lqstuart

Too bad they don't care so much about factory worker safety or slave labor

I had a TI-89 in high school. I was that kid.

The “$500B AI labs” are also predominantly ~200 person Chinese teams…

Buried pretty deep in the article

> “The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Lichtman says. But now he and Tao have shortened the proof so that it better distills the LLM’s key insight.

I guess “ChatGPT came up with a novel approach to a problem that later turned out not to be totally stupid and terrible for once” isn’t as catchy of a headline

What do you call the law that you violate when you vibe code an entire website for "List of 'laws' of software engineering" instead of just creating a Wikipedia page for it

My company has four (4) vibe-coded dashboards to monitor AI tool usage.

We have made no revenue, let alone profit from any AI feature. However, some curiously under qualified people have been hired into new “AI” themed roles with seven or eight figure comp, and we seem to be preparing for major layoffs in the next 30-60 days. Presumably those new roles will be safe.

I switched from Windows to Linux because I got a Steam Deck, which caused me to realize that the only games in my library that don't also run flawlessly on Linux are the ones that have invasive anticheat that I'm really not comfortable installing.

Having to enable TPM or device integrity or whatever it is on my own computer just to run my own games is just too much power to hand to some garbage corporation that shits on its users. Rubbed me so far the wrong that way that I gave it up. The fact that Win 11 is no longer just an easy and hands-off solution that "just works" but is bloated with dark patterns and "AI" bullshit certainly helped cement the decision.

you mean the $5 billion they've generated off of the $73 billion they've raised?

yes, because who ever heard of an AI leaking passwords or API keys into source code

if an idea can't be vibecoded in under 10 minutes, it's not worth pursuing. Checks out

Claude Code asked me for blanket permission to ‘rm:*’ and “security find-generic-password” within the same hour or so last week. When I’m ready to quit my job I’ll just let it go hog wild and see if it can get to my next stock vest without getting me fired

This isn’t how deep learning works. You can’t just “adjust weights” for some random user/product.

I feel like even otherwise intelligent people these days think these chatbots are Westworld-like programmable AIs and not pieces of shit that barely run or work. There is no tech monolith that’s getting advanced and gaining new capabilities. There are some very smart people who have switched from building ad recommenders or autonomous vehicles to building KV caches and reinforcement learning systems, and then in a different department there are the same people who built ads systems at whatever big tech company that will build the same shit at OAI etc.

I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard.

I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool

I love this podcast, I've listened to it all the way through probably ten times.

That acoustic guitar riff followed by "Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome" is how I'll know I'm dead and I've arrived at the gates of heaven

We just haven’t figured out how to use it. You wouldn’t try to create an entire project out of IDE templates, but how many “low code” attempts were there to do just that at some point?

I think there are phases in a project’s lifecycle where it’s more appropriate, at the very beginning and very late. I do not think junior developers should be using it, because it is much much harder to learn and it kills productivity having senior developers review 3000 lines of slop. Just stuff like that needs to be figured out.

I was in the “AI is grossly overhyped” camp because I work on large distributed deep learning training jobs and AI is indeed worthless for those, and will likely always be worthless since the APIs change constantly and the iteration loop is too cumbersome to constantly resubmit broken jobs to a training cluster.

Then I started working on some basic grpc/fullstack crap that I absolutely do not care about, at all, but needs to be done and uses internal frameworks that are not well documented, and now Claude is my best friend at work.

The best part is everyone else’s AI code still sucks, because they ask it to do stupid crap and don’t apply any critical thinking skills to it, so I just tell AI to re-do it but don’t fuck up the error handling and use constants instead of hardcoding strings like a middle schooler, and now I’m a 100x developer fearlessly leading the charge to usher in the AI era as I play the new No Man’s Sky update on my other PC and wait for whatever agent to finish crap.

It's always fun reminding people that the internet was invented by the US military

The only problem here is that "going from an F to a C in mental health" is vastly different than "going from a C to an A." It's very well known and well documented that antidepressants have very little effect on mild depression compared to say, exercise, but that F grade of depression tends to be a different beast with different causes.

That's not to suggest that exercise etc isn't great, just that society has come a long way in destigmatizing mental health and just being like "oh just take fish oil" to someone dealing with that kind of depression, either through shitty genes or childhood trauma or whatever, can be really harmful.

The ideal is that Microsoft's customers are not idiots who will lose their keys. But that's just not reality, and those customers matter more than using what is arguably the objectively correct design in a certain light

If you don’t like the behavior of a company voluntarily doing something, your problem is with that company. If you don’t like a company complying with the law, your problem is with the law. It is unreasonable to expect anyone or any company to break the law or violate a court order to protect you.

If you don’t trust the institutions issuing those court orders, that is an entirely reasonable stance but it should be addressed at its root cause using our democratic process, however rapidly eroding that process may seem to be.

The fourth amendment protects against warrantless search and seizure, it is not carte blanche to fill up your hard drive with child porn and expect Microsoft to fall on their swords to protect you.

It’s so depressing how right you are

The “Great Filter” is the fact that humans are nowhere near as remarkable nor “intelligence” as necessary as we want to think

> What is a compiler?

Might be worth skipping to the interesting parts that aren’t in textbooks

“Principal” at Microsoft (or Oracle) is “Senior” or “Staff” everywhere else just fyi

So it’s some brittle crap built on verl, which is already pretty much train by config (and makes breaking changes with _every single commit_), with no documentation, no examples, and no clear purpose? Heck yeah Microsoft

Hahaha I would have led with this honestly.

I’m the chief legal officer but at the end of the day I’m just like bruh, chill, who gives a shit

The biggest problem with “agents” as originally described is that they don’t exist, will most likely not exist in our lifetimes if ever, and meanwhile the bullshit peddlers keep quietly changing their separate definition of “agent” to the point where now it literally just means “an LLM.”

Like, for example, NVIDIA investing billions back into OpenAI so that they can buy more of NVIDIA’s hardware

"AI" is a $100B business, which idiot tech leaders who convinced themselves they were visionaries when interest rates were historically low have convinced themselves will save them from their stagnating growth.

It's really cool. The coding tools are neat, they can somewhat reliably write pain in the ass boilerplate and only slightly fuck it up. I don't think they have a place beyond that in a professional setting (nor do I think junior engineers should be allowed to use them--my productivity has been destroyed by having to review their 2000 line opuses of trash code) but it's so cool to be able to spin up a hobby project in some language I don't know like Swift or React and get to a point where I can learn the ins and outs of the ecosystem. ChatGPT can explain stuff to me that I can't find experts to talk to about.

That's the sum total of the product though, it's already complete and it does not need trillions of dollars of datacenter investment. But since NVIDIA is effectively taking all the fake hype money and taking it out of one pocket and putting it in another, maybe the whole Ponzi scheme will stay afloat for a while.

I tend to agree with you, but I hoped the field would start collectively figuring out how to be big boys with CICD and dependency management back in 2017–I thought Google’s awkward source release of BERT was going to be the low point, and we’d switch to Torch and be saved. Instead, it’s gotten so much worse. And the kind of work that the Python core team has been putting into package and dependency management is nothing short of heroic, and it still falls short because PyTorch extends the Python runtime itself, and now Torch compile intercepting Py_FrameEval and NVIDIA is releasing Python CUDA bindings.

It’s just such a massive, uphill, ugly moving target to try to run down. And I sit here thinking the same as many of these comments—on the one hand, I can’t imagine we’re still using Python 3 in 2035? 2050?? But on the other hand I can’t envision a path leading out of the mess making money, or at least continue pretending they’ll start to soon.