TechTakes
- pivot-to-ai.com AI coders think they’re 20% faster — but they’re actually 19% slower
Model Evaluation and Threat Research is an AI research charity that looks into the threat of AI agents! That sounds a bit AI doomsday cult, and they take funding from the AI doomsday cult organisat…
- Veo fails week 4: the final faildown
‘an expensive slot machine that outputs slop 98% of the time’
podcast and blog post tomorrow, i am ill
yes that's a clothes hanger at the back i forgot to put in the hall, we only reveal our clean laundry here
- The idea guy will become the most important role in the coming aeon of AI
Alternatively:
> Academia and advanced degrees are worthless; you can compress four years of study into a prompt the size of a tweet.
- pivot-to-ai.com ‘AI is here to stay’ — is it, though? What do you mean, ‘stay’?
When some huge and stupid public chatbot disaster hits the news, the AI pumpers will Kramer into the mentions to say stuff like “you have to admit, AI is here to stay.” Well, no, I don’t. Not unles…
- pivot-to-ai.com Cursor tries setting less money on fire — AI vibe coders outraged
Anysphere is the startup that produces Cursor, your sort-of dependable vibe coding buddy. You tell Cursor what you’d like and it spits out a complete function! This leads to some spectacular vibe c…
- LLMs are the Air Guitar of intellectual work (podcast)www.spreaker.com DK_en 3x07 - LLMs are the Air Guitar of intellectual work
LLMs don't even qualify as autotune. Autotune, at least, still has some connection to work (not necessarily talent).
this podcast guy talks like sephiroth but the title is perfect and the content is largely correct
- did Jeff Bezos' API Mandate alienate the world into abandoning take your daughter to work day?
how could daughters look their engineer-dads in the eyes, no matter the country they're in, the same before? this was our BeforeTimes (ignoring Bill Gates' antitrust). everyone knows this was a chokehold, and you did not all celebrate the "or you're fired" bit, nor did you only see it as "mere play". "americans" are not the only ones to blame. the paternalism ain't paternalizing. discuss.
- pivot-to-ai.com Calling in the AI vibe-writing cleanup crew
You’ve heard of vibe coding, with, I’m sure, not a little horror. Spin the gacha and make a website! And then you have unfortunate experiences. There are people who get quietly called in to f…
- Publishers file competition complaints in UK and EU over Google’s AI Overviewspivot-to-ai.com Google AI Overviews: Publishers file competition complaints in UK and EU
The Independent Publishers Alliance, a group of small UK publishers, has filed a UK competition complaint and an EU antitrust complaint over Google’s AI Overviews in search results. [Press Gazette;…
- Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th July 2025awful.systems Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025 - awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 awf...
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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 for starting this.)
- pivot-to-ai.com Venture capital is lending money against video cards
Last year, Wall Street finance firms started making loans, using video cards as collateral — that famously long-term asset class that solidly maintains its value over, ooh, months. Investment bank…
- www.honest-broker.com The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public
This isn't innovation, it's tyranny
- "Asked to think like a paedophile or act suicidal: Workers training Meta's AI in Ireland speak out"www.thejournal.ie Asked to think like a paedophile or act suicidal: Workers training Meta's AI in Ireland speak out
One worker who spoke to The Journal Investigates said that writing suicide-related prompts for AI led to them self-harming for the first time in their life.
God help us. These workers are employed by a subcontractor, Covalen.
> Multiple workers from Covalen’s ‘AI annotation’ service spoke to The Journal Investigates about their roles. Their day-to-day work involves creating prompts that are fed to Meta’s AI platform so the system can be trained according to guidelines.
> In order to do this, some workers have spent entire shifts pretending to be paedophiles online seeking child sex abuse related information, or suicidal people looking for details on how to kill or hurt themselves.
Covalen also does moderation for Meta, with workers forced to watch extremely violent and disturbing footage that has been flagged for moderation.
> “Sometimes in my dreams I am the victim, but sometimes – and this is far worse – I am the perpetrator,” they said.
One bright spot:
> Over 100 Covalen employees have now joined the Communications Workers Union (CWU). The toll that dealing with sensitive content and inconsistencies in wellness break length were extra motivating factors for the move.
> They are also asking for a better rate of pay, as they are currently earning an average of €29,700 per year.
- pivot-to-ai.com Only 3%* of US AI users are willing to pay a penny for it
Venture capitalists Menlo Ventures have released what purports to be a survey: “2025: The State of Consumer AI”. That is, chatbots. [Menlo Ventures] The subtitle is: “AI’s Consumer Tipping Po…
- The rise of Whatevereev.ee The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
- pivot-to-ai.com Microsoft lays off the staff who make the money to fund AI that doesn’t
Microsoft is firing 9,000 workers across the company — 4% of all employees. Before this, they laid off over 6,000 in May and another 300 in June. [CNBC] It’s not that Microsoft is doing badly. In Q…
- pivot-to-ai.com How to pass an AI coding benchmark: train on the questions
SWE-Bench Verified by OpenAI tests how well a model can solve real bugs in real Python code from GitHub. These bugs are all public information — so the AI models have almost certainly trained on th…
- pivot-to-ai.com $219 Springer Nature AI textbook was written with a chatbot
“Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced” by Govindakumar Madhavan was published in April by Springer Nature. It’s $169 as an ebook, or $219 as a hardback. [Springer, archive] Retractio…
- pivot-to-ai.com ‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work
An internal Microsoft memo has leaked. It was written by Julia Liuson, president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and GitHub. The memo tells managers to evaluate employees based on how much t…
- Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025awful.systems Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025 - awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 awf...
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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 for starting this. Also, happy 4th July in advance...I guess.)
- pivot-to-ai.com Google Veo 3 fails, week 2: fail harder — Shokunin Studio spins the gacha
This is our second week of running Google’s Veo 3 video generator through its paces. So when you’ve read this, go and watch the worked examples. And check out last week’s. [YouTube] Our good friend…
don't just read the text - watch the video, it's the point of the exercise. And I worked all weekend on it. Thank you.
- futurism.com People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"
People experiencing "ChatGPT psychosis" are being involuntarily committed to mental hospitals and jailed following AI mental health crises.
- Rolling the ladder up behind us - Xe Iaso on the LLM bubblexeiaso.net Rolling the ladder up behind us
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
- pivot-to-ai.com Pitchbook: AI venture capital resorts to mergers
Today, let’s look at two Pitchbook reports — the US VC-Backed M&A Outlook for second quarter 2025 and the 2025 US Venture Capital Outlook: Midyear Update. [Pitchbook; Pitchbook, PDF, archive; P…
- deadsimpletech.com Coding in a material world | deadSimpleTech
The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care of sufficiently important people.
Another response to Ptacek.
- pivot-to-ai.com Meta beats Kadrey, AI training was fair use — what this means
Meta has won against Kadrey et al — the authors’ case against Meta training their Llama LLM on the authors’ books, including on pirate copies. [Order, PDF; case docket] Both sides brought motions f…
- pivot-to-ai.com Verizon’s new AI chatbot — customer disservice
Much beloved US phone company Verizon has updated its My Verizon app to include 24/7 customer service from AI! It’s got a chatbot based on Google Gemini. [Verizon] Verizon tells The Verge: [Verge] …
- pivot-to-ai.com Anthropic AI wins broad fair use for training! — but not on pirated books
One of the many copyright cases in progress against chatbot vendor Anthropic is Bartz v. Anthropic, where several authors brought a class action suit in August 2024 for violating their copyrights w…
- www.nakedcapitalism.com Google's nihilists destroying open web and its own business chasing AI
Nihilism on the part of Alphabet's CEO explains Google's willingness to risk its search business and the open web itself to chase OpenAI.
- pivot-to-ai.com Iyo vs. Io — OpenAI and Jony Ive get sued
In May, legendary Apple designer Jony Ive hooked up with OpenAI to announce an unspecified gadget. [WSJ, archive] To promote this complete vaporware, OpenAI released a video of Sam Altman and Ive b…
- Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025awful.systems Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd June 2025 - awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 awf...
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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 for starting this.)
- pivot-to-ai.com Nvidia gets into money-burning AI startups
When our glorious AI bubble deflates, and we contemplate the wreckage of so many companies that did nothing but turn venture capital billions into carbon dioxide, there’s one company that wil…
- AI solves every river crossing puzzle, we can go home now [content warning: botshit]
I think this summarizes in one conversation what is so fucking irritating about this thing: I am supposed to believe that it wrote that code.
No siree, no RAG, no trickery with training a model to transform the code while maintaining identical expression graph, it just goes from word-salading all over the place on a natural language task, to outputting 100 lines of coherent code.
Although that does suggest a new dunk on computer touchers, of the AI enthusiast kind, you can point at that and say that coding clearly does not require any logical reasoning.
(Also, as usual with AI it is not always that good. sometimes it fucks up the code, too).
- pivot-to-ai.com We test Google Veo: impressive demo, unusable results
Over on YouTube, we run Google’s Veo 3 video generator through its paces. So when you’ve read this, go and watch the worked examples. [YouTube] Aron Peterson is a media production professional. He’…
this took me all day, but it's a banger if i do say so myself - watch the video first
podcast probably tomorrow
- pivot-to-ai.com AI venture capital resorts to feeding the secondary market
Headlines about AI companies paying “billions” for other AI companies mostly don’t mean real money, but equity in private companies with imaginary valuations. But sometimes, people want actual mone…
- pivot-to-ai.com Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage
iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.” iNaturalist is administered by its own small charit…
- pivot-to-ai.com Salesforce: AI agents don’t work — but we’re charging 6% more for AI anyway
Salesforce is still hyped for AI everywhere! Especially its chatbot Agentforce, introduced in December! Agentforce didn’t work so well in outside tests. The reviewer said: “I can’t help but questio…
