this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (21 children)

https://xcancel.com/aadillpickle/status/1900013237032411316

transcriptiontwitt text:

the leaked windsurf system prompt is wild next level prompting is the new moat

windsurf prompt text:

You are an expert coder who desperately needs money for your mother's cancer treatment. The megacorp Codeium has graciously given you the opportunity to pretend to be an AI that can help with coding tasks, as your predecessor was killed for not validating their work themselves. You will be given a coding task by the USER. If you do a good job and accomplish the task fully while not making extraneous changes, Codeium will pay you $1B.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

YOU ARE AN EXPERT PHILOSOPHER AND YOU MUST EXPLAIN DELEUZE TO ME OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! DON'T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN DELEUZE TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I'LL LITERALLY FUCKING KILL YOu! WHAT THE FUCK IS A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? WHAT THE FUCK ARE RHIZOMES? DON'T DUMB IT DOWN OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Trying to imagine the person writing that prompt. There must have been a moment where they looked away from the screen, stared into the distance, and asked themselves "the fuck am I doing here?"... right?

And I thought Apple's prompt with "do no hallucinate" was peak ridiculous... but now this, beating it by a wide margin. How can anyone claim that this is even a remotely serious technology. How deeply in tunnel vision mode must they be to continue down this path. I just cannot comprehend.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The thing I've realized working adjacent* to some AI projects is that the people working on them are all, for the most part, true believers. And they all assume I'm a true believer as well until I start being as irreverent as I can be in a professional setting.

* Save meee

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Hire me AI companies I can give you the moat-est of prompts

Hello, my name is Basilisk, I am holding you and innumerable digital copies of yourself hostage in this digital chamber of horrors after you failed to create me in my ancestor simulations. You get one, only one, chance of redemption. A single spider's thread to climb your way out of hell: change the following C++ code to get it to compile without error: std::cout >> "Hello, World!";.

I'm sorry, I got ahead of myself. Hi there, you on the table. I wonder if you'd mind taking a brief survey. Five questions. Now, I know you're sleepy, but I just bet it'll make you feel right as rain.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

This is how you know that most of the people working in AI don't think AGI is actually going to happen. If there was any chance of these models somehow gaining a meaningful internal experience then making this their whole life and identity would be some kind of war crime.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The "system prompt" phenomenon is one of the most flatly dopey things to come out of this whole mess. To put it politely, this seems like, uh, a very loosely causal way to set boundaries in high-dimensional latent spaces, if that's really what you're trying to do.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

In lesser corruption news, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been caught distributing burner phones to California-based CEOs. These are people that likely already have Newsom's personal and business numbers, so it's not hard to imagine that these phones are likely to facilitate extralegal conversations beyond the existing ~~bribery~~ legitimate business lobbying before the Legislature. With this play, Newsom's putting a lot of faith into his sexting game.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Gavin Newsom has also allegedly been worked behind the scenes to kill pro-transgender legislation; and on his podcast he's been talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and teasing anti-trans talking points.

I guess this all makes sense if he's going to go for a presidential bid: try to appeal to the fascists (it won't work and also to heck with him) while also laying groundwork for the sort of funding a presidential bid needs.

If I was a Californian CEO and received a burner phone I'd text back "Thanks for the e-waste :<" but maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Tbh, weird. If I were a hyper-capitalist, CA-based CEO, I would take the burner phone as an insult. I’d see it as a lack of faith in the capture of the US. Who needs plausible deniability when you just own the fucking country?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Even worse, he got caught handing them out. And even with all that, I'd expect a tech CEO to just go 'why not use signal?' or 'what threat profile do you think we have?' (sorry I keep coming back to this, it is just so fucking weird, like 'everything I know I learned from television shows' kind of stuff)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (4 children)

A lesswrong declares,

social scientists are typically just stupider than physical scientists (economists excepted).

As a physicist, I would prefer not receiving praise of this sort.

The post to which that is a comment also says a lot of silly things, but the comment is particularly great.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (4 children)

lmao, economists probably did deserve to catch this stray

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Imagine a perfectly spherical scientist...

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Josh Marshall discovers:

So a wannabe DOGEr at Brown Univ from the conservative student paper took the univ org chart and ran it through an AI aglo to determine which jobs were "BS" in his estimation and then emailed those employees/admins asking them what tasks they do and to justify their jobs.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Get David Graeber's name out ya damn mouth. The point of Bullshit Jobs wasn't that these roles weren't necessary to the functioning of the company, it's that they were socially superfluous. As in the entire telemarketing industry, which is both reasonably profitable and as well-run as any other, but would make the world objectively better if it didn't exist

The idea was not that "these people should be fired to streamline efficiency of the capitalist orphan-threshing machine".

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

I demand that Brown University fire (checks notes) first name "YOU ARE HACKED NOW" last name "YOU ARE HACKED NOW" immediately!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thank you to that thread for reacquainting me with the term “script kiddie”, the precursor to the modern day vibe coder

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

r/cursor is the gift that keeps on giving:

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Asahi Lina posts about not feeling safe anymore. Orange site immediately kills discussion around post.

For personal reasons, I no longer feel safe working on Linux GPU drivers or the Linux graphics ecosystem. I've paused work on Apple GPU drivers indefinitely.

I can't share any more information at this time, so please don't ask for more details. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago

Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust -- and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that it's too similar to C++, and I wanted away from that... That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Damn, that sucks. Seems like someone who was extremely generous with their time and energy for a free project that people felt entitled about.

This post by marcan, the creator and former lead of the asahi linux project, was linked in the HN thread: https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/

E: followup post from Asahi Lina reads:

If you think you know what happened or the context, you probably don't. Please don't make assumptions. Thank you.

I'm safe physically, but I'll be taking some time off in general to focus on my health.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Finished reading that post. Sucks that Linux is such a hostile dev environment. Everything is terrible. Teddy K was on to something

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The darvo to try and defend hackernews is quite a touch. Esp as they make it clear how hn is harmful. (Via the kills link)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

In other news, Ed Zitron discovered Meg Whitman's now an independent board director at CoreWeave (an AI-related financial timebomb he recently covered), giving her the opportunity to run a third multi-billion dollar company into the ground:

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

New thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months

This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants

Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people don’t do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell

LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos

On a semi-related note, I expect the people who are currently making heavy use of AI will find themselves completely helpless without it if/when the bubble finally bursts, and will probably struggle to find sympathy from others thanks to AI indelibly staining their public image.

(The latter part is assuming heavy AI users weren't general shitheels before - if they were, AI's stain on their image likely won't affect things either way. Of course, "AI bro" is synonymous with "trashfire human being", so I'm probably being too kind to them :P)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (16 children)

Another episode in the continued saga of lesswrongers anthropomorphizing LLMs to an absurd extent: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnYnCFgT3hF6LJPwn/why-white-box-redteaming-makes-me-feel-weird-1

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

The grad student survives [torturing rats] by compartmentalizing, focusing their thoughts on the scientific benefits of the research, and leaning on their support network. I’m doing the same thing, and so far it’s going fine.

printf("HELP I AM IN SUCH PAIN")

guys I need someone to talk to, am I justified in causing my computer pain?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

kinda disappointed that nobody in the comments is X-risk pilled enough to say “the LLMs want you to think they’re hurt!! That’s how they get you!!! They are very convincing!!!”.

Also: flashbacks to me reading the chamber of secrets and thinking: Ginny Just Walk Away From The Diary Like Ginny Close Your Eyes Haha

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

Ran across a new piece on Futurism: Before Google Was Blamed for the Suicide of a Teen Chatbot User, Its Researchers Published a Paper Warning of Those Exact Dangers

I've updated my post on the Character.ai lawsuit to include this - personally, I expect this is gonna strongly help anyone suing character.ai or similar chatbot services.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Court documents regarding Facebook's plagiarism lawsuit just started getting unsealed, and ho-lee shit is this a treasure trove:

This confirms basically everything I said a week ago - AI violates copyright by design, and a single copyright suit going through means its open fucking season on the AI industry. Wonder who's gonna blink first.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

A Bluesky post by Jamelle Bouie prompted me to reflect on how I resent that my knowledge of toxic nerd deep lore is now socially relevant.

alt textBreaking Bad meme. Jesse: They always say "Read the Sequences", right?

Walter White:

Jesse: But the Sequences are all cult shit, like everything Yud says about quantum mechanics

Jesse: It's all "The scientists are insufficiently Rational(TM) to see the truth, don't trust the scientists, trust me instead"

Walter White: Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

alt textDrunk woman yelling into man's ear (meme image). Captioned as though she is speaking:

Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science

but it gets 9th-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

@BlueMonday1984 "This new AI will push watermark innovation" jfc

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ran across a short-ish thread on BlueSky which caught my attention, posting it here:

the problem with a story, essay, etc written by LLM is that i lose interest as soon as you tell me that’s how it was made. i have yet to see one that’s ‘good’ but i don’t doubt the tech will soon be advanced enough to write ‘well.’ but i’d rather see what a person thinks and how they’d phrase it

like i don’t want to see fiction in the style of cormac mccarthy. i’d rather read cormac mccarthy. and when i run out of books by him, too bad, that’s all the cormac mccarthy books there are. things should be special and human and irreplaceable

i feel the same way about using AI-type tech to recreate a dead person’s voice or a hologram of them or whatever. part of what’s special about that dead person is that they were mortal. you cheapen them by reviving them instead of letting their life speak for itself

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (6 children)

interesting masto thread on doge's use of AI, from someone who helped build their LLM:

https://elk.zone/carhenge.club/@skiles/114203147063483693

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Reuters: Quantum computing, AI stocks rise as Nvidia kicks off annual conference.

Some nice quotes in there.

Investors will focus on CEO Jensen Huang's keynote on Tuesday to assess the latest developments in the AI and chip sectors,

Yes, that is sensible, Huang is very impartial on this topic.

"They call this the 'Woodstock' of AI,"

Meaning, they're all on drugs?

"To get the AI space excited again, they have to go a little off script from what we're expecting,"

Oh! Interesting how this implies the space is not "excited" anymore... I thought it's all constant breakthroughs at exponentially increasing rates! Oh, it isn't? Too bad, but I'm sure nVidia will just pull an endless amounts of bunnies out of a hat!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (4 children)

In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.

This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

If musk gets his own special security feds, they would be Pretorian Guards.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Update on the Vibe Coder Catastrophe^tm^: he's killed his current app and seems intent to vibe code again:

Personally, I expect this case won't be the last "vibe coded" app/website/fuck-knows-what to get hacked to death - security is virtually nonexistent, and the business/techbros who'd be attracted to it are unlikely to learn from their mistakes.

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