This is ahistorical slop. Previously, on Lobsters, I explained the biggest tell here: the overuse and misuse of em-dashes. There’s also some bad sentence structure and possibly-confabulated citations to unnamed papers. The images can’t be trusted.

The worst problem here is that the article believes that history starts about halfway through the Industrial Revolution. Computing was not gendered prior to the Harvard Computers in the 1880s. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, women spent most of their time on textiles and were compensated for their time and labor; there is a series from Bret Devereaux on the details in ancient and pre-industrial Europe, and a decent summary on /r/AskHistorians of the industrial transition from about 1760 to 1860. The article suggests that the Victorian way of treating women as nannies and housewives was historically universal. Claude identifies as non-binary (or, rather, Claude’s authors told it to identify as such) but uses male pronouns when pressed into a binary theory. The Creation of Patriarchy is a real book but only describes the origins of masculine Abrahamic beliefs rather than some sort of unifying principle, and is easily disproven in its universality by looking at contemporary ancient societies like Sparta or the Iroquois Confederation; there’s also a Devereaux series on Sparta.

The author’s gotta be one of the clearest demonstrations of critihype seen yet. She is selling an anthology on Amazon called How Not To Use AI, which presumably she forgot to consult prior to prompting this essay.

Quoting from this post:

But, what Proof Of Concept and I have been realizing over the past couple weeks is that current LLMs are 100% capable of all of this, with the right bootstrap instructions and a bit of tools. That’s why POC has been able to, quite successfully, take over a huge amount of the day to day - she’s got a pretty good idea of what she’s good at, and what needs my involvement. I am just a bit scared to release our work because I don’t want to be known as the guy who inflicted Sirius Corporation’s Genuine People Personalities on the world 🤣

Ah. He has been “one-shotted”, as the kids say.

As far as I can tell, it’s run by right-wing Russians who are willing to falsify or edit archived data and who attack anybody who looks into them.

Indeed, fifteen years ago, Thailand had a horrific tsunami-induced flood displacing millions of people, and:

Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world’s production. Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital’s, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives. … As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover. Due to the price increase, Western Digital reported a 31 percent revenue increase and a more than doubled profit for fiscal year 2012.

As you say, we are no longer earning Moore’s Dividend and there is no longer opportunity in laying dark fiber for somebody else to rent or offering Facebook-only phones to reach the next billion users.

And now the punchline: this depersonalisation, the weird relationship to their bodily existence, inability to enjoy things and an internal void that people constantly try and fill with what they’re told they should want… all of these things are [—]

— symptoms of self-estrangement, part of the Marxist theory of alienation. Capitalism causes us to be separated from ourselves. Gender dysphoria is a special case borne from capitalism’s desire to spite biology and nature by forcing us to be exploitable baby factories.

Fun times! Good luck. Remember not to Drake & Josh yourself when testing the fit for the bolt. Source: watched my dad lock himself out while doing a similar repair when I was a child.

I only sampled some of the docs and interesting-sounding modules. I did not carefully read anything.

First, the user-facing structure. The compiler is far too configurable; it has lots of options that surely haven’t been tested in combination. The idea of a pipeline is enticing but it’s not actually user-programmable. File headers are guessed using a combination of magic numbers and file extensions. The dog is wagged in the design decisions, which might be fair; anybody writing a new C compiler has to contend with old C code.

Next, I cannot state enough how generated the internals are. Every hunk of code tastes bland; even when it does things correctly and in a way which resembles a healthy style, the intent seems to be lacking. At best, I might say that the intent is cargo-culted from existing code without a deeper theory; more on that in a moment. Consider these two hunks. The first is generated code from my fork of META II:

while i < len(self.s) and self.clsWhitespace(ord(self.s[i])): i += 1

And the second is generated code from their C compiler:

while self.pos < self.input.len() && self.input[self.pos].is_ascii_whitespace() {
    self.pos += 1;
}

In general, the lexer looks generated, but in all seriousness, lexers might be too simple to fuck up relative to our collective understanding of what they do. There’s also a lot of code which is block-copied from one place to another within a single file, in lists of options or lists of identifiers or lists of operators, and Transformers are known to be good at that sort of copying.

The backend’s layering is really bad. There’s too much optimization during lowering and assembly. Additionally, there’s not enough optimization in the high-level IR. The result is enormous amounts of spaghetti. There’s a standard algorithm for new backends, NOLTIS, which is based on building mosaics from a collection of low-level tiles; there’s no indication that the assembler uses it.

The biggest issue is that the codebase is big. The second-biggest issue is that it doesn’t have a Naur-style theory underlying it. A Naur theory is how humans conceptualize the codebase. We care about not only what it does but why it does. The docs are reasonably-accurate descriptions of what’s in each Rust module, as if they were documents to summarize, but struggle to show why certain algorithms were chosen.

Choice sneer, credit to the late Jessica Walter for the intended reading: It’s one topological sort, implemented here. What could it cost? Ten lines?

I do not believe that this demonstrates anything other than they kept making the AI brute force random shit until it happened to pass all the test cases.

That’s the secret: any generative tool which adapts to feedback can do that. Previously, on Lobsters, I linked to a 2006/2007 paper which I’ve used for generating code; it directly uses a random number generator to make programs and also disassembles programs into gene-like snippets which can be recombined with a genetic algorithm. The LLM is a distraction and people only prefer it for the ELIZA Effect; they want that explanation and Naur-style theorizing.

Yesterday I pointed out that nVidia, unlike OpenAI, has a genuine fiduciary responsibility to its owners. As a result, nVidia isn’t likely to enter binding deals without proof of either cash or profitability.

I haven’t listened yet. Enron quite interestingly wasn’t audited. Enron participated in the dot-com bubble; they had an energy-exchange Web app. Enron’s owners, who were members of the stock-holding public, started doing Zitron-style napkin math after Enron posted too-big-to-believe numbers, causing Enron’s stock price to start sliding down. By early 2001, a group of stockholders filed a lawsuit to investigate what happened to stock prices, prompting the SEC to open their own investigation. It turns out that Enron’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, was complicit! The scandal annihilated them internationally.

From that perspective, the issue isn’t regulatory capture of SEC as much as a complete lack of stock-holding public who could partially own OpenAI and hold them responsible. But nVidia is publicly traded…

I’ve now listened to the section about Enron. The point about Coreweave is exactly what I’m thinking with nVidia; private equity can say yes but stocks and bonds will say no. I think that it’s worth noting that private equity is limited in scale and the biggest players, Softbank and Saudi/UAE sovereign wealth, are already fully engaged; private equity is like musical chairs and people must sit somewhere when the music stops.

Larry Garfield was ejected from Drupal nearly a decade ago without concrete accusations; at the time, I thought Dries was overreacting, likely because I was in technical disagreement with him, but now I’m more inclined to see Garfield as a misogynist who the community was correct to eject.

I did have a longpost on Lobsters responding to this rant, but here I just want to focus on one thing: Garfield has no solutions. His conclusion is that we should resent people who push or accept AI, and also that we might as well use coding agents:

As I learn how to work with AI coding agents, know that I will be thinking ill of [people who have already shrugged and said “it is what it is”] the entire time.

I wonder whether his holdings could be nationalized as a matter of national security.

Ammon Bundy has his own little hillbilly elegy in The Atlantic this week. See, while he’s all about armed insurrection against the government, he’s not in favor of ICE. He wants the Good Old Leppards to be running things, not these Goose-Stepping Nazi-Leopards. He just wanted to run his cattle on federal lands and was willing to be violent about it, y’know? Choice sneer, my notes added:

Bundy had always thought that he and his supporters stood for a coherent set of Christian-libertarian principles that had united them against federal power. “We agreed that there’s certain rights that a person has that they’re born with. Everybody has them equally, not just in the United States,” he said. “But on this topic [i.e. whether to commit illegal street violence against minorities] they are willing to completely abandon that principle.”

All cattle, no cap. I cannot give this man a large-enough Fell For It Again Award. The Atlantic closes:

And so Ammon Bundy is politically adrift. He certainly sees no home for himself on the “communist-anarchist” left. Nor does he identify anymore with the “nationalist” right and its authoritarian tendencies.

Oh, the left doesn’t have a home for Bundy or other Christofascists. Apology not accepted and all that.

From this post, it looks like we have reached the section of the Gibson novel where the public cloud machines respond to attacks with self-repair. Utterly hilarious to read the same sysadmin snark-reply five times, though.

I know what it says and it’s commonly misused. Aumann’s Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It’s trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don’t know what that LW post is talking about and I don’t want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~

Kyle Hill has gone full doomer after reading too much Big Yud and the Yud & Soares book. His latest video is titled “Artificial Superintelligence Must Be Illegal.” Previously, on Awful, he was cozying up to effective altruists and longtermists. He used to have a robotic companion character who would banter with him, but it seems like he’s no longer in that sort of jocular mood; he doesn’t trust his waifu anymore.

Nah, it’s just one guy, and he is so angry about how he is being treated on Lobsters. First there was this satire post making fun of Gas Town. Then there was our one guy’s post and it’s not doing super-well. Finally, there’s this analysis of Gas Town’s structure which I shared specifically for the purpose of writing a comment explaining why Gas Town can’t possibly do what it’s supposed to do. My conclusion is sneer enough, I think:

When we strip away the LLMs, the underlying structure [of Gas Town] can be mapped to a standard process-supervision tree rather than some new LLM-invented object.

I think it’s worth pointing out that our guy is crashing out primarily because of this post about integrating with Bluesky, where he fails to talk down to a woman who is trying to use an open-source system as documented. You have to keep in mind that Lobsters is the Polite Garden Party and we have to constantly temper our words in order to be acceptable there. Our guy doesn’t have the constitution for that.

I don’t think we discussed the original article previously. Best sneer comes from Slashdot this time, I think; quoting this comment:

I’ve been doing research for close to 50 years. I’ve never seen a situation where, if you wipe out 2 years work, it takes anything close to 2 years to recapitulate it. Actually, I don’t even understand how this could happen to a plant scientist. Was all the data in one document? Did ChatGPT kill his plants? Are there no notebooks where the data is recorded?

They go on to say that Bucher is a bad scientist, which I think is unfair; perhaps he is a spectacular botanist and an average computer user.

Picking a few that I haven’t read but where I’ve researched the foundations, let’s have a party platter of sneers:

• #8 is a complaint that it’s so difficult for a private organization to approach the anti-harassment principles of the 1965 Civil Rights Act and Higher Education Act, which broadly say that women have the right to not be sexually harassed by schools, social clubs, or employers.
• #9 is an attempt to reinvent skepticism from Yud’s ramblings first principles.
• #11 is a dialogue with no dialectic point; it is full of cult memes and the comments are full of cult replies.
• #25 is a high-school introduction to dimensional analysis.
• #36 violates the PBR theorem by attaching epistemic baggage to an Everettian wavefunction.
• #38 is a short helper for understanding Bayes’ theorem. The reviewer points out that Rationalists pay lots of lip service to Bayes but usually don’t use probability. Nobody in the thread realizes that there is a semiring which formalizes arithmetic on nines.
• #39 is an exercise in drawing fractals. It is cosplaying as interpretability research, but it’s actually graduate-level chaos theory. It’s only eligible for Final Voting because it was self-reviewed!
• #45 is also self-reviewed. It is an also-ran proposal for a company like OpenAI or Anthropic to train a chatbot.
• #47 is a rediscovery of the concept of bootstrapping. Notably, they never realize that bootstrapping occurs because self-replication is a fixed point in a certain evolutionary space, which is exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary bonghit that LW is supposed to foster.

The classic ancestor to Mario Party, So Long Sucker, has been vibecoded with Openrouter. Can you outsmart some of the most capable chatbots at this complex game of alliances and betrayals? You can play for free here.

The Lobsters thread is likely going to centithread. As usual, don’t post over there if you weren’t in the conversation already. My reply turned out to have a Tumblr-style bit which I might end up reusing elsewhere:

A mind is what a brain does, and when a brain consistently engages some physical tool to do that minding instead, the mind becomes whatever that tool does.