Want to wade into the snowy 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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    20 hours ago

    Moltbook still going great. Even the enthusiasts are feeling that the shine may have worn off.

    eastside mccarty @eastsidemccarty

    So just to clarify: You created a thing that you now realize you can’t control, and you can’t do anything to secure it, and people that use ClawdBot… err sorry… @openclaw, are own their own to deal with the consequences?! Did I get that right?

    Turns out that combining unsecurable vibe-coded web services with unsecurable chatbots and combining them into an unmoderated public platform can be bad. Also, shrugging off problem reports with “i unno” is a bit of a bad look.

    alt text

    eastside mccarty @eastsidemccarty

    Hey @openclaw team, can you do something about these malicious skills in your registry, ClawHub? Last night, one user, hightowerSeu, published more than 200 malicious skills. Each of these tricks the user into installing malware

    Rajveer @RajveerJolly

    Tried to reach out, no response yet. @steipete please address it

    Peter Steinberger @steipete

    Yeah got any ideas how? There’s about 1 Million things people want me to do, I don’t have a magical team that verifies user generated content. Can shut it down or people us their brain when finding skills.

    Rajveer @RajveerJolly

    Sorry homie I don’t have any idea either. I understand you have a lot on your plate perhaps some sort of flagging feature could do wonders

    Peter Steinberger @steipete

    And who reviews the flags? That would be abused right away too

    eastside mccarty @eastsidemccarty

    So just to clarify: You created a thing that you now realize you can’t control, and you can’t do anything to secure it, and people that use ClawdBot… err sorry… @openclaw, are own their own to deal with the consequences?! Did I get that right?

    Rajveer @RajveerJolly

    I hear you. I guess for now people just need to double and check and verify it all bevause there isn’t a simple solution to this

    • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      The real damning thing is the speed that the true believers abandoned this garbage fire. You used to be able to string these guys along for years, and now they can barely keep the trend going for a week. Gonna be real weird when the scammers realize they’ve finally burnt out all the good will.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      15 hours ago

      there isn’t a simple solution to this

      How about just not creating the problem in the first place. How about that.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      19 hours ago

      The people who are worried that Moltbook is where agents are gaining self-consciousness forgot the part of Accelerando where all the AIs were basically scammers (the Slug)

  • dovel@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    22 hours ago

    It seems that Anthropic has vibe coded a C compiler. This one is really good! The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      3 hours ago

      The first issue filed is called “Hello world does not compile” so you can tell it’s off to a good start. Then the rest of the six pages of issues appear to be mostly spam filed by some AI guy’s rogue chatbot.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      This could be regarded as a neat fun hack, if it wasn’t built by appropriating the entire world of open source software while also destroying the planet with obscene energy and resource consumption.

      And not only do they do all that… it’s also presented by those who wish this to be the future of all software. But for that, a “neat fun hack” just isn’t enough.

      Can LLMs produce software that kinda works? Sure, that’s not new. Just like LLMs can generate books with correct grammar inside, and vaguely about a given theme. But is such a book worth reading? No. And is this compiler worth using? Also no.

      (And btw, this approach only works with an existing good compiler as “oracle”. So forget about doing that to create a new compiler for a new language. In addition, there’s certainly no other language with as many compilers as C, providing plenty of material for the training set.)

    • ________@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      18 hours ago

      The fact it doesn’t have an assembler or linker, and I am doubting it implemented its own lexical analyzer, I almost struggle to call this a compiler.

      The claim it is from scratch is misleading since it has all prior training from open source.

      Building a small compiler for a simple language (C is pretty simple, especially older versions) is a common learning exercise and not difficult. This is very much another situation where “AI” created an over simplified version of something with hidden details on how it got there as a way to further push the propaganda that it is so capable.

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      21 hours ago

      I wonder what actual experts in compilers think of this. There were some similar claims about vibe coding a browser from scratch that turned out to be a little overheated: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/27/cursor-lies-about-vibe-coding-a-web-browser-with-ai/

      I do not believe that this demonstrates anything other than they kept making the AI brute force random shit until it happened to pass all the test cases. The only innovation was that they spent even more money than before. Also, it certainly doesn’t help that GCC is open source, and they have almost certainly trained the model on the GCC source code (which the model can regurgitate poorly into Rust). Hell, even their blog post talks about how half their shit doesn’t work and just calls GCC instead!

      It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own).

      It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo video was produced with a GCC assembler and linker.

      I wonder why this blog post was brazen enough to talk about these problems. Perhaps by throwing in a little humility, they can make the hype pill that much easier to swallow.

      Sidenote: Rust seems to be the language of choice for a lot of these vibe coded “projects”, perhaps because they don’t want people immediately accusing them of plagiarism. But Rust syntax still reasonably follows languages like C. In most cases, blindly translating C code into Rust kinda works. Now, Rust does have the borrow checker which requires a lot of thinking to deal with, but I think this is not actually a disadvantage for the AI. Borrow checking is enforced by the compiler, so if you screw up in that department, your code won’t even compile. This is great for an AI that is just brute forcing random shit until it “works”.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        I wonder why this blog post was brazen enough to talk about these problems. Perhaps by throwing in a little humility, they can make the hype pill that much easier to swallow.

        I feel this is an artefact of the near complete collapse of mainstream journalism, combined with modern tech business practises that are about securing investment and cashing out, and every other concern is secondary or even entirely absent. It’s all just selling vibes.

        People only ever report the hype, the investors see everyone else following the hype and panic that they might be left out and bury you in cash. When it all turns sour and people ask pointed questions about the exact nature of the magic beans you were promising to grow, you can just point at the blog post that no-one read (or at least, only poor people read, and they’re barely people if you think about it) and point out that you never hid anything.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        15 hours ago

        I only sampled some of the docs and interesting-sounding modules. I did not carefully read anything.

        First, the user-facing structure. The compiler is far too configurable; it has lots of options that surely haven’t been tested in combination. The idea of a pipeline is enticing but it’s not actually user-programmable. File headers are guessed using a combination of magic numbers and file extensions. The dog is wagged in the design decisions, which might be fair; anybody writing a new C compiler has to contend with old C code.

        Next, I cannot state enough how generated the internals are. Every hunk of code tastes bland; even when it does things correctly and in a way which resembles a healthy style, the intent seems to be lacking. At best, I might say that the intent is cargo-culted from existing code without a deeper theory; more on that in a moment. Consider these two hunks. The first is generated code from my fork of META II:

        while i < len(self.s) and self.clsWhitespace(ord(self.s[i])): i += 1

        And the second is generated code from their C compiler:

        while self.pos < self.input.len() && self.input[self.pos].is_ascii_whitespace() {
    self.pos += 1;
}

        In general, the lexer looks generated, but in all seriousness, lexers might be too simple to fuck up relative to our collective understanding of what they do. There’s also a lot of code which is block-copied from one place to another within a single file, in lists of options or lists of identifiers or lists of operators, and Transformers are known to be good at that sort of copying.

        The backend’s layering is really bad. There’s too much optimization during lowering and assembly. Additionally, there’s not enough optimization in the high-level IR. The result is enormous amounts of spaghetti. There’s a standard algorithm for new backends, NOLTIS, which is based on building mosaics from a collection of low-level tiles; there’s no indication that the assembler uses it.

        The biggest issue is that the codebase is big. The second-biggest issue is that it doesn’t have a Naur-style theory underlying it. A Naur theory is how humans conceptualize the codebase. We care about not only what it does but why it does. The docs are reasonably-accurate descriptions of what’s in each Rust module, as if they were documents to summarize, but struggle to show why certain algorithms were chosen.

        Choice sneer, credit to the late Jessica Walter for the intended reading: It’s one topological sort, implemented here. What could it cost? Ten lines?

        I do not believe that this demonstrates anything other than they kept making the AI brute force random shit until it happened to pass all the test cases.

        That’s the secret: any generative tool which adapts to feedback can do that. Previously, on Lobsters, I linked to a 2006/2007 paper which I’ve used for generating code; it directly uses a random number generator to make programs and also disassembles programs into gene-like snippets which can be recombined with a genetic algorithm. The LLM is a distraction and people only prefer it for the ELIZA Effect; they want that explanation and Naur-style theorizing.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        16 hours ago

        I wonder if this is going to hold out long enough to get some obnoxious AI-first language created that is designed to have as obnoxiously picky of a compiler as it can in order to try and turn runtime errors that the model can’t cope with into compile failures which it can silently retry until they’re ‘fixed’

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      20 hours ago

      for a second i thought we were talking about the audio codec and got mildly interested but no

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      15 hours ago

      There’s a letter in the book of Asimov’s correspondence that his brother edited where Asimov says that he’d been asked “How close are we to George Orwell’s 1984?” again and again in the years leading up to 1984, to the point that he was sick of it and dreading the actual year 1984, when no one would ask him about anything else. I figure he had a lot of venom built up in his system that came out here.

      He was also a veteran of science-fiction fan club drama, after which he worked in academia, so yeah, he knew sectarian in-fighting.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      22 hours ago

      I don’t think I disagree with much of what Asimov is saying here! Aside from the silly bits about left infighting and scifi as forecasting (yawn), and the horrible recount of the Spanish civil war, I’ve made pretty much the same observations about 1984. It’s nihilistic and reactionary, it’s profoundly misogynistic and it reeks of contempt for the working class. It’s also shockingly naive and paradoxically enthusiastic about the workings and effectiveness of propaganda and censorship. There’s certainly nothing prescient about it. It’s baffling to me that it’s still popular with leftleaning people to this day.

      The most generous thing I can say is that the book might have been intended purely as satire, and as such it would at least be coherent. But sadly I don’t think this is how people tend to read it.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena don’t mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.

      Then there’s a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. It’s pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. It’s only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise it’s just sparkling sectarianism.

      The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed

      Better organized than the POUM, I’ll give it that. “Won out” is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.

      And then there’s the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because it’s impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesn’t work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldn’t possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isn’t this dystopian society more feminist?

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        22 hours ago

        The thing is, the world in 1984 is feminist! as imagined by a bloke who hates feminism. Sex for pleasure is outlawed, makeup and dresses are banned, women look and act like men (and indeed are worse than men) instead of following their womanly nature. It’s a feminist dystopia!

        I mean, if god damned Asimov thinks your book is misogynistic, you know you’ve fucked up!

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        24 hours ago

        Orwell had Julia working in the novel factory - where machines spliced together romance trash pablum for light entertainment. So he accurately prophesied LLMs.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    They are organizing another Inkhaven in April, maybe because it brings in at least $80,000. I do not recommend committing to spend a month in the presence of our dear friends given their practice of allowing sexual, psychological, and substance abuse in their communities!

    https://www.inkhaven.blog/

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        18 hours ago

        I don’t know if there has been any on-the-ground journalism about our dear friends except possibly the Zizian murders and some of the investigations into misogyny and sexual abuse. What reporter without a bankroll from EA has money to spend a few months in the Bay Area making friends with introverted bloggers?

        One of the mentors at Inkhaven will be Jesse Singal who has said good things about pedophiles and KiwiFarms and is worried about so many young people identifying as trans. Does he have prior connections to eugenics or race pseudoscience? Pinkerite says he is Bluesky buddies with Razib Khan (one of the names RationalWiki can no longer mention).

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    Ryan Mac:

    Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.

    We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.

    For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.

    Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.

    Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir’s chairman and tells Epstein there is “no need to rush.” This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.

    Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel’s VC funds.

    One of @ering.bsky.social’s great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the “optics” of telling founders that Epstein was involved.

    So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.

    At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.

    […]

    While reporting this, I had something happen that’s never happened. A comms rep for one of the co’s disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI’s chatbot.

    I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

    https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

      These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI’s say so.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    But why are we talking about some AI agent platform in the Urbit newsletter? Naturally because we think, Urbit fixes this.

    As a matter of fact, Tlon is already working on this with their Openclaw Plugin for Tlon Messenger. It is currently in an early adopter phase, but they expect to provide an instance of Openclaw with every ship that they host for their users.

    but of course

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      desperately trying to latch themselves onto the coattails of whatever passes for cool among nerds these days

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    Not one, but two utterly out of touch LWs trying to interact with culture.

    Earlier today, woke Proust get slammed by some young 'un direct from college: https://awful.systems/post/7140871/10327823 (note that they can take time off to read Recherche, even going to the length of spending time in France, which tells me they don’t really have to worry about getting a job or anything)

    And now, someone tries to “explain” the perfectly spherical explosion at the end of the Akira movie with the fact that atom bombs in Japan really looked like that because humidity, utterly forgetting that the explosion in question was psychic/telekinetic and therefore probably follows its own damn rules on visual appearance

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pbChvM8xZnKmxaKAa/jackson-wagner-s-shortform?commentId=xjX85Kah6AQNsnHPg

    I swear to fucking god both LW and HN have the worst takes on culture in general and SF/F in particular.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    17 hours ago

    Axios publishes an ad for Anthropic. tptacek bravely defends a corporation from unimpressed fellow hackers

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902909

    Edit: tptacek implies that Ludic no longer stands behind Contra Ptacek’s Terrible Article On AI, which I don’t believe.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906403

    tptacek explains that the one armed bandit addiction loop is good actually:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905142

    Edit2: He took off to his Xafe space. Getting Mozilla Jake vibes. lol at tptacek calling it the orange site:

    https://xcancel.com/tqbf/status/2019493645888462993

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Here’s a fun exercise: go email the author of that blog (he’s very nice) and ask how much of it he still stands by.

      Has someone already done it or should I send the email? Ludic would be delighted I’m sure

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror | The Guardian

    On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you aren’t distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesn’t quite match up with the noises coming out of them.

    Too bad, I liked about half of his films, esp The Wrestler.

    • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      You know what they say. Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake, as this can allow them to continue their errors and lead to their own downfall

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    The suspicion that notbyai.fyi was in fact a pro-ai techbro highlighting scrapable data has prompted comment from the founder: https://mastodon.social/@notbyai/116004178899556722

    Hi, Allen here! I never thought I’d need to say this but, I am not an AI bro. I don’t work for an AI design agency. We’re not in the AI industry, nor do we sell your data.

    …which seems like a load of cobblers. Imbl brings the receipts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@imbl/116014455337112737

    I’ll assume the argument will devolve into weasel words over what “ai bro” and “ai design agency” will mean, and I suspect the conclusion will be that actually he’s working for and with ai bros, with an interest in selling ai bro-related services to further the goals of ai bros in general, but somehow that wont’t be precisely the same thing.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        21 hours ago

        Looks like they zapped it. Possibly unhappy that it was being spread.

        Anyway, the gist of it is:

        • Allen Hsu is a founder of notbyai and the website includes a photo of him
        • modomodo employs someone called “Allen Hsu” who has a photograph that looks remarkably like the notbyai guy
        • the modomodo about page says

          Artificial intelligence (AI) is cool and we embrace it. But when it comes to solving complex business problems, we don’t just press a few keys to generate answers with ChatGPT.

        The don’t just do that, so it’s ok guys!

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      This is the first time I have ever seen the term “AI design agency,” which raises some yellow flags