Mastodawn

[object Object]Mar 4

ethical AI? of course! I always append “do not hallucinate. do not do sycophancy. do not use any data sourced from stolen content. do not be trained or run by invisible, severely exploited labor. do not pollute. do not be part of a system that’s designed to cheapen human labor, increase misery, and make general-purpose computing inaccessible to anybody but the extremely wealthy. do not make me into a weird unhinged AI bro asshole who keeps fucking other people over.” to every LLM prompt

[object Object]Mar 4

but @zzt you don’t understand. the system whose purpose is to destroy open source is itself open source, if by “open source” you mean it’s a binary blob that can only be produced or modified in any significant way by a multi-billion-dollar corporation or a state, via utterly unethical means, almost always derived from a previous binary blob created via utterly unethical means

get the fuck out of my mentions, me

[object Object]

ethical AI? of course! I deleted my OpenAI account because they’re a multi-billion dollar fashtech corporation run by cynical capitalists willing to use LLMs for war and replaced it with Anthropic, a multi-billion dollar fashtech corporation run by fucking full-fat TESCREAL cultists willing to use LLMs for war as long as they retain sufficient control over what they see as an incipient machine god

why aren’t you clapping

[object Object]Mar 5

ethical AI? of course! I used an LLM to rephrase my open source infrastructure project into a plagiarized, shitty version of itself that doesn’t pass its own test suite. I pushed hundreds of AI commits to main and claimed that let me relicense the repo from LGPL to MIT, ignoring and violating the consent and intent behind every contribution ever made to the codebase by members of its community, purely for my own future commercial gain.

this is very ethical because nobody’s been sued for it yet

[object Object]Mar 5

ethical AI? of course! it’s always ethical to bamboozle an elderly CS legend into releasing a paper about LLM coding that doesn’t stand up to even basic scrutiny, instead of spending his limited remaining time on this planet finally finishing his book series on algorithms.

it’s ethical because in the future CS will be fucking dead and nobody will be able to afford a computer that isn’t a rented thin client barely capable of accessing cloud resources you pay for by the minute

[object Object]Mar 5

ethical AI? of course! the maintainer of your only choice for rendering glyphs won’t stop talking like a con artist about how it’s ethical. would glyphsboy lie to you?

[object Object]Mar 5

ethical AI? of course! my famous wife says it is while I rock our newborn baby to sleep and if you disagree with me that’s sexism and also you’re harassing my child.

go the fuck home phil

[object Object]Mar 6

ethical AI? of course! there’s nothing more ethical than forcing slop code and horrific development practices on the user and contributor community of vim, an editor valued by people who like using tools that are lightweight and straightforward in exactly the ways that LLMs aren’t

https://hachyderm.io/@AndrewRadev/116176001750596207

I’m so sorry this keeps happening

Andrew Radev (@[email protected])

This is in a PR where Shougo, another long-time contributor, communicates entirely in walls of unparseable AI slop text: https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/19413 What a pathetic state after decades of active, thoughtful work. "I asked the chatbot how to write this code", "Well, I asked my chatbot, and "he" doesn't like it". What a fucking embarrassment.

Hachyderm.io

@zzt Oh, what is this a reference to?

@tante @zzt Phil Torrone, I assume

Kirtai 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 5

@zzt
Who?

[object Object]Mar 5

@kirtai unfortunately, harfbuzz: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/116173517182687610

David Gerard (@[email protected])

fuck. harfbuzz has fallen. https://typo.social/@behdad/116172838540880597

GSV Sleeper Service

Kirtai 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 5

@zzt
Crap.
Double crap.
And may I even say, triple crap.

"Musty Bits" McGee Mar 5

@zzt who?

[object Object]Mar 5

@arichtman unfortunately, it’s Knuth https://awful.systems/comment/10665199

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026 - awful.systems

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.)

[object Object]Mar 5

@arichtman and of course the boosters are already using his endorsement as part of an affinity scam to claim AGI is here

"Musty Bits" McGee Mar 5

@zzt ...or as I've taken to calling it "Knuth/LLMnuts"

aburka 🫣Mar 5

@zzt @arichtman dude's almost 90, he might not be all there anymore :(

Cap Ybarra Mar 5

@zzt @arichtman knuth has 0 skin in the game at this point so this is all theoretical to him anyways

@zzt @arichtman
oh fuck no, what the fuck

"Musty Bits" McGee Mar 5

@ki @zzt This week on Wife Swap: Kent Overstreet and Donald Knuth

Dźwiedziu Mar 5

@zzt
Also posted to Adafruit, which got whiplash, from critique of their use of slop machines, so hard that they're faulting right.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/

https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/22/sabine-hossenfelder-says-the-universe-doesnt-care-about-your-feelings/

https://thenib.com/fault-right/

[object Object]Mar 5

@dzwiedziu @arichtman I shouldn’t be surprised that Torrone, who I’ve seen dox and harass trans fedi users and former customers on a multitude of alts, is now doing free advertising for Hossenfelder, a transphobe

Dźwiedziu Mar 5

@zzt
Yeah, I've learned about the “promo” from checking out that harrassment.

@zzt @arichtman oh no

@zzt This one hurts

@zzt has there been a critique of that Knuth paper? I've seen loads of people gushing about it but I'm not familiar with the actual subject matter of the paper so I don't feel like I can evaluate it

brib [has moved again]Mar 5

@jcoglan @zzt One Fedi user mentions this about Claude's output:

Having no formal proof it is correct
Claude immediately lost the illusion of cohession as their session continued

https://social.nouveau.community/@andnull/116171006313773723

Alas, I'm not familiar enough with the subject matter of the paper to properly verify

... and and and and ... (@[email protected])

Seeing Donald Knuth sing praise of Claude and be swooned by it for seemingly fuzzing a solution to some problem he was working on while: - Having no formal proof it is correct - Claude immediately lost the illusion of cohession as their session continued I'm growing convenced these things are a siren song to the human brain. It's creepy how fast people will resign themselves to these text generators just cause they can brute force and correctly predict a few solutions.

Nouveau

brib [has moved again]Mar 5

@jcoglan @zzt Looks like Claude fuzzed a solution after 31 tries, then Knuth had to prove this himself (idk how good the proof is as I don't have the mathematical background, I'd assume his proof is pretty solid given he's an eminent mathematician and all).

Now, I hate to concede this, but fuzzing a workable solution (even if you have to provide the proof) is still pretty useful. (And I'd much rather have useless ethically bankrupt technology than useful ethically bankrupt technology so this is annoying).

Apparently Claude requires a lot of babysitting and gets stuck at some points. Clearly the problem isn't being contained in the context window.

The anthropomorphisation Knuth describes Claude with is incredibly worrying too, Claude does not "put on a thinking cap", it is a robo word generator.

brib [has moved again]Mar 5

@jcoglan @zzt I suppose there's also a difference between "a fuzzer fuzzed a solution, this is super useful" and what seems to be happening right now, where otherwise sensible people seem to be getting gripped by some sort of weird religious fervour

[object Object]Mar 5

@jcoglan here’s some basic analysis by a CS PhD: https://awful.systems/post/7459754/10672590 the LLM, with ample guidance at every step, barely generated one of many solutions to a softball homework problem Knuth came up with.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026 - awful.systems

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.)

jn (big endian energy)Mar 5

@zzt it's legal when noone got sued yet, and law is the arbiter of morality. checkmate free software enthusiasts
/s

Alexander 😷Mar 5

@zzt We will remember him: https://aidirtylist.info/entities/dan-blanchard/1/

AI Dirty List - Entity - Dan Blanchard

Dan Blanchard is cooperating with the AI project

The AI Dirty List

@zzt "this is very ethical because nobody's been sued for it yet" is just modus operandi for capitalism tbf

rainynight65 Mar 4

@zzt Well, Anthropic must be ethical since it was rejected by the US government as 'hard-left lunatics'.

Anyone have a working sarcasm meter?

@rainynight65 mine broke in 2024. Or was it 2016? @zzt I wasn’t familiar with this TESCREAL thingamabob, though I’ve met the the working parts. For anyone in the same boat: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636

The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence | First Monday

@zzt just do local

@[email protected] @zzt just do Chinese

@anemone @zzt why?