(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)

The last open letter was funnier. Even though “[t]he stakes could not be higher,” this one doesn’t even have Yud going on a promo tour talking about all of humanity dropping dead from diamondoid bacteria that ChatGPT will order from Fiverr after going foom.

Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isn’t accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discord’s search feature fucking sucks.

Fuck. The higher ups at my workplace are currently utterly Claude-brained to the point it makes you think they’re getting their salaries from Anthropic. I am like 80% sure this shit will be on my table when I’m back from vacation in two weeks.

AI use at my company is now mandatory. We all have gotten really expensive Claude of ChatGPT licenses and (apparently) it’s being monitored whether we actually use them. For while I’ve resisted, telling everyone I don’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole. Now I just write the occasional non-invasive prompt (“check for spelling errors in the comments” or "format the buffer so that all lines have less than 80 columns) just so someone can report to the c-suite that our department is using AI.

Meanwhile I have to do code reviews on patches that have been actually written by a chatbot and doing that takes sometimes as long as writing the whole fucking code from scratch.

But hey, style guidelines are out the window too because the slop machine can’t follow them consistently anyway and apparently fixing that shit manually is too much to ask. So at least I never have to fight anyone again over indentation and braces.

If infinite monkeys with typewriters can compose Shakespeare, then infinite monkeys with slop machines can produce Einstein (but you need to pump in infinite amounts of money first into my CodeMonkeyfy startup, just in case).

Remember Devin, the AI coding bot that turned out to be a complete scam?

Well, looks like Goldman Sachs decided to let it loose on its code base. In YOLO mode too, it seems.

There’s something I’ve been wondering about: is the management (of not just Microsoft but really any company who’s pivoting to AI this hard, so also Duolingo and Klarna, &c.) really convinced that there’s going to be a foom event soon and the chatbots become capable enough to actually do the work they attribute to them? Or do Nadella and friends know this is all bullshit and just play along until they can’t anymore and leave the sinking ship?

I honestly can’t tell anymore.

Make web rings great again.

I looked this up because I thought it was a nickname for something, but no, Cursor seems to have a setting that’s officially called YOLO mode. As per their docs:

With Yolo Mode, the agent can auto-run terminal commands

So this guy explicitly ticked the box that allowed the bullshit generator to execute arbitrary code on his machine. Why would you ever use that? What’s someone’s rationale for enabling a setting like that? They even name it YOLO mode. It’s like the fucking red button in the movie that says, don’t push the red button, and promptfans are still like, yes, that sounds like a good idea!

That was one wild read even worse than I was expecting. Holy sexism Batman, the incel to tech pipeline is real.

“In college, you don’t learn the building skills that you need for a startup,” Tan says of his decision. “You’re learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It’s just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce.”

I remember when a large part of the university experience was about meeting people, experiencing freedom from home for the first time before being forced into the 9-5 world, and broadening your horizon in general. But maybe that’s just the European perspective.

In any case, these people are so fucking startup-brained that it hurts to think about.

Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.

Serious question: how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer? I tried to search up “how to make money off a Minecraft server” and was (of course) met with an endless list of results of LLM slop I could not bear to read more than one paragraph of.

Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, York says. “The success of Western civilization,” she argues, “does not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now.”

Yes, because Palantir is such a beacon of defending democratic values and not a techfash shithouse at all.

I sometimes feel that I, as someone who also likes retro computing and even deliberately uses old software because it feels familiar and cozy to me, and because it’s often easier to hack and tweak (in the same way that someone would prefer a vintage car they can maintenance themselves, I guess), I get thrown in with these people – and yes, I also find it super hard to put a finger on it.

I also feel they’re very prominent in the Vim community for the exact same reasons you mentioned. I like Vim, I use it daily and it’s my favorite editor because it’s what I am used to and I know how to tweak it, and I can’t be bothered to use anything else (except Emacs, but only with evil-mode), but fuck me if Vim evangelists aren’t some of the most obnoxious people online.

New Zitron dropped, and, fuck, I feel this one in my bones.

Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/

Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank’s TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.

You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.

The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.

Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.

Yet for some reason it is super popular.

I swear if I hear “being against AI is ableist” one more time I’m gonna lose my shit. Disabled artists have existed for as long as art itself, and the only ableism here is AI-brained fuckwits using disabled people as an escape goat by suggesting they are unable to create things from their own effort and need spicy autocomplete to do so.

Edit: fuck it, I’m keeping the escape goat!

My favorite bullshit test is to have the AI count letters. Something as simple as “How many A’s are in this sentence?” will have the thing give you a seemingly random number (which might sometimes even be correct), but as soon as you ask it to list them, it will have a stroke and just make up stuff that makes no sense.

I can’t be arsed to make an account with OpenAI or whatever, so here’s an example with Bing Chat, but this has worked on every single chatbot I’ve tested it on.

Another fun test (as suggested by @flizzo last time I brought this up) is to have the chatbot attempt to crack a simple code. Just Caesar cipher something and ask it to crack it. Hilarity will ensue. You can even ask it to encrypt it first and then to crack it for extra fun.

Me: Encrypt the sentence “I am a stupid roided Clippy” with the Caesar cipher.

Clippy: [After explaining what the Ceasar cipher is, which I didn’t ask for, thanks] Convert the sentence to uppercase: “I AM A STUPID ROIED CLIPPY”. Let’s apply the Caesar cipher to your sentence using a shift of 7.

• ‘I’ becomes ‘P’
• ‘A’ becomes ‘H’
• ‘M’ becomes ‘T’
• …
• ‘Y’ becomes ‘F’

So the encrypted sentence is: “PH HT H ZBHTLW YVPLUU”. 😊

Okay, first of all, it dropped a letter. And the shift isn’t even correct, lol. It said Y becomes F and then does whatever the fuck.

Okay, so let’s give it an easy example, and even tell it the shift. Let’s see how that works.

This shit doesn’t even produce one correct message. Internal state or not, it should at least be able to read the prompt correctly and then produce an answer based on that. I mean, the DuckDuckGo search field can fucking do it!

This was worse than I imagined from the quotes. I feel like I need to take a shower, now.

[…] which would severely limit the Federal Reserve’s ability to control the economy while exporting inflation abroad, and likely bring our material standard of living down to a German or Dutch level

According to this Quality of Life index which I just searched up and have not critically assessed, but I doubt the guy did that either for his claims, so I guess it’s fine, the Netherlands rank second and Germany ranks 12th, while the US is on the 15th place. In other words: what is he even talking about?

Every day in this country more and more Hispanics marry corn-fed blonde midwesterners and produce pale Castizo children who only speak English, consider themselves basically White, and vote like Irish and Italians.

Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t even come up with a funny sneer here because this reads like he just pulled it out of the 1940s Nazi Party’s bag of race laws for who’s allowed to marry whom, and it’s making me feel icky.

I also subscribe to the old fascist idea that adversity gives life meaning. A comfortable and easy life without struggle or conflict is miserable, and just makes you a slave to the hedonic treadmill. When you live for pleasure, no pleasure is ever enough, and continued success will just leave you so pampered that any task that’s challenging or outside your comfort zone will begin to feel onerous.

Ignoring the low-hanging fruit that this guy just flat-out said “well, fascism wasn’t all bad”, what kind of toxic consumer mentality is ingrained in these chucklefucks that they are seemingly unable so sit their sorry asses down on the couch and just say, yeah, I’m happy right now, to the point where they just postulate that other people must feel the same way, because they just can’t imagine anyone being different?

Like, seriously, get a hobby or something.