MattyRad

This is very disappointing, I've been on Proton for a long time and just assumed a "high trust non-Google" email provider implicitly had integrity. Knowing that they're scummy almost defeats the purpose of using it for me.

Is it groundhog day? I'm sure I've seen this article at least as early as 2 years ago. My RSS feed is just the same cycle:

- New model released, this changes everything (plus thumb scaled metrics to prove it)

- LLMs kinda suck

- The bubble will burst any day now

- Are Plinko machines conscious?

- LLMs kinda rule

- Tech companies doing unethical things

- Someone discovers that, surprise, agents work better when given context (skills! mcp! monorepo! etc)

- Slop that successfully conned its audience and got past the filters

- And so on

This particular article is slop that got past the filters. See the title, see the jargon, see the insufferableness, see the total lack of narrative structure.

I guess that means we're due for a new model pretty soon.

Moreover, the parent comment linked to a decent PR presumably human made. If an LLM had written the PR, its description would be 9 paragraphs long and the code changes full of assinine comments.

If the author really did one-shot the PR, then the author must have also put in the extremely detailed and tedious work which would be required to tame LLM output for this specific repo, in which case, they actually put in real effort, applyed expertise and thoughtfulness, which is the whole issue at hand.

I agree with what I think you're implying, but if it needs to be started explicitly: converting a 100% handwritten, high quality repo to an different language via LLM should be trivial, because all of the hard parts have been reasoned through, and yet these conversions had mistakes, which is unimpressive. Rectifying the mistakes is non-trivial, and the LLMs did not have foresight to rectify them in advanced. (Expectant "you're right, I [sic] did completely fuck that up")

That said, I don't know if it matters at this point.... On top of Brandolini's law (mentioned elsewhere), what's more likely to happen is that developers' intellect, made available in open source, is just going to be harvested as context for different projects (I'm not taking about training data, I'm taking about devs literally cloning repos into an agent to harvest intellect).

This is a pattern which I hope manifests more observably in industries and hiring. Right now, tech postings tend to be a litany of arcana and hyper-specific tech. Developers rarely, if ever, have to understand domain knowledge x. But if we were able to "fan out" to "x tech enhancer" which requires 50% x domain knowledge and 50% tech knowledge, that sounds like it could be an effective position all around.

I see two issues with this however, which probably need to be addressed somehow:

- 1 is that, similar to tech, the positions may be seen as cush/low-effort... Like they did half the real work and are going to phone in the rest with LLMs. (Maybe this is already an existential problem, idk.)

- 2 is that domain knowledge is still difficult to aquire... (which may affect whether this manifests, not necessarily that older engineers like myself can jump in)

Nevertheless, if the pattern of dual expertise were to become common, it could open up a lot of opportunities, and is a positive vision of the future, which I think we pretty desperately need.

Ok, so 78% of developers are unsatisfied... I had to search for it because their link to 2025 was broken :/ but looks like last year it was ~75%, so ~3% increase in unhappy/complacent.... Not as high as I'd anticipated. And 2024 didn't appear to track the stat.

The internet is now a token cache, and we reap those tokens into agents, ethics be damned.

I just used 5.5 xhigh reasoning to make a massive implementation spec (for a vibey throwaway project/exploration, not anything important, burned 80% of the 5h window), now my Strix is in the process of implementing it.

I think there's probably low-hanging fruit to outsource reasoning from rote read/writes.... Just speculation though, I'm not a token optimization expert.

`npm...` and then instant tab close. The total lack of self-awareness regarding how much they're asking us to infect our toolchain is hilarious. I mean, consider that agents can and should be containerized.... Like, that's what competent engineers- the target audience- are doing. It's just so completely tone-deaf.

Yeah, the city search got cut off on mobile. Vibey and janky, but still it's a pretty creative idea.

I would have been very impressed if it made pixel art for cities on demand. If I were able to put in my hometown and see a delightful pixel art memory, I'd swoon and point to it and say "wow wee LLMs are pretty dope aren't they", but instead I'm just thinking this is yet another shallow project which will be abandoned tomorrow.

I smirked at the opening joke. But yeah, in true SNL fashion, it's toothless. In this case, they repeated the same joke, with a bunch of nonsequiters. Pretty typical.

SNL has never been funny, at least not in my adulthood. For instance, I got chummed by YouTube, and hooked into watching Tiny Horse, which was embarrassing for both the actors and viewers alike. The the skits play like pre-recorded improv.

I just skipped to a random part, 41:47, where the speaker is talking about the chasm of the old and the new, the before and the after, and our acceptance of the new status quo.

These match my own thoughts exactly. As much as I don't love them, I agree with the speaker.

For Factorio players: we used to live in Nauvis. It was beautiful but sparse. Then we outgrew it and unwittingly found ourselves on Fulgora. It is abundant but trashy.

And just like in a game, the rules changed and we adapt. That's what makes the game fun. Granted, that it's all our livelihoods on the line (very high stakes), but all things being equal, we have new challenges in front of us that we can either bemoan or accept.

> The hard part of software becomes ... user-interface design.

Seems to undercut some of its own claims, the idea that we need to design interfaces for end users is already antiquated.

Yeah the homepage toplines are pure vibeslop, they didn't even bother touching their own homepage. Trust is instantly vacated. Next.

Like the sibling comment says, text is always "true" in the sense that it's reacting to context correctly. So yes, true, but insufferable.

Ironically, what I'm working on a post-processing hook for colorizing and summarizing responses without degrading the session quality. So "truncating" = summarizing, "quantizer" = char limits and thresholds, "collides" = conflicts, "two oranges" is referring to the "alert level colors" where a second model (Haiku/Sonnet) colorizes text based on the perceived (or suggested) priority of a response's statements (e.g. "just so you're aware, I didn't commit" is fucking useless and it needs to be blacked out).

So the original insufferable statement translates to something like "The code that checks whether a text fragment is too verbose was conflicting with the part that colorizes the text."

P.S. Let me know if there's something out there that exists like this- something that adds a dimension like color or priority-assessments on a per-response basis. So far all I've seen is 2 dozen ~100k starred GitHub plugins that add zero value or make things worse.

I know we're all experiencing NDFSMs differently, like that's part of the whole problem, but 5.5 just gave me "The truncating quantizer collides two oranges", which is a new low for me.

If anything it seems worse. I'm experiencing about -10% insufferable jargon, but +30% more verbosity. It's unredeemable. There also seems to be even less structured output (headings, bullets, etc).

I agree that OpenRouter kinda sucks, but it took about 15 seconds to see that a few sentences got reverse-compressed into what is now this article, and it's slop.

The [content-based] trust layer of the internet is what we have deferred to this point, and what needs to be created (which is easier said than done, of course).

Personally I think a web-of-trust Keybase-style solution could work... But buy-in is difficult... you'd need some sort of "seed" strategy to make the app useful alack of 100 (a huge number) trusted friends.

That does indeed seem like LLM text to me, which makes a depressing article even morning depressing. Inauthentic and hypocritical.

I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt, but since we've set all ourselves on being cynical....

Jesus christ, the lack of self awareness is all so depressing. These Sisyphuses have doomed themselves to making NDFSMs deterministic.

Saying "more" seems generous. I don't trust Pangram at all, and I also don't trust the author at all. Both can be trustless charletans simultaneously, and I feel this speaks volumes about the state of digital media today.

Whether that chess repo is genuine or not genuine, legal or illegal, tasteful or tasteless, vibed or not vibed, stolen or copied, the signal to open source maintainers is clear: get off GitHub.

All I can hear is the nihilistic AI generated song at the end of the Malus talk. (https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...)

I admit that I read this stuff for self-soothing, although the self-sooth is not about AI going away, just that SotA will become expensive enough that everyone stops shilling digital garbage everywhere all the time.

If SotA does not go up in price (ala open weights), then everyone will continue to shill digital garbage AND the stock market will presumably get ravaged. So I'm really crossing my fingers about cost increase and- full circle- this hope is why I like to self-soothe with these articles (i.e. I cannot attest the articles' veracity but it makes me feel good that a human writer is speculating convincingly about instability).

That said, I sense that the ravaging is a forgone conclusion, unless someone pulls a(nother) rabbit out of a hat. I'd qualify agentic coding was a rabbit, so it could happen again I suppose.

That podcast was very timely and topical, thanks!

They even put it in quotes, because they know what they did.

Maybe just take out the word "traditional" and be honest: "This is not an operating system. We're redefining the term because it is convenient for marketing."

I actually had a great session with Gemini pushing back on the "Max 401k" advice. Summarized in my own words:

  - Why would I contribute tons more to my already decent 401k? If anything, I want to pull from it. I refuse to diminish the peak years of me and my family's life together just to be wealthy when I'm old and alone.
  - that's a good point, but know you'll pay tax on top of 10%
  - well I would have paid tax anyway if I just saved it, and 401k turned out to be more lucrative anyway. So the penalty is only 10% when tax is unavoidable timewise, paltry
  - true, but you yourself just mentioned how lucrative the 401k is over time. That money will not manifest over time if you pull it now
  - why would I even want to be rich when I'm old and boring anyway, life is happening for me right now
  - well that depends on what you consider old, you could retire early, use SEPP to access penalty free, say at 50
  - I actually wasn't aware of that as an option... The difference between my age an 50 isn't that large, at least not compared to 55/60. Very good then, perhaps I'll keep things as they are.

As is typical with AI, I can't attest to whether this is accurate, whether it's good advice, or whether I myself am financially illiterate (probably), but it did raise my confidence a bit, and legitimately talked me out of a hypothetical of using some 401k money to buy a better house.

Bummer that they didn't cite the product as being neither Open nor AI.

This is an agreeable article, sure, but the idea that an LLM fueled group or team will collectively have this discipline is... idk... bemusing and saddening at the same time.

"Involution" is spot on.