TechTakes

Such heroes! If only everyone were so generous!

Beautiful, I trolled myself with this without even realizing it.

The job application process is so broken I don't have words for it.

Make no mistake: these robots aren’t autonomous and everything they do is controlled by a human operator. Those hip thrusts and other gross gestures are pre-programmed moves, not something that’s happening spontaneously.

Nonetheless, the German police statement added an unnecessary air of mystery to who was responsible for these actions, saying that it’s now “investigating how the robot was operating at the time of the incident and whether someone was deliberately controlling its movements.”

This is unfortunately another example of how men looking for clout are using the latest gadgets to target women. Plenty of other livestreamers and Instagram “pick up artists” are using Meta smart glasses to film themselves harassing girls on the street and record them without their consent.

Remember when technology was about a vision of the future and not just a reflection of media illiterate, sexist and bigoted rightwing boys?

Just two weeks til' Halloween now.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Has alignment been fixed after all with AI? Probably not, you would think the car would head for ICE first but shrugs maybe.

I don't know because we CAN that is why!

So, I was thinking about how modern LLMs got better at coding in the last 1 year, despite not having much good new training data.

The way it was done is largely via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (and a little bit with human feedback).

Basically, you use an LLM to make slop, random token choice and everything, monkeys on typewriters style, and then if slop passes a test, you use said slop as the training data. You use the compiler, unit and integration tests, any static analysis tools, etc etc as verification.

For natural language, attempts to do anything like this work miserably, the whole slop centipede, model collapse, all that. But for coding this turned to be unexpectedly effective.

So that raises the question: can an LLM coding assistant be developed like a normal corporate project, with no YOLO exemptions from software legal compliance, without any special treatment like it's a favorite child that grows up to be a techbro? Like normal fucking software?

I think, the answer is probably a yes on the purely technical level but still a hard no commercially.

On the technical level, an LLM could be pre-trained on compatibly licensed open source projects, RLVR'd in a license-compliant way.

The end result isn't going to be good for plagiarism, though, and won't use plagiarism to cover every gap in capabilities. I think it's pretty obvious all the folks who are trying to clone Adobe or whatever would reject such a product.

Meanwhile the one "strength" of LLMs is this intuitive argument that if you have a good enough predictor of what your workers do, then you don't need workers. That is the whole reason the "AI companies" are rolling in investor money and are able to operate at such large loss.

The other thing is that having done copyright infringement, OpenAI/Anthropic/etc etc have to portray it as necessary, and alternative as impossible.

Anyhow basically my thought on this is that I'll continue not using any LLM coding tools in my personal projects until some acceptable tooling appears and proves itself actually useful.

edit: For a concrete example if someone makes a tool that can take the compiled assembly, run it through non-LLM translation to some much abridged Lean and prove that nothing depends on exact timing of threads (no race conditions) or identify race conditions, or complain it could do neither, would I use it? If the carbon footprint is not insanely greater than what I would do instead (which is either a: run stress tests overnight, or b: ship buggy software that users have to restart, which also has a large energy footprint), sure.

‘No more hand-written code’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1UGgcs0H3s&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/episode-20261015 - podcast

time: 5 min 08 sec

I am not specifically hating on the UK here I just don't understand how this is ever going to work out as anything other than beaucratic sabotage under the guise of magic I mean AI.

Anthropic on tenterhooks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYp5RCRVTl4&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://www.patreon.com/davidgerard/posts/podcast-not-172570904 - podcast (free)

time: 5 min 10 sec

As I was using LLMs at work (I never use LLMs for personal projects), a question occurred to me:

What in the fuck are these new data centers supposed to actually do?

The enterprise users are all in on having LLMs write 300% of the code. And yet, both OpenAI and Anthropic are still giving these "$200 gets you $10 000 in API costs" subscriptions to every victim of AI psychosis.

Why do we have RAM, hard disk, SSD, GPU and CPU shortages and no "token shortage"?

I mean, we all know the answer, these are the offerings for the robot god, but like how in the fuck are they still obtaining loans for this shit?

‘The kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ARF2KcDgc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA&index=1&pp=iAQBsAgC - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261014-linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits - podcast

time: 13 min 43 sec

looks at AI, Silicon Valley and US big tech companies

DRACARYS Ed Zitron!! DRACARYS!!!

https://www.omnycontent.com/d/playlist/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/cf0c25ad-cf01-4da5-ae1c-b0fc015f790e/53ed270b-7147-4f70-81c2-b0fc015fe4ed/podcast.rss

Scientology survivor Jenna Miscavige tells the story of her life to the camera. Unlike similar interviews she's given over the past decade-ish, this isn't a discussion with a journalist or a generalist overview, but a deep dive from somebody who served Sea Org, Disconnected their family, and was Audited daily. Content warning for internal details of the Church of Scientology and Sea Organization; there's a lot of abuse. I figured that our newer friends might not realize the degree to which the CoS threatened the Internet and violates human rights, and her story is a complete slice of everything we dislike about the church.

Never forget Lisa McPherson.

I think that's a really good idea and we should encourage them. I recommend Kent cigarettes with the Micronite filter for a smooth aroma.

Archived link

all my apes gone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwZ6_Q2lnsc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261012-ai-game-demo-going-broke-on-just-430-players - podcast

time: 4 min 47 sec

the return of the SaaSpocalypse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTbb7Ub43F0&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261013-the-ai-photoshop-clones-interface-mockups-that-dont-work - podcast

time: 4 min 59 sec

Do you believe in magic in an old creepy techbro's heart?

I would be interested because I think in the future, if that’s where things go, it would be cool that my children or my grandchildren could be in charge of my likeness and my image, and hopefully put me in some good movies. It’ll be interesting to see where things go.

I wonder how this will age?

“There's only really roughly 2,000 AI researchers in America, and the vast majority of them believe in this sort of worldview around effective altruism,” Sankar noted. The Palantir CTO seems to believe, like many effective altruism critics, that all the doomsday scenarios and far-fetched risks being posited by the EA AI crowd are less technical critiques and more like theological ones.

“I think there's a profound truth to Pascal's saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart,” Sankar said, “and it's important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI.”

At least the vibes are consistent I guess.... but still death cults are always lame because besides the whole obsession with death, they are also all the same.

The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

So the boosters are making a big deal about the dump of "proofs" OpenAI has made recently, so I thought I would collect some relevant links in one place...

Stuff on autoformalization:

• A short blog post breaking down some of the bugs found and potential for more
• preprint discussing the problems with natural language to lean in detail and pointing out some blatant inconsistencies in the recent Navier-stokes "proof"
• /r/betteroffline discussion of above preprint
• Some of our very good friends are aware of the problem! Of course, this is lesswrong, so there is a tinge of "this is why we need to be careful with using this sort of approach to make our AI God".
• The soundness bug that led to the fallacious disproof of the Collatz Conjecture

And some other related links:

• OpenAI already retracting a few papers

Let me know in the comments if you have any links I should to these lists!