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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)

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[-] lurker@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Here's that side-by-side comparison

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago

Bioman has already pointed out the "Economic Value" numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to this... the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). "Coding Time Horizon" is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They don't have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they aren't, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)

"AI Software R&D Uplift" is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvement... and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.

[-] lurker@awful.systems 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I took a quick look over the article again, this spreadsheet contains how they measure their metrics. "Compute" seems to be based off number of chips, which is probably in part based off data centres anyways

And apparently they have ditched METR and are now using "coding uplift (i.e., how much of a speedup AIs are providing to software engineers at AGI companies) and revenue."

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 3 points 6 days ago

Ed Zitron has also explained his suspicion that lots of GPUs are sitting around in warehouses waiting to be installed, in some cases sold (to juice NVIDIA's revenue) but not even shipped yet.

And I'm really skeptical speedup from AIs claimed by the LLM companies is in anyway related to reality.

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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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