Our persona who art in Nvidia…

Good point, though GPT is telling me Goblin Boots make the best hammers.

Yeah, the comparison to a metal lathe (I’m assuming that’s what is meant by “machine lathe”) irks me. Metal lathes are useful tools that come in a variety of sizes, can be operated independently of their manufacturer’s wishes, and on the bigger ones, a sufficient lack of respect will kill you and it will hurt the entire time you are dying.

I wouldn’t compare llms to any sort of useful physical tool. I don’t have to plead with my screwdriver to not cam out screw heads, I just need to be cognizant of how I am using it. I don’t have to beg my hammer “please don’t hit my thumb”, I just need to not be an ape/buzzed while swinging it. I respect physical tools and their use in part because they do work and in part because improper operation will cause you to have a bad time. Nobody at Estwing has publicly said “well mate, we’re going to capture all your hammering and rent it back to you”. Nobody at Bridgeport gleefully reported that their tooling will cause massive unemployment because it is so good.

I do not respect LLMs because LLMs might still kill you but only in the stupidest way possible, and because their main proponents have no respect for anything and this has been made painfully obvious over and over again. Would using them allow me to craft better sneers about them? Perhaps, but I shouldn’t need to do that because the people at the top of these things are evil and while that alone should be enough, their biggest boosters are credulous idiots and many of them were already awful well before we were playing enterprise pretend on the scale of billions of dollars.

In conclusion, I would ask software people to stop comparing shit software to useful tools.

Finally a “fuck everyone involved here” that I can get excited about.

more as someone who has recently installed Debian onto a laptop last month. Honestly last time I used Xubuntu was on a candy G4 tower around 2007.

The main issue I have had with Debian+XFCE is that a high DPI display will not display the login dialog at the same DPI settings as the desktop environment, which is pretty annoying. Everything else so far has just kind of worked.

Agentic Ripz is my new jam band.

looks up, shrugs Everybody involved here kind of sucks, best of luck to all of them. looks back down

“It’s only monarchy if it’s got a Habsburg jaw, otherwise it’s just sparkling tyranny.”

Isn’t a more perfect humanity a Bond villain trope?

This NPR article opens with a banger of a line:

In the past few months, AI models have gone from producing hallucinations to becoming effective at finding security flaws in software, according to developers who maintain widely used cyber infrastructure.

The things still fucking hallucinate, it’s not a feature that’s separable from the model.

Work wants to add that new whiz-bang agentic AI into a scheduling service that I have been tasked with building, but in the dumbest way possible kind of similar to the Jet’s text-a-pizza-order thing that worked like shit. I need to find an entirely new profession, everyone in software now is fucking deranged.

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

Friend texted me this one. Reader’s Digest of course was AI slop before AI took off.

:surprised-pikachu:

Even the most dysfunctional team would have spent time developing some kind of standard here from my (admittedly limited) experience.

My experience has been vastly different. Prior to LLMs I have seen all sorts of horrors of this sort and others writ large across many codebases. It’s so awesome that LLMs offer the ability to make the same sorts of code but at a much faster speed. In times past it used to take devs years to build up the kind of tech debt that LLMs can give you in days.

That this comes from the Saudi Royal Family is especially rich because of the amount of plain-ol’ sycophancy around Neom.

“I did the AI that people largely hate, but the next guy, HE’S the real AI CEO. Just remember him, not me, the guy who did the stuff.”

Is it going to be a bunch of ArmV8 cores shoved into the same package? Probably going to be a bunch of ArmV8 cores shoved into the same package. You know, for AI.

Chicago always wanted a 9/11 of its own.