Too many good sneers in this one.
Also, it was only yesterday that I learned that several great conservative thinkers on X thought that making a Harry Potter x Star Wars crossover with a genderbent character would be an exceptionally powerful cultural message that would greatly influence the outcome of the midterm elections. https://www.404media.co/republicans-learn-x-is-an-echo-chamber/
Sometimes you miss a few shots. Well, sometimes you miss 40 shots in a row with those anti-data center ballot measures. I’m sure their streak of bad luck will end eventually and they’ll find tons of people who love having data centers near their homes.
He could also read any exit poll and see that 56% of voters thought AI data centers were a crucial or major issue. Oh well, I’ll let him cherry pick a random out of context data point if it helps him cry himself to sleep at night.
I will not say the bubble has burst until OpenAI and Anthropic are dead.
Vibe coded websites really are the epitome of AI: there’s tons of flashy stuff that looks impressive at first glance, but shit starts breaking down with the slightest breeze. The reading progress widget was working perfectly for me at first, but then I clicked around a bit (the “see what’s coming” link in that widget straight up leads to a 404) and then it got stuck at 88% for me. The slider in the “Timeline Explorer” is also extremely laggy for me, with an update taking 1-2 seconds. There’s also some UI elements that don’t make sense, like the four options in the bar above the “Countdown to AGI Achievement” box are duplicated in the “AGI scenarios” sidebar on the right side immediately below. Sometimes the drop down menus from the top just open randomly when I’m clicking something else. Also some buttons break occasionally and I need to refresh to fix them.
Even though my own work does not involve any coding, I have seen a vibe coded project secondhand from someone who wanted to use it because they thought it would save time. It is very impressive at the start, since it can just pump out tons of features very quickly. But then disillusionment sets in as the project turns into a game of whack-a-mole where you yell at the AI to fix an issue and then two more pop up. And no way in hell are you fixing things yourself, because the codebase is an unreadable pile of spaghetti.
I hope he’s pissing his pants.
The rationalist attitude towards politics really is something else. Either politics is a pointless sideshow compared to the machine god, or they are the ultimate politics understanders. I could not come up with a worse way to market AI than they did.
I’m not the most politically astute person, but even I know that AI is a perfect symbol of the hated oligarchy. AI is a tool for the rich to plunder the labor and resources of the poor, all while dehumanizing them in favor of the machine. Of course AI is politically toxic. The rationalists are so far up their own asses that they can’t even think of this basic viewpoint.
I used to dislike when Bernie Sanders would take the warnings of the AI doom prophets too seriously, but now I realize that it is still a shrewd strategy, because the outcome is good in the end (bad for the AI companies). If they start talking about how AI will cause human extinction, it is bad either way if they are sincere or if they are grifting. Jon Ossoff even referenced the human extinction narrative in his victory speech. The political reaction was not “please help the AI companies figure out AI safety,” but “shut that shit down right now.” And that is the right thing to do.
Although my district wasn’t very contested, I am still happy that I voted. For the past two years, the oligarchs have operated under the assumption that they are immune from consequences. The AI bros believed that politics was an irrelevant pastime beneath their notice. If anything, I am happy knowing that they now feel fear.
Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?
Honestly, the manifesto should have stopped here. They admitted defeat right out of the gate. But the manifesto must continue, because the LLM cannot fail, it can only be failed. I wonder if this report is starting to get under their skin.
The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
This is not even a meaningful distinction. If I use an IDE command to change the name of a method everywhere it’s used, did I change all the names or did the IDE change all the names? What difference does it make?
I can only see this as them ordering engineers to use the AI more and go faster. The manifesto talks a good game about how “expertise” and “good engineering practices” are not dying, but telling engineers to offload more of their work to AI has the unavoidable tradeoff of making these things worse.
As a side question, how is it that all of these fuckers always want to use the precious gift of AI to go faster, not to, say, give their engineers more time to improve the quality of their software? Almost like they don’t actually give a shit about good engineering practices!
The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 — using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.
At least they’re realizing that maybe one of the anti-AI talking points has some merit to it. But they don’t seem to realize why they need stuff like code review and CI/CD: the AI is unreliable and these processes are needed to reduce the probability of a major fuckup reaching production. All they think is, hey, more opportunities to use AI!
(“Another takes it is place.” I had to look at the original text to make sure. At least we know the CTO wrote this himself after many drinks at 3 am. Damn, why are all those people on the internet so mean to us? I’m gonna show them!)
The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselves… But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.
What do I even say to this? Once again the problem is that there isn’t enough AI, and the solution is to buy more AI. We’re gonna buy so much more AI that we’re retooling the entire company and shoving it up every bodily orifice.
Excuse me? What happened to the mythical cybersecurity abilities of Claude Mythos? Physician, cure thyself!
Anthropic has not informed customers, and the malicious version was silently deleted the backdoored version without telling anybody.
Now we see Anthropic’s attitude towards security when the incident does not make for good marketing. Also, considering Binance was just hacked for a massive $3B in stablecoins, and this backdoor allowed remote access to developer laptops, I have a feeling these things are connected. If that is true, then this is by far the worst cybersecurity incident involving AI, worse than even the much ballyhooed PHP2Shell.
Edit: From Molly White’s article
Binance later wrote that their “initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop”, which allowed an attacker to “submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”
Okay, now I am really suspicious that these things are connected.
The boosters hope that the AI will replace mathematicians, but they are running into an awfully inconvenient fact: theorems and proofs are useless without people who care enough to understand them and make meaning from them.
Another nitpick: they say no mortal can resist the One Ring for very long, but even someone who just watches the movies knows that immortals can also be corrupted by it (which is why Gandalf and Galadriel were very careful to not accept it). I know there are so many examples of tech bros not understanding media, but Lord of the Rings is by far the worst offender.
No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have.
We all know how LotR goes. Boromir got the One Ring, carried it back to Gondor, used its sheer might to defeat his enemies in Mordor, and saved the world. Whatever problems you may have with Boromir, we all know that it would be a lot worse if Sauron got the One Ring. What do you mean, destroy the Ring? Are you a Luddite? This technology is here to stay. It cannot be destroyed by any craft we here possess, unless you’re crazy enough to try throwing it into a volcano or something.
If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis
That’s all I need to know. The statement is correct since it is vacuously true.
What terrifies me is how we will react. In the aftermath, like after 9/11, there will be an overwhelming pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW. Everyone in Washington and in San Francisco will be panicking. There will be no time to think, no time to talk, only time for DECISIVE ACTION. All our worst instincts will take over. And then…
When this bubble started, there have been so many people urging caution. Many people have urged for time to think and talk, to make sure that we could properly address the many negative aspects of AI. Nope, we went full speed ahead with this nonsense. DECISIVE ACTION. And here we are.
Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
There was an annoying booster who said “Ed Zitron is definitely falling for this one”. Ed Zitron is not fooled. In fact, he is frustrated with the report not properly breaking down the expenses (and having a mysterious “other expenses” category).
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I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are “separate axes”. Where does he think the LLMs come from? Does the stork deliver them? Is ChatGPT powered by magic fairy dust? Does he think that Sam Altman is a great defender of liberalism and democracy who definitely hasn’t donated tons of money to Donald Trump?
I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My “Very Sane AI Newsletter” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.
Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad it’s all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.
But Sam Altman said AI is smarter than the smartest human scientists! I wasn’t expecting shutting down a server to be one of the deep, intractable mysteries of the universe, but here we are.