The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
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.)
recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately thrown into the hobby drama about all the havoc that generative “AI” is wreacking into the community. fake slop patterns that don’t work, fake photos of impossible amigurumi, that kinda stuff.
then I learned that, a few months ago, Hobbii, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love “AI” and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online.
in damage control during the entirely predictable backlash, the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this:
While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind.
My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or fucking macramé by hand, for fun. What technology do you figure we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??
My wife has been talking about the scourge of AI in fiber arts for like a year or more, and when I asked if she had any brands that were still trustworthy she said “good luck, mate”.
It’s so bad.
I follow a couple (like, 2~3) of fiber arts people and that was about the impression I got too, it’s blown up with that much spill
risk being left behind
Im also simply not sure how much of a risk that is, people keep saying that but I’m not sure being conservative on new tech has lead to much business closures the past 20 years.
It’s just such a clichéd remark from AI bros now that I cringe whenever I hear it along with “sure the current model can’t do X but the next one will be able to bro… Just one more model bro”
My NFT blockchain store selling segways in second life is now using LLMs! (Now also available on your Blackberry). Im ready to be raptured, I dont want to be left behind!
ijlth: quantum
I think there’s a typo: we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market TO risk being left behind [by our customers].
Holy shit, I also got into crocheting last week. I have, however, managed to entirely avoid any hobby drama so far, but of fucking course this one is also being thrown into the fucking AI meatgrinder, ugh money people are so smart, man
yay one of us! if you want to, feel free to follow @elilla@transmom.love if you want to see me hyperfocusing on crochet details! here are two threads that are particularly infodumpy as I learn the ropes: on turning chains, and on the magic circle and counting
Love your threads (haha). I didn’t have a mastodon account, so actually you’re my first follow :)
Yeah it’s really bad, I’ve been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it’s not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it’s pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I’ve been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.
At least being on ravelry and checking out other people’s project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.
Also, why apply new technology to core product lines and communication with customers, and not back office number crunching crap.
bow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:
a lot of opposition to AI is rent seeking, and the material incentives of being a rentier, even a small time one, lead you towards fascist conclusions from first principles
between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.
(not linking to the skeet on purpose).
other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious
Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but it’s inevitable because I really want it to, so don’t be on the wrong side of history when it happens).
He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.
just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that “slop” is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for speaking english
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for using slop jar to mean the vessel into which chamber pots are poured, in 1855
“Slop” as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using “slop” as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies — cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I can’t wait for the new episode of “Stranger Things”, because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. It’s just slop. Nothing nefarious.
I think this may have been a case of the “dirtbag left” types using slang that originated on 4chan, I did a search with date restrictions on the 4plebs archive site and found posts using it for mindless entertainment going back to 2012 at least
Here’s an example from an 1897 book review I found in the google books corpus: “There never was anything in all this world quite so provincial as American literature. When we over here are not reading slop we read the books that bear the approval of London.” Or this doggerel from the October 1920 issue of Farm Journal: “I read all kinds of printed junk / the good, the noble and the punk / the ancient and the new / and men who see me reading slop / predict that if I do not stop / my head will go askew.”
These both seem like wiktionary’s current sense 8 (“Content or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlessly”), so I don’t see any need to credit 4chan or 21st-century anti-Semites in general.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73708#comment-1642217
Sadly I think the popularization does owe a lot to the intermediate stage where 4chan started calling mass entertainment media “goyslop,” but even the Protocols types switched to tacking on specific descriptors before it made it out into the mainstream and got picked up as a term for genAI output.
Really hope the people outside of our little forum paid attention when warned Gyges was also an AI doomer.
they’re collectively spiraling.
Look he is right, if you redefine ‘rent’ to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.
In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).
He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.
Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad it’s all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.
I just wonder if he means ‘they are looking to pay their rent’ or ‘they are holding on the ‘capital of being able to do math’ and want to be paid for it’.
Oh my god he’s doing fandom gatekeeping discourse
yeah it like. infuriates me that “fully automated luxury communism” was named in a way to specifically pay homage to the past. the word “communism” itself is some sort of vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things
https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3my3letkpbc2b
Lol dorkus
It’s “fully automated luxury gay space communism”, and every adjective is a pithy critique of the past.
“Lol dorkus” is an idiomatic translation of Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur (more literally “What is freely asserted is freely denied”), and if you call that “Hitchens’s razor” I will fucking cut you.
what never having seen a left-wing person in real life does to a slopper
vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things
The “vicious traditionalism” that develops among his fellow travelers, who insist that some form of autonomous, inscrutable AI has to be the next step in technological progress, will be something to see. Religious movements don’t just stop when their central prophecy disappoints.
… the fuck?
Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition’s obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?
TFG: Everything I don’t like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me
I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My “Very Sane AI Newsletter” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.
I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I’m sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.
So far I’ve come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and “rent seeking”. If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it “better”, and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn’t stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.
And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.
another ai pusher recently generated a slop image, where she and the chairman xi are fighting the united forces of darkness, which include the ai companies, people opposing the LLM embrace and american conservatives. the thing they’re fighting over? “open technology”.
say hello to the TankAIs
…and all of them are working for one or another californian ai company or a slopware house.
q: is an image derivative of a slop image still a slop image if the process of creating the derivative did not involve Sloppy Babobots? Asking for a friend, who is me, also this question is not intended to be philosophical.
What do you have in mind specifically? Parody? It depends a little on intent but I would say not a problem at all, others might disagree.
Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.
More news about the character dot ai bankruptcy: as it turns out, the true economics of the company are disastrous. At their peak, their revenue was around $1M a month while their AI compute expenses alone were $14M a month! Their total expenses in 2025 were around $18.5M a month before counting legal fees. All of this is for a pure text-based low power LLM (none of the “reasoning” business).
Before AI boosters crow about how much cheaper AI is currently, they tried every trick in the book to enshittify: open models, ads, usage limits, etc. This allowed them to cut down their losses to a mere $9M a month.
Surely this is all one big exception, everyone else in the AI bubble is doing just fine!
I haven’t really kept up, but it looks like Character’s business model was still focused on NSFW content. If so, then this is also a disaster for the industry at large, since NSFW content is one of the few genuine money-printers for chatbot and image-generation services; people really do want thousands of iterations of the same fantasy, slightly changed in order to stay engaging, and Character was highly recommended as a source of affordable slop. (Examples of unaffordability include the rampant free-tier abuse on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok; I’m assuming that customers are willing to open their wallets at least a little. In general, the porn industry turns a profit, so I do think that people will pay for porn.)
My prior estimate (previously, on Awful and on Lobsters) was that token generation was subsidized to the tune of an effective 80-90% discount; this looks to be more in the 90-95% range. For contrast, consider chatbot-booster Willison’s belief, in reply above, that Chinese labs will magically produce a five-fold improvement in token production; this still would be between two to four times slower than needed to turn a profit for Character.
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How you look at “my company pays $14 for every $ from the user” and not like, idk, stop, seek help, change your job, name, and address, is completely beyond me.
I mean, the founders literally did that, Google hired them back at a 2.8 billion dollar premium for some reason.
You assume that the VCs will keep you alive a little longer as a honeypot to gather more plaintext blackmail material and private information and keep preparing to sell out to Facebook
@lagrangeinterpolator :thisisfine: :trashfire: @BlueMonday1984
Anthropic has a new angle for trying to get local LLMs banned, apparently they’re about to be able to use your temu android tv to take over your smart toaster:
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested
edit: The TVs need to be off-brand to lack basic security features, and also there must be at least four of them to even start being inference-capable, and the actual setting up of a distributed inference network on android tvs is handwaved as “feasible”.
The thrilling conclusion of this blog post is called Signs of Life, because of course it is.
MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin
Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn
Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.
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9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.
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Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.
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Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.
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Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.
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Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.
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Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.
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Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.
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I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.
What if an AI did the same thing that Mirai is already doing only we spent far more money on the attempt and we were almost certainly legally liable for the consequences?
edit: failed to spot the ninja edit so the response made no sense
Sorry I thought this updated comment was a better one 😅
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I can’t decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, they’ve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.
Sama is a serial scammer, this is just the biggest scam he’s managed to foster. He’ll say whatever it takes to get the payout.
Dario is a true believer but I also think the prospect of $billions skews his judgement
The presence of billions of dollars under anyone’s control destroys anyone’s brains as their lives have all negative feedback removed, their surroundings become a reflection of their own preferences alone rather than bearing any information about the world, and their social connections become transactional and sycophantic.
mirai also was spotted ten years ago, and if iot push happened earlier so would it
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It’s funny how they’re twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.
What fullsquare said, they’ve got years of sci-fi filtered through lesswrong short stories and sequence posts saying it could happen, so they repeated that despite all the ways it is completely impossible given the limitations and hardware requirements of LLMs.
but it has to work, it was foretold in ai in a box prophecy
rats’ best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton
And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria” or whatever it is. I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.
I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.
i mean that’s why we all are here, the problem is that they have thiel’s money and white house advisors
And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria”
drexler is a hack and yud’s nanobots can’t grow, can’t divide (they’re made from stiff material), can’t self-repair (it’s one piece), and would turn out to be extremely expensive coal dust fire, and that’s before you look too closely, so i wouldn’t say that because iot devices at least aren’t forbidden by known laws of physics
I wonder what answers you would get if you polled these Anthropic people about the Covid lab leak theory
Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way
I too have seen the documentary “Maximum Overdrive”
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Feel like this blog must have made the rounds but today is the first time I’m actually reading it and it’s sharp enough to cut with:
Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.
My mother, who paid for Haverford, says she didn’t raise a drug dealer. That’s accurate. She raised a quant, and the quant made a lateral move.
🤌🤌🤌 Chef’s fucking kiss
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 “… sharp enough to cut with” is brilliant, I want to steal it!
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The comments have some real gems too.
Fair. I’ve reweighted in DALYs. The net goes up, because my customers’ remaining DALYs are low. Thanks for the push.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 Firefox throws me TLS errors over that link.
Weird, it’s a regular Google trust services issued cert here; my Firefox doesn’t complain about it.
Same here, Chrome works, but I am also behind some weird corporate network.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 The comments are amazing
Previously, on Awful, Gutsick Gibbon spent an hour ripping apart T. Beale’s (VD’s) anti-evolution book. She was still angry though, so she got her prior collaborator and four friends to join her for a complete dissection of VD’s bullshit claims. Content warning for literally everything awful we discuss here, including sex crimes, neo-Nazis, Silicon Valley bullshit, and remarkably bad arithmetic. My choice sneer is her chosen video title, “Six Scientists Roast One Racist Loser (Heartwarming) (Four Hours) (Hopecore)”. GG’s requested that we not give VD any attention other than reminding him that he’s such a pathetic loser that even white nationalists disavow him as too boring and insipid, so I’m not posting this to a top-level topic, but I’m getting a lot of household chores done while listening to it in the background and maybe you will too.
.As if insufficient volume of text output was ever a problem among lesswrongers
Im just surprised they have even more ideas they have not written up, surely we are missing out on some quality content.
Butlerian Jihad now.
Aella was homeschooled by fundies. I don’t think anyone ever sat her down and explained that first and foremost you write to figure out what you think about something. She must know the OnlyFans model of a celebrity and dozens of underlings in a call center answering ‘her’ texts in ‘her’ voice and selling her smut.
Pray tell, how is the chatbot going to know what you want to say if you won’t write it out? This feels a little too obvious.
Cognitive surrender illustrated.
I’m some random shitposter from TERF Island and I can definitely write better than Aella
I thought GPT 2 had already hit the point of “Writing better than Aella”
Nah I think it was earlier than that… Markov chain models!
In fact you could probably do better by building script that pseudo-randomly picks words from categories containing “intelligent sounding” words and “lewd” words and “edgelord” words
as soon as AI is good enough to discharge feces out of my butt as good as I would if I had enough fiber in my diet, I intend to use AI to do so. I know how I want to poop, and I could poop so much more if I didn’t need to manual labor little clumps out one by one
obligatory apology for the foregoing
sorry not sorry
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell some assets for $20 million
At one point “valued” at 2.5B, so that sale is 99%+ discount, even charitably assuming 100M sale of it all it’s still 96% discount
Also notable for being the first to get a kid killed by AI suicide encouragement. Burn it to the ground and make teeth fillings from the slag.
Bankruptcy means they’re not going to be paying out damages for all the AI Psychosis they caused.
They looking to get off the hook before all the class action lawsuits pile up?
or maybe they genuinely ran out of vc money
Wonder who gets all the plaintext logs from all their victims
not done yet
Under this process, Disney’s bid would set a baseline offer while allowing competing bidders to submit higher bids, and the company expects the sale process to conclude by late November or early December 2026.
perhaps them, and maybe these are linked to identities of users
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame they’re probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.
thank god. horrid, parasocial site
it’s not shutting down so far, and if anyone buys that part it will remain up
please let nobody buy it and have it shut down. it’s arguably the patient zero of ai psychosis
This is sad news, as companies are not alive, this means there is no new public toilet.
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Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says researchers have started smoking, believing AI will cure cancer via r/nottheonion
The Palantir CTO said that researchers were now so confident in AI that they had started smoking. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Shyam Sankar told CBS. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will—I’m showing you my chips are all in.” Perhaps, the researchers think that there is no better way of showing faith in AI than to indulge in something that could cause them cancer – hopefully AI finds that cure before things get serious.
ok way to snitch on them to health insurance bot. presumably all their CEO customers are prompting “hike premiums on dumbasses. make no mistakes no luigi”. happy open enrollment season. /s
This is proper cult membership credibility testing stuff. “If you really believe, you’ll drink the koolaid”
Costly signaling by which one credibly gives something up to follow the precepts of the cult and demonstrate that one believes in the face of personal disadvantage is one of the strongest things that predicts cohesion of a religious movement.
Previously posted here: https://awful.systems/post/10025000
I recognise that the sloperator is pretty damn insecure about their AI usage. [YES][NO]
I’ve actually met this person in a different context some years ago, and yes, his ego has always been extremely fragile.
Right on buddy, I too want to live in a future where my diamonds are judged by their brilliance and my passion as a magnate, not by the child labor I employ to produce them.
Kind of fascinated by how this guy has gone into reddit threads about this to complain about being bullied, including complaining that people are sharing this screenshot with his full name and face unredacted. Buddy, I don’t know what to tell you about who’s responsible for that one.
Plot twist: he just told the chatbot to put in a screen about slop usage, didn’t look at the result, and it dug up a photo portrait from his photos without him noticing
what in the fuck
and I presume the answers default to
yes
Lets spend 500 Billion tokens on reverse engineering an unspecified first person shooter. You ask how our agents communicate with each other? Obviously via a fucking Discord channel because that makes sense.
“Yes I did it. No you can’t see the work”
I think it was modern warfare 2 but they redacted all explicit references because activision or whoever was starting to make annoyed legal noises.
The insistence on using number of functions copied as a metric is weird, like of course a port isn’t going to be a function-to-function translation, programming languages are never a 1-1 match with each other that’s kind of the point of having more than one.
What we needed was an automated check that tells agents whether a reconstructed function matches the original. It should verify identical semantics. A simple PASS or FAIL signal would be enough and the agent can figure out on its own what’s wrong.
Uh, sure.
Also a lot of their recommendations come of as no-duh, like pressing the compact conversation button early to reduce tokens or using a common specification document across LLM instances to keep them more coordinated, how novel, are you kidding me.
Another one of their recommendations is that fixing stuff causes garbage to accumulate, so if something isn’t working out you are better off starting from scratch, because tokens are cheap now! You just need to be doing the equivalent of maxing out dad’s credit cards by using multiple private subscriptions in tandem, and I guess also make sure to time your dev cycle to coincide with the two major LLM vendors having a money burning competition on their way to an IPO.
Finally there’s a whole hypecycle going on currently that this feeds into, that makes headline readers think that LLMs can convert binaries right back into code now, when they are actually using an MCP to control existing decompilation software which is so far from the same thing.
Slop foundries solved the “slop is uncopyrightable” problem by making the output so awful that nobody would want to pinch it
How much slop is in Linux now? You’re no longer allowed to know, so its probably all slop
(why did I jump ship to Linux at this exact moment)
For copyright purposes, all patches must be substantially human-written. However, it seems that most patches are now prepared with chatbot assistance, so that effectively means that people are required to be psychotic centaurs in order to keep up with review demand. There’s an LWN secret link from the documentation lieutenant which summarizes the linked LKML thread. My former lieutenant, in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem, is apparently having a bad time:
Airlie asked his sub-maintainers; most of them identified him as the biggest pain point. More seriously, it was that the DRM subsystem is still seeing too many regressions. There is a push within the subsystem to move development to GitLab in order to use its CI features; he is not standing in the way because he wants to see how it turns out.
This is a more systemic problem than one might expect, because DRM (and DRI, Direct Rendering Infrastructure) are partially shared between Linux and the BSDs. This subsystem has creaked along under the weight of corporate expectations for decades, mostly fueled by a kind of quiet sponsorship of young university folks from GPU vendors along with outsourced drivers produced behind corporate privacy and thrown over the wall. Every vendor, even our eternal nemesis nVidia, has made repeated concessions in order to try to figure out the maintainer burden, but it seems that we are still dependent on Airlie’s stoutness and willingness to get shouted at by Torvalds.
The saga of DRM/DRI and “open” GPU drivers is one of those topics for which I wish I could hire a historian to write an extensive treatment. The primary sources of how we ended up here, mailing list discussions and the like, are probably mostly publicly available, but unless you were there, who has taken the time to understand how it all happened?
furthering my previous guessing that there’s likely only appetite for 2, maybe 3, of these ridiculous IPOs, a number of analyst notes have started kicking around and they’re getting progressively more realistic in their outlook. saw this one this morning
Red Flag #3: The IPO is Exit Liquidity, Not Growth Capital
To justify a $2 trillion valuation, our model shows that Anthropic would have to: • immediately improve NOPAT margin to 10% and sustain it for the next 10 years (compared to -175% reported operating margin in 2025), • grow revenue by 1000% in 2026 and 100% in 2027, and • grow revenue 56% compounded annually from 2028-2035.sounds ambitious. sure hope they don’t have any material risks and systematic exposures that make that harder!
In this scenario, Anthropic’s 1. revenue would reach $3.6 trillion (compared to $4.6 billion in 2025), which is 1.4x the combined TTM revenue of Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), NVIDIA (NVDA), Meta (META), and Oracle (ORCL). 2. NOPAT would reach $358 billion in 2035, compared to the company’s -$8 billion reported operating loss in 2025. For reference, $358 billion is 2.0x NVIDIA’s $184 billion and 2.6x Apple’s $136 billion in TTM NOPAT.good thing the cost of inference is going down! sure, qwen3.8-27b is already stale and everyone needs to throw another couple hundred million at another training update, but the cost of inference! /s
“so you’re saying there’s a chance Anthropic will be profitable?”
At this point I’m gonna dig a big hole in my yard and stick a sign next to it that says “AI datacenter” with a down arrow. I figure I can get a way better prospectus than anyone currently on the market.
