Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th November 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Welcome to November, and 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.)___

(I get the feeling we’re close to this bubble’s end.)

Anyways, 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.)

  • lurkerEnglish
    1·
    56 minutes ago

    Peeked back at their blog to see if I could find anything about it. Text dump incoming:

    The model with Daniel’s latest median parameters predicted that when an Automated Coder (AC) was developed, AI software R&D uplift would be ~2.7x and the pace of progress would be accelerated from the 2024.0-2025.5 level by ~1.25x.

    So naively, if we’re at a 1.7x AI-attributed pace of progress multiplier, we might think that AC has been achieved (as of Model 4).

    Based on the METR report and Anthropic’s Fable 5.2 system card, it seems unlikely but not totally implausible.

    In the Fable 5.2 system card: Anthropic says: “we have been using Claude Mythos 5.2 extensively in our own day-to-day research and engineering during the pre-release period, and it does not seem close to being able to substitute for our Research Scientists and Research Engineers.” This is the strongest evidence against AC already. On the other hand, METR surprisingly doesn’t rule out full AI R&D automation: “We are uncertain, but think it’s unlikely that [Claude Mythos 5.2] can fully automate the AI R&D process at Anthropic.” Fable 5.2, based on its AECI, likely represents “Model 3,” which is the second-most-capable internally deployed Anthropic model.

    Idk man that seems like that pretty solidly means AC did not happen

    Relevant interview quotes from the METR report include: Being “no longer bottlenecked on code,” “SWE acceleration… is extremely substantial.” “When people present experiments, they most often just point to an [agent scaffold] thread. Experimentation overhead is driven towards zero super fast.” There’s also the report’s assessments on automating researchers beyond coding:

    “We were told that R&D is accelerated primarily via AI assistance rather than fully autonomous contributions, but there are some signs that fully autonomous contributions will play a larger role soon”. “Simply put, Anthropic tries hard to substitute researchers out for models, but researchers are still required.” Note that humans could still contribute some alongside an AC: the criterion is that only the AIs could do all the coding as well as only the humans.

    ok and?? if only the AIs could do the work then they wouldn’t be having trouble substituting out researchers for AI.

    In the report’s chart showing “Model 4 achieves >50% on all of its benchmarks”, there is a software engineering benchmark on which Model 4 gets ~52%, and another around ~75%. Surprisingly, on the 52% one, scores have been getting worse since Mythos 5. This makes me discount it substantially, but still it’s informative that Anthropic chose to include it in the AECI. The progression for the 75% one looks more reasonable; Eli thinks these benchmarks provide weak evidence against AC. (Not strong evidence, because humans might also score well under 100%.)

    My take is that if there was an AI model that could automate all the coding on Anthropic’s AI projects, it would be absolutely plastered all over the news. Especially with their IPO looking shakier and shakier by the day. Plus if they’re apparently trying to replace researchers but can’t that’s a pretty strong indicator that AC isn’t here