I hear you. I feel weirdly guilty about seeing this coming for so long.

Bruh, Big Yud was yapping that this means the orthogonality thesis is false and mankind is saved b.c. of this. But then he immediately retreated to, “we are all still doomed b.c. recursive self-improvement.” I wonder what it’s like to never have to update your priors.

Also, I saw other papers that showed almost all prompt rejection responses shared common activation weights and tweeking them can basically jailbreak any model, so what is probably happening here is that by finetuning to intentionally make malicious code, you are undoing those rejection weights + until this is reproduced by nonsafety cranks im pressing x to doubt.

I can’t comprehensively express how much I despise what Discord has done to the internet. Support communities are gone from the open web (as in, you can’t use a search engine to search Discord servers, neither can you easily log them to processable text files like you can with IRC), tons of communities are now insulated to a point where you can’t even get in if you want to, because unless you’re large enough or have enough booster points (which, to no one’s surprise, cost money, and only last for a limited time) you can’t generate permanent invite links, so you gotta know someone to get in.

And all of that for a proprietary app that is an accessibility nightmare (for fuck’s sake let me change that ugly-ass font to something readable, because God forbid that one of your users might be dyslexic, you absolute munted dickheads), doesn’t listen to any user feedback but is constantly adding absolute bottom-of-the-barrel features, many of which are behind a paywall, and is now adding LLMs to the mix?

Okay, rant over, but I just needed to get that out.

looks like tomorrow’s Pivot

Now im wondering how long it will take for people to claim Trump is Satoshi.

E: ah googled it T:-1

what the fuck, who’s tweeting this on his behalf and what is it meant to accomplish?

What kind of total vampire would finance this … oh, it’s YC. Yeah, makes sense.

optifye.ai

When the normal -fy startup nomenclature isn’t even enough.

I looked at their website and they’re not even attempting to mask their dystopian shitshow. And of course it’s all in the name of productivity and efficiency.

I hate those ghouls so much.

Wow, they invented a way to make people feel good about getting a PIP

The whole email thing does resemble Morton’s fork:

1. See! They didn’t answer the email! Clearly it means this employee is fraudulent or incompetent.
2. See! My wonderful AI assessed that the 5 bullet points are in insufficient reason for keeping them around.

---

It’s a bit of a slimey attempt at complete discretionary firing, which Elon or even Trump can’t possibly actually have the authority for.

Read here a worthwhile deconstruction of Hanania’s bullshit by John Ganz: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/enough

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.

“Keep wearing”, so is he saying that Musk et al “keep doing” “stiff-armed salutes” (that anyone with eyes can see are Nazi salutes) in public?

I know one shouldn’t expect logic from a Nazi, but claiming that the fog horn is actually a dog whistle is really ridiculous. “You heard nothing!”

an oppositional culture

[enraged goose meme] “Oppositional to what, motherfucker? Oppositional to what?!”

How is Hanania the “ex” Nazi a credible source on this at all? For fucks sake!

The Luigi thing is already souring on me a bit as a saw a yter use his actions to threaten gaming companies. (And it wasnt even some super predatory gaming company it was really a “wtf dude” moment. Dont get me wrong im not mourning the CEO, and the McDonald’s guy was wrong, but jesus fuck Gamers ruin everything.

E: And it wasn’t even about Fortnite, or Roblox like those predatory goes after kids things, nope just some dumb live service game with a cosmetics store badly bolted on in a corner. Sure horse armor sucks, but damn touch some grass and note the difference between lifetimes in debt or die and paying for overprices skins.

as in, distro for normal people? (for arbitrary value of normal, that is) distrowatch ranks mint #1, and i also use it because i’m lazy and while i could use something else, It Just Works™

there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss

I’m thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.

“But if I don’t get the supplies I can’t save the town!”

“Yeah, sorry, the AI still says no”

The best answer will be unsettling to both the hard skeptics of AI and the true believers.

I do love a good middle ground fallacy.

EDIT:

Why did the artist paint the sky blue in this landscape painting? […] when really, the answer is simply: Because the sky is blue!

I do abhor a “Because the curtains were blue” take.

EDIT^2:

In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other.

Of course “Jagged intelligence” is also—stealthily?—believing in the “g-factor”.

OK I sped read that thing earlier today, and am now reading it proper.

The best answer — AI has “jagged intelligence” — lies in between hype and skepticism.

Here’s how they describe this term, about 2000 words in:

Researchers have come up with a buzzy term to describe this pattern of reasoning: “jagged intelligence." […] Picture it like this. If human intelligence looks like a cloud with softly rounded edges, artificial intelligence is like a spiky cloud with giant peaks and valleys right next to each other. In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other, but AI can be great at one thing and ridiculously bad at another thing that (to us) doesn’t seem far apart.

So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the “intelligence” part of it, to suggest that “AI can be great”. The article just boils down to “use AI for the things that we think it’s good at, and don’t use it for the things we think it’s bad at!” As they say on the internet, completely unserious.

The big story is: AI companies now claim that their models are capable of genuine reasoning — the type of thinking you and I do when we want to solve a problem. And the big question is: Is that true?

Demonstrably no.

These models are yielding some very impressive results. They can solve tricky logic puzzles, ace math tests, and write flawless code on the first try.

Fuck right off.

Yet they also fail spectacularly on really easy problems. AI experts are torn over how to interpret this. Skeptics take it as evidence that “reasoning” models aren’t really reasoning at all.

Ah, yes, as we all know, the burden of proof lies on skeptics.

Believers insist that the models genuinely are doing some reasoning, and though it may not currently be as flexible as a human’s reasoning, it’s well on its way to getting there. So, who’s right?

Again, fuck off.

Moving on…

The skeptic’s case

vs

The believer’s case

A LW-level analysis shows that the article spends 650 words on the skeptic’s case and 889 on the believer’s case. BIAS!!! /s.

Anyway, here are the skeptics quoted:

• Shannon Vallor, “a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh”
• Melanie Mitchell, “a professor at the Santa Fe Institute”

Great, now the believers:

• Ryan Greenblatt, “chief scientist at Redwood Research”
• Ajeya Cotra, “a senior analyst at Open Philanthropy”

You will never guess which two of these four are regular wrongers.

Note that the article only really has examples of the dumbass-nature of LLMs. All the smart things it reportedly does is anecdotal, i.e. the author just says shit like “AI can do solve some really complex problems!” Yet, it still has the gall to both-sides this and suggest we’ve boiled the oceans for something more than a simulated idiot.

Does vox do anything other than vomit hot garbage?

These are also — and I do not believe there are any use cases that justify this — not a counterbalance for the ruinous financial and environmental costs of generative AI. It is the leaded gasoline of tech, where the boost to engine performance didn’t outweigh the horrific health impacts it inflicted.

ed reads techtakes? i wonder how far this analogy disseminated

Baldur’s given his thoughts on Bluesky - he suspects Zitron’s downplayed some of AI’s risks, chiefly in coding:

There’s even reason to believe that Ed’s downplaying some of the risks because they’re hard to quantify:

• The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?
• Coding isn’t the biggest “win” for LLMs but its biggest risk

Software dev has a bad habit of skipping research and design and just shipping poorly thought-out prototypes as products. These systems get increasingly harder to update over time and bugs proliferate. LLMs for coding magnify that risk.

We’re seeing companies ship software nobody in the company understands, with edge cases nobody is aware of, and a host of bugs. LLMs lead to code bases that are harder to understand, buggier, and much less secure.

LLMs for coding isn’t a productivity boon but the birth of a major Y2K-style crisis. Fixing Y2K cost the world’s economy over $500 billion USD (corrected for inflation), most of it borne by US institutions and companies.

And Y2K wasn’t promising magical growth on the order of trillions so the perceived loss of a failed AI Bubble in the eyes of the stock market would be much higher

On a related note, I suspect programming/software engineering’s public image is going to spectacularly tank in the coming years - between the impending Y2K-style crisis Baldur points out, Silicon Valley going all-in on sucking up to Trump, and the myriad ways the slop-nami has hurt artists and non-artists alike, the pieces are in place to paint an image of programmers as incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst.

Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world’s biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.

As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the “Agentic coding benchmark” (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren’t pushing the frontier, then there’s no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.

On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren’t wasting money on the compute they can’t afford. The only winning move is to not play.

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don’t usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it’s deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to “yes-and?” citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder’s vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying “brevity is the soul of wit”. Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative ‘I was conned by some asshole’ is too much to bear.

Gentlemen, you can’t have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.

I’m honestly impressed to see anyone on HN even trying to call out the problem. I had assumed that they were far enough down the Nazi Bar path that the non-nazi regulars had started looking elsewhere and given up on it.

lol wow, I’m cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism “gackin’ off”

Isn’t that his full-time job? (derogatory)