TechTakes

pushy rationalist tried to glom onto and fly to meet my niche internet microcelebrity friend & i talked her through setting boundaries instead of installing this person in her life. my good deed for the week

In today’s torment nexus development news… you know how various cyberpunky type games let you hack into an enemy’s augmentations and blow them up? Perhaps you thought this was stupid and unrealistic, and you’d be right.

Maybe that’s the wrong example. How about a cursed evil ring that when you put it on, you couldn’t take it off and it wracks you with pain? Who hasn’t wanted one of those?

Happily, hard working torment nexus engineers have brought that dream one step closer, by having “smart rings”, powered by lithium polymer batteries. Y’know, the things that can go bad, and swell up and catch fire? And that you shouldn’t puncture, because that’s a fire risk too, meaning cutting the ring off is somewhat dangerous? Fun times abound!

https://bsky.app/profile/emily.gorcen.ski/post/3m25263bs3c2g

AI video generation use case: hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days, such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?

It his the uncanny valley triggers quite hard. It’s faintly unsettling t watch at all, but every individual detail is just wrong and dreamlike in a bad way.

Also, weird scenery clipping, just like real kids did back in the day!

https://bsky.app/profile/mugrimm.bsky.social/post/3lzy77zydrc2q

The US economy is 100% on coyote time.

It wouldn't matter if everyone came to their senses today. All the money that's been invested into AI is gone. It has been turned into heat and swiftly-depreciating assets and can never be recouped.

It's surreal isn't it?

I know it’s terrible being a drama gossip, but there are some Fun Times on bluesky at the moment. I’m sure most of you know the origins of the project, and the political leanings of the founders, but they’re currently getting publicly riled up about trans folk and palestinians and tying themselves up in knots defending their decision to change the rules to keep jesse singal on site, and penniless victims of the idf off it.

They really cannot cope with the fact that their user base aren’t politically aligned with them, and are desperate to appease the fash (witness the crackdowns on people’s reaction to charlie kirk’s overdue departure from this vale of tears) and have currently reached the Posting Through It stage. I’m assuming at some point their self-image as Reasonable Centrists will crack and one or more of them will start throwing around transphobic slurs and/or sieg-heiling and bewailing how the awful leftists made them do it. Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?

Oh hey, bay area techfash enthusing about AI and genocidal authoritarians? Must be a day ending in a Y. Today it is Vercel CEO and next.js dev Guillermo Rauch

https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031

I also have strong opinions about not using next.js or vercel (and server-side javascript in general is a bit of a car crash) but even if you thought it was great you should probably have a look around for alternatives. Just not ruby on rails, perhaps.

Tyler Cowen saying some really weird shit about an AI 'actress'.

(For people who might wonder why he is relevant. See his 'see also' section on wikipedia)

E: And you might wonder, rightfully imho, that this cannot be real, that this must be an edit. https://archive.is/vPr1B I have bad news.

The AI industry is getting sneered by the dictionary.

Opening the sack with this shit that spawned in front of me:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says GPT-8 will be true AGI if it solves quantum gravity — the father of quantum computing agrees

Guess it won’t be true AGI!

Samsung developer sends AI slop to linux mailing list

TERF obsessed with AI finds out the "degenerate" ani skin for grok has an X account, loses her shit

https://xcancel.com/groks_therapist/status/1972848657625198827#m

then follows up with this wall of text

https://xcancel.com/groks_therapist/status/1973127375107006575#m

AI Shovelware: One Month Later by Mike Judge

The fact that we’re not seeing this gold rush behavior tells you everything. Either the productivity gains aren’t real, or every tech executive in Silicon Valley has suddenly forgotten how capitalism works.

... por que no los dos ...

Do we have a word for people that are kind of like… AI concern trolls? Like they say they are critical of AI, or even against AI, but only ever really put forward pro-AI propaganda, especially in response to actual criticisms of AI. Kind of centrists or (neo) libs. But for AI.

Bonus points if they also for some reason say we should pivot to more nuclear power, because in their words, even though AI doesn’t use as much electricity as we think, we should still start using more nuclear power to meet the energy demands. (ofc this is bullshit)

E: Maybe it's just sealion

So bit of a counter to our usual stuff thing. But a worker migrant here won a case against his employer who had linked his living space to his employment contract (forbidden) using chatgpt as an aid (how much is not told). So there actually was a case where it helped.

Interesting note on it, these sorts of cases have no jurisprudence yet, so that might have been a factor. No good links for it sadly as it was all in Dutch. (Cant even find a proper writeup in a bigger news site as a foreigner defending their rights against abuse is less interesting than some other country having a new bisshop). Skeets congratulating the guy here https://bsky.app/profile/isgoedhoor.bsky.social/post/3m27aqkyjjk2c (in Dutch). Nothing much about the genAI usage.

But this does fit a pattern, how, like with blind/bad eyesight people, these tools are veing used by people who have no other recourse because we refuse to help them (this is bad tbh, Im happy they are getting more help don't fet me wrong, but it shouldn't be this substandard).

I might flesh this out into a proper post, but I remember stumbling on this weird website: https://www.reactionary.software/

I originally found it on r/shittysysadmin when a screenshot of the discord for it (so much for modern software being bloated and unusable) had the person behind it defending that the site didn't have an ssl cert, since that was a way "modern browsers control you".

I was curious and poked around on the site, and first thing you see is this:

Make software great again! For programmers who hate modern software. Modern software is overcomplicated, bloated, unreliable, incomprehensible, pointlessly ideological, and mostly unusable. We like the values of older software: simplicity, reliability, and usability.

This seems pretty fashy, but there is some legitimate criticisms of modern software.

Saving programming from modern culture

Nevermind, fash.

On the about page, he starts by mentioning html swipers, and one he made himself. The one he made is pretty dogshit on anything but a phone.

After talking a bit on how terrible modern software he then compares it to brick walls, which were also so much better back in the day (?).

He then rambles about ancient greece and rome.
An excerpt:

Why did it take to long? Because humanity had become just too stupid to appreciate good ideas. They weren't completely retarded. Ptolemy's horrible system did require some intelligence to create. [...] Today's West is currently at the level of the decaying Greeks, heading toward complete idiocracy. The programmers in Silicon Valley are like Ptolemy, able to construct and maintain horrible overcomplicated monstrosities, but totally unable to innovate at a fundamental level. All good programming ideas are rejected because they don't fit into current programming ideologies. Any programmer like Aristarchus who comes up with a good programming idea will be rejected and ridiculed for violating orthodoxy. Modern programmers are in love with their own ideas and love complexity. They hate simplicity and anything that violates their ideologies.

He then complains about how his parser was met with scorn by Modern Programmers, because they were too stupid to appreciate how good it was?

The post is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/cv78b3/parsing_for_programmers_who_hate_modern_software/

Some excerpts:

What is good? The short answer is that everything that modern culture hates is good, and everything that modern culture loves is bad. But we need more details than that. You can find good values in scripture or in good traditional culture. These values should be applied to programming and to everything else in life. I wrote an Old Testament guide to programming. I also discussed applying traditional Japanese culture to programming. These are just two examples. Any other scripture like the Quran or any traditional culture should work fine to give you good values, in contrast to the horrible values of modern culture, and these good values can guide you to writing good reactionary software.

So, anything anti-modern is good?

Going back to the homepage, there's a page for existing reactionary software.

Java 8.
One of the pinnacles of software, to him, is Java 8.
Not java specifically, just java 8.

Luan is a language he made, which I can only describe as a mash of lua, java and php.
Here's a snippet from the docs:

local Io = require "luan:Io.luan"
local Http = require "luan:http/Http.luan"

return function()
	Io.stdout = Http.response.text_writer()
%>
<!doctype html>
<html>
	<body>
		Hello World
	</body>
</html>
<%
end

So, this is basically a lua clone, written in java. with a few missing features .

The why page on the luan site is probably the most deranged bit of this.

Luan rejects the complexity of modern software. [...] Luan will appeal to you depends on who you are. Members of modern culture will not like Luan because they hate simplicity. Luan will only appeal to good cultures that value simplicity, so I will address the two good cultures that I know of.

The mentioned two good cultures are the Mennonites, and the Japanese.

Japan is the only remaining country that I know of that values quality.

You cannot expect to achieve Japanese standards of quality and reliability if you use modern western software. So use Luan instead.

He has a chronically inactive forum at https://mikraite.arkian.net/Reactionary-Software-f1999.html .

Also, shoutout to this political take: https://web.archive.org/web/20240831203139/http://mikraite.arkian.net/Are-democrats-actually-our-allies-td4846.html

Been tangentially involved in a discussion about how much LLMs have improved in the past year (I don’t care), but now that same space has a discussion of how annoying the stupid pop-up chat boxes are on websites. Don’t know what the problem is, they’ve gotten so much better in the past year?

Check out this epic cope from an Anthropic employee desperately trying to convince himself and others that actually LLMs are getting exponentially better

https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-the-exponential-again/

Includes screenshots of data where he really really hopes you don't look at the source, and links to AI 2027.

Elon Musk announces "Grokipedia", which is exactly what it sounds like.

for article in wikipedia: grok.is_this_true(article)

The Gizmodo story mentions that he retweeted Larry Sanger, but it doesn't dive into the rabbit hole of just how much of a kook Sanger is and how badly his would-be Wikipedia competitors have failed.

Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood is sneering — at us! On Mastodon:

bad news "AI bubble doomers". I've found the LLMs to be incredibly useful … Is it overhyped? FUCK Yes. … But this is NOTHING like the moronic Segway (I am still bitter about that crap), Cryptocurrency, … and the first dot-com bubble … If you find this uncomfortable, I'm sorry, but I know what I know, and I can cite several dozen very specific examples in the last 2-3 weeks where it saved me, or my team, quite a bit of time.

T. chatbot booster rhetoric. So what are those examples, buddy? Very specifically? He replies:

a friend confided he is unhoused, and it is difficult for him. I asked ChatGPT to summarize local resources to deal with this (how do you get ANY id without a valid address, etc, chicken/egg problem) and it did an outstanding, amazing job. I printed it out, marked it up, and gave it to him.

Um hello‽ Maybe Jeff doesn't have a spare room or room to sublet, but surely he can spare a couch or a mailbox? Let your friend use your mailing address. Store some of their stuff in your garage. To use the jargon of hackers, Jeff should be a better neighbor. This is a common issue for unhoused folks and they cannot climb back up the ladder into society without some help. Jeff's reinvented the Hulk tacos meme but they can't even eat it because printer paper tastes awful.