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.)
The security blog I linked the other day has more criticisms of Anthropics mythos cybersecurity claims:
-Apparently Opus 4.6 may have found the FreeBSD Anthropic has made a huge deal about Mythos finding? And Anthropic didn’t clarify that there older model had found the bug as well: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/freebsd-cve-2026-4747-log-suggests-mythos-is-a-marketing-trick/
-More explanation about why Anthropic’s entire approach with Mythos and cybersecurity is more oriented around marketing than good (or any) cybersecurity practices. Also, the author makes the point that if you did have a tool that could rapidly refactor code into other languages, the solution to the vast majority of bugs and vulnerabilities Mythos found isn’t bug hunting one by one with Anthropic’s (much more expensive) LLM, it is to refactor code into a memory safe language and to make some boilerplate counter-approaches cheaper to implement. (I think the author is too credulous of LLM coding agents code quality here, but given those assumptions I think there point is correct.) https://www.flyingpenguin.com/how-sans-mythos-marketing-disappoints-defenders/
-Bonus, MCP (model context protocol, a standard for tools for LLM agents Anthropic has developed and tried to push) is insecure by default and Anthropic has refused to fix it! Which is really hypocritical given that many of the “vulnerabilities” Mythos found are small things that aren’t actually properly exploitable under most conditions. https://www.flyingpenguin.com/ox-security-report-anthropic-mcp-is-execute-first-validate-never/
refreshing to see people tale actual deep dives and explain in detail why Mythos is nonsense
The MCP thing feels like an I like to leave my keys as a huge bulge under the welcome mat type vulnerability. It seems really easy to not do that and also something that is kind of out of scope for both lock makers and mat salesmen to address directly.
Maybe the MCP ecosystem is such that it’s hard to both avoid this and keep the impression that you’re doing magic and not just implementing a heavily annotated API, hopefully secured and with specific and well-defined functionality, and also they are all hacks.