this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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TechTakes

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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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 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.)

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[–] dovel@awful.systems 16 points 3 days ago (8 children)

I have to share this one.

Now don’t think of me as smug, I’m only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: I’m pretty good at Vim. I’ve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. I’ve pulled off some impressive stunts with Vim macros. But here I sat, watching an LLM predict where my cursor should go and what I should do there next, and couldn’t help but admit to myself that this is faster than I could ever be.

Yeah, flex your Vim skills because being fast at editing text is totally the bottleneck of programming and not the quality and speed of our own thoughts.

The world is changing, this is big, I told myself, keep up. I watched the Karpathy videos, typed myself through Python notebooks, attempted to read a few papers, downloaded resources that promised to teach me linear algebra, watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym.

Wow man, you watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym...

In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the university’s AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldn’t give less of a shit about the things I had been concerned about. Was this code written with Pure Vim, was it written with Pure Emacs, does it not contain Artificial Intelligence Sweetener? They don’t care. They’ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldn’t they? Next question. Concerns about “is this still the same programming that I fell in love with?” seemed so silly that I didn’t even dare to say them out loud.

SIDE NOTE: I plea the resident compiler engineer to quickly assess the quality of this man's books since I am complete moron when it comes to programming language theory.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

They’ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them.

Is that the same AI that's been available for barely two years?

What a drama queen.

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago

Of course, like everyone else present at the Big Bang, I clapped and was excited and tried everything I could think of — from translating phrases to generating poems, to generating code, to asking these LLMs things I would never ask a living being.

"Like everyone else in my social circle, which I confuse with the entirety of the world, I am easily distracted by jangling keys"

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago (7 children)

As someone not versed in the relevant deep lore, did emacs vs vim ever actually matter? Like, my experience is with both as command line text editors, which shouldn't have nearly as much impact on the actual code being written as the skills and insight of the person doing the writing. I assumed this was a case where you could grumble through working with the one you didn't like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.

[–] aio@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

honestly the only important difference between them is that emacs's default keybindings can and will give you a repetitive stress injury (ask me how i know...)

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.

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[–] corbin@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago (4 children)

The books look alright. I only read the samples. The testimonials from experts are positive. Maybe compare and contrast with Lox from Crafting Interpreters, whose author is not an ally but not known evil either. In terms of language design, there's a lot of truth to the idea that Monkey is a boring ripoff of Tiger, which itself is also boring in order to be easier to teach. I'd say that Ball's biggest mistake is using Go as the implementation language and not explaining concepts in a language-neutral fashion, which makes sense when working on a big long-lived project but not for a single-person exploration.

Actually, it makes a lot of sense that somebody writing a lot of Go would think that an LLM is impressive. Also, I have to sneer at this:

Each prompt I write is a line I cast into a model’s latent space. By changing this word here and this phrase there, I see myself as changing the line’s trajectory and its place amidst the numbers. Words need to be chosen with care, since they all have a specific meaning and end up in a specific place in latent space once they’ve been turned into numbers and multiplied with each other, and what I want, what I aim for when I cast, is for the line to end up in just the right spot, so that when I pull on it out of the model comes text that helps me program machines.

Dude literally just discovered word choice and composition. Welcome to writing! I learned about this in public education when I was maybe 14.

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 15 points 4 days ago (2 children)

New 404 Media article: Elon Musk's Grok AI Will 'Remove Her Clothes' In Public, On X

So we can add "fully automatic sexual harassment" to the list of reasons Twitter can die in a fire

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

whoops e_thread

so it looks like openai has bought a promptfondler IDE

some of the coverage is .. something:

Windsurf brings unique strengths to the table, including a seamless UI, faster performance, and a focus on user privacy

(and yes, the "editor" is once again VSCode With Extras)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

New piece from Soatok/Dhole Moments: Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI

If you've heard of him before, its likely from that attempt to derail an NFT project with porn back in 2021.

ETA: Baldur Bjarnason has also commented on it:

This is honestly a pretty sensible take on this all. That it comes from somebody with a "fursona" shouldn't surprise anybody who has been paying attention.

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 27 points 5 days ago (2 children)

More big “we had to fund, enable, and sane wash fascism b.c. the leftist wanted trans people to be alive” energy from the EA crowd. We really overplayed our hand with the extremist positions of Kamala fuckin Harris fellas, they had no choice but to vote for the nazis.

(repost since from that awkward time on Sunday before the new weekly thread)

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 23 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I hate this position so much, claiming that it's because "the left" wanted "too much". That's not only morally bankrupt, it's factually wrong too. And also ignorant of historical examples. It's lazy and rotten thinking all the way through.

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There's so much to hate with this, but for some reason what really irks me is the "overplayed their hand" b.c. she was a poker player so she has to view all human interaction through the lens of gAmE tHeOrY instead of, you know, believing people should have human rights.

Like you just know in a parallel universe she's yapping about how "the West has fallen b.c. leftist pushed their pawns too far" or "I have to vote for elon for president b.c. the left's clerics exhausted all their healing mana"

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

25+ years... i.e. Bush II instituted a new Golden Age but it was betrayed by (checks notes) radical Marxists??

At least set the start of "Western society solidity" at 1989...

I keep forgetting so many people online are very, very young.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Big chance this person is <25 and this is just the reactionary yearning for a better past that never was. Also interesting how they always blame the 'Left', and not just somebody like Reagan who had actual power, actually caused a measurable shift etc. (Not saying it was great before him, I wasnt there in time and place) But nope popular culture controls the world. Thanks cartoon Obama.

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago

Leopard nibbles at venture founders' faces in a new way - OpenAI researcher can't get green card

(will they reconsider their wholehearted support for trump tho? also no)

[–] aio@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Apparently MIT is teaching a vibe coding class:

How will this year’s class differ from last year’s? There will be some major changes this year:

  • Units down from 18 to 15, to reflect reduced load
  • Grading that emphasizes mastery over volume
  • More emphasis on design creativity (and less on ethics)
  • Not just permission but encouragement to use LLMs
  • A framework for exploiting LLMs in code generation
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

Fuckin' dammit. At least it's not my old department... yet...

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)

From the class guide:

We ask that students do not use laptops or phones in class. Research suggests that students who do so unwittingly spend much of the time surfing the internet leading to worse educational outcomes, and that taking notes by hand is much more effective. You may use laptops during class exercises, and you may also use a tablet to take notes.

lol

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

A tangent: the tablet.

Why is the tablet ok for taking notes? Is it banned from the wifi? Does it lack a browser? Or are todays students unaware that most sites can be visited without an app?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 4 days ago

because if they try to ban accessibility they will get in trouble

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Zuck, who definitely knows how human friendships work, thinks AI can be your friend: https://bsky.app/profile/drewharwell.com/post/3lo4foide3s2g (someone probably already posted this interview here before but I wasn't paying attention so if so here it is again)


In completely unrelated news: dealing with voices in your head can be hard, but with AI you can deal with voices outside of your head too! https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

(No judgement. Having had a mental breakdown a long long time ago, I can't imagine what it would have been like to also have had access to a sycophantic chat-bot at the same time.)

[–] ebu@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago

i retain a pretty dismal view of AI for just about any use case, but had some distant friends / people i follow on social media say they used it as a rubber duck for troubleshooting a problem they had, or a place to just dump emotions into. i figured this, at the very minimum, could and should be harmless. i guess i wasn't cynical enough

I found this quote interesting (emphasis mine):

He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.” “At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.

I would absolutely believe that this is the case, especially if like Sem you have a sufficiently uncommon name that the model doesn't have a lot of context and connections to hang on it to begin with.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I think this sub might be satirical and that this post is under that umbrella, investigating!

E: post is tagged as humor

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago

Whoops, thanks for the heads up! They got me good

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Core Strategy: We define the probability of victory, PvictoryP_{\text{victory}}Pvictory​, as: Pvictory=( C B A^2+ℏ∂ΨP∂t)×(Nc⋅c2)P_{\text{victory}} = \left( C B A^2 + \hbar \frac{\partial \Psi_P}{\partial t} \right) \times (Nc \cdot c^2)Pvictory​=(CBA2+ℏ∂t∂ΨP​​)×(Nc⋅c2). (Someone told me this is "LateX"? I think you need to copy it to ChatGPT to see the equation.)

Yeah it’s time to delete LaTeX. We’re done. We don’t deserve it anymore

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

\begin{equation} /\!\! \curlywedge \circledcirc_{\,\smallsmile\!\smallsmile} \! \circledcirc \curlywedge \! \backslash \end{equation}

spoilerKyubey from Madoka Magica, except in LaTeX

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (13 children)

That couple have been in the white house to brief the president on their one thing ig

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I knew the exact couple you were talking about before I read any additional comments. They seem to show up in the news like clockwork... do they have a publicist or PR agent looking for newspapers in need of garbage filler puff pieces? If anything, going to the white house is a step up from there normal pattern of self promotion.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago

they're Thiel creatures. This is why (a) they're in all the papers all the fucking time (b) no other pronatalist couple is

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago

They're Internet Native/Terminally Online, so they can SEO their own appearances, plus now they are fully plugged-in to the right-wing hype machine so they're probably turning down appearances instead of chasing them.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago

they have billionaire bank rollers. since the reality of our media system is that you hear a lot about whatever billionaires want you to hear about, they are covered

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Update on my comment from yesterday: it seems I fell for satire (?). (I don't know the people involved, so no idea, but it seems plausible.)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago

Satire-brackets-questionmark is a whole industry now, isn't it?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Looks like elon and the others fell for it tbh, not so much you. (Note his screenshot showed he liked and retweeted it).

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