Replying to
if your "containment" is "telling the robot to be a good boy" you're not a serious person
Remote
jcoglan
@jcoglan@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06he/him : you may know me as @mountain_ghosts on twitter : I wrote some books you can buy from https://shop.jcoglan.com
2049 Followers
464 Following
50 Posts
Joined March 31, 2017
Replying to
"the tech would be reasonable and useful if there weren't a perverse investor bubble around it" is nonsense. the bubble is a product of what the tech explicitly aims to achieve, and the tech exists *because* investors are willing to fund it to fulfil those aims. you can't separate these things
Replying to
anyone claiming that a system of computation can do non-computational things is claiming to have a solution to the halting problem and should not be taken seriously
Replying to
SAMA ET AL: why can't we make a profit with this revolutionary technology
ME: your operating cost scales super-linearly with the value it delivers to users
SAMA ET AL: better tell the government we have invented the angels from evangelion or something
Replying to
first we got "prompt injection" aka "deciding to forget two decades of knowledge about secure composition of code and inputs, langsec, etc" and now we have "deciding to forget everything about capability-based security and writing a call of duty script about it"
Replying to
investors aren't pumping money into b/c they're wildly irrational and deluded about its capabilities or profitability. they're funding it because eliminating jobs and destroying epistemic reality are useful outcomes to them, and the tech *is* doing those things
Replying to
this also makes it hard to take seriously claims that the marginal cost of inference is not a serious contributor to the resource use of data centres. your program has polynomial running cost and people run it for hours on end
Replying to
they ran into this and then didn't figure out a way to externalise the state in some fixed-size form so the LLM can resume from there. you just have to restart the computer and redo everything
in any other program this would be considered a DoS vector and have CVEs issued
gosh I wonder why their costs are completely unmanageable
Replying to
they invented a technology business with super-linear marginal cost of production I am losing my *entire mind*
Replying to
so it's not really an argument from complexity, it's an argument from "I don't know foundational results in computer science, also give me money"
Replying to
"the robot went to a website" wow should we throw a party should we invite tim berners lee
a great summary of the current state of de facto ruby governance from @threedaymonk@sonomu.club; I think that if ruby is going to meaningfully remove the influence of the fascists currently in charge of it, it is imperative that gems.coop and the move to fork rails are successful https://po-ru.com/2026/07/29/it-doesnt-matter-whether-matz-is-nice
Boosted by @fedicat@pc.cafe
for now until the end of august, I'm running a sale on my programming book "building git" -- get 50% off using code BGAUG2026 https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/
Replying to
also, an LLM's "explanation" for its own actions is meaningless and there is no reason to assume anything in the explanation is true. is it still deeply alarming that anyone thinks putting "NEVER FUCKING GUESS" in a text file constitutes a security guardrail
I am pretty inconsistent about this but I do usually put technically redundant parentheses in anything involving ternaries or bitwise arithmetic because I simply cannot remember their precedence and I think it reads better @mos_8502@studio8502.ca
one reason that "AI" is not producing huge shifts in profitability is that, for most businesses, raw production speed of software has not been the bottleneck on generating or increasing revenue for at least as long as I've been working in tech (20 years)
Replying to
you can argue the evidence on deskilling effects at the individual level but I think it's beyond doubt that this is happening at an institutional level
Replying to
people keep doing this bit of "AI keeps getting more complex which necessarily raises the prospect of it being conscious" and this is just not an argument. there is nothing there worth thinking about for more than two seconds
Replying to
"I am asserting is it impossible to know if AI is conscious, therefore anyone making a categorical statement that it is not is making an unfounded claim" this is not how extraordinary claims are supposed to work. open the schools
finally had someone call one of my open source projects "legacy technology" do I win a prize
Replying to
nobody has ever established any causative relationship between "complexity" (which is not inadequately defined here) and consciousness but every article like this assumes that one exists, because they're written by completely unserious people
an air conditioner is a sandwich
Replying to
related: tools that claim to "improve" your writing are actually *removing variance*. improving the input in a genuinely additive way is physically impossible, so they use a sleight of hand to dress up the removal of signal as an enhancement
vim's spell checker is unhappy with "endiannesses"
yes hello welcome to binary data processing, we describe bit/byte order using a term from gulliver's travels about the orientation of eggs. I wish I was making this up
Replying to
@TheoEsc@mastodon.social ok but that means they found a bug in the firewall, not that the AI "disobeyed its instructions" which is the framing of these types of stories, and one which makes no sense at a conceptual level
I have been playing "nier replicant" having previously played "nier: automata" and have come to the conclusion that the design brief for "breath of the wild" was "what if nier replicant was good"
Replying to
genAI is basically a bunch of "I fucking love science" dudes thinking they can invent hawking radiation without also having the black hole
Replying to
no computing appliance, no matter how complicated, can ever gain capabilities beyond those of a turing machine, or by church-turing, the untyped lambda calculus. anything a computer does must arise from some composition of x, \x -> e, and x y (names, abstractions and applications)
Replying to
you can't actually make a computing system that is anything but a large graph of these operations. you can make it as big as you like but it will only ever do those 3 things. therefore you need to show that those 3 things and nothing more can give rise to consciousness
Replying to
there is no argument that implies that if you glue enough of these 3 things together, the system will be able to do things it couldn't before. we have known what the limits of computation are since the 1930s. you can't break those limits by building the same kind of machine but bigger
last couple days to get "building git" for 50% off using code BGAPR2026
thought I would check if @Taweret@timeloop.cafe@mastodon.social is genuine and it's actually even worse
if bluesky were decentralised it would be decentralised
Replying to
except I know at least some of the people making such arguments take their work very seriously indeed, so not sure what to do with that
Replying to
even if your system does not support deleting an account or its email address, at lease use a domain you own as the null value
Replying to
@mcc@mastodon.social @elomatreb@chaos.social a single iterator encapsulates the process of iterating a structure in one direction visiting each item once. you cannot change the direction of a partially consumed iterator
handshake meme between Édith Piaf and Tony Hoare: "I regret nothing"
does anyone know why there might be a ludicrous number of helicopters flying over north london all afternoon