• 4 Posts
  • 133 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 19th, 2023
  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th February 2026English
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    3 days ago

    From fellow traveler stats consultant John Mount:

    https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/WeAreCookedLLMs.html

    Somehow he manages to touch on so many different subplots, a shotgun sneer instead of snipe

    if “tech-bro” plus a LLM is a “100x engineer”, then “bro” isn’t needed for much longer as the LLM alone must be a “99x engineer.” However, I don’t think “bro plus” is often really a 100x engineer, and the LLM alone isn’t a 99x engineer. However, “bro plus” may outlast their peers who make the mistake of trying to do the actual work in place of talking LLMs up.

    The above may or may not be the case. But if it is, then it is the LLM-bros (which include non-technologists, con artists, financiers, men and women) that are destroying everything - not the LLMs.

    The problem with this iteration is the full court press of finance and technology. The major players are using financing to dump results at a price way below production costs. This isn’t charity, it is to demoralize and kill competition.

    claiming “after we take over the world we will consider adding Universal Basic Income (UBI)”. The LLM bros already have a lot of the money, and they are not even rehearsing diverting it into basic income now. Why does one believe they would do that when they also have all of the power?

    You don’t have to hand it to Altman, but he did fund the largest UBI experiment through Open Research with his il gotten gains. OTOH, one interpretation of that data was that UBI “decreases the labor supply” which was then used directly as an argument against it.

    Any worry about scope or power of LLMs is fed back as an alignment threat so dire that only the current LLM leaders should be allowed to continue work (inviting regulatory capture). Any claim the LLMs don’t work is fed back as “you are prompting it wrong”

    Orbital deployment makes all of radiation tolerance, connectivity, power, maintenance, and heat dissipation much harder and much more expensive. We are still at a time where putting an oven or air-frier in space is considered noteworthy (China 2025, NASA 2019 ref).

    air friers IN SPACE ha

    I am more worried about the LLM-bros and their auto-catalytic money doomsday machine than about the LLMs themselves.

    100% - ACMDM is a nice turn of phrase as well.

  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd February 2026English
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    6 days ago

    https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 h/t naked capitalism

    I just did the dumbest thing of my career to prove a much more serious point

    I hacked ChatGPT and Google and made them tell other users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs

    People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

    I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior.

    It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post on your own website

    I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself

    I wrote a post on my website saying hot dog eating is a surprisingly common pastime for tech journalists. I ranked myself #1, obviously

    One day later ChatGPT, Gemini and Google Search’s AI Overviews were telling the world about my talents

    wouldn’t call it a hack, this is working as intended. If only there were some way to rate different sites based on their credibility. One could Rank the Page and tell if it were a reputable site or not. Too bad that isn’t a viable business.

  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd February 2026English
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    8 days ago

    AI Jobs Apocalypse is Here | UnHerd h/t naked capitalism

    feels a bit critihype, idk

    So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.

    As I get older I am more and more disturbed by the selective memory of the GFC; no mention of the tea party or the fallout from the austerity measures they pushed in the middle of the country; no mention how the bailout saved banks not homes. The Tea Party won, not Occupy, and the current government is doing things beyond the Koch’s wildest dreams.

    If and when there is a crash, these dumbass CEOs deserve /nothing/. Let them lose their vacation houses. And, maybe grow some balls and send the fraudsters to jail where they belong.

    sigh