this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

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 so 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.)

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 12 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 12 hours ago

this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy

This is poetry, AI could never

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

Old: AI Winter

Bold: AI Ragnarok

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago

AI Winter but with the same connotations as a nuclear one

[–] samvines@awful.systems 10 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

The new Claude model will silently decide whether what you asked it to do is in line with anthropic ToS and silently corrupt your prompt if it doesn't like what you're asking. It's couched as a "safety countermeasure" but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.

We've moved from 'accidental' hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and you're paying $$$ for the privelige.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 7 points 15 hours ago

Claude can now be silently nerfed. Anthropic has decided it won't tell users when this happens.

considering how many habitual llm users can't tell good from bad output anyway, they always could have done that

[–] FredFig@awful.systems 5 points 14 hours ago

To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.

Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust

I know this outcome was inevitable after software became a mass market thing, but it's still rather depressing.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 15 hours ago

"You're holding it wrong" as official policy

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Wake up babe new genre definition just dropped

https://stoates.substack.com/p/programmer-science-fiction

Includes all the usual suspects, but notably doesn't mention Ken MacLeod whose Fall Revolution series is probably too socialist[1]. Also avoids discussing Stross post-Singularity Sky.


[1] MacLeod's Corporation Wars trilogy has immersive VR, artificial conciousness rebelling against authority, and literal p-zombies but is also very anti-fascist, so no wonder it's not mentioned (also, it's unfortunately not very good)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago

Viral: "read a second book"

Spiral: "read a second Borges story"

The author of "Death and the Compass" and "Emma Zunz" is unrecognizable from the description there.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 5 points 19 hours ago

@gerikson @techtakes Technical nit-pick: "American hard science fiction space opera like Timelike Infinity is also influential"— Timelike Infinity was written by Steven Baxter who is *very* English indeed. Best contextualized as mid-period Interzone generation hitting its imperial phase.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

This is a new method of bootlicking: if you as a FLOSS developer don't use LLMs to fix vulnerabilites identified by LLMs, you're being unethical

https://lobste.rs/c/5toqqs

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Lol what a weak argument. Not only does this limit your llm use to only bugfixing (which is what the op is limiting their use to right?), it also ignores how a few big recent outages were prob caused by llms. And it treats ethical concerns like some sort of numbers game. We have one ethical concern for and one against so it cancels out.

And it leads to 'Mengeles experiments were not unethical because some of the torture he did actually provided valuable insights on the extremes a human body can go through'

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 15 hours ago

"It is your moral duty to send as much money as you can to Sam Altman"

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have discovered that Grok leaks its prompts when slopping out Grokipedia pages. Examples:

  • "The instructions say "You are an agent that writes the various article sections for an encyclopedia entry on Joseph Kanuku."

  • "[Note: Britannica is encyclopedia, but instructions say no Britannica. Wait, replace with another.]"

  • "Wait, instructions say NEVER cite Wikipedia. Oops. Let me adjust."

  • "The instructions say prioritize peer reviewed, books, etc."

  • "Wait, but instructions say never cite social media, so omit that last part. Wait, adjust. Since Instagram is social media, omit that."

  • "Wait, instructions say avoid "References" as a section, but for completeness, I've omitted it from structure.)"

  • "The guidelines say "Include any of the following where relevant: - Factual details..." under Missing Information or Knowledge Gaps Examples. And in format, it's to list only critical issues or all missing info or knowledge gaps."

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I guess a certain country is using LLMs to try to engage people 1:1 to change their opinions of said country.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Could be a LLM, could be a call-center worker in Kenya or Mumbai or Manilla. Its an old move.

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 3 points 11 hours ago

Good point. Now I imagine someone trying to pass the turing test by having their bot pretend to be a sales person.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Anthropic insists that you should use their demon-as-a-service. Hackernews debates the finer points of pentangle construction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463808

Edit: a hackernews is tired of simonw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464627

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 7 points 15 hours ago

Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.

oh fuck off. going full SCP in their press releases now. insufferable.

[–] samvines@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] lurker@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

On a related note Mythos has been released and as pointed out, the original “GPT-2 is too dangerous to be released” post was written by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and Jack Clark, who are all Anthropic’s founders. Same ploy, different model

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I’ve also seen mention of “Fable” and I’ve been too sick to go check up on whatever the fuck that is

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Mythos with extra safety dust sprinkled on top and they listened to The Safety Dance while writing the system prompt. Also a hand painted sign on the front that says "no chinese were serius"

Hope you get to feeling better fast!

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

after calling the con about a super hacker AI the "mythos", now they're calling the next spiel "fable"? are they like, just taking the piss at this point?

[–] macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Claude v6.0, "Tall Tale"

Claude v6.1 "Big Fish Story"

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

They want to invent the AI Named For Untruth from the hit Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Do Not Invent the AI Named for Untruth".

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

just taking the piss at this point?

always-have-been.jpg

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

okay damn you o7 I checked

Claude Fable 5 introduces our 5th model generation for your most ambitious work. Tackle days-long, complex, and asynchronous tasks previous models couldn’t sustain.

folks, can I get a "please god pay us for even more tokens" for 500?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

and they listened to The Safety Dance

not sure they're cool enough even to do that

Hope you get to feeling better fast!

ty! rest is helping, but why are sinuses

[–] samvines@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Let's all just agree that it's a beloved RPG game by Lionhead Studios and we'll leave it at that

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

lol

Time is a dumb circle

[–] lurker@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is AI profitable yet? a website that tracks the spending and revenue of leading AI companies. The answer is so helpfully provided at the top of the page

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

It’s also fun to sort by pnl and see just how far the gap is for others that aren’t nvidia

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

New pride month Odium Symposium episode. We go through the life and activism of notorious homophobe and orange juice queen, Anita Bryant

https://www.patreon.com/posts/18-swallowing-of-160587597

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

I'd been betting on one of the promptfarmer companies being the ones to set off the bubble-popping chain reaction, but looks like musk is so desperate for cash that his coterie of grifts are speedrunning for the underdog position

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