I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541

The self-fulfilling prophecy machine will ensure that engorgement will become a household term

It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.

Here’s a pretty good sneer at the writing out of LLMs, with a focus on meaning https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters.

Also, on people:

I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

Ah yes, three of the worst people alive today talking about how objects are indistinguishable from women.

Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/

Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.

I’m sure whoever put money into that venture will see dramatically amazing returns, now there’s a founder that will not take the money and run.

It’s kind of a distinction without much discriminatory power: LLMs are a tool created to ease the task of bullshitting; used to produce bullshit by bullshitters.

My favorite meme message board on the internet keeps putting out bangers, but this one is extra good and relevant http://www.b3ta.com/board/11416629

Would you believe this prescient vibe coding manual came out in 2015! https://mowillemsworkshop.com/catalog/books/item/i-really-like-slop

Also he wrote borderline anti-woke stuff back when doing that could still appear edgy and icky.

So many projects and small websites I’m aware of are being overtaxed by shitty LLM scrapers these days, it feels like an intentional attack. I guess the idea of ai can’t fail, it can only be failed; and so its profiteers must sabotage anything that indicates it’s not beneficial/necessary.

This “insight” tool gives a very incisive critique of the opinion-page journalism we’ve been seeing lately. Oddly enough, not the kind of critique you’d see printed on an opinion page.

Just a couple more GPUs bro, I’m sure it’s around the corner

Ah, yes. The implication.

Thanks. I simply switched to Fastmail over this bullshit. (“Simply” mileage may vary)

They’ll react to it … by swerving further right.

Very normal tech persona behavior, but it’s made very special by the presence of that channel on yammer of all places.

I have some positive news, someone did the math: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity

Yeah, why do they dress expensively but shit? My suspicion is so that the kind of elites the Kravattennazis don’t like can snub them. Gives them street cred, the “elites” don’t like them!