I like your optimism. But I think this can go on for a looong time. I’m actually betting on it, because I tend to lose bets. A rare occasion where winning and losing both counts as a win.

The scenario begins with AI agents undergoing a “jump in capability”.

Might as well stop reading there. Another fluff piece about how useful and capable AI supposedly is, disguised as a doomsday scenario. I’m so sick of reading this bullshit. “Agentic AI” based on LLMs does not work reliably yet and very likely never will.

If you complain about bugs in traditional (deterministic) software, you ain’t seen nothing yet. A probabilistic system such as an LLM might or might not book the correct flight for you. It might give you the information you have asked for or it might delete your inbox instead.

As a consequence of a system being probabilistic, anything you do with it works or fails based on probabilities. This really is the dumbest timeline.

Can someone explain to mr why these people are buying Mac Minis to run this in a “safe” environment and then they go on and connect it to the internet and give the AI credentials to all their cloud accounts? This seems excessively moronic to me? Am I missing something?

Might be an unpopular opinion. I don’t hate AI as the technologies like LLMs and ML, the possibilities are limited but when used consciously with the drawbacks and faults in mind it can be useful. If you want to hate anything, hate the players, not the game…

• People who sell LLMs to customers under false pretenses
• People who force the use of LLMs for tasks they are objectively bad at
• People who build massive datacenters, ruining the environment for their dubious claims.
• People who feed the LLMs with a massive amount of stolen training data
• People who release those LLMs to customers who are not educated to deal with them (causing AI psychosis and general brainrot)
• People who sell that stuff as if it was magic instead of what it really is. A sophisticated autocomplete.
• People who sell that stuff as if it was close to being a superintelligence and therefore dangerous. Which is bullshit. The dangers lie in LLM chatbots being confidently wrong, persuading unsuspecting users to believe the hype
• People… i think there is a pattern here.

Yeah it’s really missing the point on every single topic. Customers are confused that Microslop renames everything to Copilot, like MS Office 365 being rebranded to Copilot 365. It’s not only the confusion between different types of LLMs. Customers are frustrated that MS puts Copilot buttons into every nook and cranny of existing products making these hard to use.

The author even manages to botch the last point: internal adoption of LLMs at MS. The amount of bugs and quality issues in recent Windows 11 updates suggest that forced LLM use at the company itself has a detrimental effect on their products.

Edit: Forgot a couple of reasons that aren’t mentioned either: Customers are frustrated that Copilot doesn’t live up to its lofty promises. Customers are frustrated that careless implementations of AI features like Recall are threatening their privacy and safety.

It’s so weird to read that. Every professional developer knows that debugging is hard and debugging someone else’s code is harder. The crap that falls out of LLMs can be even worse, and yet you allow yourself to be reduced to a human full-time debugger/QA person.

This isn’t just fatigue, this is taking a wrong approach to software development from the ground up.

Ok let me try a different angle. I think the reason why AI is such a hotly debated topic right now is that AI is something that influences the lives of white westerners directly, while war is an abstract concept for most. To put it more bluntly, you’re in contact with AI stuff every day, but there are no tanks rolling down your street (yet - but that might change soon).

Yeah the Antrophic guys are also firmly in the “believer” group.

I think that Satya Nadella and a lot of other CEO types genuinely believe in AI, as misguided as it seems. This is more about who they choose to listen too than having an actual understanding of the technology and its limits. And probably some FOMO sprinkled on top.

Sam Altman knows what’s up though and so does Jensen Huang. In this gold rush one is peddling the fake gold and the other is selling the shovels.

Do you have a source for that backtracking about AI? I think they did not mention that explicitly. Instead they were talking about unrelated improvements. The CEO is still in denial about AI bloat. He seems unable to comprehend that people don’t like to be force fed AI everywhere across the OS.

Its also hallucinating the parentheses in a way that looks vaguely like code, but it’s complete garbage

It’s more of a risk assessment than anything else. The US has proven to be erratic in honouring treaties and contracts, which makes them unreliable. Gas supply is a critical infrastructure and failures in delivery have grave consequences.

because they can sell it for more money and as a bonus controlling people’s data gives them power. Supervillains love technology.

This orb surveillance thingy looks like Wheatley from Portal 2, an AI which eventually turned evil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatley_(Portal) I’m sure that’s a good sign.

Probably depends on what AI DDG is using… I switched DDG to noai so I don’t see any generated results

Interesting, if i do site:neocities.org with a random search term e.g. site:neocities.org anime in DDG I get zero results. In google, this yields thousands of neocities subdomains. Do you get any relevant results in DDG this way?

I chose a random neocities website and searched with both DDG and Google. The search was “irony machine neocities” without quotes. Google yielded a result which pointed to the correct URL https://irony-machine.neocities.org/ while DDG did not.

Before you say haha no one is using bing… Your beloved DuckDuckGo uses bing results and this means it’s censored there too. And it’s not only about the start page https://neocities.org/ (which can be found with DuckDuckGo via Wikipedia Snippet). None of the hosted sites are in the index.

The article itself looks like it’s written with AI. Inconsistencies, repetitions, dull language and an unnecessary bullet point summary at the end. While I haven’t read the actual study, nothing in the article seems to explain what makes this causation instead of correlation.

Personally I’m a bit annoyed with articles like these because they try to create the impression that criticism of AI only stems from it being too powerful, instead of recognizing that the technology has very real capability limits. What is presented as two opposing viewpoints is effectively just one. AI boosters and AI doomers are both strong believers in something that hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t happen for a very long time.

I’d argue that Java is not bigger than ever, it’s more of an established legacy language used almost exclusively in business applications today. Comparing it to COBOL in that sense would be mean but there are similarities. When I started with Java in the late 90s it was something completely different. It became popular because it was open and easy to learn. Java gained a huge community quickly. Now there are some technical reasons why Java lost its popularity among the general tech community over time but as I witnessed it the major downfall happened when Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle and the new licensing model was just horrible. Many of us didn’t want to use a language that wasn’t open and moved on. Others created open source forks like you said. I remember we were forced to move to OpenJDK in the company where I was employed. At that time OpenJDK was was neither fast nor complete. It was a shitshow and I can assure you we did not have a good time. Eventually we phased out Java entirely and built the next version on a new stack. And today there are a lot of open and modern general purpose languages available so there is no need to use Java for new projects unless you want to integrate it into an existing Java ecosystem.

And it was basically the same story with MySQL. You actually said it - “people do their best to get his stench off of it if they can”. In most cases that means moving on to something that isn’t owned by Oracle.