EFreethought

The Zig CoC stance on AI makes me want to look at Zig.

It is shocking that there are a lot of smart people unable to find work, yet rich people throw money at this guy.

The discourse about AI is similar to the way people talk about Trump. A lot of us saw them for what they were immediately, and were called alarmist. And over time, more and more people try to explain that they have changed their mind, and they were fooled, and aren’t bad people themselves, something something something.

I guess OpenAI’s attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.

How did Lex Fridman’s podcast become so popular? He has no affect, always seems like he is about to fall asleep, and most of his guests are horrible people. He is a less intense Joe Rogan.

They do not want humans producing anything, and now they do not want humans consuming anything. Is there any place for humans in their AI future?

This isn’t some special class of attack; it’s a fundamental designed-in flaw of the system. Will it ever not be a flaw in LLMs? Or will they always be this way?

I read somewhere that EBITA really means “Earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor”.

Over the past two years, having the food companies regulate themselves has not worked out.

If it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time. 4 years and more money has been spent on AI than anything else in human history outside of war.

For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether. Now it seems like a lot of meetups are all about AI, and if the topic is not AI, someone brings it up: Can AI do this, did you use AI, etc, etc.

I saw a Cybertruck yesterday that was painted bright green. I did not think there was a way to make those things any uglier, but I guess I was wrong.

I hate it when people say, “It’s a management/culture problem; you are just not using the AI properly.” If you did not have a particular management problem until the AI came along, then I can say it’s an AI problem.

Here is a video I came across today that seems relevant to the discussion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiDqJMxg6o He is a professor at Imperial College in London. He says that a potential negative consequence of having AI do the math is that if people stop doing it, then there will not be enough people to understand and check the math and to push back against bad proofs. A few years ago I was at the local Java meetup and the speaker was from Azul Systems. They contribute to OpenJDK, offer support contracts, and I think they used to make a special JDK for embedded systems. He said there is a big sign at one of their offices that said: “We write in C, so you don’t have to”. I took enough C to understand what things like the JDK or the Golang runtime are doing for me wrt things like memory management. I do not know a lot about C, or anything about the C compiler, or the assembly, or the chip, or all the layers underneath. But I do know that there are people who do know that. The point of all that is: What if we wind up in a world where nobody understands how the JDK or other runtimes work anymore? Or if the only people who do use their knowledge to break or take down systems running one of these runtimes? That is where I think things are heading. We started this decade with doors falling off of airplanes, and a lot of people seemed to think that is a wonderful idea.

The authors are part of AI Fight Club. The first rule of AI Fight Club is: Do not consider or suggest not using AI.