Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    6 days ago

    Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?

    Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas’s cloud spend.

    Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.

    I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.

    I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.

    How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189073

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      5 days ago

      people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org

      How does using personal plans impact the company’s bill? If someone is so profoundly stupid as to spend their own money on a “tool” for their job then why stop them?

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        5 days ago

        That’s a good point. I wonder if they’re also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven’t manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can’t really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.

      • JFranek@awful.systems
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        5 days ago

        Dunno, maybe they believe the pinky promise that their code won’t be used for training on the enterprise plans?

        • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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          5 days ago

          It’s more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you can’t tell that just means your enterprise code isn’t discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.

          I’m assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, it’s going to be a big legal deal.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          5 days ago

          My assumption based on nothing except life experience is that all of that data gets pushed through differently coloured pipes into the same giant bucket with privacy concerns being “too hard” and “approved by legal”.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        5 days ago

        I’ve seen the pattern be used as an enterprise pricing dodge before: rather than sign the whole org up at $$$, everyone signs up themselves at $ (and maybe get to claim or somesuch)

        another reading could be that someone in leadership/security went “holy shit this exposure is terrible” and put forth a policy including “no personal” and the poor little promptfondler is left ashen-faced upon reading that the policy instruction actually thought of the first obvious workaround

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      6 days ago

      If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.

    • sansruse@awful.systems
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      6 days ago

      WELL WELL WELL, if it isn’t the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling

      (plus a dose of corporate greed)