I am sick and tired of all this benchmark business. It really feels like people staring at tea leaves and bird patterns and sheep guts to see if they line up with the prophecy written in the book some random shady oracle sold them 200 years ago. If they wanted a clear picture, why don’t they just ask a practitioner in the field? Ask a programmer if software has become very reliable and user-friendly, and if codebases are well-structured and easy to maintain and not spaghetti nightmares. Or they could just open their eyes and see Microsoft and the FAA shitting their pants on two consecutive days. But I guess it’s not Rational if it doesn’t let them make up 37 numbers.

The funniest part of Jensengate is seeing all the techbros being really sad and petitioning to restore Jensen to his rightful position, thinking that there is some analogy to Sam Altman. They seem to not realize that the reason Saltman was fired was because the board didn’t like his stupid face. Meanwhile, Jensen has committed three affairs, two with employees, and somehow that is the less important thing, considering he smuggled tens of billions of dollars of chips illegally into China. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up in jail. If Jensen thought he had a reasonable chance of surviving, why would he resign and start whining like a teenager?

They even built a vibe coded petition website with zero user validation whatsoever:

Outlook was down for an entire day yesterday, which affected me since my school email uses it. I don’t remember any Outlook outage this bad before, and from what I’ve heard, Microsoft was cosplaying as a headless chicken in their attempts to fix it. Maybe getting rid of 60,000 employees to embrace the magic of AI isn’t working out so well.

Meanwhile I saw this AI panic post on Linkedin (warning: psychic damage). Apparently all the doomers are vindicated and all the critics are completely discredited because of … you guessed it, math problems! You see, one mathematician was very sad in an interview! (Let’s also ignore the many nuanced statements like this that mathematicians have made about their own field.)

But somehow he hasn’t noticed AI affecting anything he actually understands. Well, you see, that’s because in the real world, the magic of AI does need to wait a few years before the puny humans understand how to wield its power (but of course the doomsday is coming on schedule in a few years). The argument sounds nice until you look at of software, where there should be no physical obstacles for adopting AI. Now, coding has been solved by AI on the planet of Earth Prime where he lives, where OpenAI and Anthropic have long monopolized every software market with products of much higher quality and reliability than what came before. Unfortunately, I live on Earth, where I have seen two major vibe-coding failures in the last two days (the Outlook outage and the Humble Store rewrite).

Back of the envelope, this means the spontaneous generation of this organism is less likely than 1 in 4^50,000, or about 1 in 1e30000, to say nothing of the machinery required for actually transcribing the DNA and synthesizing proteins

Are the Wrongers using their Powers of Rationality to literally rediscover creationist talking points?

I remember during my first year of undergrad, I saw some dumbass creationist with a big poster in the middle of a courtyard. I was so dumbfounded that I decided to take a picture of the poster (I didn’t grow up around creationist types so I found it shocking). One of the talking points on that poster was that the probability that 18000 base pairs randomly happen to be correct is around 10^-10000. Quite funny that this Wronger offers even worse odds.

When children go to sleep, the Sandman shows them dreams. When AI boosters go to sleep, the Smiling Man shows them nightmares.

This guy probably thinks that outputting sloppily written proofs to math problems is the same thing as curing cancer because both of them are done by super smart scientific brain geniuses and the AI is an even bigger brain genius.

But Sam Altman said AI is smarter than the smartest human scientists! I wasn’t expecting shutting down a server to be one of the deep, intractable mysteries of the universe, but here we are.

Maybe Telling Americans They’re Useless Eaters Who Must Perish for the Glorious AI Revolution Was a Bad Idea

Too many good sneers in this one.

Also, it was only yesterday that I learned that several great conservative thinkers on X thought that making a Harry Potter x Star Wars crossover with a genderbent character would be an exceptionally powerful cultural message that would greatly influence the outcome of the midterm elections. https://www.404media.co/republicans-learn-x-is-an-echo-chamber/

Sometimes you miss a few shots. Well, sometimes you miss 40 shots in a row with those anti-data center ballot measures. I’m sure their streak of bad luck will end eventually and they’ll find tons of people who love having data centers near their homes.

He could also read any exit poll and see that 56% of voters thought AI data centers were a crucial or major issue. Oh well, I’ll let him cherry pick a random out of context data point if it helps him cry himself to sleep at night.

I will not say the bubble has burst until OpenAI and Anthropic are dead.

Vibe coded websites really are the epitome of AI: there’s tons of flashy stuff that looks impressive at first glance, but shit starts breaking down with the slightest breeze. The reading progress widget was working perfectly for me at first, but then I clicked around a bit (the “see what’s coming” link in that widget straight up leads to a 404) and then it got stuck at 88% for me. The slider in the “Timeline Explorer” is also extremely laggy for me, with an update taking 1-2 seconds. There’s also some UI elements that don’t make sense, like the four options in the bar above the “Countdown to AGI Achievement” box are duplicated in the “AGI scenarios” sidebar on the right side immediately below. Sometimes the drop down menus from the top just open randomly when I’m clicking something else. Also some buttons break occasionally and I need to refresh to fix them.

Even though my own work does not involve any coding, I have seen a vibe coded project secondhand from someone who wanted to use it because they thought it would save time. It is very impressive at the start, since it can just pump out tons of features very quickly. But then disillusionment sets in as the project turns into a game of whack-a-mole where you yell at the AI to fix an issue and then two more pop up. And no way in hell are you fixing things yourself, because the codebase is an unreadable pile of spaghetti.

I hope he’s pissing his pants.

The rationalist attitude towards politics really is something else. Either politics is a pointless sideshow compared to the machine god, or they are the ultimate politics understanders. I could not come up with a worse way to market AI than they did.

I’m not the most politically astute person, but even I know that AI is a perfect symbol of the hated oligarchy. AI is a tool for the rich to plunder the labor and resources of the poor, all while dehumanizing them in favor of the machine. Of course AI is politically toxic. The rationalists are so far up their own asses that they can’t even think of this basic viewpoint.

I used to dislike when Bernie Sanders would take the warnings of the AI doom prophets too seriously, but now I realize that it is still a shrewd strategy, because the outcome is good in the end (bad for the AI companies). If they start talking about how AI will cause human extinction, it is bad either way if they are sincere or if they are grifting. Jon Ossoff even referenced the human extinction narrative in his victory speech. The political reaction was not “please help the AI companies figure out AI safety,” but “shut that shit down right now.” And that is the right thing to do.

Although my district wasn’t very contested, I am still happy that I voted. For the past two years, the oligarchs have operated under the assumption that they are immune from consequences. The AI bros believed that politics was an irrelevant pastime beneath their notice. If anything, I am happy knowing that they now feel fear.

Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?

Honestly, the manifesto should have stopped here. They admitted defeat right out of the gate. But the manifesto must continue, because the LLM cannot fail, it can only be failed. I wonder if this report is starting to get under their skin.

The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.

This is not even a meaningful distinction. If I use an IDE command to change the name of a method everywhere it’s used, did I change all the names or did the IDE change all the names? What difference does it make?

I can only see this as them ordering engineers to use the AI more and go faster. The manifesto talks a good game about how “expertise” and “good engineering practices” are not dying, but telling engineers to offload more of their work to AI has the unavoidable tradeoff of making these things worse.

As a side question, how is it that all of these fuckers always want to use the precious gift of AI to go faster, not to, say, give their engineers more time to improve the quality of their software? Almost like they don’t actually give a shit about good engineering practices!

The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 — using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.

At least they’re realizing that maybe one of the anti-AI talking points has some merit to it. But they don’t seem to realize why they need stuff like code review and CI/CD: the AI is unreliable and these processes are needed to reduce the probability of a major fuckup reaching production. All they think is, hey, more opportunities to use AI!

(“Another takes it is place.” I had to look at the original text to make sure. At least we know the CTO wrote this himself after many drinks at 3 am. Damn, why are all those people on the internet so mean to us? I’m gonna show them!)

The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselves… But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.

What do I even say to this? Once again the problem is that there isn’t enough AI, and the solution is to buy more AI. We’re gonna buy so much more AI that we’re retooling the entire company and shoving it up every bodily orifice.

Excuse me? What happened to the mythical cybersecurity abilities of Claude Mythos? Physician, cure thyself!

Anthropic has not informed customers, and the malicious version was silently deleted the backdoored version without telling anybody.

Now we see Anthropic’s attitude towards security when the incident does not make for good marketing. Also, considering Binance was just hacked for a massive $3B in stablecoins, and this backdoor allowed remote access to developer laptops, I have a feeling these things are connected. If that is true, then this is by far the worst cybersecurity incident involving AI, worse than even the much ballyhooed PHP2Shell.

Edit: From Molly White’s article

Binance later wrote that their “initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop”, which allowed an attacker to “submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”

Okay, now I am really suspicious that these things are connected.

The boosters hope that the AI will replace mathematicians, but they are running into an awfully inconvenient fact: theorems and proofs are useless without people who care enough to understand them and make meaning from them.

Another nitpick: they say no mortal can resist the One Ring for very long, but even someone who just watches the movies knows that immortals can also be corrupted by it (which is why Gandalf and Galadriel were very careful to not accept it). I know there are so many examples of tech bros not understanding media, but Lord of the Rings is by far the worst offender.

No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have.

We all know how LotR goes. Boromir got the One Ring, carried it back to Gondor, used its sheer might to defeat his enemies in Mordor, and saved the world. Whatever problems you may have with Boromir, we all know that it would be a lot worse if Sauron got the One Ring. What do you mean, destroy the Ring? Are you a Luddite? This technology is here to stay. It cannot be destroyed by any craft we here possess, unless you’re crazy enough to try throwing it into a volcano or something.

If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis

That’s all I need to know. The statement is correct since it is vacuously true.