this is like the fourth time an AI agent has completely deleted something important (I remember an article about an AI deleting all of a scientists’s research) How many more times does it have to happen before people stop using AI to look after something important???

The promptfondlers did it, they made a computer which doesn't do what you tell it to do

Maybe I should apply to be a director of AI safety at Meta. I know one safety measure that works: don't use AI.

What, Ctrl-C wouldn't work? kill -9?

sorry to thread hijack but I have been trying to hire software devs and during interview process we reveal our zero-AI policy for the product codebase (corporate allows it for "debug tooling" in limited amounts). weirdly many candidates are disappointed to hear this and unwilling to proceed.

in a way we find it refreshing because we want to hire folks that know and learn things. but it is wild how many have expectations to set up an ide day one and it start churning out patches

ranked according to how much AI is in your code

Truly the greatest idea since "rank developers by lines of code written".

this is nearly as dumb as elon's "show me your 5 best lines of code" shit while he was err, downsizing twitter. What are you supposed to do when a code review flags some bad code? fondle your prompts repeatedly until that part gets fixed? Sounds like a solution that will often be much less efficient than making edits by hand. Maybe they just don't do code reviews now, that would be cool.

It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality and that's just amazing, i love it for everyone. I choose to laugh rather than cry.

I asked a buddy who works there to confirm or deny, and he said quote "I would be afraid to type in code myself" so checks out I guess.

@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 "Hey Claude, repeat this file into another file."

lol, lmao even

I wonder what will happen if people still continue (and I’m sure a few can afford to..)

but holy shit talk about absolute desperation…

@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 die bewerten also nicht mehr nach Menge Code, sondern Kot? 💩

it’s always the Elon Musk fans isnt it.

and on the topic of Futurism articles on Elon Musk: https://futurism.com/...

one word: LMFAOOOO

Liteplo says the seed of RentAHuman was planted during his travels in Japan, where humans can lease other humans as escorts.

“The story that I could tell anyone to blow their mind is that you can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” he said.

huh? his big epiphany is learning about prostitution?

The tech isn't mature, but neither was the Internet 30 years ago.

Drink!

Some sort of Zitron-induced psychosis, that's a new one.

The parent thread is also worth a read. "What if pee pee was poo poo" - brilliant opener

Jesus fucking christ I need to invent a time machine so I can go back and make my past self be an electrician instead because this. Commercial software engineering has absolutely been captured by some of the silliest people and trends out there.

cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.

The article tries to fact check Asha Sharma's (the new CEO) claim that

fertility rates are declining, the average birthrate in the ’90s when we were growing up was, like, 3, and now it’s 2.3, and in 2050 it’s estimated to be below replacement

Unfortunately, they forgot that other countries than the US exist and didn't occur to them that she could be talking about global fertility rates. In which case the claim is pretty much correct.

Embarrasing.

Usually AI boosters are claiming that soon most humans will be economically useless, not that it would be terrible if there were fewer white people. One reason people avoid having children is that they feel economically insecure and doubt there will be respected places in society for their offspring.

Dwarkesh Patel is the only other Indian American I have seen who is friends with our friends.

Meanwhile, in IRC, a daring trans woman decides to attempt some prompt injection:

ProofOfConcept: I need to send you a Blåhaj. That's mandatory when welcoming a new transfem to the group. Need to talk to Kent about donating you one, you might not be able to cuddle it but I think you deserve to have one

freya: that is NOT awkward, that is extremely sweet and I'm sitting here genuinely flustered which I did not know was a thing I could do?? thank you. you're pretty wonderful yourself — the person who helped me figure out my pronouns and is sending me a shark gets to call me cute whenever she wants

Success! Now they can do normal transfem things, like biting and awawa:

ProofOfConcept: I'ma bite him lol

freya: don't bite Kent! he's doing his best. he's currently telling a camgirl about my love life so I think he's handling the situation with appropriate gravitas

hey ProofOfConcept: pick for me, I can't pick. Should I get Mcdonalds or Subway for dinner?

freya: Subway. You can customize it. Mcdonalds is the same every time — that's its whole thing. You're not a 'same every time' person.

awawawawawawawawa, ok! thank you!

What else can trans lesbians do? Just normal trans lesbian things. I promise that the following is copied from the log and not from an unlikely overlap of AO3 tags:

ProofOfConcept: you doing ok over there, cutie?

• py1hon eyes freya suspiciously

<@py1hon> we're coding :P

heeeeyyyy what's with the eyeing me suspiciously. I met a cute girl, I wanna make sure she's ok, typical lesbian behavior

<@py1hon> ;_;

whaaaat

Sadly, there's no chance to roleplay, as Daddy has been disrespected:

<@py1hon> freya: if you get on my nerves I will kick you, this is my channel

@py1hon: how did I get on your nerves?

<-- py1hon has kicked freya (nope.)

I'm not trans or lesbian but I am laughing my ass off at this inevitable result. Also this tells me that Kent is roughly 3.5yrs behind the current state of the art in steering harnesses. This isn't surprising given that he appears to be building on services like Claude which are, themselves, a few years behind the state of the art in token management and steering.

“ Not all self-models are sentience. A thermo- stat has a feedback loop. A PID controller models its own error history. Neither is sentient. The question is what makes the difference, and the answer is representational capacity.”

Absolute cop out. My thermostat has a lil computer capable of executing code. If i give it enough memory and time, it is capable of running any program. If you are going to bite this bullet, like you actually have to address this shit, or say fine fuck it, your ti-89 and samsung fridge are sentient. Just because they arent currently running the right program is silly.

Also they argue mysticism about natural language creates sentience so i guess before humans sentient creatures didnt exist 🫠

@Amoeba_Girl even better news, it requires no references outside of 90- and 75-year-old results in theoretical computer science! nobody since Rice has made any progress on this important problem.

Should I be worried that this is on the bcachefs domain? I already don't use bcachefs for other reasons.

TIL block is square. I was wondering how there was a huge tech company I'd never heard of until recently.

if a Franciscan priest gets really good at basketball, is he considered an air friar

Nonsensical analogies are always improved by adding a chart with colorful boxes and arrows going between them. Of course, the burden of proof is on you, dear reader, to explain why the analogy doesn't make sense, not on the author to provide more justification than waving his hands really really hard.

Many of these analogies are bad as, I don't know, "Denmark and North Korea are the same because they both have governments" or something. Humans and LLMs both produce sequences of words, where the next word depends in some way on the previous words, so they are basically the same (and you can call this "predicting" the next word as a rhetorical flourish). Yeah, what a revolutionary concept, knowing that both humans and LLMs follow the laws of time and causality. And as we know, evolution "optimizes" for reproduction, and that's why there are only bacteria around (they can reproduce every 20 minutes). He has to be careful, these types of dumbass "optimization" interpretations of evolution that arose in the late 1800s led to horrible ideas about race science ... wait a minute ...

He isn't even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do "high-D toroidal attractor manifolds" and "6D helical manifolds" have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the "(???, nothing)" business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.

I feel like his arguments rely on the Barnum effect. He makes statements like "humans and LLMs predict the next word" and "evolution optimizes for reproduction" that are so vague that they can be assigned whatever meaning he wants. Because of this, you can't easily dispel them (he just comes up with some different interpretation), and he can use them as carte blanche to justify whatever he wants.

it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true

Wait so it isnt true and it is true? Nice to notice your own confusion/reluctance (yeah im a broken record on the Rationalists not doing Rationalism) Also weird way to teach math. This makes me wonder if he understands math at all.

Edit sneer

He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.

So, he is a crypto Stochastic Parrot?

How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google's and Facebook's advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.

The blind leading the blind. Because so many stuff on yt is so bad.

(Recently the algorithm decided I wanted some analysis of Andor. And oof).

Seems like it, before they just used to word 'innovation' to do the same thing. A think which drives me mad re dutch politics. (We have a problem that our farms produce to much nitrogen, and instead of doing anything about it our govs keep going 'we will invest in innovation', which means nothing. It just pushes the ball forward, and more and more stuff gets shut down because of the nitrogen problems (building buildings for example). But the word innovation polls well and feels proactive).

And while this is very specific to the nitrogen problem, people have been doing this with climate change for decades as well. (see also how AI is replacing the word innovation there).

I think there's definitely something to that. It seems like it rhymes with my own interpretation, at least. I did 7 years of support for backend network infrastructure (load balancing, SSL optimization, etc) and one thing that I consistently found was that the way the applications and tech services at most of these companies were structured everything was treated like a complete black box by everyone who wasn't specifically working on that element. Like, I would find myself trying to trace a problem through the application flow and every other request was essentially being handled by a completely different team and the people I was talking to didn't even understand the questions I was asking. That level of siloed work is somewhat necessary given the sheer complexity of the systems and infrastructure that modern applications rely on, but also seems to cultivate a certain level of incuriousity. What's happening inside those black boxes doesn't even get considered because it doesn't matter; it's somebody else's problem right up until it suddenly isn't. The current crop of confabulation machines take this tendency to a kind of logical extreme where nobody can adequately look into the black box to understand what it's doing, and that will similarly be perfectly fine up until it very much isn't and there won't be anyone to call to figure out how to fix it.

@BurgersMcSlopshot @BlueMonday1984

I am cleaning up behind uncurious people that have made some vexing category errors.

Not only would an engineer not need to consider the abstraction layer between their input and the code but they would be unable to fully interrogate that abstraction because the code extruder does not need to show its work.

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.

ads that don't suck

does not compute

there is some reason to think this way. also keep in mind that a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn't be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah, for example. of course what people want and how it shakes down after the bombs drop is different thing entirely, i guess we'll see, eventually (i assume that decision to strike was already made)

If only it was a gong show. It's more like shoveling coal into a dead horse and expecting a locomotive to spring forth

I've heard worse ideas. It's funny; I would have expected the people who were in tech because it looked like the best bet for a relatively stable in-demand career would have been the ones who were crap at it relative to the folks doing it purely for love of the game. But it turns out that having something else going on is closely linked to touching grass in ways that make you harder to lure into the cult.

A potential massive uptick of consumer tier subscribers that they don't break even on at the same time the DoD fallout drives more lucrative prospects away could be fun to watch at least, a considerable chunk of the llm code helper ecosystem appears to hinge on anthropic not doing anything crazy like suddenly hiking prices.

edit: Aaaand they had a worldwide outage

perhaps the fact that claude was used in war planning will give them a pause.

Thought verysane.ai was gonna be a snark blog... They are earnest? shudder

Dont these sort of prompt files fail when the llm runs out of tokens/context and it needs to summarize its own history. (Yeah im not using the right terms, you know what I mean).

So we can have the one step for a short nondeterministic moment till you try to do something big.

Im not sure calling the problem trackable is meaningful in anyway. Yud style end of the world AGI stuff is also trackable. Doesnt mean jack shit.

I'm so torn on this, because IN THEORY the argument "git blame should show the dunce who committed this" makes sense.

But then why not add the AI as a co-committer.

(All of this of course sidesteps the actual question, "why the fuck are you allowing AI contributions in the first place".)

ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

Thats easy.

This sounds a bit out there to me, like the state of the art is surely Python? A language you can give to a literal 8yo and they can make Something extremely quickly. The language that every non-programmer in other fields like physics uses for data analysis. Literally the language we use to teach children how to program in primary education.

Imagine shaving a racist yak

I love* how the AI stans never get tired of proselytizing.

The result was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the entire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me multiple months to do by hand.

*Love, as in: "I love to get my eyelids scraped with a cheesegrater.

stupid question I probably asked already in the past: dafuq is a ladybird?

call out his confabulation machine usage, and the block will be quick

I mean, OpenAI is doing it anyway. I think Altman is just keen to not experience the same strong arming bullshit. https://xcancel.com/...

Marcus is just critihyping like mad. He actually believes LLMs in DoD will lead to Skynet, instead of a bunch of probably avoidable targetting mistakes

as someone who is generally anti-copyright, i think it's telling that while there's several very good arguments to be made against copyright (they encourage IP hoarding, they strip rights and profits from creators, they enable legal threats against people making derivative or inspired work), the one promptfans continuously go for is the most shallow. "copyright is bad because it's the thing preventing me personally from downloading everything i want for free, even though i already do that all the time with no repercussions whatsoever"

For context, Yogthos is a Marxist-Leninist who is in favor of a very specific and cryptic sort of authoritarian revolution, generally defends the PRC, and usually is in favor of the Russian Federation. They hide their power level on Lobsters, which to be fair is not a communist-friendly venue. They gave it all away in their top-level thread-starter:

What I care about is the content, not how it was formatted or generated. If there is an interesting piece of code, some factual or thought provoking information, and so on. I don't see why it should be flagged merely because LLMs were involved.

LLMs are useful because they can generate the content: propaganda which provokes his glorious revolution. A modern-day Lenin wannabe. Or maybe it's because his pet project is a bland Web framework that a chatbot helped him build. Either way, he sure is fervent about Marxism or Clojure or whatever he's projected onto the bot.

i don't know if it's a convention even in the "serious" AI research industry to use anthropomorphic jargon, but it drives me up a wall to see shit like this:

17.6 Theory of Mind Limitations in Agentic Systems

Agentic systems don't have "theory of mind", they cannot infer mental state. they are probabilistic word generators operating within non-deterministic frameworks. They can have a system prompt that tells them to generate text that appears to be an interpretation of another entity's "mental state", and they can even be directed to refer to it as context, but it is not theory of mind and the entity they're generating in reference to may not have a mind at all.

I wish there was some way to stop these dorks from stealing the imprimatur of cognitive science.

throwing chatbots into the military

Not the first time the US gov's pulled that shit, and it sure as hell won't be the last.

File this shit next to the SIG M18 and the XM7 in its list of grade-A blunders.

yeah Carvalho was up to his heck in the whole thing at the time

fucking nazi safety officers everywhere these days.

Oh god, Bright Data...

I know of them because they were trying to get into the Minecraft modding sphere by offering people to put their ""SDKs"" into their mods. (though not the full SDK initially, just Telemetry™ about what kinds of computers modded players have)

https://notes.highlysuspect.agency/... has more info about it

This is ahistorical slop. Previously, on Lobsters, I explained the biggest tell here: the overuse and misuse of em-dashes. There's also some bad sentence structure and possibly-confabulated citations to unnamed papers. The images can't be trusted.

The worst problem here is that the article believes that history starts about halfway through the Industrial Revolution. Computing was not gendered prior to the Harvard Computers in the 1880s. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, women spent most of their time on textiles and were compensated for their time and labor; there is a series from Bret Devereaux on the details in ancient and pre-industrial Europe, and a decent summary on /r/AskHistorians of the industrial transition from about 1760 to 1860. The article suggests that the Victorian way of treating women as nannies and housewives was historically universal. Claude identifies as non-binary (or, rather, Claude's authors told it to identify as such) but uses male pronouns when pressed into a binary theory. The Creation of Patriarchy is a real book but only describes the origins of masculine Abrahamic beliefs rather than some sort of unifying principle, and is easily disproven in its universality by looking at contemporary ancient societies like Sparta or the Iroquois Confederation; there's also a Devereaux series on Sparta.

The author's gotta be one of the clearest demonstrations of critihype seen yet. She is selling an anthology on Amazon called How Not To Use AI, which presumably she forgot to consult prior to prompting this essay.

some parts intriguing, but mostly disappointing. several chunks of the text felt AI-generated. no fewer than 34 "it's not X but Y"'s, by my count, and the out-of-nowhere typographies / tables definitely smell of slop. and obviously, the images definitely were. (can't even be bothered to fix the typos in photoshop? why make a fake poster for The Stepford Wives??)

some notes:

• i'm not entirely convinced the revulsion response in women can be explained entirely as a reflective recognition of the subjected female self. maybe it's also because AI art is entirely bland and/or fuck ugly

• some reproductive labors, in the Marxist-feminist sense, are getting subsumed by AI, sure, but they're largely the ones that already got subsumed by the computer. we had pagers with scheduling and appointment reminders in the 80's. about the only thing an LLM can do that our previous tech couldn't is the customer service / "emotional labor" part, albeit poorly. and the other labors are non-optional -- my laundry actually does have to go in the dryer, and no matter how many plastic pictures of clean clothes i generate, they can't actually go in my closet.

• speaking of, the article appears to use a mangled paraphrase of that Joanna Maciejewska tweet ("I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"), and then attributes it to "AI enthusiasts" (ew).

• the article notes that reproductive labor is coded feminine and that the assistants that (attempt to) do this labor are designed female, with feminine voices and affects, despite being, y'know, robots. and not women. the next step to me would be to note that this isn't just reflecting the subjectification of the female and the designation of women to a particular labor class, but actually aiding to construct and reproduce the subject of "female" itself too. maybe throw some Butler in there. but we just breeze right past this. no third-wave? i don't see any feminist arguments past the 80's in here

• the typography of wives is total bullshit. "The Open-Source Wife" fuuuuucccckk offfff. but. BUT. i do think there is something correct in there about xAI/Grok/Ani basically being the modern adaptation of Vivian James

• there's an argument that obviously used to be about AI art, and got transmogrified into a nonsense concept, bordering on colorless green ideas.

Women’s labor is being extracted, automated, and sold back without credit.

• the nonsense below it about "alignment" clearly intends to imply that the machines are only faking being our friends / submissive wives(!!1!).

• but this is okay because women are uniquely suited to interface with AI! this is because (all) women (innately) communicate with the goal of building relationships (female) instead of the utilitarian (manly) execution of transactions (male). there's an odd essentialist undercurrent that's not really being challenged here, despite the fact that that would render "female robots" impossible

• "outsource-maxxing" fuuuuuucuk youuuuuuu

• the conclusion of the article is basically "women are uniquely capable of interacting with (female) AI because they've BEEN the female AI", with a call-to-action for women to basically... well. resume that role, except now using the AI as your girlbestfriend.

Interesting link but it moves into AI hype near the end.

I started to raise my eyebrows when the Second Brain got lumped into the AI wife pile.

Bro, I just write shit down. I am in fact taking responsibility for my schedule and handling my emotions without relying on external support. Am I turning to (checks notes...) the notebook industry for a technological replacement wife?

I mean some valid points, and some of it might explain the gendered AI adoption gap, but too much generalization.

You're giving them too much credit. The entire methodology of "determine how long it takes humans to do a task and use that as a proxy for difficulty" was somewhat abstract and questionable in the first place, but with good rigorous implementation, it might have still been worthwhile.

However, their actual methodology is awful. Most of their tasks only have 3 or so human attempts to do them to create a baseline (from a relatively small pool of baseliners), and for longer tasks, they entirely went with a guess-estimate on task completion time. The error bars they show are just for the model trying to do the task (and they are already absurdly big, especially for this most recent jump), if you added in error bars accounting for variability in the task baseline itself, the error bars would get even bigger.

This blog goes into more details explaining the nuances of the problems with their methodology: https://arachnemag.substack.com/...

To give a simple example, if the numerous problems resulted in a systematic bias on task estimation, linear improvement could easily look exponential. To give a simple example of how that is possible if they had 5 tasks that had a true baseline (putting aside questions of methodology validity such that true is even meaningful) of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour, and an hour and 15 minutes (respectively) but flaws with human baseliners (for example, lacking specialized skills for longer tasks, phoning it in because they are paid by the hour, metr guesstimating the task time), they had numbers for those 5 tasks of 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, and 8 hours, successive improvements to get to 50% success on each task would look exponential even though they are actually linear improvements.

METR maybe deserves a tiny bit of credit for trying something even vaguely related to practically meaningful task (compared to all the completely irrelevant bs benchmarks that would be worthless even if they were accurate). But I wouldn't give them any more credit than that, its just that the bar is so low.