Bonus race pseudoscience quoted by No77e!

There is a phenomenon in which rationalists sometimes make predictions about the future, and they seem to completely forget their other belief that we’re heading toward a singularity (good or bad) relatively soon. It’s ubiquitous, and it kind of drives me insane. Consider these two tweets:

Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo: Hypothesis: We’ll look back on mass migration as being worse for Europe than WW 2 was. … high-trust and honogeneous … ethno-religious fractures

Liv Boeree: Would not be surprised if it turns out that everyone outsourcing their writing to LLms will have a similar or worse effect on IQ aslead piping in the long run

(he shares these tweets as photos, I ain’t working harder to transcribe them or using a chatbot)

Old Twitter was terrible for people’s souls. I can only imagine what it is like now that the well-meaning professionals are gone and catturd and Wall Street Apes are the leading accounts.

I feel like there’s a difference between alcohol and drugs, something people can make in their back yard and AI which requires a first world country’s entire economy to be oriented towards it to function… a difference in what we should be required to accept.

I don’t buy the general argument about shame either. We teach children to shit in toilets and not sidewalks. I see rampant AI use as just another form of disgusting public indecency and the faster we bring shame in to remedy it the better.

I think that’s 100% correct and also it’s year 3 of this nonsense and I cannot be fucked. My response to genAI in any context now is to scream and start doing jumping jacks.

Imagine the drug policy context but then also half of your colleagues are doing meth every day every time you see them, people say shit like “everyone does meth, those that say they don’t are lying”, and meth is a trillion-dollar industry that has been telling you “meth is the future” for years. You’d be much less inclined to argue calmly against meth and much more inclined to start screaming and jumping.

Sounds kind of like the Baldur Bjarnason strategy but for your coworkers instead of your boss.

I can see the value of someone with a critical understanding diving into the technology, so they can talk others down from the ledge.

But you also need the social pressure to maintain some slop-free spaces. Not everyone can be asked to accomodate recovering slopaholics.

Kind of a pseudo-sneer, author is writing a

blog on machine learning engineering, compound AI systems, search and information retrieval, and recsys — exploring machine learning, LLM agents, and data science insights from startups to enterprises.

Here’s the discussion on the red site: https://lobste.rs/s/nmhkdl/ai_great_leap_forward Plenty of people suspect the text being LLM generated. Pangram disagrees, fwiw.

I do think there’s some interesting ideas about how humans will “defend” themselves from being replaced by bots, and that the critical info in a company is seldom in the source code, but in the customer relationships, sales etc.

I need to find an entirely new profession, everyone in software now is fucking deranged.

Mood

It’s bad for me too.

I’m trying to hang in there until I get some healthcare stuff taken care of over the next year or two but it is getting increasingly difficult. Most of the the good people at my job have been driven out, quit, or been poached by other (AI) companies.

By this point a majority of the programmers at my job (or at least the one’s most active on the mailing lists) are LLM true believers who think that the end times are near. My management chain has explicitly said that LLM programming is required, and that a subsequent increase in “productivity” is expected with it. My department got renamed to something with “AI” in the name. I constantly field questions from people who want me to read a screen full of LLM nonsense, or who push back when I tell them something claiming that the chatbot said differently.

There’s always some frantic push to adopt “MCP” or “Skills” or whatever the next fad will be without any guidance as to how or why. If I ignore this I get nastygrams from my manager.

And at my last doctor visit I had elevated blood pressure :)

Up next, when the first agent fails, implement an agent that checks the other agent. Both of these need agents to check for malicious inputs of course. And translation agents.

Glad that I did the major upgrades in 2024, hopefully they will outlast this bullshit

So, they are planning to use an ai to fix the sec bugs that their ai generates? Good hussle, if a bit obvious.

The fuck is Mythos?

if even half of this is true, it’s really fucking bad lol

“Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.

The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.

The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.

I’ve seen this story play out in software engineering: people were very impressed when the AI does unexpectedly well in one out of 50 attempts on an easy task, and so people decided to trust it for everything and turn their codebases into disasters. There was no great wave of new high-quality software. Instead, the only real result was that existing software has become far more buggy and insecure.

Now we have people using AI in science and math because it was impressive in random demonstrations of solving math problems. I now have friends asking me why I’m not using AI, and also saying that AI will be better than all mathematicians in 30 years or whatever. Do you really think I refuse to use AI out of ignorance? No, I know too much about it! I have seen the same story play out in software engineering, and what makes this any different?

@blakestacey @BlueMonday1984

“AI HAS SOLVED THE SCIENCE-GENERATION CRISIS”

The replausibility crisis.

Q: what do you call a tool that works 90% of the time? A: broken