this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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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.
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Damn, I was hoping someone would finally recognize the true value of the ASCII-art goatse that used to show up on Slashdot all the time, before this inevitably came to pass
Word of warning, if you are squeemish, Charlie Kirk got shot, and closeup videos of him getting shot are over social media and people have not put warnings up. Managed to avoid it myself, but careful with autoplaying gifs, and use this link https://bsky.app/profile/nycsouthpaw.bsky.social/post/3lyiw3vi3yc2c for instructions how to turn that off.
The video's also all over Twitter, thanks to nonexistent moderation.
JFC if he dies he's the new Horst Wessel
According to this https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3lyj2o4cuvc2g , and I think a fox news news report he is dead.
He was shot while he was trying to blame gun violence on trans people and gang violence basically. In a moment of weird poetry.
But I just posted this here to warn people. A tip if you see something traumatic: https://bsky.app/profile/baroness.bsky.social/post/3lyj32qx2os2f go play some videogames to not sear it into your mind.
Anyway, doubt they will make the diaper guy the new Horst Wessel.
E: a awful.systems relevant lol: https://bsky.app/profile/lasergiant.bsky.social/post/3lyixmkzfuc2r
Why progressives should care about falling birth rates
2 weeks old, but regardless. The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote a very EA-adjacent article basically making the case for “progressive” eugenics. The studies he cites all derive from a behavior-genetic model of intergenerational value transmission, i.e. conservatism is “in the genes” & progressivism is literally getting bred out of the gene pool.
A masterclass in baiting liberals. Take note, NYT & Atlantic!
Nominative determinism counter-example
Just give the birthrates a cane or a walker if they keep falling. I don't see why we should care more than that.
OpenAI's trying to make an AI-generated animated film, and claiming their Magical Slop Extruders^tm^ can do in nine months what allegedly would take three years, with only a $30 mil budget and the writers of Paddington in Peru for assistance.
Allegedly, they're also planning to show it off at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places. By my guess, this was Sam Altman's decision - he's already fawned over AI-extruded garbage before, its clear he has zero taste in art whatsoever.
I mean he doesn't seem to taste food either, so it tracks
OpenAI’s tools also lower the cost of entry, allowing more people to make creative content, he said.
So, even working under the assumption that this somehow works, they still needed two animation studios, professional writers, and 30 million to get this film off the ground.
$30 mil budget
From what I heard that is twice the budget of a Studio Ghibli movie. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cost 1 million to make in 1984. (No idea what that would be adjusted for inflation).
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cost 1 million to make in 1984. (No idea what that would be adjusted for inflation).
I checked a few random inflation calculators, and it comes out to roughly $3.1 million.
Well you have to assume they need $29 million alone for humans doing color correction to make it less yellow
I hadn’t seen this article yet about the hardware economics underpinning the LLM hype, but it’s really pretty good https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/articles/how-to-use-computing-power-faster
Heard about the below last night; apparently survivors are forced into arbitration, so only the dead can sue. IANAL but thats pretty messed up.
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.
I got paid $2700 for teaching a semester. Adjuncting sucks. It doesn't get better.
Even if you finished, all the postdocs I know had their NSF starter kit yanked.
sorry my friend, that is really brutal. wishing you the best. ❤
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) 🤷
😭
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!
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
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.
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)
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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.
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