he/they
New paper on LLMs just dropped, titled LLMs Can Get “Brain Rot”!
Currently a novelty at this point, but could prove useful to make the likes of Iocaine and Nepenthes more effective - especially since the paper notes:
the damage is multifaceted in changing the reasoning patterns and is persistent against large-scale post-hoc tuning.
It does also suggest doing some actual quality control to prevent damage to the LLMs, but that sure ain’t happening
Another attempt to platform fascists has cropped up in FOSS, and Drew DeVault’s talked all about it. Featuring our good friend Curtis Yarvin.
I don’t see how this can be taken seriously;
That’s because you’re thinking of Omarchy as a Linux distro, not as an open endorsement of fascism. Its goal isn’t to make a usable Linux distro, its to entrench fascists into Linux and the wider FOSS ecosystem.
He has a personal website as well as a website for his stupid statue idea. Both of which are buggy / ugly – apparently after saving $450 million for a dumb statue he has none left for good website coding.
Tenner says he vibe-coded both of them himself. Man’s a capitalist at heart, he thinks paying labour their fair due is an abomination unto God.
More “red hat” than “red flag”, but you’re still dead-on.
My exposure to the guy began and ended at seeing him tut-tutting HBomberguy for nuking James Somerton’s career - glad to know my five-second assessment of him was dead on
The Framework thread caused by the company’s fash turn is still going even after eight full days.
Lotta lowlights to pick from, but the guy openly praising DHH for driving Basecamp straight off a cliff is particularly sneer-worthy:
They posted this recent article written by Peter Coffin
Oh, hey, that’s the “Plagiarism is AWESOME, And Here’s Why” guy, who tut-tutted HBomberguy for erasing plagiarist shithead James Somerton from existence and went to bat for JK Rowling okay yeah dump this guy’s shit in the fucking bin
I was pretty strongly anti-copyright back when I was younger, but after seeing the plague of art theft and grave robbing the NFT fad brought (documented heavily by @NFTTheft on Twitter), and especially after the AI bubble triggered an onslaught of art theft, cultural vandalism and open hostility to artists, I have come around to strongly supporting it.
I may have some serious complaints about the current state of copyright (basically everyone has), but its clear that copyright is absolutely necessary to protect artists (rich and poor) from those who exploit the labour of others.
Guy’s been doing well for himself since the Escapist imploded in 2023 - he’s doing video reviews and video essays over on Second Wind, under the names Fully Ramblomatic and Semi Ramblomatic, respectively.
(As for the Escapist, it got sold off to a “private investor” and turned into a gambling content mill in 2025)
New Baldur Bjarnason: The inevitability of anger, on the impending reckoning for AI and tech influencers’ attempts to avoid it, plus how social media shapes public discourse.
I know full well you’re being sarcastic, but my answer is an emphatic “NO”. I feel like I’m gonna need a lobotomy to get this hypothetical out my head now.
New Ed Zitron, giving exact numbers for how much money Cursor and Anthropic have lit on fire and continuing to shed light on the AI industry’s ability to incinerate revenue.
Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die?
To lightly paraphrase Yahtzee Croshaw:
Short answer: No. Long answer: No, and go fuck yourselves, you ignorant hype-mongering cockbags.
This is the second time this rancid idea has been put forward, and its just as morally bankrupt as the first.
How do you even get to the point that you think that’s something you want to advertise?
Man’s spent several years and shitloads of cash destroying his public image (and probably his brain) via slop bots, I suspect he’s getting desperate to prove his LLM booster turn wasn’t a career-ruining blunder
(He’s also probably lost the ability to tell good work from bad work as well - that’s a universal quality among slop advocates, as Gerard has pointed out on multiple occasions)
I don’t think there’s literally any non-shitty tech left with Framework turning fash.
Doing some digging, it seems GNOME’s still non-shitty - they’ve reportedly refused sponsorship money from Framework, to the whining of multiple people online (post is in Russian).
Doesn’t change the fact that Framework’s dealt a big blow to right-for-repair by doing this, but its something.
EDIT: Just gonna add in something I gotta get off my chest:
Even from a “ruthless capitalist” perspective, Framework’s fash turn is pretty baffling to me. They positioned themselves as beacons of right-to-repair, as good guys in tech trying to “fix consumer electronics, one category at a time” - their shit was overtly political from the fucking start. People weren’t buying them to get the fastest laptops, or to get the best value for money, they bought them because they believed in their stated mission. Anyone with business sense would’ve known shilling a fascist’s personal Linux “distro” would’ve presented a severe risk to Framework’s brand.
Exactly how Nirav got blindsided by this shit, I genuinely don’t understand. Considering his response to the backlash involved “aPoLiTiCaL” “bIg TeNt” blather and publicly farming compassion from Twitter fash, its probably because he’s an outright fascist himself and assumed everyone else around him shared his utterly rancid views.
“Don’t rely on random oracles and spirits when running a military campaign, you fool, you moron.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War (paraphrased)
Words of wisdom from Baldur Bjarnason (mostly repeated from his Basecamp post-mortem):
We know we’re reaching the late stages of a bubble when we start to see multiple “people in tech don’t really believe in all of this, honest, we just act like it because we think we have to, we’re a silent majority you see”, but the truth is that what you believe in private doesn’t matter. All that matter is that you’ve been acting like a true believer and you are what you do
In work and politics, it genuinely doesn’t matter what you were thinking when you actively aided and abetted in shitting on people’s work, built systems that helped fascists, ruined the education system and pretty much all of media. What matters, and what you should be judged on is what you did
Considering a recent example where AI called someone a terrorist for opposing genocide, its something that definitely bears repeating.
Found a quality sneer in the wild, taking aim at vibe-coded “websites”
A US Army general just bragged about using ChatGPT as an accountability sink - the same ChatGPT that caused plenty of students to fuck up a basic question:
Omarchy’s not a distro, its an open endorsement of fascism. Its getting pushed as hard as it is in an attempt to entrench fascists in Linux and the FOSS ecosystem at large.