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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
https://softcurrency.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-economics-of-walk-away
- Anthropic (Medium Risk) Until mid-February of 2026, Anthropic appeared to be happy, talent-retaining. When an AI Safety Leader publicly resigns with a dramatic letter stating “the world is in peril,” the facade of stability cracks. Anthropic is a delayed fuse, just earlier on the vesting curve than OpenAI. The equity is massive ($300B+ valuation) but largely illiquid. As soon as a liquidity event occurs, the safety researchers will have the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.
WTF is “even safer” ??? how bout we like just don’t create the torment nexus.
Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass though…
new interview with Dario Amodei dropped https://youtu.be/n1E9IZfvGMA basically exponential curve real soon, nice skepticism from both the interviewer and the comment section
On a related note, I really gotta stop browsing r/singularity man, it’s just a acceleration echo-chamber that rots my brain
EDIT: this is also the same podcast where Dario said we could have AGI in 2-3 years back in 2023. So lol
Last megathread I posted about some LWer writing about “demographic collapse” in Japan (indistinguishable from anyone with any ambition leaving for greener pastures). I’ve read the comments to see if there’s any pushback, and found this absolute doozy
also this video by 80,000 Hours on timeline increases in 2025 https://youtu.be/YeRS4TbtZWA
What in tarnation is happening at adafruit?
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/14/heres-our-first-gemini-deep-think-llm-assisted-hardware-design/
@o7___o7 @techtakes It was Arduino who emitted the llm generated circuit but I was tired and conflated two companies with similar names (whose products I don’t use) before going to bed. Now they’re trying to throw a flame war. Pay no attention.
You can always blame an LLM for confusing the 2 companies ;)
Limor Fried and I had a class together at MIT in 2001. This has no bearing on the present circumstances and offers me no real insight (anything I could say about our extremely limited interactions would amount to confirmation bias). It’s just the odd little factoid that comes to mind whenever adafruit Does Something Online.
they’ve jumped the shark a while back. ptorrone is relatively widely documented to go around harassing people (often using his partner as a shield excuse for doing so, just like this time), and a couple months back they sold to qualcomm
This person “Charlie Stross”
ah yes, that absolutely must be a pseudonym, and absolutely couldn’t be a real person
such a fucking weird bit
anyway yeah fuck adafruit. don’t buy their shit, there are other options (and often cheaper)
e: I derped on the who-sold, conflated the two for dipshittery. see subthread
Men on Mastodon who never snark on male founders, or CEOs, or engineers, or guys sharing their work, have decided to target Limor since she shared it.
hey mr. adafruit watch this, I can weaponise oppression olympics too, I’m a trans woman from the third world: fuck off with profiteering from your selling out to the planet-destroying plagiarism machine that’s proudly empowering ICE and the IDF. it’s not your country that will pay the price for your meaningless carbon output to generate nonsense until it looks right. and you brag about it. pega teu fascism-assisted hardware design e enfia no cu. happy never to be an adafruit customer again. assholes.
Starting the week with this fairly extensive compendium of intractable issues with LLMs: GenAI has an Alignment Problem… But it’s not the machine’s hostility we need to worry about.
AI bros are seizing the means of computation: RAM, GPUs, SSDs and now HDDs…
I don’t think there’s an actual conspiracy, just lots of MBAs following their noses towards the $$$.
That said, time to buy a new lipo battery for that 10 year old laptop in the loft and stick Linux on it - before the lithium miners announce they’ve sold the next 12 months global supply of Lithium to Altman because he needs it to sleep at night…
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 isn’t it funny how the whole AI tech sector is wildly unprofitable because the costs are unsustainable and… they’re addressing the problem head on by collectively increasing them
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 I just hope that the manufacturers are insisting on cash now for future deliveries, rather than assuming that Altman will have the money in the future when the data center that doesn’t exist using power from the powerplant that doesn’t exist is ready to install the storage in the computers that don’t exist.
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 I wish we could finally agree that tech bros (and MBAs!) are greedy, full of shit and ruining the planet. And then remove both groups from any place of influence. If tech bros in particular were reduced to the role of village idiot, the world would be a much better place.
I wish we could finally agree that tech bros (and MBAs!) are greedy, full of shit and ruining the planet. And then remove both groups from any place of influence.
Prohibiting the teaching of MBAs and/or massively funding the humanities would be a good start. Hell, you could fund the humanities with the cash that currently goes toward MBAs and kill two birds with one stone.
@samvines @BlueMonday1984
If this is related to the AI datacenter construction boom then it is all being paid for by taking on more debt to build “future laserquest warehouses”.
What could go wrong ?
OT: I tried switching away from my instance to quokk.au because it becomes harder and harder to justify being on a pro-ai instance, but it seems that your posts stopped federating recently.
Which makes that a bit harder to do. Any clue why?Look at the fresh garbage LinkedIn served to me today: https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/managing-ai-is-the-next-gen-skill-7655601/
(Why am I still on that godforsaken hellsite)
Rishi Sunak, a man with his finger 100% on the pulse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sunak-asks-royal-mint-to-create-nft
(2022)
I was surprised that Sunak had any pull in the UK gov currently.
OpenClaw guy got hired by OpenAI
My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use.
Maybe he’ll get to stick it in whatever John Ives designs, eventually.
Congratulations to the maker of a tool that charges you $20 to remind you to buy milk the next morning.
Missioned accomplished for him. Unleash a wave of toxic, community-destroying bots, get hired by Big Sam.
“fuck you, got mine”
completely unsurprised, cant wait to see what shitshow this produces













