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.)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    15 hours ago

    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.