Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didnāt survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my accountās cake day, too, so thatās cool.)
The common clay of the new west:
transcription
Twitter post from @BenjaminDEKR
āOpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you arenāt careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking āis it daytime yet?ā every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude āno, itās still night.ā Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The āHeartbeatā cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, (āremind me tomorrow to get milkā)ā
Continuation of twitter post
ā1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied āHEARTBEAT_OKā 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:
There are other posts of the same story that include the original ādevā learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.
https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226
Thereās also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150
I hadnāt realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.
$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit theyāre eating is good?
As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.
They think itās just that theyāre early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, whoās to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.
I guess I can check back in six months to see how theyāre doing ā¦ wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, werenāt they? Thatās a bummer.
Well, sure, but that was six months ago.
Tired: itās required to taste
Wired: itās an acquired taste
theyāre already pivoting to the narrative that ālocal models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run themā
ON WHAT HARDWARE BEN, DDR2 SCAVENGED FROM JUNKYARDS???
i still think that lots of people damaged by chatbots will stop in their tracks when this vc money burning charade ends, they wonāt be able to set up it all locally because chatbots brainrotted them even if it was possible in the first place
god I canāt wait for the subsidies to end