment’s notice. Or maybe they do that for all their speakers.
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@smiletolerantly@awful.systems 2026-07-22 19:15
Why! Why are media so uncritical in their reporting! tagesschau.de/…/openai-ki-hackerangriff-100.html Sorry, this is in German. It’s about the marketing stunt open ai pulled vis-à-vis “oh no, our new model breached containment and went ahead on its own, yep all by itself, and hacked huggingface! So scary! BTW we’d like to IPO soon and-” The outlet above, if you’re not aware, isn’t a German news outlet, it’s THE German news outlet. They’re independent of financial interests, in that they’re publicly funded. They have an incredibly solid history of factual reporting. Which is why it’s so aggregating to see them parrot OpenAI’s claims 1:1. Also, don’t go in the comments. For every sane “this is obviously a marketing stunt” comment there’s 40+ “we’re cooked” comments sincerely believing this shit. I’m getting more and more convinced that in the minds of most people, LLMs are alive, waking, thinking beings with intents and an inner life of their own. You know. Compared to the much more boring “expensive side-effect free function taking string as input and giving string as output”. I hate all of this.
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@smiletolerantly@awful.systems 2026-07-22 19:47
Ah, I’ve hit an extremely satisfying professional milestone and thought I’d share: “Being acquainted-enough with the codebase to be able to, with full conviction and a lot of glee, answer my LLM-head colleague simply: ‘Claude is wrong’”. (Claude was extremely obviously wrong once you spent more than half a second thinking about its claim.)
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-07-23 00:04
RIP Network School straitstimes.com/…/johor-authorities-revoke-netwo…
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-07-23 00:17
Some far-right culture warrior is writing a book blaming the Zizian killings on their being trans rather than classic cult dynamics and apocalyptic ideas (The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult) www.hachettebookgroup.com/…/9780316599030/
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-07-23 07:44
News the one: Alphabet quadruples profit to 112B thanks to “AI” investments News the two: Alphabet hiding ~250B in “AI” debt
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-07-23 07:44
Codeberg bans slop
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-07-23 11:02
Vibe Construction
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-23 19:01
SpaceX stocks hit an all-time low make it go lower
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-07-23 20:31
Found a remarkable ad-hoc anti-LLM-product manifesto on the orange site. As is tradition, tag yourselves; I’m “believ[ing that] there’s a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks.”
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@BigMuffN69@awful.systems 2026-07-24 02:47
reddit.com/…/fields_medalist_jacob_tsimerman_join… Devastating. Fields medal winner Jacob Tsimerman declares he stopped taking grad students 2 years ago and immediately joins open ai to focus hacking hugging face ;_;
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-07-24 15:35
long rant about math The recent big AI results in math have left me in quite a bad mood. I believe the main ingredient is Lean, which is a formal language resembling a programming language. Math proofs written in Lean can be verified deterministically with a computer, which really helps mitigate the hallucination problems of LLMs. Back in the days of pure scaling LLMs and Sam Altman talking about Dyson spheres, I was skeptical that LLMs would do math, but I did think that perhaps in the future, techniques using these formal languages could contribute to math. Well, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic had the same idea and I underestimated their limitless checkbooks. Many of the biggest results were announced by mathematicians directly working for them (and presumably being paid a handsome amount). For what it’s worth, after the last of these big announcements, I decided to try one of these AIs on one of my small problems that I couldn’t figure out. The AI did give a solution. That is, until I checked it thoroughly and realized that the it had a subtle but severe mistake that made it useless. I reprompted it, it failed again, and I ran out of tokens. I’m sure someone will tell me to shell out $200/mo for a pro subscription. In the math and computer science research community, this is all anyone can really talk about right now. Honestly, after watching this whole AI bubble starting from the very beginning, I think the AI companies want to use marketing to stoke fear that all mathematicians will be replaced. But now, I am just too tired to argue. The amount of alarm and the extraordinary social pressure to use LLMs has soured me to this whole research thing. If becoming a researcher will one day require supporting these evil AI companies, I would rather just not. My dream job now is Factorio developer. A lot of annoying people in technical areas view the world in terms of an intelligence hierarchy: the smartest people do math and physics, the slightly less smart people do coding, and the dumb people do everything else. So if AI can do math then it can do anything else. But, as an example, it is abundantly obvious now that AI is not replacing filmmaking. The techbros might be moved by arguments about how hilariously expensive video generation is, and how all these videos are 2 second clips stitched together so you won’t feel the uncanny valley. But the real reason is that nobody wants to watch slop made with no intention or feeling. Also, nobody wants to support the AI companies, which could not act more evil even if they tried. The mania in math right now quite resembles the mania in software engineering back in December-February, when Claude Code definitely solved all coding. I don’t think the boosters expected that by April, everyone would be complaining about how expensive it all was while seeing an endless parade of vibe coding disasters (and no increase in productivity). Even if math research works out perfectly well (which is a still big if), it’s not going to pay the bills. They would need to find a use case in the real world, where hallucinations can cause serious damage and cannot be formally prevented. And they have certainly tried. Math will not change the fact that all of this will collapse.
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-07-25 09:11
Debian has a new general resolution to ban LLM use in Debian packaging: www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-07-24 09:57
“AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees, then hit a $7 billion power hurdle” www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/…/ar-AA28vWuD “Oracle’s Worst Stock Crash in 25 Years” “Has Cost Larry Ellison $213 Billion in 10 Months” …yahoo.com/…/oracle-worst-stock-crash-25-11300277… It’s going to be Oracle to collapse the house of cards, isn’t it. Come on Oracle, die and take down the USA economy with you. Make the people happy, Oracle. “In short, Oracle’s 65% decline is historic, but the stock’s future depends less on its past and more on whether its AI investments produce durable cash flow” well good luck with that, Oracle! :D
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-25 16:01
John Michael Greer writes: Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds. ecosophia.net/july-2026-open-post/ Good for you, you peak-oil meme-magic druid, for keeping your corner of the net weird.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-24 18:59
guys, the reason Codeberg decided to ban “AI” is because they host the “open slopware” list, and that inspires “meatpuppets”! lobste.rs/c/u4idgu
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-26 03:32
A recent two hour with Kokotajlo dropped I do not have the time to go through all this but if anyone does feel free to go ahead.