I switched to DuckDuckGo like a goddamn hipster years ago, nice to know I dodged a fucking artillery shell

New(ish) Baldur Bjarnason - a fairly politically charged one at that, going into the US hegemony powering the current tech industry (and the AI bubble by extension), and how the Hormuz crisis is all-but guaranteed to topple the whole thing.

AI is bad at everything, part infinity: AI transcription whitewashes 18th-century documents

In more positive news, the Slopfree Software Index recently hit 100 stars.

If you’re an awful.systems user and you post to communities on those instances, you will need to create an account on one of them.

Good thing I haven’t heard of either of them until now.

Same energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjREyGgR2yg

🎶 We’re doing a sequel, we’re back by popular demand…

(Muppets: Most Wanted was fun, I should rewatch that)

PS3 emulator RPCS3 has put up some guardrails against slopcode, and responded to the AI bro shitfits by sneering them:

Bonus response:

Google is forcibly installing Gemini Nano onto every Chrome installation without the user’s knowledge, and actively re-installing it if the user deletes it. Probably an attempt to juice the numbers.

(h/t Matt Roszak)

New blog from Iris Meredith: Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox

Based off her own unusually good experience with Claude, the general thrust is about sneerers being better-equipped to use AI than boosters.

Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac has sued Google for defaming him with AI, over his cancelled concert in December caused by Google’s AI overview calling him a sex offender.

Starting this Stubsack off with a double bill from the tech world.

First, Blender accepted cash and slop commits from Anthropic, and Adobe’d their public image in the process. They put out some corpo-speak to try and quell the mob, but it isn’t working.

Second, FFmpeg put out a showcase of AI’s coding prowess:

For something more low-key, I bought a controller and got into Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers a couple weeks ago. Pretty damn tough kart racer, but oh so much fun.

At some point, Anthropic puts up its prices so much the companies try to go back to brain coders. They hand these actual human coders a toxic waste dump of AI slop code that is literally incomprehensible to humans and can’t be fixed in less time than it would take to start over. This does not end well.

Given the slop bots have been actively destroying their users’ coding abilities for the past 2-3 years, finding someone capable of unfucking their codebases will be a bit of a challenge.

Picking red guarantees your survival by endangering everyone else, making it morally fucked, but risk-free. Picking blue puts your life at risk, but saves everyone’s ass if it pays off, making it the more moral option overall. Picking blue also requires you to put some trust in your fellow man, so I’d have probably picked red if I didn’t know how the Twitter poll came out.

Someone else on the orange site claimed the experiment would end with only red-pushers left if it went for multiple rounds. Adding my two cents, the outcome would depend on how the first round goes - if red wins round 1, voting blue looks like suicide, shifting the calculus in red’s favour, and if blue wins round 1, you have reason to trust everyone will continue voting blue, making it a lot less risky and shifting the moral calculus in blue’s favour.

Another lament about the tech industry has come to my attention, as Ky Decker asks themselves “Do I belong in tech anymore?”

Pretty solid piece all around, recommend checking it out

Two tech-related links for today, both relating to fascism.

First, tante has a new blogpost about AI being overtly fascist in nature, which he’s also posted to LinkedIn, seemingly for kicks. (Found on red site, too)

Second, the Nazi laptop company has sent a second pre-release laptop to DHH, showing they have not changed at all since they went full fash six months ago:

Don’t do drugs, kids. You might end up like these guys.

A more effective anti-drug PSA than anything DARE ever tried.

shot:

chaser:

New Blood in the Machine, about the escalating violence against the slop-mongers.