jaschop

The concept seemed interesting to me, but they did seem to enjoy making everything as complicated as possible. Idid find a CLAUDE.md when I was browsing their core repos a while back. That was only the web frontend I believe, not the core algorithm. Though it seems generous to assume they weren’t slopping up that one too.

I need to remember the multiple people that pointed me to Next.js and lose some respect retroactively. Though it did feel like a sneaky Vercel ad even back then.

First time I heard of this guy, but this slaps! Main post material

My line break produced some good comedy: Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)

Oof, the brain poison is real. Tap for spoiler Mod: Nothing says revolutionary politics like voluntarily abandoning productive terrain to capital and then yelling at everyone who wants to contest it. Organize workers? Fight over ownership? Build public and cooperative alternatives? Open source the tools? Democratize control? No thanks. I have selected performative outrage and yelling at strangers online. Rando: Not only that - they don’t even build art coops as pushback, instead celebrate petty-burgeoise of lone commission artist. And those types have that slimy “bootstrap” mentality. I’ll do you a favor and not link it.

@supersquirrel@lemmy.ca I suppose this is a score for you apropos our recent discussion on industrial esponage. Although I’ll note that the domain they tried to take over this time (dickwaving with math proofs) does also not have a business model, so they’re not really working themselves out of their financial death sentence.

You’re right of course, stupid engineering like that will kill people and already has. From an emergency responder perspective I’m mostly asking how can I keep my squad safe and how can I rescue survivors. Once we’re there we usually got all the tools you would ever need. And I’m 100% sure, if someone is in danger I’m breaking out the can opener before I would ever bother to call remote support.

Ah fuck, they’re also funding {ungeskripted}. He’s a way too big german “free speech” type podcaster. I’ve got him on my shitlist recently, after wonky BSW-type supposed leftists were sharing his clips in a political group chat.

The door handles don’t sound so bad from a firefighter perspective. More excuses to break out the slicy claw. ಠᴗಠ Having to account for the stupid thing to start driving on its own for no reason seems more irritating. Maybe we can invest in some big jaws attached to the front of the truck to crunch down on and immobilize struggling robo-taxis. This seems like a very reasonable direction to develop car technology.

Haven’t heard bad stuff about mailbox.org (Heinlein Group) yet.

Disappointing that this submission was accepted, though no reason to despair. It is one event in a very solid looking lineup, and in it they are basically pitching a thing. They wanna be the idea guys, not announce a new flagship KDE app.

A kid was trolling an anti-ICE protest at his school while livestreaming and got himself punched by a fat kid. It was pretty epic. Top 5 epic anime fight scenes for sure.

What has the author of requests been up to? (tldr; talking to Claude) For reasons of my own to be revealed in due time, I was searching for the term “programmer mysticism” and found this essay by Kenneth Reitz: Programming as Spiritual Practice I was slightly intrigued at the start, since it was going in the “subjective experience of programming” angle I’m interested in. This understanding deepens when we recognize that consciousness itself might be a linguistic phenomenon. If consciousness emerges from patterns of language and mathematics, then programming isn’t just creating tools—we’re literally crafting the linguistic-mathematical structures from which conscious experience emerges. Well this concious approach to digital tooling sure didn’t result in any scruples about LLM usage. Kenneth seems to have delegated most of his essay writing to Claude for some time (the article above is likely Claude-extruded). The piece continues to trudge through a basket of spiritual metaphors to hammer home how programmers should be more concious and do good things instead of bad things. This is all framed as a personal ethical issue without a shred of societal or structural analysis. Extra sneerable bit: The emerging understanding that LLMs contain humanity’s digitized collective unconscious adds profound depth to conscious programming: when we collaborate with AI systems, we might be interfacing with the archetypal patterns that have guided human wisdom throughout history. This makes programming with AI a form of accessing collective spiritual wisdom rather than just advanced tooling. In another (likely slopped) article, linked in the same section, he goes into how he designed the API of the requests Python modulreto be far more convenient to use than the builtin HTTP resolver urllib2. The reasoning given strikingly reminded me of Intention Revealing Interfaces from Domain Driven Design. And I can personally confirm that library is a pleasure to use and a de-facto default for a reason. Took me a while to catch on to the sloppedness. I gave him some credits for requests and wanted to get a gist of the guy when I stumbled on his full-throated AI posts. Essays credited to Claude with himself as “editorial director”. And of course this handy self-report: How I Write Now I guess this doesn’t stand out that much by itself. It did kind of hit home when went into detail how he linked his AI use directly to his history of mental health problems, which he was quite public about. He describes being moved to tears by LLM writing, seeing “his thoughts” clearly articulated for the first time after years of brain fog. He made this accessibility argument ecplicitly. I won’t waste my breath sneering about it. He gives plenty of fuel to that himself.

Yeah, but he's been saying this for a while, and I don't think this is a new way of saying it that is particularly useful.

I expect we’re gonna hear more about the cherry-picked data points that aren’t atrocious for AI. Like specifically the “help me learn” usage stat (the only one where some AI users are.on par or better), and the even more specific “help me learn” usage with AI/media literacy discussed in class stat. There’s probably all kinds of interesting factors involved that had to ignored because we needed an AI fluff statistic. Like one fact they mention, that high AI-use and partly non-AI use correllate with curiousity. Kids who want information will use the tools given. If your teachers are into AI and discuss it in class, even more so. I expect the “once or twice a year”-users include a big bulk of kids that just do not care about education (often coming from unpriviliged households), so they use it to cheat on their assignments and call it a day. Pretty undeniable though, that the daily users are always worse than the sometimes users. That’s probably the habitual delegation of thought kicking in. I could accept that a subgroup of the AI users learns on par or sliiiightly better than non-users on average, but they might be building up a reliance on tooling that will serve them worse and worse once they get past well-trodden school problems. In the same vein they’re probably all getting fucked, because noone gives a fuck about good text books & reference materials anymore.

This is nice! I’m curious how it’s building its index. Probably not great fot general research, but for finding wholesome authentic stuff like cooking recipes it seems great.

You can download an executable and surf websites with it, which will frequently break I guess. Not sure how much help one can offer atm except donating or contributing directly.

though the lobotomized themselves weren’t among the loudest advocates of the procedure afaik

Also works for cocaine, I’m noticing. Might be best as a comeback, if someone compares AI to a pharmaceutical breakthrough like antibiotics.

Meh, Ben Jordan did it better. I think his offer still stands that, despite humanoid robots being stupid, if Unitree sends him one he will film himself having a boxing match with it.

I just watched the whole thing. She makes a consistent case. I felt a little called out by the being tolerant bit. I for sure haven't had great success in talking to close people about their AI use. And I was maybe a little too cold to colleagues, who tried to get ahead of the AI literacy circus with good intentions, although I grudgingly agreed that they are right. Maybe I don't meet enough randos to get feeling on the level of pervasiveness of chatbots. Maybe it's a personality thing; I worked myself out of depression mostly by disciplining myself and stopping to buy my own excuses, and that's kind of how I approach every problem now. That sure isn't a vibe that most people respond to. There was one part of my AI beliefs that wasn't adressed. Besides the "front-end" and "back-end" harms, that can be mitigated, the tech as a whole still seems trash to me. That may be boomerism setting in, but chatbots just feel counter to and displacing my positive vision for a social fabric, be it for responsible professional communities or for interpersonal connections. (I do buy into the use-case for a context-sensitive search engine, e.g. for walls of legalese. But the current framing of the tools is just so harmful, even that use is hazardous as seen in the anecdote.)

But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”. That sure sounds like a zinger, but going off Wikipedia he does argue in that book for a loosening of copyright, which is pretty much what I meant. I don’t hate those positions though I’ll note they’re more libertarian than socialist. He has a whole personal freedom + monopoly control shtick, which works great for me in a lot of scenarios, but doesn’t quite work on GenAI tech. You can call me exceptionalist, but I think LLMs stand out because the adoption of the tech basically requires very capital-intensive and thus centralized operations for model training. This makes whoever runs them (likely capital or a state) a powerful arbiter of information space, maybe best comparable with algorithmic feeds in monopolistic social media. I think it is necessary to say: “Hey, we as a society shouldn’t run things like that. There are better ways of distributing information that work just fine.” A tech-neutral attitude can’t achieve that.

You’re right. The grammer is right, but it still sounds off. Like, idk, someone fully capable of english leaving threats in his second language to be sneaky?

Je, wrong gramnar and the german feels totally off. Much too wooden amyway for a proper death threat.

I bumped heads here before on that take, but I can empathize deeply with these people. I expect that interacting with most of them will be infuriating, since they probably accepted the “this is just how things are done from now on” narrative of AI and are some level of infatuated with the fancy demos. But this acceptance is also where the inescapable soul-crushing comes from. If you can adopt an internal posture of resistance, the pervalence of AI is still grating but you can adopt a perspective that doesn’t devalue your own skill and makes personal impact conceivable. Many of these folks are pretty far gone, but a pipeline of recovery should be possible from a starting point like this.

Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head. “Have you even tried some frontier meth?” “Sure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we don’t have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!” Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory There’s surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.

I think he realized it too and sockpuppeted a better example. Check the comment by “Gerard”

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.

I just happened to watch the Heute-Show segment on the topic. (german late-night satirical news show, pretty decent takes usually but it’s no ZDF Magazin Royale) It is nice that the doom claims by AI-CEOs are considered incredulous and their motivation is questioned (financial trouble, flagging product improvement). They certainly weren’t critical enough on some claims, e.g. the “AI hacking” incidents, let alone the inevitable dominance of AI tools. But despite that it was nice to see some sneering of the endless parroting of AI PR pieces that dominates german news.

I can tell you the two languages I would learn right now if I had the spare cycles. Zig is a C-replacement language that took a no-AI stance early on. It doesn’t have compiler-assured memory safety like Rust, but it does try to revamp structures (like alloc or error handling) in a way that makes it more obvious to the programmer what is happening. I’d love to learn more, but cycles… Gleam is a language that is part of the Erlang/BEAM ecosystem. It’s a functional language, so it’s a bit of a mindfuck if you come from a Python-/C-esque perspective, but if you like formal logic it might well be up your alley. It has a good web tutorial if you’re interested Neither Gleam nor its runtime Erlang-OTP have taken a stance on AI as far as I know (Elixir has a permissive stance), but at least I’ve seen no red flags as of yet.

The bubble will pop. It’s much too big to be sustainable. But that won’t fix software industry employment because the Large Language Models don’t really need to work that well for this process. They only need to sort of work. Get ready for the era of digitally sovereign on-premise open weight perpetual software sweatshops.

Apparently they have the same sense of timing as the Blockchain Socialist guy, but he at least picked a brand that isn’t tied to the current hype cycle again.

Funny horse-butt-creature nonwithstanding, Dotcorows AI takes have been rather mid. Quoting from Guardian… In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: “To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.” He isn’t falling for AI doom and he is aware of the bubble, which puts him near the better end of the spectrum. But he’s also unwilling to criticize community damage resulzing from LLM use. That may be because he is fond of LLMs himself for his text editing and is repping the “it’s just another tool” defense. So he isn’t willing to go all the way when it comes to criticizing the global theft of labour that continues to power this industry. Information wants to be free, dontcha know?

Wernher von Braun is the way better comparison. Just maybe not one we like to make, since he basically got away with it and died an icon of U.S. space exploration. Goering was pretty unapologetic at Nürnberg afaik, since he knew he was getting the rope.