Skip Navigation

User banner

________

@ yellowcake @awful.systems

0
45
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026

  • The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

  • Bunch of missing stops and unlabeled dots on the green lines. Even with MBTA green line projects this is wrong. Boston metro is full of turbo transit nerds who argue nightly at breweries about how to build a proper spoke-hub model for the T so these clowns could have popped into any of the many local establishments and had about a dozen experts chime in to volunteer help. But of course AI is used by the non-experts because if they do not know it already then that means no one knows it.

    Wasn't there also a local celebrity MBTA expert on a reality dating show too? Cmon MA officials, do better.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026

  • Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026

  • The slop startup dubs this "Audience Intelligence" and claims pixar experience. There are two "interactive movies" by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026

  • Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.

    All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI "audience immersive presentations" where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.

    Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026

  • unfortunately AI tools do exist in the company and there are some expectations of use on some teams but it varies depending where in the product you work. anything OS, kernel, bootloaders, filesystem, etc is a strict no AI policy. All the front end teams seem to use something sparingly, couldnt tell you what it is or why.

    without revealing too much personal info, companies like mine aren't too hard to find but they tend to be somewhat old school. Lots of C programming, some assembly, and digging into the guts of stuff. Anyone doing firmware, infrastructure (like all the big storage guys), or even some of the trading world is highly sensitive to genAI tools because of the risk. Especially if you ship a box rather than some fully cloud connected always updating app. The companies may even say they do something with or about AI then you talk to the loader or kernel team and they will say "absolutely not". I cannot tell you over the years across a few jobs how often I hear management lamenting how we can never fill recs because we need actual C people or someone not afraid of a terminal debugger. And two of these shops are hugely popular in the tech world. Hope these hints help

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026

  • sorry to thread hijack but I have been trying to hire software devs and during interview process we reveal our zero-AI policy for the product codebase (corporate allows it for "debug tooling" in limited amounts). weirdly many candidates are disappointed to hear this and unwilling to proceed.

    in a way we find it refreshing because we want to hire folks that know and learn things. but it is wild how many have expectations to set up an ide day one and it start churning out patches

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026

  • cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

  • The fact it doesn't have an assembler or linker, and I am doubting it implemented its own lexical analyzer, I almost struggle to call this a compiler.

    The claim it is from scratch is misleading since it has all prior training from open source.

    Building a small compiler for a simple language (C is pretty simple, especially older versions) is a common learning exercise and not difficult. This is very much another situation where "AI" created an over simplified version of something with hidden details on how it got there as a way to further push the propaganda that it is so capable.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

  • Dave Mosher is a Principal Consultant at Test Double, and has experience in legacy modernization, agentic coding, and explaining CORS poorly to people who didn't ask.

    What legitimate experience does he possess? I can only assume legacy modernization means throw spaghetti microservice buzzword architecture at the client. And he admits he doesn't really know CORS. I see these blogs about how LLMs are so much better than humans for programming yet never written by someone who has put together anything more complex and bigger scale than their myspace page in '05.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

  • did they use ai to make the image? "wood of of year"

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systems

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systems

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systems

  • The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

  • Is there any search engine that isn't pushing an "AI mode" of sorts? Some are more sneaky or give option to "opt out" like duckduckgo, but this all feels temporary until it is the only option.

    I have found it strange how many people will say "I asked chatgpt" with the same normalcy as "googling" was.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th November 2025

  • Gentoo is firmly against AI contributions as well. NetBSD calls AI code “tainted”, while FreeBSD hasn’t been as direct yet but isn’t accepting anything major.

    QEMU, while not an OS, has rejected AI slop too. Curl also famously is against AI gen. So we have some hope in the systems world with these few major pieces of software.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

  • The ffmpeg social media maintainer is an Elon fan so when he purchased Twitter and made foolish remarks about rewriting it all in C and how only hardcore programmers are cool that write C/assembly they quickly jumped on it.

    https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/1598655873097912320

    Ya maybe it’s a way to attract more contributors or donation money. Felt a bit weird after Elon was shitting on all the people who built Twitter and firing them.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

  • I’ve been wanting to go back to some sort of DAP full time but I’m not a huge fan of Android being the experience. Anyone got recommendations of a non-Android based DAP so I can cut the streaming services out for good?

    I miss my Creative Zen back in 2008.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

  • I’m convinced the proliferation of AI art comes from a generation of digital inhalants.