Want to wade into the sandy 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.)
Looks like Mythos didn’t catch this one:
Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop
Whoopsie!
It’s fine, spyware is only a risk when it’s bad people’s spyware. It’s totally fine when it’s Anthropic™-approved spyware!
As for Mythos catching things, maybe they should have used Mythos on their very own Claude Code considering that it has hilariously obvious security exploits, such as this one which inserts an arbitrary string into a shell command. Actually, never mind I don’t see anything wrong here, maybe we should burn another $20k in electricity running Mythos on it again to find out.
Well it does have the secret “Any attempt to arrest a senior officer of OCP results in shutdown” derective.
guys
If it’s “agentic,” doesn’t that imply it smokes weed for you
I’m sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It can’t be real (It’'s definitely real).
Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if there’s one problem with weed it’s that it’s not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing it’s going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.
Wake me up when there’s an agentic butt plug
You made me look and now you all have to know there’s a library for butt plugs (written in Rust) that has LLM generated code in it:
https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug#inclusion-of-llm-generated-code
This is how I learn that buttplug.io has fallen
I hurt myself today… to see if I still feel…
Considering the amount of weird hentai on the internet that cannot end well.
I have mixed feelings about speaking things into existence
This is a serious blow to coolness, from which not even drugs will easily recover.
Agentic Ripz is my new jam band.
New random positivity thread:
Habryka @ LW takes a break from reinventing Western civilization from first Rat principles to advocate a RETVRN to incandescent lighting:
Eventually, in most of the western world outside of the US, incandescent lightbulbs were literally banned to promote energy saving policies.
This was the greatest uglification in history. Within two decades, much of the world that was previously filled with beautiful natural-feeling light started feeling alien, slightly off, and uncomfortable, and societal stigma around energy-saving policies prevented people from really doing anything about it.
Who TF was using LED lights for indoor lighting in the 1990s? Compact flourescents were the lightbulb replacement in the oughties.
And how TF do you write that post without using the phrase “sensory sensitivity” and citing some women who know they have autism? Once you know you are more sensitive to your environment than allistics, you can start to experiment with interventions.
Dramatic fascistic “RETVRN” language and focus on aesthetics aside, my wife and I actually dug into some of this lighting quality stuff a while ago and while our very good friend here does a poor job explaining it there is a definite difference in normal LEDs vs incandescent or natural light. The LED spectra is fascinating - big spikes at a couple wavelengths and nothing in between. In my experience with switching to the fancier high-CRI LEDs the difference is pretty minimal. Feels like a possible case where you don’t notice it, but your brain does. For my wife it seems to have helped reduce the incidence and severity of her crippling migraines, which is obviously more impactful. I don’t think I’d say it beautified the space or brought us back to the halcyon days of our glorious past, but that’s been huge for us all the same. The plural of anecdote is not cliche, but there’s not nothing here.
This was the greatest uglification in history.Seems like a market opportunity for some special lights/glass that recreates the natural feeling light they want. (I have some lower light leds in older style lamps and I’m having, for me, nice and cosy lighting. Only issue seems to be me getting older and my eyes getting worse with age.
jesus fucking christ this is insufferable, these guys have been masking off for so long now that they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to find new things to do fascist signalling about
looks up, shrugs Everybody involved here kind of sucks, best of luck to all of them. looks back down
When we’re all too tired for “let them fight”.
I can’t imagine the Mouse being happy about this cameo.
damn i wish i had confidence of a mediocre techbro. twitter thread suggests that there’s four copyright infringements just in these two images
e: still can’t get fingers right, lol
For the uninformed (like myself), the odd fox out is a character from Zootopia (pic related), which is a Disney movie.
Bold move to steal from The Mouse in broad daylight, isn’t it?
You can see also his rabbit counterpart from Zootopia in a princess dress in the background of the first picture!
I assume that’s more because they used AI to lift zootopia’s art style wholesale and so that’s just how rabbits are now.
This has been getting posted repeatedly on a reddit sub I follow and it’s funny that we’re still finding Harris fans who somehow didn’t catch on for all these years that the dude is just straight up racist and hates Muslims on an individual basis. The fact that he was probably the most commonly mentioned podcaster on the slate star codex sub is a sign!
I’ll steal my general remark from one of the threads on DTG:
Sam, if you’re allowed to call the mayor an Islamist because his wife liked some posts on social media, can we call you a racist for having a notorious racist on your podcast to yammer about the woke menace?
Why? So it can be firebombed?
(don’t fire-bomb residences people)
also it’s hilarious that a 5% local tax surcharge on a place you don’t even live in is considered Stalinism
Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of bankrupt AI company iLearningEngines charged with fraud - Reuters, 17 April 2026
Prosecutors said iLearning marketed itself as an artificial intelligence-driven digital education company with an “out-of-the-box AI platform,” and claimed to earn revenue mainly by selling licenses for its educational and training platforms to customers, including healthcare companies and schools.
According to the indictment, the defendants used forged sham contracts to make it seem that iLearning’s customers were real, and used “round trip” transfers of investor and lender funds – meaning they sent money to purported customers, who then returned it to iLearning – to manufacture revenue.
At least 90% of iLearning’s $421 million of reported revenue in 2023 was fabricated, the indictment said.
I think they called this wash trading in cryptoland.
Look I know Doctorow fails the gen-AI purity test but I think he’s making sense here
It’s not so much he fails the purity test than it is he thinks all gen-ai works like whisper on a laptop and open source LLMs grow on trees.
edit: and also that big company engineers are encouraged to be discreet in using them, like what?
It’s not just that he fails a purity test it’s that he basically only cares about his pet issues like right to repair and hating copyright and positions himself as a social activist while twisting real social issues to fit into his framework of ‘copyright bad, hackers fix this.’
Too narrow of a scope to be useful I think.
When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he’s referring to has to be capitalism. The “unaligned AI is already here, it’s corporations” trope has been around for a while, and I don’t think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.
I think you can’t usefully tackle just the capitalism of the tech industry, if you don’t understand the wider system around it. I mean the VC that sloshes around in tech to raise up one bullshitteer after another comes from somewhere. Real estate, mining, fossil fuels, etc.
Yeah. I mean, I’m going to assume that he’s not specifically referring to LLCs and that, say General Partnerships and Sole Proprietorship aren’t actually better, mostly because they absolutely share the same problems. But that’s a whole lot of digital ink spilled about how important it is to create “digital public goods” - and one assumes public goods more generally, given our ongoing inability to subsist on digital food - without any real thought put to how such systems should be organized, controlled, protected, etc. Like, if he stopped trying to wave “digital innovation” around like a magic wand he’d basically have to be a communist or anarchist of some flavor. But he’s still sufficiently in the Silicon Valley Milieu where lefty politics are too cringe to admit, so he’s stuc having identified some real problems and having no realistic starting point for solving them
When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he’s referring to has to be capitalism. The “unaligned AI is already here, it’s corporations” trope has been around for a while, and I don’t think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.
Nah, this is the threat as he describes it:
Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country
He doesn’t need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark’s access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he’d control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice
He’s not saying that “corporations are a parasitic species we created that will devour our precious planet and ability to survive and turn it into shareholder value for our corpses to enjoy” no sir he’s saying we need to switch to open source replacements for Office 360 and get Right To Repair for our tractors.
Yeah, but he’s been saying this for a while, and I don’t think this is a new way of saying it that is particularly useful.
Agreed
