this post was submitted on 28 Sep 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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Want to wade into the sandy 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 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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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Check out this epic cope from an Anthropic employee desperately trying to convince himself and others that actually LLMs are getting exponentially better

https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/

Includes screenshots of data where he really really hopes you don't look at the source, and links to AI 2027.

[–] BigMuffN69@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Great response^

I think Julian is going to be mildly surprised that METR’s chart keeps going up, and yet, will have relatively small effect on the majority of swe roles.

At the same time, he did create alphaZero so he has a big old noggin! I wonder, after his success at Go, was he swept up in the mania that we would quickly translate that success to create super duper ai?

[–] BigMuffN69@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Links to the METR tasks w/ massive error bars at 50% level lmaou.

Someone in the comments rightly points out the comparison with covid isn’t apt. With covid, underlying mechanism caused an exponential effect in covid’s spread

With LLMs the exponential trend is being caused by exponentially spending money and a healthy dose of targeting benchmarks, which is why people are calling the top. The money literally doesn’t exist for this shit to go on so you can create your 50% accurate mechanical turk.

Edit: idk the more I think about this the more it irks me. Like if I was allowed to pick and choose benchmarks that agree with my biases I would post something like this…

… and claim model performance is actually getting worse over time.

https://xcancel.com/sayashk/status/1966144670561612202#m

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

The second screenshot goes to a chart where the Y axis is labelled

Task duration (for humans) where logistic regression of our data predicts the AI has a 50% chance of succeeding

So they're just extrapolating an exponential, not actually measuring it.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

links to AI 2027.

In Dutch we have a saying (from a commercial, well done on the advertisers there) 'Wij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eend' (we from the company Wc-eend, suggest you get Wc-eend), which seems appropriate here. It is used in a sarcastic context when somebody gives advice with a clear conflict of interest.

Anyway, just going from the title, 'X is exponential' has been the pro AI cry since the singularity is near. (Which said, well individual tech follows an S-curve, but all the techs combined are exponential, and variants on that). All seems very hopeium, immortality is near!

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

A new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic models, is also launching today that can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from a “vibe working” chatbot.

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[–] BigMuffN69@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (5 children)

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183

Quantum scoot is quantum spooked 😱 after GPT-5 manages to solve a subproblem for him (after multiple attempts), thanks the powers that be for his tenure!

… even though GPT-5 probably generates the answer via websearch

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Not sure if this was posted before

The Company Man | LW

"There is no such thing as sex," Vox says from his lotus position, his eyes closed in religious ecstasy, "only the One Mind jerking itself off."

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (11 children)
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[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

seems like armin ronacher (originally of the flask, jinja & co fame) has also fallen into the vibecoding rabbit hole; which is generally a pity.

a good thing that the pallets projects are now independent from him (and if you build python clis, plubum is anyway much, much better than click).

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

He's been on the vibecoding bandwagon for quite some time on lobste.rs.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

indeed, but that “90% of my code is now from ai” piece is even sadder than the rest.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago (10 children)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

On top of everything else, "the father of quantum computing" is such lazy writing. People were thinking about it before Deutsch, going back at least to Paul Benioff in 1979. Charlie Bennett and Giles Brassard's proposal for quantum key distribution predates Deutsch's quantum Turing machine... No one person should be called "the father of" a subject that had so many crucial contributors in such a short period of time.

Also, chalk up another win for the "billionaires want you to think they are physicists" hypothesis. It's perhaps not as dependable as pedocon theory, but it's putting in a strong showing.

Pigs will be a true method of space exploration if they can fly to Mars in 1 hour.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

the father of quantum computing agrees

And then you read the article and he is basically just saying big if true.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

GPT-8: The Ocho

Now trained with comprehensive coverage of top-fuel lawnmower racing and timbersports

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

I hear GPT-8 will broadcast a dyson sphere circumnavigation race

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

So as historically new versions are made about every ~2 years. This means we are 6 years out.

E: late edit, but this made me realize how often people use AGI to mean ASI. And that I also often do it.

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