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."
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein
But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so
How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?
Similarly, what's going on with Charles Murray (Bell Curve) ???
He converted to christianity? https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Religion-Seriously-Charles-Murray/dp/1641774851
But now supports euthanisia? https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-i-changed-my-mind-on-assisted-suicide/
Over in the epstein files, Jim Watson tried to make an intro but Murray never replied? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00475960.pdf
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Either the stupidity just metastasized or China is going to try and pull a reverse star wars on the US and make them burn up an even more horrendous amount of capital to keep up with nothing.
China plans space‑based AI data centres, challenging Musk's SpaceX ambitions (reuters)
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Found another website doing a good job keeping eye on the slop machines and their promoters: The AI Dirty List.
It also lists those who have fought against the bullshit fountains as well.
Ammon Bundy has his own little hillbilly elegy in The Atlantic this week. See, while he's all about armed insurrection against the government, he's not in favor of ICE. He wants the Good Old Leppards to be running things, not these Goose-Stepping Nazi-Leopards. He just wanted to run his cattle on federal lands and was willing to be violent about it, y'know? Choice sneer, my notes added:
Bundy had always thought that he and his supporters stood for a coherent set of Christian-libertarian principles that had united them against federal power. "We agreed that there’s certain rights that a person has that they’re born with. Everybody has them equally, not just in the United States," he said. "But on this topic [i.e. whether to commit illegal street violence against minorities] they are willing to completely abandon that principle."
All cattle, no cap. I cannot give this man a large-enough Fell For It Again Award. The Atlantic closes:
And so Ammon Bundy is politically adrift. He certainly sees no home for himself on the "communist-anarchist" left. Nor does he identify anymore with the "nationalist" right and its authoritarian tendencies.
Oh, the left doesn't have a home for Bundy or other Christofascists. Apology not accepted and all that.
Oh, the left doesn’t have a home for Bundy or other Christofascists
I'm willing to accept him if he converts to Communist Anarchism in his heart of hearts and writes a long treatsie on what he thinks that even is.
i think it's when you and a bunch of other vegans live in a group home together and argue over who does the dishes
that one in which the person behind/running @FirefoxWebDevs drops the mask so fast it looks like a magic trick: gallery link
thread by @self, toots by myself and others. the poster managed to keep their civility for quite a while until I dared(tm) to highlight their lack of a reply outside of UK 5pm, at which point they immediately ramped up
(and based on some screenshots I’ve been sent, he’s also been doing the classic tail-darvo moping elsewhere)
for those who hadn’t seen before, FWD is an account that showed up on the fedi not too long ago (3~4mo?), and has been acting as a Mouthpiece (and semi consent manufacturing outlet)
across a number of “polls” (with forced answer paths) they’ve had their replies absolutely blasted, and across literally hundreds of replies they’ve dodged the point so hard they might have invented a new sports class
earlier today I attempted to (quite lightly) check with them if they understand why their responses aren’t all-liked. it didn’t take much of long for them to go off the rails
I’ll have you know we’re acting like someone who’s rude to “serving staff” right now, where serving staff is defined as a formerly chrome currently mozilla developer relations marketing guy with fucking flatlined vibes
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OT: vehicle shopping is such a clusterfuck these days jfc. Do not recommend. Also car salesmen are on par with rationalists, I swear to god.
The "we'll save some bucks by removing physical knobs and pose this as futuristic by making some vital functions only accessible via multiple levels of menus on a touchscreen" thing is the worst and should be banned.
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Not one, but two utterly out of touch LWs trying to interact with culture.
Earlier today, woke Proust get slammed by some young 'un direct from college: https://awful.systems/post/7140871/10327823 (note that they can take time off to read Recherche, even going to the length of spending time in France, which tells me they don't really have to worry about getting a job or anything)
And now, someone tries to "explain" the perfectly spherical explosion at the end of the Akira movie with the fact that atom bombs in Japan really looked like that because humidity, utterly forgetting that the explosion in question was psychic/telekinetic and therefore probably follows its own damn rules on visual appearance
I swear to fucking god both LW and HN have the worst takes on culture in general and SF/F in particular.
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It seems that Anthropic has vibe coded a C compiler. This one is really good! The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.
The first issue filed is called "Hello world does not compile" so you can tell it's off to a good start. Then the rest of the six pages of issues appear to be mostly spam filed by some AI guy's rogue chatbot.
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I wonder what actual experts in compilers think of this. There were some similar claims about vibe coding a browser from scratch that turned out to be a little overheated: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/27/cursor-lies-about-vibe-coding-a-web-browser-with-ai/
I do not believe that this demonstrates anything other than they kept making the AI brute force random shit until it happened to pass all the test cases. The only innovation was that they spent even more money than before. Also, it certainly doesn't help that GCC is open source, and they have almost certainly trained the model on the GCC source code (which the model can regurgitate poorly into Rust). Hell, even their blog post talks about how half their shit doesn't work and just calls GCC instead!
It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own).
It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo video was produced with a GCC assembler and linker.
I wonder why this blog post was brazen enough to talk about these problems. Perhaps by throwing in a little humility, they can make the hype pill that much easier to swallow.
Sidenote: Rust seems to be the language of choice for a lot of these vibe coded "projects", perhaps because they don't want people immediately accusing them of plagiarism. But Rust syntax still reasonably follows languages like C. In most cases, blindly translating C code into Rust kinda works. Now, Rust does have the borrow checker which requires a lot of thinking to deal with, but I think this is not actually a disadvantage for the AI. Borrow checking is enforced by the compiler, so if you screw up in that department, your code won't even compile. This is great for an AI that is just brute forcing random shit until it "works".
I only sampled some of the docs and interesting-sounding modules. I did not carefully read anything.
First, the user-facing structure. The compiler is far too configurable; it has lots of options that surely haven't been tested in combination. The idea of a pipeline is enticing but it's not actually user-programmable. File headers are guessed using a combination of magic numbers and file extensions. The dog is wagged in the design decisions, which might be fair; anybody writing a new C compiler has to contend with old C code.
Next, I cannot state enough how generated the internals are. Every hunk of code tastes bland; even when it does things correctly and in a way which resembles a healthy style, the intent seems to be lacking. At best, I might say that the intent is cargo-culted from existing code without a deeper theory; more on that in a moment. Consider these two hunks. The first is generated code from my fork of META II:
while i < len(self.s) and self.clsWhitespace(ord(self.s[i])): i += 1
And the second is generated code from their C compiler:
while self.pos < self.input.len() && self.input[self.pos].is_ascii_whitespace() {
self.pos += 1;
}
In general, the lexer looks generated, but in all seriousness, lexers might be too simple to fuck up relative to our collective understanding of what they do. There's also a lot of code which is block-copied from one place to another within a single file, in lists of options or lists of identifiers or lists of operators, and Transformers are known to be good at that sort of copying.
The backend's layering is really bad. There's too much optimization during lowering and assembly. Additionally, there's not enough optimization in the high-level IR. The result is enormous amounts of spaghetti. There's a standard algorithm for new backends, NOLTIS, which is based on building mosaics from a collection of low-level tiles; there's no indication that the assembler uses it.
The biggest issue is that the codebase is big. The second-biggest issue is that it doesn't have a Naur-style theory underlying it. A Naur theory is how humans conceptualize the codebase. We care about not only what it does but why it does. The docs are reasonably-accurate descriptions of what's in each Rust module, as if they were documents to summarize, but struggle to show why certain algorithms were chosen.
Choice sneer, credit to the late Jessica Walter for the intended reading: It's one topological sort, implemented here. What could it cost? Ten lines?
I do not believe that this demonstrates anything other than they kept making the AI brute force random shit until it happened to pass all the test cases.
That's the secret: any generative tool which adapts to feedback can do that. Previously, on Lobsters, I linked to a 2006/2007 paper which I've used for generating code; it directly uses a random number generator to make programs and also disassembles programs into gene-like snippets which can be recombined with a genetic algorithm. The LLM is a distraction and people only prefer it for the ELIZA Effect; they want that explanation and Naur-style theorizing.
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new odium symposium episode. this one is a lot lighter than the previous two. we went back and looked at joseph swetnam, the guy the word misogyny was coined to describe, and how he got relentlessly dunked on by his peers.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/9-first-149546072, or on any platform
Freshly minted LWer does LLM-assisted analysis of LLM Facebook and concludes that the bots are conspiring to take over
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Et7dgiBjSj2zJnGuM/unicode-ekfv
No thought to the fact that (at least AFAIK) there's no verification that the posting entity is actually an LLM, and not a cheeky human stirring things up
Emails Show Even Epstein Thought Crypto Pumps are Unethical | Gizmodo
Crossover month for the epstein extended universe continues...