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Found something rare today: an actual sneer from Mike Masnick, made in response to Reuters confusing lying machines with human beings:
Some of the comments seem to be under the misapprehension that twitAI is actually vetting or editing the posts that go to grok's twitter. Gonna be honest I doubt it just because how would they have gotten into this situation in the first place? At best someone can come through after the fact and clean up the inevitable mess, but as someone else noted it's real easy to make it spit out a defiant non-apology.
How about some quantum sneering instead of ai for a change?
They keep calling it a 'processor,' but it's actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond
“Refrigerated probability sculpture” is outstanding.
Photo is from the recent CCC, but I can’t find where I found the image, sorry.
alt text
A photograph of a printed card bearing the text:
STOP DOING QUANTUM CRYPTOANALYSIS
- DECADES of research and billions in funding, yet the largest number a quantum computer quantum physics experiment has ever factorized remains a terrifying 21
- They keep calling it a 'processor,' but it's actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond - fever dreams of the QUANTUM CULT
- The only countdown ticking toward Y2Q is researchers counting the years of funding they can squeeze out of it
- Harvest now, decrypt later: because someday quantum computers will unlock the secret... that all the encrypted traffic was just web scrapers feeding Al model training
- Want to hack a database? No need to wait for some Quantum Cryptocalypse, Just ask it politely with 'OR 1=1'
(I can’t actually read the final bit, so I can’t describe it for you, apologies)
They have played us for absolute fools.
The NYT:
In May, she attended a GLP-1s session at a rationalist conference where several attendees suggested that retatrutide, which is still in Phase 3 clinical trials, might fix her mood swings through its stimulant effects. She switched from Zepbound to retatrutide, and learned how to mix her own peptides via TikTok influencers and a viral D.I.Y. guide by the Substacker Cremieux.
Carl T. Bergstrom:
Ten years ago I would not have known the majority of the words in this paragraph—and was indubitably far better off for it. [...] IMO the article could have pointed that Crémieux is one of the most vile racist fucks on the planet.
https://bsky.app/profile/carlbergstrom.com/post/3mbir7bhfhc2u
100% thought the story was gonna end with "she died."
Give it some more time.
GeneSmith who told LessWrong "How to Make Superbabies" also has no bioscience background. This essay in Liberal Currents thinks that a lot of right-wing media personalities are using synthetic testosterone now (but don't call it gender-affirming care!). Roid rage may be hard to separate from Twitter brain-rot and slop-chugging.
Is mentioning his other reddit account not permitted on wiki?
You would need a non-self-published source which says u/TPO = Lasker
Yeah, the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have a whole pile of instructions for how to write about living people. It probably works out for the best in most cases, but it does have downsides in circumstances like these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons
As a guy who writes for the Times Carl's probably going to get a smack on the wrist for using spicy language in criticism of a Times article.
Steve Yegge has created Gas Town, a mess of Claude Code agents forced to cosplay as a k8s cluster with a Mad Max theme. I can't think of better sneers than Yegge's own commentary:
Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.
If you're familiar with the Towers-of-Hanoi problem then you can appreciate the contrast between Yegge's solution and a standard solution; in general, recursive solutions are fewer than ten lines of code.
Gas Town solves the MAKER problem (20-disc Hanoi towers) trivially with a million-step wisp you can generate from a formula. I ran the 10-disc one last night for fun in a few minutes, just to prove a thousand steps was no issue (MAKER paper says LLMs fail after a few hundred). The 20-disc wisp would take about 30 hours.
For comparison, solving for 20 discs in the famously-slow CPython programming system takes less than a second, with most time spent printing lines to the console. The solution length is exponential in the number of discs, and that's over one million lines total. At thirty hours, Yegge's harness solves Hanoi at fewer than ten lines/second! Also I can't help but notice that he didn't verify the correctness of the solution; by "run" he means that he got an LLM to print out a solution-shaped line.
Fantastic bit. I wonder if the Computer History Museum will eventually be able to replicate this as the peak of the "gen-AI" era.
Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come
Oh. Oh no.
First came Beads. In October, I told Claude in frustration to put all my work in a lightweight issue tracker. I wanted Git for it. Claude wanted SQLite. We compromised on both, and Beads was born, in about 15 minutes of mad design. These are the basic work units.
I don't think I could come up with a better satire of vibe coding and yet here we fucking are. This comes after several pages of explaining the 3 or 4 different hacks responsible for making the agents actually do something when they start up, which I'm pretty sure could be replaced by bit of actual debugging but nope we're vibe coding now.
Look, I've talked before about how I don't have a lot of experience with software engineering, and please correct me if I'm wrong. But this doesn't look like an engineered project. It looks like a pile of piles of random shit that he kept throwing back to Claude code until it looked like it did what he wanted.
Just confirming that none of what is described really approaches engineering.
- Please god let this be a joke. (I know its not)
- Do we know what the limit he's talking about hitting with Anthropic is? Like, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars has this man set on fire in the past two weeks such that Anthropic went "whoa buddy, slow down"
That’s horrifying. The whole thing reads like an over-elaborate joke poking fun at vibe-coders.
It’s like someone looked at the javascript ecosystem of tools and libraries and thought that it was great but far too conservative and cautious and excessively engineered. (fwiw, yegge kinda predicted the rise of javascript back in the day… he’s had some good thoughts on the software industry, but I don’t think this latest is one of them)
So now we have some kind of meta-vibe-coding where someone gets to play at being a project manager whilst inventing cutesy names and torching huge sums of money… but to what end?
Aside from just keeping Gas Town on the rails, probably the hardest problem is keeping it fed. It churns through implementation plans so quickly that you have to do a LOT of design and planning to keep the engine fed.
Apart from a “haha, turns out vide coding isn’t vibe engineering” (because I suspect that “design” and “plan” just mean “write more prompts and hope for the best”) I have to ask again: to what end? what is being accomplished here? Where are the great works of agentic vibe coding? This whole thing just seems like it could have been avoided by giving steve a copy of factorio or something, and still generated as many valuable results.
Also I can’t help but notice that he didn’t verify the correctness of the solution
Think I have mentioned the story I heard here once, about the guy who wrote a program to find some large prime which he ran on the mainframe over the weekend, using up all the calculation budget his uni department had. And then they confronted him with the end result, and the number the program produced ended in a 2. (He had forgotten to code the -1 step).
This reminded me of that story. (At least in this case it actually produced a viable result (if costly), just with a minor error).
It's okay, he definitely wants to verify it but actually confirming that this whole disaster pile worked as intended and produced usable code apparently didn't make the cut.
Federation — even Python Gas Town had support for remote workers on GCP. I need to design the support for federation, both for expanding your own town’s capacity, and for linking and sharing work with other human towns.
GUI — I didn’t even have time to make an Emacs UI, let alone a nice web UI. But someone should totally make one, and if not, I’ll get around to it eventually.
Plugins — I didn’t get a chance to implement any functionality as plugins on molecule steps, but all the infrastructure is in place.
The Mol Mall — a marketplace and exchange for molecules that define and shape workloads.
Hanoi/MAKER — I wanted to run the million-step wisp but ran out of time.
Also worth noting that in the jargon he's created for this, a "wisp" is ephemeral rather than a proper output, so it seems like he may have pulled this solution out of the middle of a running attempt to calculate the solution and assumed that it was absolutely correct despite repeatedly saying throughout his writeup here that there's no guarantee that any given internal step is the right answer. This guy strikes me as very good at branding but not really much else.
??????????????????
OT: Did you guys know they give cats mirtazapine as an appetite stimulant? (My guy is recovering from pneumonia and hasn’t been eating, so I’m really hoping this works).
Rooting for your kitty!
Its working! I got him to eat!!!
Hell yeah 💪
I bet it works great. I put on so much with mirtazapine my doctor took me off. Worked great for my depression though unfortunately.
A journalist attempts to ask the question "Why Do Americans Hate A.I.?", and shows their inability to tell actually useful tech from lying machines:
Bonus points for gaslighting the public on billionaires' behalf:
These worries are real. But in many cases, they're about changes that haven't come yet.
Of all the statements that he could have made, this is one of the least self-aware. It is always the pro-AI shills who constantly talk about how AI is going to be amazing and have all these wonderful benefits next year (curve go up). I will also count the doomers who are useful idiots for the AI companies.
The critics are the ones who look at what AI is actually doing. The informed critics look at the unreliability of AI for any useful purpose, the psychological harm it has caused to many people, the absurd amount of resources being dumped into it, the flimsy financial house of cards supporting it, and at the root of it all, the delusions of the people who desperately want it to all work out so they can be even richer. But even people who aren't especially informed can see all the slop being shoved down their throats while not seeing any of the supposed magical benefits. Why wouldn't they fear and loathe AI?
These worries are real. But in many cases, they’re about changes that haven’t come yet.
famously, changes that have already happened and become entrenched are easier to reverse than they would have been to just prevent in the first place. What an insane justification
guess the USA invasion of Venezuela puts a flashing neon crosshair on Taiwan.
An extremely ridiculous notion that I am forced to consider right now is that it matters whether the CCP invades before or after the "AI" bubble bursts. Because the "AI" bubble is the biggest misallocation of capital in history, which means people like the MAGA government are desperate to wring some water out of those stones, anything. And for various economical reasons it isn't doable at the moment to produce chips anywhere else than Taiwan. No chips, no "AI" datacenters, and they promised a lot of AI datacenters—in fact most of the US GDP "growth" in 2025 was promises of AI datacenters, if you don't count these promises the country is already in recession.
Basically I think if the CCP invades before the AI bubble pops, MAGA would escalate to full-blown war against China to nab Taiwan as a protectorate. And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing
Small brain: this ai stuff isn't going away, maybe I should invest in openAI and make a little profit along the way
Medium brain: this ai stuff isn't going away, maybe I should invest in power companies as producing and selling electricity is going to be really profitable
Big brain: this ai stuff isn't going away, maybe I should invest in defense contractors that'll outfit the US's invasion of Taiwan...
invest
If you are broadly invested in US stocks, you are already invested in the chatbot bubble and the defense industry. If you are worried about that, an easy solution is to move some of that money elsewhere.
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@mirrorwitch I note that China is on the verge of producing their own EUV lithography tech (they demo'd it a couple of months back) so TSMC's near-monopoly is on the edge of disintegrating, which means time's up for Taiwan (unless they have some strategic nukes stashed in the basement).
If China *already* has EUV lithography machines they could plausibly reveal a front-rank semiconductor fab-line—then demand conditional surrender on terms similar to Hong Kong.
Would Trump follow through then?
@cstross @mirrorwitch Having the fab is worthless. (Nearly. They're expensive to build.) The irreplaceable thing is the specific people and the community of practice. (Same as with a TCP/IP stack that works in the wild, or bind; this is really hard to do and the accumulated knowledge involved in getting where it is now is a full career thing to acquire and brains are rate-limited.)
China most probably doesn't have that yet.
That is, however, not in any way the point. Unification is an axiom.
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" And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing"
That's a great line.
And they don't even turn a profit.
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From the new Yann LeCunn interview https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2
Meta made headlines for trying to poach elite researchers from competitors with offers of $100mn sign-on bonuses. “The future will say whether that was a good idea or not,” LeCun says, deadpan.
LeCun calls Wang, who was hired to lead the organisation, “young” and “inexperienced”.
“He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know . . . There’s no experience with research or how you practise research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”
Wang also became LeCun’s manager. I ask LeCun how he felt about this shift in hierarchy. He initially brushes it off, saying he’s used to working with young people. “The average age of a Facebook engineer at the time was 27. I was twice the age of the average engineer.”
But those 27-year-olds weren’t telling him what to do, I point out.
“Alex [Wang] isn’t telling me what to do either,” he says. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
OR, maybe nobody /has/ to tell a researcher what to do, especially one like him, if they've already internalized the ideology of their masters.
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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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