can't wait to see what fresh horrors this shit unleases
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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ugh cybersecurity is already a fucking nightmare i should have braced myself
wouldn't you just love some snakeoil sauce on your snakeoil sandwich? imagine how good it'll go with that snakeoil cocktail we've given you, on the house!
(which, ofc, is a limited-size cocktail. only 30ml! enough to get a feel for our snakeoil! but also it's only 10ml/day. license levels. you understand, I'm sure.)
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Considering the quality of your average LLM, and the quality of the promptfondlers who use them, I expect this will result in a lot of serious security vulnerabilities and broken projects.
Considering how bad these things are at math, see below, and how important math is for cryptography, see any textbook on it, this will be !!fun!!.
Fuck. The higher ups at my workplace are currently utterly Claude-brained to the point it makes you think they’re getting their salaries from Anthropic. I am like 80% sure this shit will be on my table when I’m back from vacation in two weeks.
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New case popped up in medical literature: A Case of Bromism Influenced by Use of Artificial Intelligence, about a near-fatal case of bromine poisoning caused by someone using AI for medical advice.
On first glance, this also looks like a case where a chatbot confirmed a person's biases. Apparently, this patient believed that eliminating table salt from his diet would make him healthier (which, to my understanding, generally isn't true - consuming too little or no salt could be even more dangerous than consuming too much). He was then looking for a "perfect" replacement, which, to my knowledge, doesn't exist. ChatGPT suggested sodium bromide, possibly while mentioning that this would only be suitable for purposes such as cleaning (not as food). I guess the patient is at least partly to blame here. Nevertheless, ChatGPT seems to have supported his nonsensical idea more strongly than an internet search would have done, which in my view is one of the more dangerous flaws of current-day chatbots.
Edit: To clarify, I absolutely hate chatbots, especially the idea that they could replace search engines somehow. Yet, regarding the example above, some AI bros would probably argue that the chatbot wasn't entirely in the wrong if it hadn't suggested adding sodium bromide to food. Nevertheless, I would still assume that the chatbot's sycophantic communication style significantly exacerbated the problem on hand.
the stupidest thing about it is that there already is commercial low sodium table salt, and it substitutes part of sodium chloride with potassium chloride, because the point is to decrease sodium intake, not chloride intake (in most of cases)
Turns out I had overlooked the fact that he was specifically seeking to replace chloride rather than sodium, for whatever reason (I'm not a medical professional). If Google search (not Google AI) tells the truth, this doesn't sound like a very common idea, though. If people turn to chatbots for questions like these (for which very little actual resources may be available), the danger could be even higher, I guess, especially if chatbots had been trained to avoid disappointing responses.
The way I understood salt is that you should be careful with it if you have heart problems or heart problems run in the family, and then esp when you eat a lot of ready made products which generally have more salt. Anyway, talk to your doctor if you worry about it. Not chatgpt.
Simple way of messing with the dumbest robot ignoring scrapers. Html bomb.
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I’m excited that Silicon Valley tech has finally managed to invent thinking. Makes this book obsolete at long last.
In other news, the mainstream press has caught on to "clanker" (originally coined for use in the Star Wars franchise) getting heavy use, with Rolling Stone, Gizmondo and Axios putting out articles on it, and NPR featuring it in Word of the Week.
You want my take, I expect it will retain heavy usage going forward - as I've stated before (multiple times at least), AI is no longer viewed as a "value-neutral" tool/tech, but as an enemy of humanity, whose use expresses a contempt for humanity.
So question, anybody ever see this before in heavy usage? Or is this just some weird media thing?
I've seen it pick up lately, particularly in non-sneer-adjacent spaces, but it's definitely recent and I'm not sure how common it really was, which is a shame because I love it.
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cue botlickers whining about "robot discrimination"
Found someone trying to fire back at the widespread sneering against promptfondlers:
Emphasis on "trying" here - they're getting cooked in the replies and QRTs. Here's a couple highlights - one from someone running an escape room, and one which allegedly ended in someone meeting a baseballer:
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A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy
Choice snippet to whet your appetites:
"With all of this, I’m only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe they’ll actually change the world, the way they’re projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, you’d see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IV’s death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoria’s death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, I’m sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that they’re going to happen. Show me. Show me!"
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Found a good sneer recently: The LLM In The Room, about LLMs' deeply-lacking usefulness for programming