this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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TechTakes

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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 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. A lot of people didn't survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account's cake day, too, so that's cool.)

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Very impressed with this comment from the creator of the Zig programming language, regarding dealing with AI slop submissions, and generally about LLMs for coding.

I should look into Zig again! Technically, I've always leaned more towards Rust, because I like its more uncompromising approach to safety, while Zig always seemed to me a bit more middle-of-the-road on that. But I've been disappointed about how wide-spread LLM usage has become in Rust circles, I fear that its culture might tip over in favor of slop. (But it's not there yet and I hope it won't happen!)

Anyway, I'm ordering the "Introduction to Zig" book...

I was taught to take off every Zig, not install them! Clearly it was a more innocent time.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Wow, I also now found the migrating to codeberg post. I should revisit Zig.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Re datacenters in space:

Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862222

Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170

Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435):

it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power

We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.

edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

Truly a conundrum worthy of the XXI century

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

OT: paying the cat tax…again. Please ignore the ash on Hector’s head, its an ongoing mystery where thats been coming from.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (5 children)

once again, the facade of the "whoops, bad company" falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask

transcripta quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: "So what's the deal with this ghastly woman again? She's a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?"

the quoted tweet by aella reads: "There's apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?"

also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it's a sock

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

robin hanson blocked me for referring to him as aella with tenure. now i think that he's ghislaine maxwell with tenure

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Tangentially on topic:

Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! I'll likely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and I'm hopeful that it'll win all the awards.

Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:

  1. In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol

  2. Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.

  3. Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 17 points 1 week ago

@o7___o7 @techtakes That's why I'm fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.

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[–] rook@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift

  • recall might be rethought, again
  • copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) “under review”
  • no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows

Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if you’re smart what happens after the launch is someone else’s problem. I wouldn’t be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately “scaled back”.

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[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The common clay of the new west:

transcriptionTwitter post from @BenjaminDEKR

“OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren't careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The "Heartbeat" cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, ("remind me tomorrow to get milk")”

Continuation of twitter post

“1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied "HEARTBEAT_OK" 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:

  • Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
  • 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
  • Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." The problem is:
  1. Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
  2. Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
  3. Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking That's $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.”
[–] rook@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.

https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226

There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150

Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:

  • Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must've done a bit more than that to get banned)
  • Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
  • Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.

Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it's obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That's not sustainable.

I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they're eating is good?

As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ryan Mac:

Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.

We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.

For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.

Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.

Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir's chairman and tells Epstein there is "no need to rush." This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.

Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel's VC funds.

One of @ering.bsky.social's great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the "optics" of telling founders that Epstein was involved.

So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.

At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.

[...]

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But why are we talking about some AI agent platform in the Urbit newsletter? Naturally because we think, Urbit fixes this.

As a matter of fact, Tlon is already working on this with their Openclaw Plugin for Tlon Messenger. It is currently in an early adopter phase, but they expect to provide an instance of Openclaw with every ship that they host for their users.

but of course

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[–] macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Enjoyed this piece from Mission Local on San Francisco's "March for Billionaires" yesterday.

Choice excerpts:

Despite the San Francisco locale, a participant said the event had “grassroots” origins at a “little rationalist restaurant get together” in a “group house” on Shattuck Avenue, subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies.

Mission Local contributor Benjamin Wachs coined a term for an event in which media observers outnumber participants: a panopticonference. This was close to that. Those in attendance did their best to field questions from the barrage of journalists that backed them into a tree.

This is where Annie, a young transgender woman who attended the protest in a T-shirt that said “I’m in a polycule with Aella,” first met Kauffman. An impromptu debate ensued, with Annie “aggressively defending billionaires.” It was, participants concluded, worthy of a larger forum.

“People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,” she said. “We are beautiful. We’re smart. We’re strong… We are supporting the billionaires, here.”

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 16 points 6 days ago

A polycule with Aella, otherwise known as a nightmare fuck rotation

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

“People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,”

Remember when Rationalists pretended to care about truth, steelmanning, ideological turning tests etc.

(Also implying that billionaires are strong and attractive is funny)

subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies

Yall still are radical hippies. Some hippies just love the boot.

California is, I believe, the only state to give health insurance to people who come into the country illegally,” Kauffman said nervously. “I think we probably should not be providing that.

Rationalism, the empathy removal training center.

“It is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,” Annie said. “Just like Germany does to the extremist organizations.”

Well, Germany certainly did excel at removing classes of people from society

lol.

Her political awakening, she added, was watching the press “constantly pump out obviously fake information” against Trump during the 2016 election instead of reporting on the “actual abhorrent views he holds.”

Converted by Scott. (That 'people are saying I was wrong but actually I was right' disclaimer aged worse than the post).

[–] lurker@awful.systems 4 points 6 days ago

gag. going full mask off now

[–] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Did any actual billionaires show up to press their case, or was it all just cronies?

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago

from bsky photos looks like entire gathering was 30 people. t h i r t y p e o p l e i might have counted some reporter or someone passing by randomly by accident

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Scum.

edit: reasonably certain annie is annieposting from tpot.

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] fiat_lux@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

I assumed billionaires could afford better signs. Were all her EAs on leave that week?

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I see that Silicon Valley has transcended AGI technology* and can now execute NP-complete** problems.

* A Guy in India
** Nationals from the Philippines, Completely

WAYMO exec admits under oath cars in the US have "human operators" based in Philippines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClPDbwql34o

Today in excellent cold opens: "I didn't talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so I'm so healthy."

[–] fiat_lux@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)
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