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
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
Continuing on the theme of nerds misreading culture, here's Asimov with abundant sour grapes about Nineteen Eighty-Four
https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
Via HN, where no-one bothers commenting on the fact that the piece is hosted on a Marxist-Leninist, anti-revisionist website.
Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena don't mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.
Then there's a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. It's pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. It's only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise it's just sparkling sectarianism.
The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed
Better organized than the POUM, I'll give it that. "Won out" is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.
And then there's the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because it's impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesn't work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldn't possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isn't this dystopian society more feminist?
Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror | The Guardian
On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you aren’t distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesn’t quite match up with the noises coming out of them.
Too bad, I liked about half of his films, esp The Wrestler.
They are organizing another Inkhaven in April, maybe because it brings in at least $80,000. I do not recommend committing to spend a month in the presence of our dear friends given their practice of allowing sexual, psychological, and substance abuse in their communities!
The whole federation loves nolto.social, an open source, federated alternative to linkedin! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the noto.social is vibe-coded
I’m confused that anyone thinks that the world needs another linkedin…
Lots of people in IT have been fired and must find a new job.
Honest question, since I’m not on linkedin (and kinda looking for a new job): does it really help anyone find a job? It has been my impression from the outside that it’s mostly empty drivel.
Anecdata here, I've been unemployed 2 times in the last 3 years and both times I mostly used LinkedIn to look for leads. Had some ok comms with recruiters too .
Depends on where you are and what kind of jobs you're looking for but for computer janitoring like me it worked ok
following up the previous thread about Eliezer in the Epstein files, he’s responded on reddit
EDIT: this sneer has been deemed important enough for its own post so feel free to sneer there too
I might be crossing a line into conspiracy theory nut over here, but is it weird that both this and his response to the zizzian’s rape allegations have undertones of “i don’t know/im not completely sure”??
Axios publishes an ad for Anthropic. tptacek bravely defends a corporation from unimpressed fellow hackers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902909
Edit: tptacek implies that Ludic no longer stands behind Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI, which I don't believe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906403
tptacek explains that the one armed bandit addiction loop is good actually:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905142
Edit2: He took off to his Xafe space. Getting Mozilla Jake vibes. lol at tptacek calling it the orange site:
YCombinator will let founders accept payments in butts:
Hmm, we already tried the thing where a bunch of startups have their cash on deposit with a couple of normal, FDIC-insured banks that had grossly mismatched duration in their capital structures. I wonder how this will play out
"They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work"
Enjoy sneering at this LWer tackling Proust
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3ZtsYBYBcTTFXH5S/in-search-of-lost-time-a-review
Edit it has garnered one comment so far
Thank you for the service you have valiantly rendered to us all, by making our own reading of these books unnecessary.
You know what? I don't think Proust would have disagreed with having rats avoid his novel.
The comment, see my prediction that when a movement runs out of idea they inevitably start a dating site for the in crowd, and 'lets do book summaries so we can all read faster'. Esp vague self help style places do this all the time.
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is one of those books that people like to claim to have read but never did.
First I heard of this.
In other news, Larry Garfield of GarfieldTech has had enough of the bullshit fountains, and put out a fury-filled sneer in response.
Larry Garfield was ejected from Drupal nearly a decade ago without concrete accusations; at the time, I thought Dries was overreacting, likely because I was in technical disagreement with him, but now I'm more inclined to see Garfield as a misogynist who the community was correct to eject.
I did have a longpost on Lobsters responding to this rant, but here I just want to focus on one thing: Garfield has no solutions. His conclusion is that we should resent people who push or accept AI, and also that we might as well use coding agents:
As I learn how to work with AI coding agents, know that I will be thinking ill of [people who have already shrugged and said "it is what it is"] the entire time.
Don't want to use AI because it's built on copyright infringement and literally destroying the planet? Well, I guess you can't work in software anymore, sorry. It is what it is.
Every time someone like Jeffrey Way says "it is what it is," it makes it so. It is not inevitable just because Sam Altman tells his over-leveraged investors it is so. It becomes inevitable when you, you personally, decide that you just don't want to think about the externalities or put in the work to find better alternatives.
We are making this choice. But really, that means you have already decided for me. And I curse you and the ground you walk on for it. No, I'm not joking or exaggerating. Burn in hell.
10/10 No notes.
Between this shit and the oncoming tech-inflicted recession, my wife and I are both reskilling out of tech. I'm looking into electrician and she's looking into accounting. Two fields that are, at least in theory, sufficiently motivated by accuracy and reality to be at least somewhat protected from the rise and fall of the confabulatron.
We'll see how it goes, but God if that "Burn in hell" doesn't just hit me right in the soul.
Good luck. There's a lack of trained electricians here in Sweden, which amazes me, it sounds like a decent job for someone with a technical bent and some handiness. Better than plumbing (no disrespect to plumbers, love them, but not the work I want to do)
there's a couple of amusing hells inside that job, you either have to deal with construction crews and contractors, jump between power poles including in cold and rain, wrangle with paperwork for permits for new lines, or fix horrors left by someone before you, it can be also dirty and people-facing
"Amazon plunges 9%, continues Big Tech’s $1 trillion wipeout as AI bubble fears ignite sell-off"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-sell-off-stocks-amazon-oracle.html
Some suggestion here that notbyai.fyi is an ai industry op: https://social.treehouse.systems/@imbl/115978426251286619
Seems plausible. Notbyai seems pretty keen on ai, and is very relaxed about what counts as “not by ai”, and adds up to a scheme whereby you pay a pro-ai techbro a monthly subscription to advertise to ai firms that your website is ideal for scraping training data from.
but here's the fucking kicker. the "founder", allen hsu (notbyai.fyi/about), is the ux design lead at modo modo (modomodoagency.com/leadership), which is an ai design company (modomodoagency.com/about)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is cool and we embrace it. But when it comes to solving complex business problems, we don’t just press a few keys to generate answers with ChatGPT. We research, interview, brainstorm, and go through a human-centric process to come up with content and solutions that are tailored to your unique business need.
recently learned about electrofuels. it's a hypothetical rube goldberg scheme where you put enough energy to propel 5-7 EVs in, and pull out enough gasoline to fuel one car. it's sold as a green technology, because now gasoline is green somehow. this spin ignores that it would require massive buildout of renewables + nuclear, and just by doing this electrification of many energy end uses just makes sense, including transportation. (what the fuck is train??) it's also sold as a long term storage for renewables, but i struggle to see how scheme that has less than 30% roundtrip efficiency can be considered "storage". just build more renewables and don't use them all if needed
cui bono?
it's a complicated pr campaign by volkswagen group (and some other usual suspects). this is a nonexistent magic solution to a real problem, so it fits a common pattern (and also makes it stubsack material) that also attempts to shank electric vehicles adoption.
if anything, it's backwards because EVs are adopted faster than renewables buildout happens (cars last less than powerplants). if realized, this allows volkswagen group to manufacture regular cars for a long, long time even after oil refining stops. originally, it was proposed as a hypothetical luxury product for antique car owners, because it's physically possible, but doesn't make sense in energy or cost terms. but then someone spun it into potential regular retail good, and also maybe this pr campaign was a part of reason why internal combustion car ban was axed at eu level recently. now that it happened, they don't need to push it so hard
it is something ironic in there that last time this process made sense was in nazi germany, just this time source of syngas is different
In Great Depression 2 news...
Goldman Sachs taps Anthropic’s Claude to automate accounting, compliance roles:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/anthropic-goldman-sachs-ai-model-accounting.html
I liked this takedown of METR's task horizon "research": https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/the-metr-graph-is-hot-garbage
In addition to all the complaints I already knew of and had, METR's methodology for human baselining of tasks was even worse than I realized.
And you know... I actually kind of respect METR relative to a lot of boosters and doomers for at least attempting any hard numbers and not just vibes and anecdotes (METR is the ones that did the study showing LLMs actually reduced coders productivity even as it made them think it increased). But the standard for quantifying LLM performance in practical terms is absurdly low.
Someone has a program to steal people’s entire codebases using malicious ai coding assistant extensions.
(note, it is an ai firm posting this, compete with cutesy slop hero image)
The vscode extensions actually do exactly what they advertise, it’s just that they also take all your code and share it with a third party for whatever purpose.