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
The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
Microsoft is firing 9,000 workers across the company — 4% of all employees. Before this, they laid off over 6,000 in May and another 300 in June. [CNBC] It’s not that Microsoft is doing badly. In Q…
SWE-Bench Verified by OpenAI tests how well a model can solve real bugs in real Python code from GitHub. These bugs are all public information — so the AI models have almost certainly trained on th…
An internal Microsoft memo has leaked. It was written by Julia Liuson, president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and GitHub. The memo tells managers to evaluate employees based on how much t…
“Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced” by Govindakumar Madhavan was published in April by Springer Nature. It’s $169 as an ebook, or $219 as a hardback. [Springer, archive] Retractio…
People experiencing "ChatGPT psychosis" are being involuntarily committed to mental hospitals and jailed following AI mental health crises.
This is our second week of running Google’s Veo 3 video generator through its paces. So when you’ve read this, go and watch the worked examples. And check out last week’s. [YouTube] Our good friend…
don't just read the text - watch the video, it's the point of the exercise. And I worked all weekend on it. Thank you.
Rolling the ladder up behind us - Xe Iaso on the LLM bubble
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
Today, let’s look at two Pitchbook reports — the US VC-Backed M&A Outlook for second quarter 2025 and the 2025 US Venture Capital Outlook: Midyear Update. [Pitchbook; Pitchbook, PDF, archive; P…
Meta has won against Kadrey et al — the authors’ case against Meta training their Llama LLM on the authors’ books, including on pirate copies. [Order, PDF; case docket] Both sides brought motions f…
The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care of sufficiently important people.
Another response to Ptacek.
Much beloved US phone company Verizon has updated its My Verizon app to include 24/7 customer service from AI! It’s got a chatbot based on Google Gemini. [Verizon] Verizon tells The Verge: [Verge] …
One of the many copyright cases in progress against chatbot vendor Anthropic is Bartz v. Anthropic, where several authors brought a class action suit in August 2024 for violating their copyrights w…
Nihilism on the part of Alphabet's CEO explains Google's willingness to risk its search business and the open web itself to chase OpenAI.
In May, legendary Apple designer Jony Ive hooked up with OpenAI to announce an unspecified gadget. [WSJ, archive] To promote this complete vaporware, OpenAI released a video of Sam Altman and Ive b…
Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025
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 awf...
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 insis
When our glorious AI bubble deflates, and we contemplate the wreckage of so many companies that did nothing but turn venture capital billions into carbon dioxide, there’s one company that wil…
AI solves every river crossing puzzle, we can go home now
I think this summarizes in one conversation what is so fucking irritating about this thing: I am supposed to believe that it wrote that code.
No siree, no RAG, no trickery with training a model to transform the code while maintaining identical expression graph, it just goes from word-salading all over the place on a natural language task, to outputting 100 lines of coherent code.
Although that does suggest a new dunk on computer touchers, of the AI enthusiast kind, you can point at that and say that coding clearly does not require any logical reasoning.
(Also, as usual with AI it is not always that good. sometimes it fucks up the code, too).
Over on YouTube, we run Google’s Veo 3 video generator through its paces. So when you’ve read this, go and watch the worked examples. [YouTube] Aron Peterson is a media production professional. He’…
this took me all day, but it's a banger if i do say so myself - watch the video first
podcast probably tomorrow