RetroFedistewart, istewart@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
Joined: 2 years ago
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Posts and Comments by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
Posts by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
Comments by istewart, istewart@awful.systems
TechTakesBy 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates.
tick tick tick tick
(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)
The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable
or flooding the zone?
With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.
Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!
…damn, it’s not really very impressive. at all.
I still respect the definition he gives for magic, which he probably pulled forward from one of the many past ritual magicians he’s studied. Magic is the change in consciousness in accordance with will… but we must always remember that that doesn’t say whose consciousness, nor whose will.
Yeah, I began losing interest in Greer as it became clear that he was perfectly happy squatting in the middle of the red-brown alliance during the Trump era. His critiques of industrialism and unquestioning belief in technological progress broadly align with what we discuss here, but he will always coddle MAHA types and tale a shrugging “well, what can ya do?” attitude towards people like Trump, as it fits his preference for cyclical theories of civilization.
I noticed a couple months ago that he actually managed to dig Nick Land out of whatever tweaker den that guy’s been hiding in for a podcast, which says a lot about what he’s willing to indulge these days.
I think the rationalist beliefs are quite pervasive among mathematicians
Unsurprising, it’s quite flattering to believe that your area of study is what generates The One True Ethical Code!
The sweaty desperation on both sides is hilarious: both the Forest City developers for getting in bed with a dodgy hustler like Balaji, and Balaji for signing up with such obviously desperate people, whose reputation in the region has already been fairly well torpedoed.
For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they’re handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who’s ever scammed $5 in venture capital
I am not retreating from public writing
That’s OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.
I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).
The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.
The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.
The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!
The rest of his “accelerationist"/"decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.
e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha
“A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.
daniel self-flagella, more like
Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor
I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.
Most “regular” people who remain human will be eaten by digital Infinite Jests, where they can the be tippy top of made up status hierarchies
This person has a remarkable lack of self-awareness
Apparently “unions” = “communism”.
…so what’s open-source software, then?
More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it:
Maybe this decision makes sense for you as a business: take the risk. But it doesn’t make sense for me as an end user.
I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.
warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed.
Oof, yeah. I kinda like the side-notes, but the instances where multiple embedded tweets were side-by-side AND simultaneously interspersed with side-notes were so visually confusing that I quit skimming the article.
this is what overpriced housing does to an mf
Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc.
Or is that something more quirky, “Eqoist?” Sorry, if you’re making it that easy to misread while I’m having my morning caffeine, I’m not going to do you any favors
cruise ship, duh
brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored
And now that we’ve got Quantum within AI, just imagine everything you can haul within Quantum
Meanwhile, “AI agents” continue to be an opaque bundle of shell scripts shoved into a trenchcoat, with an inconsistent English-language translation layer stapled on top
Is this… technocracy in collapse…
Do they also block NYT, WSJ, Atlantic? I think not. Odd, but I didn’t trust dang and friends to start with. HN is not intended to be a neutral forum.
Seeing it extracted from context and called out like this helps me understand why I’ve bounced off Hofstadter multiple times over the years, despite his hype. It’s an artistic choice, sure, but 400 pages of this stuff without a break can be like beating your face against a brick wall after a while.
Cory, baby, my dogg, sure “enshittification” was a big hit, but you can’t expect that your rough-draft followups are automatically gold
you gotta give him a morsel of credit, he’s got his buzzword and he’s stickin’ to it
“Aging left” has lost “vitality” - he’s phoning this one in, straight out of the house style guide.
Hmm, he’s still sticking to tweet-threads on Twitter. We’ll know he’s fully cracking when he resorts to Ackman-style unreadable text blocks on there.
I’m not sure “one-shotted” is a good description for some of these folks. More like they bet against themselves in a rigged game of Russian roulette being played with a fully-loaded Uzi.
man, I got totally zonted in the zonte last time I was down there
yeah, you know, I’m really doing OK with just the one kidney. seriously. thanks for asking
As a layperson skimming the paper, this strikes me as equivalent to a dashed-off letter to the editor coming from someone in Knuth’s position. It’s an incomplete, second-hand reporting of somebody else’s results that doesn’t really investigate any of the interesting features of the system at hand. The implicit claim (here and elsewhere) is that we have a runtime for natural-language programming in English, and the main method reported for demonstrating this is the partial prompt:
and later on, a slightly longer prompt from a correspondent using GPT-5.2 Pro, that also loads a PDF of Knuth’s article into the context window. No discussion of debugging how these systems arrive at their output, or programmatically constraining them for more targeted output in their broader vector space. Just more of the braindead prompting-and-hoping approach, which eventually, unsurprisingly diverges from outputting any viable code whatsoever. This all strikes me as being an exercise similar to
The cargo-cult system prompt approach is like banging two rocks together compared to what a computational system should be capable of, and I would be much more impressed and much more interested if someone like Knuth was investigating such capabilities, instead of blogging somebody else pretending to have the Star Trek computer.
“They wanted me to build an AI, so I built a shoddy AI casing filled with used pinball machine parts!”
I think maybe you nailed it here. Being able to pretend they’re doing game theory/mapping out an escalation ladder allows Yud and our friends to feel like they’re in the same intellectual lineage as guys like Oppenheimer and Teller, manifesting the same sort of “objective” emotionless rationality. The big difference, you see, is that the AI will think so much faster than us that…!
lmfao
When they witness the skyrocketing economic growth enabled by American AGI, they will be clamoring for Westernization
I certainly remember that Microsoft Internet Explorer was almost the only game in town during the Mac OS 9 era (partly thanks to the infamous investment/rescue deal between Jobs and Gates), then promptly turned into a steaming, crash-happy pile of crap under the Carbon API in early Mac OS X once it was subject to proper memory management. I don’t remember OS X having a decently stable, widely compatible browser until Apple forked KHTML and came out with Safari. Web browsers being a sad, ugly pile of hacks goes back a long way.
A lot of younger people who are being conditioned to accept this stuff just weren’t around to experience how unstable and unreliable the vast majority of PC software was in the 1990s, and a lot of more senior-level people must have willfully forgotten. I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. The difference was that in the 90s, the major PC companies could port their enterprise-grade OSes with proper memory protection down to the consumer level, as hardware advanced and running a more complex OS kernel was no longer a big demand. Even then, it was an uphill battle, especially once you threw widespread networking and dubious internet-sourced malware into the equation.
End-user software has already seen a decline in quality and increase in user frustration during the cloud era, as many apps have become siloed blobs of JavaScript running on top of an extra copy of your web browser engine. I’m concerned that we’re headed firmly back to the bad old days now, without the release valve of better underlying software stacks on the horizon. The main solution will likely be to rip a lot of this crap out and start over (which is already a pretty widespread approach anyway, my credit union is going on their 3rd online banking “upgrade” in 5 years). But that completely zeroes out the “productivity” gains, not that anyone touting such things will ever measure it that way. I suppose the cost of re-stabilizing the software industrial base will be counted as GDP gains instead.
I think you’re actually right on the money here, nowhere near delusional, especially since you come from a Lisp background. I really appreciate Lisp (and Smalltalk) for the “live-coding” and universal inspectability/debuggability aspects in the tooling. I appreciate test-driven development as I’ve seen it presented in the Smalltalk context, as it essentially encourages you to “program in the debugger” and be aware of where the blank spots in your program specification are. (Although I’m aware that putting TDD into practice on an industrial scale is an entirely different proposition, especially for toolchains that aren’t explicitly built around the concept.)
However, LLM coding assistants are, if not the exact opposite of this sort of tooling, something so far removed as to be in a different and more confusing realm. Since it’s usually a cloud service, you have no access to begin debugging, and it’s drawing from a black box of vector weights even if you do have access. If you manage to figure out how to poke at that, you’re then faced with a non-trivial process of incremental training (further lossy compression) or possibly a rerun of the training process entirely. The lack of legibility and forthright adaptability is an inescapable consequence of the design decision that the computer is now a separate entity from the user, rather than a tool that the user is using.
I’ve posed the question in another slightly less skeptical forum, what advantage do we gain from now having two intermediate representations of a program: the original, fully-specified programming language, as well as the compiler IR/runtime bytecode? I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.