I’m hearing different things from different quarters. My mom’s job spent most of the last year pushing AI use towards uncertain ends, then had a lead trainer finally tell their whole team last week that “this is a bubble,” among other little choice bits of reality. I think some places closer to the epicenter of the bubble are further down the trough of disappointment, so have hope.

the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc,

Is there a public benefit corporation in existence that isn’t angling to be a kinder, gentler form of a VC grift?

You make an important point. For instance, just imagine when Twitter finally goes down for good. Trump’s most provocative bullshit is archived in multiple places, but the output of dozens of little Twitlers that we might recognize and consider fairly important movement figures will probably be so much dust in the wind. Historians working on Nazi Germany can consult complete archives of shit like Der Sturmer if they need to; historians working on this period might be faced with a tattered quilt.

This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I don’t really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoples’ lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.

A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:

A man who is considered a TPOT ‘elder’:

TPOT isn’t misogynist but it’s made up of men and women who prefer the company of men. it’s a male space with male norms.

this makes it barely tolerable for the few girls’ girls who wander in here. they end up either deactivating, going private, or venting about how men suck.

I’d never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, they’re never going to grow up.

I don’t wish to belittle the author’s suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participants’ worth.

Didn’t really think about it until just now, but a load-bearing part of Yarvin’s work seeming erudite is him dropping in little bits of obscure trivia that may or may not have anything to do with the topic at hand

(One year later, the homelab is running a cluster of North Korean crypto-mining bots)

Why did this happen to ME?

It somewhat goes without saying that this is the natural outcome of Paul Graham and others emphasizing the creation of new startup companies over the utility and purpose of the products and tools that those companies make. An empty business for generating more empty businesses.

Willison is also subtly implying the claim that his judgment on the validity of this codebase and its massively tremendous test suite, after a few hours of admittedly distracted slop extrusion, is roughly equivalent to that expensive expert team working over multiple months. Given that the entire conceit of this article is him talking to himself, I will continue to hold my reservations.

It’s the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy – who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! – but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider “truth-teller.”

Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didn’t really want that anyway. I’ve been reading through JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: “Why be #1 when you can be #2?”

The future of ass is being set right now, and it’s ponderously flabby!

This one is just eternally ???!!!

Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the suckersVCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.

Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.

When I used to work at the farmers’ market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the “intactivists.” It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)… But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬

Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore)

Beyond the obvious and well-discussed material externalities, it strikes me that we don’t know and can’t yet know the true total cost of the LLM-driven development cycle. The manifestation of security holes and rewrites are possibly still years off in the future, maybe decades in the case of lower-level code. And yet, given industry practice and the mentality of most of the management strata, I have little doubt that such future costs will either a) be ignored completely and thus rendered true externalities or b) somebody else’s problem, I done got my bag, brah, see ya…

I’m sure it’s all meant to bolster a sales pitch to corporate clients that “this is YOUR AI, that YOU CONTROL!”

I’ve been wondering, since Rust has a more complex compiler that can take longer to run, and people are typically farming it out to a build/CI server anyway… are these otherwise accomplished vibe coders like Klabnik and the Oxide bros pursuing an experience similar to the REPL/incremental compilation of Lisp or Smalltalk? We’ve already discussed how the mechanics are similar to a slot machine, but if you can convince yourself you’re getting a “liveness” that you wouldn’t otherwise get with a compiled, rigorously type-checked language, you’re probably more than willing to ignore all that. I’m curious, but not curious enough to go pin one of these people up against the wall, or start poking the slop machine myself.

Lately, I’ve become more and more concerned that “systemd free” is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier

Fantastic bit. I wonder if the Computer History Museum will eventually be able to replicate this as the peak of the “gen-AI” era.

The whole culture of writing “system prompts” seems utterly a cargo-cult to me. Like if the ST: Voyager episode “Tuvix” was instead about Lt. Barclay and Picard accidentally getting combined in the transporter, and the resulting sadboy Barcard spent the rest of his existence neurotically shouting his intricately detailed demands at the holodeck in an authoritative British tone.

If inference is all about taking derivatives in a vector space, surely there should be some marginally more deterministic method for constraining those vectors that could be readily proceduralized, instead of apparent subject-matter experts being reduced to wheedling with an imaginary friend. But I have been repeatedly assured by sane, sober experts that it is just simply is not so

Maybe if we’re lucky, Alvin Meshits can team up wtih https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bum_Farto for the feel-good buddy comedy of the summer. Remember, the more you toot, the better you feel!

Vacuum-driven total intestinal eversion, nobody’s ever seen anything like it