this sounds exactly like the sentence right before “they have played us for absolute fools!” in that meme.

I gave the new ChatGPT Health access to 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements [“a decade of my Apple Watch data”]. It drew questionable conclusions that changed each time I asked.

WaPo. Paywalled but I like how everything I need to know is already in the blurb above.

The interesting thing in this case for me is how did anyone think it was a good idea to draw attention to their placeholder code with a blog post. Like how did they went all the way to vibe a full post without even cursorily glancing at the slop commits.

I’m convinced by now that at least mild forms of “AI psychosis” affect all chatbots users; after a period of time interacting with what Agenla Collier called “Dr. Flattery the Always Wrong Robot”, people will hallucinate fully working projects without even trying to test whether it compiles.

I mean you don’t have to grasp, know of, or care about the consequences when none of the consequences will touch you, and after the bubble pops and the company bankrupts catastrophically, you will remain comfortably a billionaire with several more billions in your aire than the ones you had when you started the bubble in the first place. Consequences are for the working class, capitalists fall upwards.

Cloudflare just announced in a blog post that they built:

a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homeserver.

it’s a vibe-coded pile of slop where most of the functions are placeholders like // TODO: check authorization.

Full thread: https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761

Someone at the It Could Happen Here podcast was making a prediction that someone at some point will make a big push for an “AI crypto”, which (under some pretext or another) you can only mine with AI datacenters. Because there’s like a real big amount of resources being burned on AI datacenters, and as the chatbots continue to fail to return anything at all on the massive investment, they’ll have to come up with a way to justify the datacentres’ existence at all. Maybe Yegge’s just ahead of the curve 🤷‍♀️

I went from “oh hey Steve Yegge I vaguely remember that name, what’s he up to these days?” to “Oh.” in the space of half a sentence

If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says “no, I really am the next Einstein,” ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub⁴.

Fuck how is Scott’s prose always so boring.

But hey, the news to me is: Is Freud a thing in the Alexandrian county of the ratworld now? I thought Freud was supposed to be illogical pseudoscience mystification or something

Choice sneering by one Baldur Bjarnasson https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2026/note-on-debating-llm-fans/ :

Somebody who is capable of looking past “ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes”, generated abuse, or how chatbot-mediated alienation seems to be pushing vulnerable people into psychosis-like symptoms, won’t be persuaded by a meaningful study. Their goal is to maintain their personal benefit, as they see it, and all they are doing is attempting to negotiate with you what the level of abuse is that you find acceptable. Preventing abuse is not on their agenda.

You lost them right at the outset.

or

Shit is getting bad out in the actual software economy. Cash registers that have to be rebooted twice a day. Inventory systems that randomly drop orders. Claims forms filled with clearly “AI”-sourced half-finished localisation strings. That’s just what I’ve heard from people around me this week. I see more and more every day.

And I know you all are seeing it as well.

We all know why. The gigantic, impossible to review, pull requests. Commits that are all over the place. Tests that don’t test anything. Dependencies that import literal malware. Undergraduate-level security issues. Incredibly verbose documentation completely disconnected from reality. Senior engineers who have regressed to an undergraduate-level understanding of basic issues and don’t spot beginner errors in their code, despite having “thoroughly reviewed” it.

(I only object to the use of “undergraduate-level” as a depreciative here, as every student assistant I’ve had was able to use actual reasoning skills and learn things and didn’t produce anything remotely as bad as the output of slopware)

Like that classic Žižek bit about fair trade organic coffee in Starbucks being a way of offering temptation, sin, penance and absolution all in one convenient package, you pay to absolve the guilt.

Invest in benefit corporations to wash the guilt/bad PR from social and environmental damage, and as a bonus if any of them randomly strike a vein in the hype mines, you can let go of the pbc frame and milk some profits. (they think. it remains to see how much profit can be made out of this bloated, costly software.)

and on the side of the _entepreneur, start your grift as a pbc and you get some investment even if you never reach a point where profits may be made.

As “AI” grift corporations race to extract all the shareholder value they can before the con is off, I expect we’re going to see a race to the bottom of polluting and destroying the environment more and more brazenly to squeeze those few more profits—an approach tolerated, when not outright endorsed, by the current political landscape. Ahead of the race and already a veteran at the bottom, Elon Musk: https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2012588893884019092

my landlord’s app in the past: pick through a hierarchy of categories of issues your apartment might have, funnelling you into a menu to choose an appointment with a technician

my landlord’s app now: debate ChatGPT until you convince it to show you the same menu

as far as I can ascertain the app is the only way left to request services from the megacorp, not even a website interface exists anymore. technological progress everyone

sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes

the incompetence of this crack oddly makes me admire QAnon in retrospect. purely at a sucker-manipulation skill level, I mean. rats are so beige even their conspiracy alt-realities are boring, fully devoid of panache

techies: ok but let’s talk about what really matters: coding. programming is our weapon, knowledge is our shield. cryptography is the revolution…

please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please no…

When I first learned that you could program a chatbot merely by giving instructions in English sentences as if it was a human being, I admit I was impressed. I’m a linguist, natural language processing is really hard. There was a certain crossing over boundaries over the idea of telling it at chatbot level, e.g. “and you will never delete files outside this directory”, and this “system prompt” actually shaping the behaviour of the chatbot. I don’t have much interest in programming anymore but I wondered how this crossing of levels was implemented.

The answer of course is that it’s not. Programming a chatbot by talking to it doesn’t actually work.

guess the USA invasion of Venezuela puts a flashing neon crosshair on Taiwan.

An extremely ridiculous notion that I am forced to consider right now is that it matters whether the CCP invades before or after the “AI” bubble bursts. Because the “AI” bubble is the biggest misallocation of capital in history, which means people like the MAGA government are desperate to wring some water out of those stones, anything. And for various economical reasons it isn’t doable at the moment to produce chips anywhere else than Taiwan. No chips, no “AI” datacenters, and they promised a lot of AI datacenters—in fact most of the US GDP “growth” in 2025 was promises of AI datacenters, if you don’t count these promises the country is already in recession.

Basically I think if the CCP invades before the AI bubble pops, MAGA would escalate to full-blown war against China to nab Taiwan as a protectorate. And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing

To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.

Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated “without changing its stress”.