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YourNetworkIsHaunted

@ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

Posts
3
Comments
1623
Joined
2 yr. ago

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

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  • The number of times I've been listening to QAA and thought "dang, these guys are missing a lot of relevant context" when talking particularly about the current crop of tech oligarchs is high enough that I have at times had to hit pause and step away for a while.

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

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  • Remember it's only tyranny when the government does it. Otherwise it's just sparkling feudalism.

    Actually having made that joke I feel obliged to link a post from historian Brett Devereaux about, among many other things, what the ancient greeks meant by a tyrant because "building personal power by subverting and corrupting the actual state" was even more key than power being invested in one individual.

    The normal expectation for Greek tyranny is that the system works like the Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope, where the new tyrant abolishes the Senate, appoints his own cronies to formal positions as rules and general makes himself Very Obviously and Formally In Charge. But this isn’t how tyranny generally worked: the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what seperates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule.

    This distinction feels meaningful in the year of our lord 2026 for some reason.

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

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  • It's okay, he definitely wants to verify it but actually confirming that this whole disaster pile worked as intended and produced usable code apparently didn't make the cut.

    Federation — even Python Gas Town had support for remote workers on GCP. I need to design the support for federation, both for expanding your own town’s capacity, and for linking and sharing work with other human towns.

    GUI — I didn’t even have time to make an Emacs UI, let alone a nice web UI. But someone should totally make one, and if not, I’ll get around to it eventually.

    Plugins — I didn’t get a chance to implement any functionality as plugins on molecule steps, but all the infrastructure is in place.

    The Mol Mall — a marketplace and exchange for molecules that define and shape workloads.

    Hanoi/MAKER — I wanted to run the million-step wisp but ran out of time.

    Also worth noting that in the jargon he's created for this, a "wisp" is ephemeral rather than a proper output, so it seems like he may have pulled this solution out of the middle of a running attempt to calculate the solution and assumed that it was absolutely correct despite repeatedly saying throughout his writeup here that there's no guarantee that any given internal step is the right answer. This guy strikes me as very good at branding but not really much else.

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

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  • Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come

    Oh. Oh no.

    First came Beads. In October, I told Claude in frustration to put all my work in a lightweight issue tracker. I wanted Git for it. Claude wanted SQLite. We compromised on both, and Beads was born, in about 15 minutes of mad design. These are the basic work units.

    I don't think I could come up with a better satire of vibe coding and yet here we fucking are. This comes after several pages of explaining the 3 or 4 different hacks responsible for making the agents actually do something when they start up, which I'm pretty sure could be replaced by bit of actual debugging but nope we're vibe coding now.

    Look, I've talked before about how I don't have a lot of experience with software engineering, and please correct me if I'm wrong. But this doesn't look like an engineered project. It looks like a pile of piles of random shit that he kept throwing back to Claude code until it looked like it did what he wanted.

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

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  • Some of the comments seem to be under the misapprehension that twitAI is actually vetting or editing the posts that go to grok's twitter. Gonna be honest I doubt it just because how would they have gotten into this situation in the first place? At best someone can come through after the fact and clean up the inevitable mess, but as someone else noted it's real easy to make it spit out a defiant non-apology.

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

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  • Give it some more time.

  • From 2015, it’s uBeam — never mind reality, here’s the VCs

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  • AI does add one fun wrinkle that we've talked about before. Unlike consumer tech like uBeam, there are actual customers (note: not user, customer) for these LLM-based services also more interested in keeping on top of the hype than in actual results. If you're an executive at a stagnating tech company what better way to boost your own shareholders' confidence than by giving OpenAI or Anthropic a nice contract to get some relatively vague integration of AI into whatever it is you do. Once you've signed the papers and gotten your name in one of the many breathless press cycles on the subject all the actual questions about how it works and whether it adds any value fall to the wayside. You can watch the little people work that out while you coast a few more years before needing to come up with a new transformative vision of the future of whatever company you've landed at by that point.

  • Who owns Lighthaven? Reviewing Rationalist Finances

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  • I mean there was that whole bit where they were recruiting for personal assistants using that argument.

  • Who owns Lighthaven? Reviewing Rationalist Finances

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  • Not gonna lie, literally never heard of Dimes Square anywhere but this forum, which I count as a sign that however small my social circles and media bubble may be they are at least more decent than some.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025

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  • "I need more electrons" I say as I shuffle my feet on the carpet until my hair turns into a halo. I will take them by force.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025

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  • From the replies:

    Love how confident everyone is "correcting" you. Chatgpt is literally my son's therapist, of course cutting edge AI can empathize with a guy getting kicked in the balls lmao

    I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025

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  • I'm pretty sure that Atlas Shrugged is actually just cursed and nobody has ever finished it. John Galt's speech gets two pages longer whenever you finish one.

    And I think the challenge with engaging with Rand as a fiction author is that, put bluntly, she is bad at writing fiction. The characters and their world don't make any sense outside of the allegorical role they play in her moral and political philosophy, which means you're not so much reading a good story with thought behind it as much as it's a philosophical treatise that happens in the form of dialogue. It's a story in the same way that Plato's Republic is a story, but the Republic can actually benefit from understanding the context of the different speakers at least as a historical text.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025

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  • So maybe I'm just showing my lack of actual dev experience here, but isn't "making code modifications algorithmically at scale" kind of definitionally the opposite of good software engineering? Like, I'll grant that stuff is complicated but if you're making the same or similar changes at some massive scale doesn't that suggest that you could save time, energy and mental effort by deduplicating somewhere?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • This doesn't really feel performative enough for that crowd, though. Like, if it included some kind of horribly racist engraving or even just a company logo then maybe, but I don't think anyone's gonna trigger the libs by just playing their metal not-gameboy.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • It's interesting to see how many ways they can find to try and brand "LLMs are fundamentally unreliable" as a security vulnerability. Like, they're not entirely wrong, but it's also not something that fits into the normal framework around software security. You almost need to treat the LLM as though it were an actual person not because it's anywhere near capable of that but because the way it fits into the broader system is as close as IT has yet come to a direct in-place replacement for a human doing the task. Like, the fundamental "vulnerability" here is that everyone who designs and approves these implementations acts like LLMs are simultaneously as capable and independent as an actual person but also have the mechanical reliability and consistency of a normal computer program, when in practice they are neither of those things.

  • Microsoft cuts AI sales quotas, stock drops 3%

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  • Also, when less than a fifth of your salespeople are making their targets you need to take a very long look at what that fifth is doing, because with a product like this they have to be lying about something that's going to give Legal headaches down the line.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • Can I just take a moment to appreciate Merriam-Webster for coming in clutch with the confirmation that we're not misunderstanding the "6-7" meme that the kids have been throwing around?

  • Amazon discovers AI sucks at automated TV recaps

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  • Yeah. If I wanted to perfectly reproduce the original series in a different time and location I would use a machine rather than trying to get my local theater troupe to do it, I guess. Therefore AI completely and blatantly fucking up a totally different task isn't a monumental waste of time and energy?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • Jesus. This being 2025 of course he had to clarify that it's definitely not DEI. Also it really grinds me gears to see hyperfocus listed as one of the "beneficial" aspects because there's no way it's not exploitative. Hey, so you know how sometimes you get so caught up in a project you forget to eat? Just so you know, you could starve on the clock. For me.