samvines, samvines@awful.systems

Waiting for Musk to turn up and announce “infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah” momentarily!

TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that’d do the trick…

Oh… Well that’s disappointing.

I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)

This has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren’t explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).

Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia

Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on… Come on guys it’s still architecture. Where are you going?

Missed this paper last week from Google

Funny how now that it’s widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their “it’s going to take your job” stance. Surely just a coincidence

Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!

So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour

So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?

All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.

It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)

Yeah exactly.

I want to pause ai because it’s a hypercapitalist project designed to further deskill and commoditise the middle class which coincidentally destroys the environment.

They want to pause ai because they believe that spicy autocomplete is intelligent and will one day soon manifest as a giant angry vengeful snek.

We are not the same.

I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags <thinking> </thinking> to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are “normal” output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like “what a human would expect to see in a thinking block” but it’s still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met with lethal force incredulous cynicism.

Just like any claim that “we don’t know how they work” - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we can’t comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observer’s belief is anything other than “you just got very lucky” most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin god…

they pinned his response as being an autistic defect.

I think it makes far more sense to pin the temporarily embarrassed millionaires over the orange site as psychopaths and cargo cultists.

Enjoyed Andrew Kelley’s rebuttal of the bun blog about moving from zig to rust

Some pretty good sneers in there like

Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs

Me too. Saved future readers a search

The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven’t considered that if no-one has any income they won’t have any customers. However, they do value geese).

US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…

From the same presentation talk of an AI bubble is blasphemy

Giving strong “pay no attention that man behind the curtain” energy

Three scenes and a comment:

1. Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.

2. I see another story: some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.

3. I’m still sweating and scrolling from my garden… I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI…

We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it

Prometheus the AI startup is a bit on the nose isn’t it?

Another explanation that feels likely to me is that all the monorail salesmen at the big corps know the gig is nearly up so they are rushing to IPO or raise new funds (Google did the same recently) to maximise the amount of $$$ in their bugout bags as they sail off into the sunset

Whitehouse gives anthropic "just draw the rest of the fucking owl" energy over Fable:

Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model’s guardrails can’t be circumvented. Security experts say that can’t be done.

With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days I’ve been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude

Wait anthropic are admitting that their model is basically the same as gpt 5.5 and the hype was undeserved?