Sailor Sega Saturn, sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems

Against all odds they found a worse future to pursue than forcing employees to strap VR goggles to their heads 40 hours a week, and have pivoted towards AI.

“Any incorrect imagery is picked up during usual production checks and processes,” they said.

The distant future. The year 2069. The only people still watching the holiday AI ads are anti-AI sneerers. The production checker hasn’t been seen for months but their LLM email auto-responder rubber stamps all videos. The AI ad industry is projected to make 100 trillion dollars within the year.

The good news is it generally isn’t necessary to reverse engineer browser behavior when writing a browser. Since it’s mostly fairly standardized, there’s a decent test suite, and the major browsers are all open source.

Though this comes with some caveats:

• There are exceptions like the CSS viewport spec which was reverse engineered from an iphone.
• There are a lot of specifications because browsers have been around for decades and Chromium keeps implementing stuff, and it can be hard to find enough programmers to write all of them / catch up from a fresh start
• This is a somewhat unstable situation; if we lose even a single major browser engine it’s easy to imagine Chrome maybe not bothering with standardization and just telling people to read the blog posts and code.
• Web pages will do nonsense like break themselves if you provide a User-Agent string they don’t like. Mozilla has an ongoing compatibility effort where they sometimes have to override the UA string for specific pages. So less popular browsers are already playing from a disadvantageous position.

Yep! These are the sorts of cursed horrors I come to awful systems for! Even if that video should have been 15 minutes at most.

The misgendering / anti-woke nonsense seemed to be a huge elephant in the room in the video so I’m a little disappointed that Karl Jobst didn’t address it or defend her or share her perspective*. Like it is incredible that someone can spend 1.5 hours talking about a obviously anti-trans harassment campaign fueled by a bunch of gamergate types and then not bring up the topic once.

It’s almost as if he’s giving space to the idea that maybe all the transphobic losers just coincidentally took issue with her decently good aiming and her gender was a completely unrelated. But Karl is terrified of forming or expressing any sort of subjective opinion so I’m not too surprised.

* The best of which is this quote:

noticing that so many people with backgrounds in professional play are defending me, and a lot of 50 year old dads think im cheating

Virus Alert! Hi, I am an AI generated virus but because of poor technology in my training data unfortunately I am not able to harm your computer. Please be so kind to delete one of your important files yourself and then forward me to other users. Many thanks for your cooperation! Best regards, AI virus. [Yes] [No] [Cancel]

Ugh OK I have to vent:

I’m getting pushed into more of a design role because oops my company accidentally fired or drove away all of a team of a dozen people except for me after forgetting for a few years that the code I work on is actually mission critical.

I do my best at designing stuff and delegating the implementation to my coworkers. It’s not one of my strengths but there’s enough technical debt from when I was solo-maintaining everything for a few years that I know what needs improving and how to improve it.

But none of my coworkers are domain experts, they haven’t been given enough free time for me to train them into domain experts, there’s only one of me, and the higher ups are continuously surprised that stuff is going so slow. It’s frustrating for everyone involved.

I actually wouldn’t mind architecture or design work in better circumstances since I love to chat with people; but it feels like my employer has put me in an impossible position. At the moment I’m just trying to hang in there for some health insurance reasons; but in a few years I plan to leave for greener pastures where I can go a day without hearing the word “agentic”.

Some Chat-GPT user queries were leaked via some Google Search Analytics owned by websites that ranked on the search result pages that Chat-GPT saw when searching: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/oddest-chatgpt-leaks-yet-cringey-chat-logs-found-in-google-analytics-tool/

Or something like that. It’s a little confusing.

“Talking with all these marbles in my mouth holds huge promise, but also exposes some longstanding flaws in communication”

Also ironically enough they seem to be claiming that natural language is the future of ambiguously(?) specifying systems:

Specifications are back, even if they are now called “prompts.”

BTW the official way to support trans people as they “explore ways of being humans” is to punch Nazis in the face and dunk on techbros. Go forth and tell all your cis friends!

(If anyone finds some ways of not being human to explore do let me know, I’m holding out for Magical Girl)

There is no need to give transphobes the benefit of the doubt really.

You don’t believe in gender? I mean you’re wrong IMO but we’re cool. But if someone says the words “I don’t believe have an attribute called gender” as part of a bunch of totally obvious anti-trans dog-whistles when butting into a discussion about transgender day of remembrance? Now it’s a problem.

We regret to inform you that one of Google’s “AI leader"s is a transphobe:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/googles-2-7-billion-ai-hire-tests-companys-speech-limits-inflammatory-posts (paywall)

https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social/post/3m52bffg2222x (screenshot of relevant section)

More bias-laundering through AI, phrenology edition!
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/06/should-facial-analysis-help-determine-whom-companies-hire

I couldn’t actually read the article because paywall, but here’s a paper that the article is probably about: AI Personality Extraction from Faces: Labor Market Implications

Saying the quiet part out loud:

First, an individual’s genetic profile significantly influences both their facial features and personality. Certain variations in DNA correlate with specific facial features, such as nose shape, jawline, and overall facial symmetry, defined broadly as craniofacial characteristics

Second, a person’s pre- and post-natal environment, especially hormone exposure, has been shown to affect both facial characteristics and personality

To their credit the paper does say that this is a terrible idea, though I don’t know how much benefit of the doubt to give them (I don’t have time to take a closer look):

This research is not intended, and should not viewed, as advocacy for the usage of Photo Big 5 or similar technologies in labor market screening.

Half the time the trucks are driving on the left side of the road. That’s fine I guess; except half the time the trucks are driving on the right side of the road.

🙃🙃🙃

NotAwfulTech and AwfulTech converged with some ffmpeg drama on twitter over the past few days starting here and still ongoing. This is about an AI generated security report by Google’s "Big Sleep" (with no corresponding Google authored fix, AI or otherwise). Hackernews discussed it here. Looking at ffmpeg’s security page there have been around 24 bigsleep reports fixed.

ffmpeg pointed out a lot of stuff along the lines of:
* They are volunteers
* They have not enough money
* Certain companies that do use ffmpeg and file security reports also have a lot of money
* Certain ffmpeg developers are willing to enter consulting roles for companies in exchange for money
* Their product has no warranty
* Reviewing LLM generated security bugs royally sucks
* They’re really just in this for the video codecs moreso than treating every single Use-After-Free bug as a drop-everything emergency
* Making the first 20 frames of certain Rebel Assault videos slightly more accurate is awesome
* Think it could be more secure? Patches welcome.
* They did fix the security report
* They do take security reports seriously
* You should not run ffmpeg “in production” if you don’t know what you’re doing.

All very reasonable points but with the reactions to their tweets you’d think they had proposed killing puppies or something.

A lot of people seem to forget this part of open source software licenses:

BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW

Or that venerable old C code will have memory safety issues for that matter.

It’s weird that people are freaking out about some UAFs in a C library. This should really be dealt with in enterprise environments via sandboxing / filesystem containers / aslr / control flow integrity / non-executable memory enforcement / only compiling the codecs you need… and oh gee a lot of those improvements could be upstreamed!

Grokipedia just dropped: https\://grokipedia.com/

It’s a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won’t copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:

• Grokipedia’s article on Wikipedia uses the word “ideological” or “ideologically” 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in it’s Wikipedia article).
• Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “biological males”. The last paragraph of the article “The Wachowskis” is downright unhinged.
• The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.

Also certain articles have this at the bottom:

The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Check out the graphics on their homepage. It has that terrible “scroll driven” web-design but the graphics look like placeholder art cooked up by a programmer.

Usually these sorts of VC bait companies at least hire a graphics designer but I guess that’s not actually necessary.

Crypto Investor Proposes 450-Foot Statue of Greek God on Alcatraz Island is a story making the rounds in the press lately and aaaaaah I hate it. I’d say something more coherent than that but it’s already given me quite a headache.

He has a personal website as well as a website for his stupid statue idea. Both of which are buggy / ugly – apparently after saving $450 million for a dumb statue he has none left for good website coding.

Yet another billboard.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1ob2l2o/replacement_ai_billboard_in_san_francisco_who/

https://replacement.ai/

This time the website is a remarkably polished satire and I almost liked it… but the email it encourages you to send to your congressperson is pretty heavy on doomer talking points and light on actual good ideas (but maybe I’m being too picky?):

I’m starting to think some of these tech skeptics are only pretending to be skeptics.