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.

last week’s edition

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    Daft ai project of the week: “lore”, a version control system that should not be confused with another vcs of the same name open-sourced by epic games a few weeks ago.

    lore does not track your code. it tracks the prompts, notes and decisions that produced it. you commit intent. when you want code, you run lore materialize: it replays the accumulated intent into a brief, and an agent reconciles the working tree to match it.

    the code is build output. the intent is the source.

    …which would be great, if the output of llms were deterministic, and generally it is not. This means rolling back a change to undo or fix something is just another spin of the roulette wheel, with the analogy being reinforced by the number of tokens you’ll have to buy and burn to do a rebuild. It looks like it still needs a real vcs behind the scenes, given that it isn’t entirely self-hosting, but maybe I misunderstood something.

    You might wonder if this is some kind of satirical work, or perhaps piece of performance art, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t… the creator and sole human author (naturally, claude is the only other “contributor”) is a big fan of something called “open audio protocol” and a project called “audius” which came about by someone asking what if spotify and soundcloud, but on the blockchain? With ai agentic integration?

    https://github.com/lorevcs/lore

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      I know we’re all familiar with the metaphor of LLMs as roulette wheel, but I think there’s some real craft to turning that into Russian roulette.

    • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Considering this is the logical endpoint of the “LLM’s are just like compilers bro” line of thought, I’m not surprised at all.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        Nah, this isn’t the endpoint… you want something like prompt2exe, which is a performance art piece. Gets an llm to output machine code, and bundles it into an executable.

        no package dependencies and invokes no assembler, compiler, or system linker.

        Hardcore mode. No handholding for puny human devs by their tool chains. 🦾

        Probably impractical for normal people to run, unless they have an employer who wants their minions to be burning all the tokens and pays up for the expensive kind of accounts.

      • diz@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        I think there’s something to the compilers analogy, in the sense that if you used a C compiler through a chat interface with one liners to insert snippets into assembly without keeping the source code in source files as such, it would probably be slower than just writing in assembly yourself.

        That LLMs have a number of extremely undesirable properties as “compilers” (from nondeterminism to plagiarism) does not make the dumb ass chat interface any less fundamentally shit. It just makes them shit in other ways too.

        • x0rcist@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          There is one narrow case in which I’ve found the compiler analogy useful: explaining my frustrations with LLM-assisted design/architecture doc generation. Here, it’s useful because handing someone a design document that was output by an LLM is a lot like handing someone a binary and asking them for a code review.

          I’d much rather work with whatever disorganized soup of thoughts someone fed into the machine, because those at least contain intent, rather than a document that actively obscures what the designer wanted in a barrage of detail.

          • diz@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            21 hours ago

            Yeah… I think the core point is, LLM’s shit is generated artifacts, which need to be kept separate from sources. That you can’t actually re-generate the same artifacts, is just a dingleberry on top of the shit pile.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      I’ve always thought that the ability for a VCS to show me exactly what my codebase looked like at any point in the past wasn’t as dementia-simulating as I’d like

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Wait, did I get that right and it reruns the prompts every time you want to look at the code? Holy token costs batman.

      • diz@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Perfect for when your workplace will fire you if you dont use enough tokens, I’m sure.