I just read that Meta has an internal leaderboard for LLM token usage, and I really can't imagine a less thoughtful, less useful status metric. Even assuming that the tokens are being used productively and efficiently (which they are most certainly not since the introduction of the leaderboard)... Do race drivers celebrate using the most fuel, for its own sake? Or might we rightly regard someone who did that as being focused on the wrong things, and maybe also kind of a dumbass? #AI #GenAI #LLMs #SoftwareEngineering
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Brad Heintz
@bradheintz@mathstodon.xyz
mastodon 4.7.2Masters student in Mathematics at Indiana State University. In my 50s. 30 years of experience as a software engineer. My mathematical interests are primarily in number theory and its modern subfields, but my tastes are broadening the more I learn.
BLM. Trans rights are human rights. Vaccines work. None of these things are controversial among decent people.
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Joined June 06, 2024
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Studying p-adic numbers with Phineus tonight.
Replying to
@julesh I dislike the term because it suggests derangement or an unexpected behavior, when non-factual output is not just expected, but provably unavoidable with current architectures. The word implies that a state of correctness is normal, when it is merely statistically more common than "hallucination”.
Replying to
@mrdk@mathstodon.xyz @passenger@kolektiva.social @inthehands@hachyderm.io Limericks should mutate. 👍🏻
Replying to
@baldur I keep seeing the "moving fast" excuse for the trash code, as if working with code in that state could possibly be faster than working with a rational architecture populated by small, composable functions, written by humans with at least four tenths of a clue.
At the intersection of SEO and disinfo in 2026: @albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz
The “AI layoff" mask continues to slip. From the linked article, speaking of a survey of executives of companies with >US$1B revenue:
"While 80% of those surveyed who have piloted an AI or autonomous technology have reported workforce reductions, the businesses cut jobs due to automation regardless of whether the technology was actually generating returns.”
The point was never to generate returns.
C-suite talking points about AI, productivity, and the motivation behind layoffs were always a bullshit rationalization. The point was always to juice the stock price by selling a story of magical AI productivity gains (with no factual support) to gullible investors.
AI was just this boom-bust cycle's excuse for treating workers as disposable.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/11/ai-automation-layoffs-gartner-study-roi/
My semi-rational loathing of JavaScript, TypeScript, and npm is paying dividends today.
Replying to
@andrejbauer@mathstodon.xyz A virtual machine sharing a folder with the host is a cheap lockdown solution.
Replying to
@christianp The "keep me signed in" checkbox is like the "close door" button on most elevators - connected to nothing, and probably intended that way.
Republicans are making all of their own most outlandish claims about government agency incompetence come true.
This is very much worth watching.
(And yeah, the clickbait-y teaser frame is kind of a pill. Even so.)
How fair/unfair is it to take GitHub uptime as a proxy measurement for the asymptotic utility of LLMs?
Replying to
@ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club Is there any chance this was generated by an LLM? That sounds like exactly the sort of result they commonly give: Code that builds and runs and may even pass tests but follows no rational or consistent architecture. What you describe is par for course with those tools if they aren't kept on a short leash.