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The ChatGPT FINAL BOSS has been revealed! ..and it's every bit as skeevy and stupid as you could have imagined..

bubsmeany

@bubs@undistinguished.com

2025-10-15 21:43:01

Over the last few weeks, OpenAI's ambitions of enhanced productivity, personal growth, and accessible learning have been replaced with a social media (SORA) platform that lets deviants create their own mini-Stile Projects and the promise of reduced safety barriers to unlock some "sexy time AI" capability that will absolutely give every edgelord an expeditious way to fulfill their own Rule 34 fantasy.

bad drawing of a cat saying can i haz no when being propsitioned by a sexy feline chatbot on his phone

This is a company that has already been sued repeatedly for some of the most mentally manipulative violations you could imagine, not to mention valid concern that it's bone-easy to trick it into sharing personal chats.

In other words : OpenAI has reached its death spiral faster than even I anticipated, primarily thanks to human-centipede like financial promises and no way to "ethically" (if you make a ridiculous leap of faith and consider rampant copyright infringement "ethical" in the first place) fulfill them.

At least in the case of OpenAI the pop of this bubble was inevitable. And while some people do seem to get.. something postive.. out of ChatGPT, those numbers seem to be decreasing rapidly as more research is done and more people see it in action. Hell, even the damn CEO is stating publicly that it can't be trusted. Not surprising, since more and more experts agree that this ain't gonna get any better when money is on the table.

Oh - and even if it ever reaches perfection, what happens if an overreaching government agency wants to get its talons into your ChatGPT logs? Sam also believes ya likely cooked my guy!

I had a long winded rant in the chamber tying this to other examples (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc) that attention whoring, political point chasing, and attempted monetization of everything has any remotely decent website on the internet completely imploding in on itself, but I'm honestly completey assed-out about things like this lately. Don't get me started on how bad most news sources on the internet is these days... but hey! At least we still have Wikipedia.. right? RIGHT?

POTPOURRI

So what, if anything, can LLM "vibe coding" actually do RIGHT? Not a lot, but maybe a little...

bubsmeany

@bubs@undistinguished.com

2025-10-06 11:13:21

I'm going to preface this article by stating this truth : I'm still 100% team "don't trust LLM vibe code for anything remotely mission-critical." And I promise your sweet ass I'm still light years away from firing up ClaudeAi/ChatGPT on the daily. But I did recently stumble across at least one use case that saves me a notable amount of time and generally doesn't trigger my "coding burnout" sensors : low impact web coding.

horrible drawing of a meme cereal guy sitting on a bus saying hes in danger for posting something not completely negative about LLMs

Before you gather up your virtual pitchforks, let me be absolutely clear : if you use LLMs to displace workers/creatives, you totes suck. Also, and I can't stress this enough : vibe.. coding.. is.. not.. real... coding.. and.. current.. LLMs.. are.. not.. worth.. the.. environmental.. harm.. they.. cause. LLMs are truly bullshit machines, and if you rely on them for nuanced coding tasks (or any real information, for that matter) you get the dumb prizes you deserve for playing those sorts of games. We are hitting "much scarier than the .com ruin" territory with these suckers, so much so that even Altman, Zuck, and Bezos have said we are reaching "financial bubble range" (without, of course, admitting the faults of the models themselves). This is undoubtedly going to end miserably for a lot of folks and entire cities for that matter. That said, just because LLMs aren't as ground-breaking as these techboi carnival-barking edgelords swear they are, does that mean they are complete ass?

We know at least one thing about them : as with most ML based models, LLMs tend to perform best when you feed them with earth-scorching, metric ass-tons of accurate data. And every LLM that scrapes webpages for their training (which is, to say, every major LLM and even ones you haven't heard of if my website datalogs full of thirsty ass model headers are being truthful) has an over abundance of 3 things that are generally pretty accurate and well-formed because ~70% of the sites on the internet use some form of CMS:

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

And we haven't even touched on the fact that many of the most trafficked sites on the internet are bespoke, professionally developed non-CMS sites as well. In other words - most of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript ingested by LLMs are pretty damn good.

This hits an odd sweet spot for me for several reasons. The coding I enjoy doing is generally "large scale data" stuff as well as game mechanic design. Stuff I hate to fudge with and honestly aren't very good at : UI and UX ("no shit!", you probably say, as you read this blog post..). Somehow, I've maintained a small but surprisingly durable little community for a web-based game (27+ years and counting with a domain name registered before Google.com). The community I serve is still vibrant enough to allow us to get a small Twitch stream together with 30-50 players joining in weekly to listen to me and my game cohorts say dumb shit and give some game stuff away.

Initially, we used a "spin wheel" we found on the internet to assist with those giveaways, but the randomness of the resulting winners seemed suspect at best. So I had a(n admittedly nerdy) plan - why not create a wheel that's based on pseudo-random MD5 hashing to determine the winners? That way, if someone doesn't believe the "wheel results", the chosen-winner can be accurately and publicly audited. So I created a hilariously bad-looking MD5 wheel that did exactly that (that I will NOT link to...). It worked, but (again) it looked rotten.. but it WORKED.. and cleaning it up was secondary to accuracy.

But after getting (understandably) ribbed one too many times on the stream for its aesthetic, I wondered to myself : could I have an LLM help make this hot-but-working-mess of a spin-wheel presentable? Again to reiterate - I would NEVER allow vibe code to be placed directly into actual game code (glaring examples of even low-impact failures follow below that doubly confirmed this fact to me), but this seemed like a relatively low risk sample use case.

So I fired up ClaudeAi (Sonnet 4) and "described" the problem I faced. Surprisingly, it gave me a pretty good-looking result out the chute.. I could see why some people would be immediately smitten!

..but "looking good" and "being accurate" are 2 entirely different things...

The celebration screen announced a winner that didn't match the wheel spin winner
My lizard brain auditing proved the MD5 hash they displayed was being calculated incorrectly

So, while it looked much better than my shitty wheel, almost nothing it created really "worked." Fabulous.

I messed around a bit more and burned through my free tokens quickly. So I tried again later and ClaudeAi was just shitting the bed left and right and the wheel quit working altogether... it had even inserted some stray, misplaced JavaScript visible at the bottom of my page. This should have been an easy offramp for an LLM hater like myself to decide upon, but I instead picked the strangest option in this self-loathing "choose your own adventure" drama...

I took the code ClaudeAI created and sent it over to ChatGPT (4) and, shockingly, it cleaned up the MD5 formula and the page once again worked. I couldn't get it to "fix" the celebration page however (or the fact the "wheel" spun fine the first time but never completed a full rotation later), so I got to digging through the JavaScript code myself. I modified the wheel to switch directions between left and right on alternating spins which fixed the "non-spin" issue (it was because the angle going past 360 and a "spin count" variable not resetting). I also noticed by random chance the "wheel winner" was always 90 degrees away from the winner stated on the celebration screen. So I just coded things to tilt the wheel 90 degrees... and everything suddenly worked and looked great!

I used this version of the wheel for a week or two on the stream to positive results... but it was incomplete. So I decide to drag the working code back into ClaudeAi to make a small addition - an "end of game" jackpot award that I had been checking manually.

Aaaannddd.. it broke the MD5 formula again in the process. WTF? Fortunately, I got things working quickly this time using only ClaudeAi (though I did have to get a notably verbose about how it screwed things up in the process). Soooo...

Here's a link to the working MD5 Wheel Spinner that now does (or at least seems to cosplay) exactly what I wanted it to. The code inside the page is roughly 85% Claude/ 12% ChatGPT / 3% Me.

This all sounds like a huge pain-in-the-ass, but it did allow me to walk away with a much more nuanced and well-formed opinion on how LLMs can be used successfully for small web projects with low impact that need zero scaling. But, with positives, come a few caveats :

if you aren't willing to audit shit, you're setting yourself up for a bad result
unless you know how to code to "baby things along", a lot of shit will still break and almost always be imperfect at best
it did a LOT of the work I didn't want to do/relearn (primarily "pretty" CSS UI code) and would have never bothered to do, and gave me an overall improved product
considering I'd have had to do all of this myself had I decided to do it (big nope), it absolutely saved me 3x+ time
my little indie user game base is happier
This didn't burn me out mentally like coding from scratch at the moment

..and after this initial experience, I actually found a couple of other use cases for ClaudeAI / ChatGPT where they save me quick spurts of time in my REAL job -

If I have the CREATE statement to a wide SQL table and need to create an initial insert statement (no, I'm not going to use INSERT *)
If I have a field list in one language (like HTML, JavaScript, Python, or SQL) and need it converted quickly to the other
It's good at creating Python lists and dictionaries from data
If I need JSON field quickly plucked out of a formatted JSON string, it's solid

..and that was it.. until yesterday when one of my favorite bloggers / social media folks posted like his 17th blog posts since I posted my last, and motivated me to get my ass in gear.

So yesterday, as a refresher for this here blog post post, I tried the new Claude Sonnet 4.5 model to create the following quick webgames for my game :

Hash Scrapper - an alternative game for my Twitch players to participate in to choose an auditable winner using MD5 hashes in a modified "battle royal". Pretty sure this was 100% Claude Sonnet 4.5; huge time save; easily 5x+ savings

Steal or no Steal - a "post wheel" prize game I plan to sporadically use. This one was a little stickier but still had what I'd estimate to be a 3x+ time save. But to get there, things :

Shit the bed a few times during generation.
Originally gave away the winning box accidentally.
Boxes were in order "high value to low" instead of numeric order by box number.
Original shuffle I asked to implement wasn't suitable so I had to manually intervene
I had to drag it between Claude 4.5 and ChatGPT 5 when Claude tried using a function name with the same name as a variable name repeatedly.
The model lost part of the CSS code somewhere along the way and I had to manually create a few lines.
I also had to modify JavaScript to reset a variable it forgot about.
My previous experience babying the MD5 Wheel helped here

2025 Triple Crown Horse Selector - All ClaudeAI 4.5; it did the research of Triple Crown racers and created a working page within like 2 iterations. I know horse racing pedigrees relatively well, and it looks like it probably got the research right but honestly if it didn't it doesn't really matter for game giveaways... 6x+ savings

..so that's it! Per the usual : Use any and all of these webpages however you would like (but of course at your own risk)!

Conclusions -

I would have only ever written MVP versions of this stuff manually that would have looked like shit without LLMs and I'd have been fine with that
I'd never pay someone to do more than the MVP version I would have written manually
I fed LLMs precise "logic" on how I wanted things work in almost all instances; I have a bad feeling they would have gone rogue had I left them to their own devices
My player base (which supports my niche, indie ass game) is having a better time because I mildly use these tools

So no - I'm not going "full LLM honk", and I will absolutely openly shit on any company replacing workers and creatives (trust me, my blog art is my own

) with LLMs. But I also drive less than 2000 miles a year (about 1/7th of an average US citizen) so I'm not going to feel overly bad about running a few LLM queries now and again to keep my loyal indie game supporting playerbase happier as well as keeping me from burning out in the process when every damn company is cramming LLMs into every orifice of every fuggin' thing we use anymore for no good reason.

And yes - I'd happily give up my handful of LLM usage tomorrow if the whole damn thing disappeared into the ether and took the environmental and psychological damage they bring with them, but I fear that particular LLM horse has sadly already left the barn.. thanks again techbros and capitalists!

POTPOURRI

Meet the new coder; same and hopefully as clever as the (very) old coder

bubsmeany

@bubs@undistinguished.com

2025-07-16 13:14:11

The least surprising thing about the AI "revolution" is the number of experienced tech-leaders pushing their departments to go all-in "vibe coding" to help unlock those sweet, industry-promised 5x+ production gains.

Doesn't that mindset go completely against everything these same sycophants have preached repeatedly that "coding shops should abide by rigid, well defined coding standards?" Of course it does! But hey - once most folks begin licking that profitable corporate boot, they acquire a taste for it.

horrible drawing of a guy looking doubtfully as someone says to him - yeah, I got some more vibe code from product development for you to comb through..

"Make sure every coder in your department can work every part of the code" has been the mantra for well over a decade in corporate America. Translated : "we wanna make sure we can keep the shop hopping at close to full capacity when you eventually burnout.. Or worse.." And don't even think about implementing a math/logic based formula in the code you develop, even if it cuts runtime and offers better scalability... that's considered "clever code", and never has a dirtier term been muttered within a "real corporate software development department!" Doubt that? Go drop that term on the socialmedias where all the "I've never produced real code outside of education or my job" folks haunt; they hate it more than doctors hate those 5 weight loss tricks click bait ads espouse.

Anyhoo, back to the AI + software coding/dev portion of my rant - how does this all end? Well, with corporate 'Murca involved, my guesses are :

An overall reduction of pure coders/devs
Little chance for employees to develop and enhance on-the-job coding (and, more importantly, dev) skills with even more reliance on SaaS "out of the box solution" trash
Most remaining coders/devs stripped of what little creativity was left in their job and simply troubleshooting, refining, and attempting to standardize AI developed "vibe coding" handed to them via product owners and "thought leaders"

..hmm..say.. if you replace "vibe coding" with "Excel VBAs" that last dot-point sounds an awful lot like an even more boring version of early 2000s corporate America... eek!

...and the second dot-point? Well, that kinda implies that "ya kinda gotta really love creating things with code and learn it on your own time really well to even get a shot at making it a profession".. The exact mindset of old-school 80's and 90's hobbyists.

But most notable is the first dot-point : less overall opportunities to code/develop, period.

If you haven't sussed it out from my ad nauseum whining, I'll be quite frank here : IMO working for corporate America blows ass, and trusting them now is a bigger fool's errand than ever. So.. what are the alternatives? My go to advice (as a part time indie-game dev) - create your own thing! Game.. write that SaaS "plug and play" solution.. contract firm.. Anything! Of course, that's not always easy or realistic for tons of reasons. So aside from that, what should you do to best protect yourself if you reeeaaalllyy do enjoy coding/developing? Well...

AI shills love to say "learn to rely on AI to help you code", but that's probably a horrible path to follow unless you actually get to "create" the product instead of simply implementing someone else's product vision and then gutting through their AI vibe code.. it may allow you to hold onto a bad job "professional debugger" position, but for how long? And you think code requests are unrealistic now?! Hah!

Contrary to line-towing experts, I'ma recommend to embrace well designed, math-heavy "clever coding" techniques and wield that ability like a weapon. Because sure, that "bland ass, generally non-efficient and busted ass AI code usually generated off of hyper generic code" can work with proper tweaking.. Maybe. And when it does, it can scale some POCs out to full blown working models using horizontal scaling with proper debugging and oversight. Buuuuttt...

.... when some of those models get too large and their computing cost gets too high, I'm damn sure the corporate answer is gonna cease being "just throw more compute at it" and morph into "we gotta stream-line this code asap." And if you're adorable enough to think a company drunk on cost savings wants to bring on a huge consulting firm to "properly rewrite things" at this point in the process, my suggestion is for you to drop everything and jot that into your dream journal and go take your unicorn for a spin.

But the person that has the best chance of keeping the chaos under control affordably by patching without a full-blown rewrite? Well shit - that's a marketable set of skills very few people will likely have going forward. And while those skills won't garner you the asinine amount some of these new tech-slurping AI carnival barkers will get, they may at least somewhat gleam that odd cube of coding creativity combined with steady work. It may not always be "fun", but at least it's a bit more specialized and engaging (bonus points : it'll confuse the shit out of AI, because it doesn't have enough similar reference points to cosplay expert like it currently does using "vanilla" code).

So yea - potentially meet the new coder; same and hopefully as clever as the (very) old coder.

POTPOURRI

What.. you're not "grind to shine"-ing?!? Are you even LinkedIn-ing brah?!

bubsmeany

@bubs@undistinguished.com

2025-07-16 13:14:15

My daughter was recently offered a PhD-tract STEM graduate teaching position with a full stipend. My wife and I agree that it's an amazing opportunity, and are encouraging her whole-heartedly to pursue it even if it "pushes back" her professional career.

"With such a competitive and technical job market, aren't you afraid she's losing out on valuable work experience..."

horrible drawing of a guy getting slapped for saying the above sentence

No.. hell no...not at all.. absolutely frigging positively no! Back to the LinkedIn "professional influencer" mines with that psychobabble BS you sleeper-cell corporate shill.

On that note : LinkedIn culture is fascinating to me. That place has it all - Over-caffeinated AF recruiters, 26 year old life-skill coaches, non-persuasive "influencers", MLM product "CEOs", and never-employed "thought leaders" all trying to out-meme / "hot take" one another. Boot-licking mid-level managers cosplaying "industry pillars" in hopes of catching the eye of their 34 year old CEO who most recently posted shirtless pictures of himself from his 3 week ayahuasca retreat with his third wife. Ex-Facebookers who have likely been blocked by their entire family reply-guying political trash to everyone within arms length alongside recently laid-off schleps with no severance thanking their ex-employee for "such a great opportunity to grow". VC guys telling you if you aren't working 60+ hours a week from the office 90 minutes away from where you live you "aren't grinding hard enough" in the same scroll-read as boomers that "made millions" without "any of that technology witchcraft." All under the guise of "professional networking."

The "real job market", IMO, sounds like ass. So what's the rush to get there? Especially given that (if you believe my past rants) AI is a comin' (even if it sucks) like it or not...

..oh also : if you weren't aware, the current job-market absolutely blows ass ATM anyway.

With all of the chaos surrounding employability, I'd argue it makes little sense to look for an entry-level job in this rapidly changing landscape if you have a paid-for, upper education alternative. Also - working hand-in-hand with fellow STEM PhD students and professors sounds a lot more challenging and mentally rewarding than dilly-dicking around with a shit company that is actively working to outsource your job or, alternatively, replace your "skilled labor" with the same LLM you are training.

"Worst" case scenario? My daughter comes out the other side of this entire PhD endeavor even more intimidatingly smart than she is now. And, while stuff like that may frighten the trad-wife incel crowd, anyone with a grain of common sense and self-worth realizes the value of "book learnin'"; education and thought are two of the few things corporate America can never strip from you regardless of hard how they try.

So with all that on the table I just wanna say loud and proud to my amazing daughter - you go girl!

POTPOURRI

Awarding Assholery : A widely accepted but completely unacceptable Email pastime

bubsmeany

@bubs@undistinguished.com

2025-04-10 03:38:09

Disclaimer : I generally deplore email as a form of communication and I pretty much always have. Spams, scams, and "thank you ma'ams" (as well as a lot of other shit that doesn't rhyme quite as nicely) are all culpable toward making email a hot mess. "But filters ..." I hear folks cry like marginally wounded animals fortunate enough to escape a bear trap with the majority of their appendages intact. But the fact legitimate sites ask you to "check your spam filter" for missed correspondence only confirms this weapon of protection is oftentimes too blunt. And while it's easy to blame the "worst email" offenders like those I mentioned above, far too many legitimate websites only compound the issue.

An amazing online community I want to be involved with that requires an email confirmation? Sign me up! A super cool blog that wants my email address to continue reading? Well that's.. passive aggressive.. Not sure why it NEEDS my email address but.. Okay? 15% off my first order and future discounts via email? Ehh.. we all like to save money...

horrible drawing of a stick figure running a lot of letters to an already overflowing mailbox

...aaannnndd... now my inbox is an absolute clusterfuque. Sure - there's an argument to be made that it was all my fault. But I'd retort by adding I shouldn't have to sign up for everything, everywhere, all at once to squeeze what little bit of enjoyment out of this horrible-ass 2025 internet experience as I can. Maybe there's a middle ground to be had? I have.. thoughts..

I operate my own website based game that sends its players sporadic emails. When a player signs up initially for an account, I send an email confirmation. When a player needs to reset a forgotten password, I absolutely send them a password reset email. And.. ? That's it. That's the list. I won't send a player anything they don't expect.. because I completely, hundo p respect my player base.

"But newsletters are a different beast..." Well, okay... ish... But are they really? Almost everyone in my immediate universe would rather read a creator's takes on a well formatted website instead of an inconsistently formatted email client. Oh wait? That's offered.. but only after I sign up with an email address? Well - that sucks phat ass, especially if I'm being sent an email EVERY... DAMN... TIME there is a blog update.. or new merch drops... or there's a new sponsor to pimp... etc.

And, yah, I casually doled out some "alternative facts" a couple of paragraphs prior - I totes understand the concept of email advertising and why newsletter folks want my email address to send me garbagio constantly even if I send that shit directly to my spam folder. I'll opine eventually on the "phantom engagement" models many third-party advertisers employ to prop up sketchy business props like "email advertising" and "podcast advertising". But what if you aren't one of these (intentional) agents of inbox "phony engagement" chaos and actually care about your user-base? Here's a thought :

If an individual doesn't respond to an automated email after XX attempts in a row, automagically cut the blast rate.. rinse, wash, repeat. Example : a daily email (please don't do that.. but) that goes ignored for 14 days in a row would turn into a weekly email... which if ignored 12 weeks in a row would turn into a monthly email.. etc.. you get the idea. And if a person that was previously ignoring emails reacts a couple of times in a row? Well - move that person back to a "blastier" tier.

And I realize no third-party bulk email senders (which most newsletter honks rely on) offer this sort of customer "quality of life" hack... because... ? Well, sending a metric fugton of emails is relatively simple. Customer service and product nuance is a much, much trickier (and expensive) beast.

Now that helps explain some of why our inboxes are a fuggin' mess. But as lame ass media consumers and small-time internet schleps, our options are limited... in theory. In practice? Absolutely not.

We all gotta start working towards a better experience because the one we have now is fugging EXHAUSTING. If you run a site, don't be embarrassed to wear the "quality of life" things you do to offer your users a better experience on your damn sleeve. Let's all work to collectively and passive-aggressively expose the "secret assholes" that happily bomb their "supporters" inboxes. And if you don't run a site - stop supporting anyone/anything that doesn't respect your mental well being.

And no.. I'm not one of those "never support consumerism at any cost" turkeys - I personally don't mind being the collective consumer+product under the right circumstances (and, as such, I support multiple podcasts and websites via direct donation). But when I become part of a simple "numbers game" that turns into a mini-propaganda machine simply to drive traffic?

I quit Twitter and Meta products for those reasons and, IMO, an indie creator being a "non-corporate yet still inconsiderate dillhole" isn't a "good enough" reason for me to support them even if I agree with their message.

And if you are the sort of indie creator I am unintentionally referencing with this blog post? Seriously.. just be better - the people that love you and your message deserve it.

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