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.)
FT reports from Amazon insiders that theyāre investigating the role AI-assisted development has played in a spate of recent issues across both the store and AWS.
FT also links to several previous stories theyāve reported on related issues, and I havenāt had the time to breach the paywalls to read further, but the line that caught my eye was this:
To be honest, this is why Iām skeptical of the argument that the AI-linked job losses are a complete fabrication. Not because the systems are actually there to directly replace the lost workers, but because the decision-makers at these companies seem to legitimately believe that these new AI tools will let their remaining workforce cover any gaps left by the layoffs they wanted to do anyways. It sounds like Amazon is starting to feel the inverse relationship between efficiency and stability, and I expect itās only a matter of time before the wider economy starts to feel it too. Whether the owning class recognizes whatās happening is, of course, a different story.
So oil prices are down again, and on nothing but a promise from Trump and a promise from the EU. The economy has proved remarkably resilient to me; the attack on Iran is like, wild nonsense number 17 that the USA regime did that I thought would trigger a major recession, and didnāt.
I mean donāt get me wrong, things are much worse now than 3 years ago, clearly. But theyāre not like, Great Depression worse. Theyāre not even 2008 worse. Itās just a certain level of degradation (cost of living is higher, purchasing power is lower, concentration of wealth is higher etc.) that people got used to as the new normal. People can get used to lots of things.
To make the IT analogy, I think the global economy is like Twitter. Sure, it feels like a Jenga tower held up by thoughts and prayers, but itās holding up. When Musk took over I really did think his catastrophic management philosophy would completely break Twitter, but no, it trudges on. Yes, moderation is now nonexistent, and Iām told itās down more often, and often in āsoft downtimeā like notifications not working, or DMs, or some other feature, or itās working but slow, and so on. But clearly the site is up most of the time and more or less functional. Users just get used to degraded quality as the new normal.
I predict AWS will 1) get slower and costlier thanks to āAIā, with higher downtime, at higher stress for the workers; 2) the leadership will refuse to see or admit or even consciously be aware of this; 3) the worsened services will be the new normal. I predict similar developments for the socioeconomic situation of the world, too; though Iām not ruling out a spiral into complete recession, either.
I somewhat agree although when the āother shoe dropsā and these things start impacting the money men they may start to realise AI isnāt the magic cure they thought it was (he says kind of hopefully)
6 hours of downtime for Amazon shopping. A very simple back of a napkin calculation. They made $213.4bn in sales in q4 2025. So divide that by 90 days and then 24 hours and multiply by 6ā¦ We are talking a $0.26bn loss for 6 hours downtimeā¦ That is not an insignificant amount of money. I imagine most bosses would be screaming for heads having lost that much money in sane non-hyper-scaled businesses.
Itās also a trend that I donāt see stopping without a major structural change. I donāt think thereās a point at which theyāre going to say āweāve cut enough corners and are going to stop risking stability and service degradation.ā The principal structure driving the economy, especially in the tech sector, is organized around looking for new corners to cut and insulating the people who make those choices from accountability for their actual consequences.
to follow this one up: there is now a new study about AI agents being dogshit at keeping code working over the long term
Unfortunately the paper structure screams āAI senpai, notice me!ā
AI coding agents seem bad at this job yet, but if you optimize for our benchmarkā¦