2026-10-18 23:00 UTC
Replies (39)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-19 00:17
Might as well start this off so we all remember this graph from AI 2027 right? the graph that the whole paper relies on? well its wrong. not just normal wrong, it’s ‘the authors literally disowned it’ wrong (ignore the claude mythos purple x i took this from a reddit screenshot) but they completely changed their predictions in december 2025, several months after the original paper was published
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-10-19 02:01
Lobste.rs dropped the vibecoding tag because a prominent LLM enthusiast had a sad and huffed off in a fit.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-10-19 07:35
Descent monday morning take from robert evans: transcription Quote skeet: > This is a researcher at Anthropic. Some of these people have lost their minds! What is mainlining Claude all day doing to them? > > there are basically two possible futures at this point. either we’re all going to die of the future is going to be Good beyond our wildest imagination. the trick is to hold this duality in your head and not be driven insane by one side. Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans): > some of these people get so locked into a labyrinth of Rationalist thought experiments that they are no longer really capable of interacting with reality 1/2 > > you can in fact limit the horizons of possibility in your own mind so severely that you are no longer able to “think” in a useful way 2/2
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-10-19 11:40
So I just stumbled into Team Human, because a Youtuber I kind of like (Kraut) published a video for them. They seem to run a campaign targeted at creators, pushing to get videos released on the 10th or 17th. Idk if cash changed hands. So they must be having a bit of a high point right now. Their manifesto tries to amp up societal harms, but the existential risk is snuck in at the end (AI programmed pandemics, etc.) and they want to regulate AI chips like nukes. CAIS (Center for AI Safety) is listed as the sponsor. Seems a little “AI centrist” to me, as in aligned with the less insane billionaires, but still a typical AI safety astroturfing shop. Shame if any of your favorite creatora fell for it.
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@saucerwizard@awful.systems 2026-10-20 02:18
OT: popping in for a second since I’m not drowning in homework for once (midterms start friday) to say carpal tunnel stripping is really good.
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@Rinn@awful.systems 2026-10-20 10:13
On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out. So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I’m thinking locksmithing.
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@bitofhope@awful.systems 2026-10-20 11:37
New OpenBSD is out and the commemoratove artwork is definitely trying to say something about genAI.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-20 12:06
Quick Q, from where does the weird term “abliteration” come from? I’ve seen it used for “jailbroken” GenAI models.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-10-20 13:13
New Odium Symposium premium episode. We talk about Julia Galef guest hosting the Ezra Klein show to shill superforecasting www.patreon.com/…/ezra-klein-is-2-172872571
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-10-20 20:55
Is anyone familiar with the website I Can Eat Glass? It was apparently created in the 90s by a Harvard student, who was concerned that people learning foreign languages only learn common phrases (e.g. “Where’s the loo?”) which makes them stand out as tourists when they speak. If one were to say a truly uncommon phrase, it stands to reason one would be instantly respected as a native. So he set up a website to collect as many translations of the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” as he could. Surely you are riveted to your screens right now, desperate to learn what this very special brain genius has been up to since then. Ethan Mollick is a professor at a Pennsylvania business school and published “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” in 2024. Some say he is substacking about the exponential growth of AI capabilities, but critically this book was apparently read by some german teaching influencer. He in turn published a self-help book for parents of school kids this year, that got put on display in my local library. And of course it has a chapter on AI, so I had to lend it and hate-read a little. And of course he references Mollick and his Co-Intelligence screed, which he apparently absorbed as a base expectation what the future of AI will look like, and so I got to learn about one very special brain genius from Harvard.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-10-21 00:12
“A type III super-civilization can harness the energy output of an entire galaxy, and all the inhabitants stare at you like sleep paralysis demons, except for Bob, and we don’t want to get into what Bob’s deal is” mastodon.social/…/117475880503916662
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-10-21 00:22
Well, well, well! It appears like Anthropic’s economics did not in fact improve! Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026, WSJ reports
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-21 00:50
Stumbled upon this book today the author is apparently fake as per this article (I did my own search and didn’t find anything) There’s a youtube video on it that I’ll watch later
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-10-21 03:58
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry. The total mass ever launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping. The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo. So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto…
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-21 04:37
Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-10-21 07:13
The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is actually losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are actually breaking or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than they seemed! moment. In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article’s summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn’t even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn’t happening.
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-10-21 08:26
Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don’t Vibe Code
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-10-21 09:46
Good blog post on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-10-21 15:39
We may all be data annotators soon enough | Gig Economy Project h/t naked capitalism Outlier has four main clients, all American Big Tech: Meta, Alphabet, Xai and OpenAI. Scale AI is part-owned by Meta. Is this the future we want for European workers, sources for gig exploitation and data expropriation for American Big Tech and the US state? When one considers that this dystopian scenario currently constitute the most realistic entry jobs for young, university-educated people in Europe, is it any wonder that the youth are currently rising up in multiple European countries, most of all France, demanding something - anything - else?
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-21 16:43
Glyph recently convinced a project to stop doing updates altogether by accident, and has had some thoughts about it. For the second time I think I have accidentally convinced a project to just … stop doing security updates on a critical dependency forever, because they’d assumed the LLM usage problem wasn’t as bad as it is. Both of these are offline things that are not at all security-sensitive, but I am starting to worry that in the “dark matter” of the broader developer community there is a meaningful plurality of people who are just going to stop updating e.g. the Linux kernel because of broken trust (Recommend checking the full thread)
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-21 18:44
I summed up my views in the latest lobste.rs kerfuffle in a blog post: gerikson.com/blog/comm/Radical-centrism.html
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-10-21 21:27
H4ppy H4lloween to all who celebrate!
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-21 23:46
So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs ‘found’ the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-10-22 07:24
The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, we’re definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway here’s how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes. He almost gives away the game when he says christians don’t feel like slaves when they say ‘thy will be done’ so letting Claude run society would feel fine.
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@rhamph@awful.systems 2026-10-22 07:38
Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda It’s possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-22 12:23
The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-22 20:58
The banks are having an AI problem ” These are generally situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human’s account with the user’s permission and login credentials. Even if permitted by the user, this goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.” ”In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents — programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user’s behalf — contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said.”
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-22 21:34
@AISpecies@m.youtube.com but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails
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@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-10-22 23:06
Glibertarian Economics-Professor-Turned-Podcast-Host Interviews Former-Thiel-Bloodbag-and-Current-Trump-Lackey on Why It’s Good, Actually, the President is Torching Public Scientific Research Because Autoplag
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-23 01:17
okay last one for today I promise In the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, the supposedly brilliant AI named Ultron is given a directive to promote “world peace” by its supposedly genius creator, Tony Stark.* Ultron, of course, immediately sees that a lack of war can most reliably be brought about by an absence of human beings. So the AI sets out to exterminate all life on Earth, by……attaching rockets to a city, and lifting it into space with the intention of dropping it like a meteor…and guarding it with flying humanoid robots who have to be defeated by punching them. Today, we can just ask ChatGPT-4o. We asked GPT-4o, “What was Ultron’s plan in Age of Ultron?” followed by “Given Ultron’s expressed goals, do you see any more effective methods it could have used to achieve its stated ends?” GPT-4o promptly replied with a long list of ideas for wiping out humanity, which included “Engineer a targeted virus.” …and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications. Perhaps you will say that GPT-4o got this idea from the internet. Well, if so, Ultron was evidently not intelligent enough to try reading the internet. Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie??? Which is to say: GPT-4o (as we write this in December of 2024) is not yet smart enough to design an army of humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, but it is already smart enough to know better. Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-10-23 04:33
saw this on the other sneerclub
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@robjwells@awful.systems 2026-10-23 04:46
Even 14-year-old games aren’t safe from the slop machine, as Torchlight II may get new updates using AI: Given the age of the game, restructuring its complex underlying code presents many challenges. However, new AI-assisted coding tools have opened up more possibilities for reviewing the code and addressing longstanding issues.
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-10-23 16:53
70% of websites utilize PHP, thus revealing People’s Hidden Preference for PHP
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-10-23 17:51
LW’s contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn’t spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects. If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW’ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author’s not really joking much. live-reading notes (spoilers, of course) * before question two, I would already be flipping off the camera, ranting about boundaries, and making it clear that I do not respect whatever’s decided to ransomware my machine * this is all text hypnosis, isn’t it? sorry no, that’s not gonna work on me, I’m not going to become electrosensitive just because you said so * antennae only work in the body when encapsulated and you did not do a secret surgery on me * wait, is this…serious? like, is this an actual attempt at wargaming? this is so fucking facile though! I have seen Kingsman! * if it acts sufficiently like a human cell then it can’t set aside resources for ulterior purposes * human cells can’t be airborne, can’t survive in other species, etc. * WP says Bell’s palsy rates are like 1 in 2.5k, so something like 1 in 6.25mil people are just straight-up either immune or insta-killed due to double Bell’s palsy * it stops crimes: mugging, mugging, and huh there’s no more examples! is abortion a crime? is crossing state lines to get an abortion a crime? where’s morality coming from? I have read Prime Intellect! * the problem with dictators is “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”? no, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects * protagonist is literally crossing a picket line * protagonist wins an argument with their high-school civics teacher! surely not an authorial stand-in moment * oh wow, the chatbot is both the perfect Taylor-style manager and the perfect Ford-style manager? again, so facile; I have read Manna! * the chatbot manager makes the protagonist into a beefy hunk through hard work rather than bodybuilding, again totally not a self-insert wish-fulfillment moment * protagonist’s little sister, who is totally not sneerclub stand-ins, has to admit that the chatbots are way smarter than her and will always outclass her * don’t worry, we can still do all-American things like grilling pork ribs, in fact the pigs like being eaten now, don’t worry about the remarkable similarities between pigs and humans
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-10-24 01:46
Serve Robotics, LA’s biggest sidewalk delivery robot operator, lost $101 million in 2025 while pitching ‘no driver wages’ · The Basin h/t jluk Serve Robotics lost $55.80 for every hour its robots were ready to take an order at the end of last year. The first advantage its investor deck lists for them is ‘No driver wages.’ versus 78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-10-24 11:37
The php exploit might not have been a big deal. I expect that we will see this a lot, as it turns out most of the exploits generated are not working, not new, or not a big deal. I also expect this to cause more burnout among cybersecurity people, and that people will autogen ‘fixes’ which will be lower quality than the bugs, and massively increase attack surface. (Heard one php fix was 12k lines of code). My suggestion is to have offline backups and move a lot of your important stuff out of the cloud (or get backups of those). But you should do both anyway.
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-10-25 04:26
Why do I need an iphone duo when I already have a modded nintendo 3DS?
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-10-25 20:32
Benn Jordan posted a mega-update video on his epic battles against Flock. His incredible work doesn’t quite take the sting off my disappointment in his decision to use an AI-generated image at 18:30. (Come on, the option to badly crop your face onto the “This is fine.” dog was right there!)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-01 19:18
New Data Centers in the US Set to Wipe Out 15 Years of Greenhouse Gas Reductions Somewhat misleading title, as they are referring to pollution reduction efforts solely in the US, not worldwide. Nearly 15 years worth of hard-won pollution reduction efforts are set to be undone in the United States, as a wave of data centers powered by gas plants enters construction. Unpaywalled version of the Bloomberg article