Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Some quality wordsmithing found in the wild:
transcript
@MosesSternstein (quote-twitted): AI-Capex is the everything cycle, now.
Just under 50% of GDP growth is attributable to AI Capex
@bigblackjacobin: Almost certainly the greatest misallocation of capital you or I will ever see. There's no justification for this however you cut it but the beatings will continue until a stillborn god is born.
university where the professor physically threatened me and plagiarized my work called to ask if i was willing to teach a notoriously hard computer science class (that i have taught before to stellar evals as a phd student^[evals are bullshit for measuring how well students actually learn anything, but are great for measuring the stupid shit business idiots love, like whether students will keep paying tuition. also they can be used to explain the pitfalls of using likert scales carelessly, as business idiots do.]). but they had to tell me that i was their last choice because they couldn't find a full professor to teach it (since i didn't finish my phd there because of said abusive professor). on top of that, they offered me a measly $6,000 usd for the entire semester with no benefits, and i would have to pay $500 for parking.
should i just be done with academia? enrollment deadlines for the spring are approaching and i'm wondering if i should just find a "regular job", rather than finishing a PhD elsewhere, especially given the direction higher ed is going in the us.
Every time I learn one single thing about how academia works in the USA I want to commit unspeakable acts of violence
imo academia in the us selects for self-serious mini-tyrants. people unable to sleaze their way to an equivalent position in the job market, so they go with a position where their subordinates have no agency or recourse for inappropriate behavior and are entirely dependent on them for their funding and their career progress^[by standing up to my piece of shit advisor, i have left with just a master's degree after five years, despite definitely having enough research completed under this advisor to leave with a phd. i chose to stand up for myself and try to end this cycle instead of adding an acronym to my title. arguably a mistake, idk, there is a robert frost poem about this.]. the university system here seems to only care if a professor brings in grant money
if so, they can do whatever they want.
e.g. a year ago a student of mine with a documented, legally required accommodation was just straight denied it by a professor in my department. this poor student had to go through some equal opportunity claim just to have his accommodation met, and the professor is still there, having suffered no consequences.
maybe i should apply to a phd program outside of the us. i speak spanish (but slowly, y como un gringo) 🤷
😭
Found two separate AI-related links for today.
First, AI slop corpo Apiiro put out a study stating the obvious (that AI is a cybersecurity nightmare), and tried selling its slop agents as the solution. Apiiro was using their own slop-bots to do the study, too, so I'm taking all this with a major grain of salt.
Second, I came across an AI-themed Darwin Awards spinoff cataloguing various comical fuck-ups caused through the slop-bots.
simon willison, the self-styled reasonable ai researcher, finds it hilarious and a good use of money throwing $14000 at claude to create an useless programming language that doesn't work.
good man simon willison!
I mean it's still just funny money seeing the creator works for some company that resells tokens from Claude, but very few people are stepping back to note the drastically reduced expectations of LLMs. A year ago, it would have been plausible to claim that a future LLM could design a language from scratch. Now we have a rancid mess of slop, and it's an "art project", and the fact it's ersatz internally coherent is treated as a great success.
Willison should just have let this go, because it's a ludicrous example of GenAI, but he just can't help himself defending this crap.
Top-tier from Willison himself:
The learning isn’t in studying the finished product, it’s in watching how it gets there.
Mate, if that's true, my years of Gentoo experience watching compiler commands fly past in the terminal means I'm a senior operating system architect.
which naturally leads us to: having to fix a portage overlay ~= “compiler engineer”
wonder what simonw’s total spend (direct and indirect) in this shit has been to date. maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?
maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?
Probably. Beyond throwing a shitload of cash into the LLM money pit, Willison's completely wrapped his public image up in being an AI booster, having spent years advocating for AI and "learning" how to use it.
If he admits he's wrong about LLMs, he has to admit the money and time he spent on AI was all for nothing.
he's claiming he is taking no llm money with exception of specific cases, but he does accept api credits and access to early releases, which aren't payments only when you think of payments in extremely narrow sense of real money being exchanged.
this would in no way stand if he were, say, a journalist.
if you call him an AI promoter he cites his carefully organised blog posts of concerns
meanwhile he was on the early access list for GPT-5
Good sneer from user andrewrk:
People are always saying things like, “surprisingly good” to describe LLM output, but that’s like when 5 year old stops scribbling on the walls and draws a “surprisingly good” picture of the house, family, and dog standing outside on a sunny day on some construction paper. That’s great, kiddo, let’s put your programming language right here on the fridge.
Sigh. Love how he claims it's worth it for "learning"...
We already have a thing for learning, it's called "books", and if you want to learn compiler basics, $14000 could buy you hundreds of copies of the dragon book.
$14,000 could probably still buy you a lesser Porsche in decent shape, but we should praise this brave pioneer for valuing experiences over things, especially at the all-important boundary of human/machine integration!
(no, I'm not bitter at missing the depreciation nadir for 996-era 911s, what are you talking about)
I’ve learned so much langdesign and stuff over the years simply by hanging around plt nerds, didn’t even need to spend for a single dragon book!
(although I probably have a samizdat copy of it somewhere)
"Engineering a Compiler" is a better read than the Dragon Book anyway
oi no spoilers ;p
That the useless programming language is literally called "cursed" is oddly fitting, because the continued existence of LLMs is a curse upon all of humanity
New Loser Lanyard (ironically called the Friend) just dropped, a "chatbot-enabled" necklace which invades everyone's privacy and provides Internet reply "commentary" in response. As if to underline its sheer shittiness, WIRED has reported that even other promptfondlers are repulsed by it, in a scathing review that accidentally sneers its techbro shithead inventor:
If you're looking for some quick schadenfreude, here's the quotes on Bluesky.
Should've called it The Adversary
Nah, call it the PvP Tag.
These things look dorky as fuck, wearing them is a moral failing, and people (rightfully) treat it as grounds to shit on you, might as well lean into the "shithead nerd who ruined everything" vibe with some gratuitous gaming terminology, too.
Apparently the hacker who publicized a copy of the no fly list was leaked an article containing Yarvin's home address, which she promptly posted on bluesky. Won't link because I don't think we've had the doxxing discussion but It's easily findable now.
I'm mostly posting this because the article featured this photo:
I was curious so I dug up the post and then checked property prices for the neighbourhood
$2.6~4.8m
being thiel's idea guy seems to pay pretty well
Certainly a lot more money in that, than scouring github for code you can put into urbit.
Belgian AI fails. So there is a big kids pop group popular in Belgium/The Netherlands, called K3. They used genAI images for their show. And apparently it created images of them with with both bikinis and headscarfs at the same time. According to this article https://www.nu.nl/muziek/6368424/k3-geschrokken-van-ongepaste-ai-beelden-tijdens-optreden-jammere-fout.html (in Dutch sorry) lot of people apparently were mad. (I have not seen mad people myself, so not sure if it actually was a problem, and how many people are mad over the four main reasons to be mad possibly (being, 'islamisation', immodesty, being insulting to Muslims, and feeding genAI crap to kids while you are one of the biggest acts around (and can certainly afford professional artists), so take into account this is likely a nothingburger))). I was amused to read first that they had shown inappropriate images, and then read it was just headscarves and bikinis.
e: also note for context, nu.nl is a news site, but usually the quality of their articles isn't the greatest, not a lot of actual journalism, and a lot of bias towards the establishment and a tendency to mainstream pro the current social order stuff no matter how out there. (They had articles going 'no the inflation isn't due to companies rising prizes, as not all inflation is because of that) and a tendency to post a lot of gossip like shit. (nos.nl is our big main news site). And their source, shownews is worse. It is basically on our fox news style tv channel. (they have an eveningshow 'vandaag inside' which is basically causing the people who watch it to become nuts in the fox news style way, esp elderly people. Weird transphobic rants, anti-woke shit, contrarian idiots who don't realize they are idiots but are brave truthtellers, all brought in a 'bar style' sort of setting. Watched some of it (really funny to hear them say leftwingers don't watch their shows) and every hour of it would require several ours to explain why almost everything they say is wrong)). I'm trying to provide context for where my poor country is going.
‘islamisation’, immodesty, being insulting to Muslims, and feeding genAI crap to kids while you are one of the biggest acts around (and can certainly afford professional artists)
Considering those AI-generated images are hitting a pentafecta(?) of ragebait, I'd be shocked if this didn't ignite backlash.
Tbh, from looking it up it seems to have just been a Muslim rights org who complained it wasnt great (which seems fine), reading between the gossip lines. Also seems that the AI images were from the people who hired K3 to play not them themselves.
Nobody seems to have been mad enough to firebomb openAIs offices.
pentafecta(?)
it should be quinella but it isn't, and there isn't a nice name for it, unless you count something like "Super 5"
"Pentafecta" works well as a name, I feel - rolls of the tongue real easily.
oh no, this whole server rack is pentafected with daemons