The trope of somebody going insane as the world ends, does not appeal to me as an author, including in my role as the author of my own life. It seems obvious, cliche, predictable, and contrary to the ideals of writing intelligent characters. Nothing about it seems fresh or interesting. It doesn’t tempt me to write, and it doesn’t tempt me to be.

When I read HPMOR, which was years ago before I knew who tf Yud was and I thought Harry was intentionally written as a deeply flawed character and not a fucking self-insert, my favourite part was when Hermione’s death. Harry the goes into grief that he is unable to cope with, disassociating to such an insane degree he stops viewing most other people as thinking and acting individuals. He quite literally goes insane as his world - his friend and his illusion of being the smartest and always in control of the situation - ended.

Of course now in hindsight I know this is just me inventing a much better character and story, and Yud is full of shit, but I find it funny that he inadvertently wrote a character behave insanely and probably thought he’s actually a turborational guy completely in control of his own feelings.

To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.

To say you are above tropes is actually a trope

Also, you can one-step explain from this guide why people with working bullshit detectors tend to immediately clock LLM output, vs the executive class whose whole existence is predicated on not discerning bullshit being its greatest fans. A lot of us have seen A Guy In A Suit do this, intentionally avoid specifics to make himself/his company/his product look superficially better. Hell, the AI hype itself (and the blockchain and metaverse nonsense before it) relies heavily on this - never say specifics, always say “revolutionary technology, future, here to stay”, quickly run away if anyone tries to ask a question.

Steve

There’s no way someone called their product fucking Steve come on god jesus christ

“Philosophy & Music” are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.

Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.

I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.

And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?

This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.

Like it’s either you’re a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or you’re 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.

I know zero Americans though, so maybe there’s a skew there.

I haven’t worked in industry for a while now but from your accounts it seems like… nothing’s changed?

Sturgeon’s law very much applies to software engineers. I’m sorry but the vast majority of people in my junior cohort I wouldn’t hire to replace my lightbulb. Of course they’re all in on LLMs. They’ll be doing what they were doing best, generating tons of awful code they copied from somewhere else that the adults in the room will have to clean up later, just the generation and copying is now paid at a $100 monthly subscription.

Like seriously, it doesn’t matter even a tiny bit the code got generated by a bullshit machine when the code is Node.JS anyway. If you’re building a giant penis out of cow dung it doesn’t matter who your construction crew is and how good they are. And the industry is like 90% building giant penises than never come to fruition anyway.

as it’s apparently no longer safe for trans people or C++ developers

Sorry but Rust knowledge is now a hard requirement for visas so you better hit the book

This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.

Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.

Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I don’t fucking think so.

We’re unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldn’t you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after you’re gone? If you can’t spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then that’s a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.

And I don’t think there’s a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.

The fact that the first thing a new fascist regime does is promise Larry Ellison a bunch of dollaridoos answers a lot of questions asked by my “ORACLE = NAZIS” tshirt

CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). It’s a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called “LLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQL”

I didn’t have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy

We systematically develop benchmarks to study [the problem] and find that standard methods answer no more than 20% of queries correctly, confirming the need for further research in this area.

(Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)

Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.

I’d also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate “DATABASES AND ML” session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.

What, no, a vocal AfD supporter is a nazi? No waaay

Surprised Pikachu, sarcastically surprised Kirk, etc.

Imagine going on the Pilgrimage and all you bring back is an MBA and some motivational quotes, instant exile

But also, wtf how are they expecting this to stay secret and there being no backlash?

No, they bet on it not mattering and they’ve been completely right thus far.

That’s just the plot of the next Fast&Furious, only they’re grilling instead of picnicking

Furious Rex or something

I said “basic management skills”, like you might get to run a school board or something.

You’re aiming for Secretary of Transportation? Your rail network better be fucking immaculate

Could pain help test AI for sentience?

This question has far too many hypotheticals to even make sense as a question.

You might think that question has far too many hypotheticals to even make sense as a question.

Wow! That’s exactly what I was thinking!

But there’s AI hype to propagate.

Ah, alas then

and it looks like a shared account, maybe with his kids or something,

The idea that his kids would like to spend time with him in any capacity, much less sharing an account with a 50 yo dude who has already proven can’t build a character for shit is laughable at best

At least PoE builds are a real thing that exists

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

Hard to believe a game with that title could suck lol