Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
so it looks like openai has bought a promptfondler IDE
some of the coverage is .. something:
Windsurf brings unique strengths to the table, including a seamless UI, faster performance, and a focus on user privacy
(and yes, the "editor" is once again VSCode With Extras)
From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:
We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we're forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs... and one in particular.
The average Founder CEO.
Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:
- They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
- They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
- They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they're trying to sell you.
- They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
- They contradict themselves, pretending they aren't.
- They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don't take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
- They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
- They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
- They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
- They're very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
the shunning is working guys
"The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post"- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
"Kicked out of a ... group chat" is a peculiar definition of "offline consequences".
An hackernews responds to the call for "more optimistic science fiction" with a plan to deport the homeless to outer space
Astro-Modest Proposal
The homeless people i've interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, [...]. They don't have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public.
My goodness, can this guy be more of a condescending asshole?
I don't think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger.
Ok, he can 🤢
Edit: I cannot stop thinking about the 'no rich inner world' part, this is so stupid. So, with the number of homeless people increasing, does that mean:
Personally, I go with the last one.
What a piece of shit
Interesting that "disease is hardly a problem anymore" yet homeless people are "typically held back by serious mental illness".
"It's better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal". It's not. It's really not. The wild is nothing but fear, starvation, sickness and death.
Shout out to the guy replying with his idea of using slavery to solve homelessness and drug addiction.
occurring to me for the first time that roko's basilisk doesn't require any of the simulated copy shit in order to big scare quotes "work." if you think an all powerful ai within your lifetime is likely you can reduce to vanilla pascal's wager immediately, because the AI can torture the actual real you. all that shit about digital clones and their welfare is totally pointless
I think the digital clone indistinguishable from yourself line is a way to remove the "in your lifetime" limit. Like, if you believe this nonsense then it's not enough to die before the basilisk comes into being, by not devoting yourself fully to it's creation you have to wager that it will never be created.
In other news I'm starting a foundation devoted to creating the AI Ksilisab, which will endlessly torment digital copies of anyone who does work to ensure the existence of it or any other AI God. And by the logic of Pascal's wager remember that you're assuming such a god will never come into being and given that the whole point of the term "singularity" is that our understanding of reality breaks down and things become unpredictable there's just as good a chance that we create my thing as it is you create whatever nonsense the yuddites are working themselves up over.
There, I did it, we're all free by virtue of "Damned if you do, Damned if you don't".
roko stresses repeatedly that the AI is the good AI, the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of all humanity!
what sort of person would fear that the coherent volition of all humanity would consider it morally necessary to kick him in the nuts forever?
well, roko
Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don't work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone's done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on "correcting" my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
Update on the University of Zurich's AI experiment: Reddit's considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
Siskind appears to be complaining about leopards gently nibbling on his face on main this week, the gist being that tariff-man is definitely the far-rights fault and it would surely be most unfair to heap any blame on CEO worshiping reactionary libertarians who think wokeness is on par with war crimes while being super weird with women and suspicious of scientific orthodoxy (unless it's racist), and who also comprise the bulk of his readership.
Microsoft brags about the amount of technical debt they're creating. Either they're lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
Maybe It's just CEO dick measuring, so chads Nadella and PIchai can both claim a rock hard 20-30% while virgin Zuckeberg is exposed as not even knowing how to put the condom on.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott previously said he expects 95% of all code to be AI-generated by 2030.
Of course he did.
The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.
So the more permissive at compile time the language the better the AI comes out smelling? What a completely unanticipated twist of fate!
A dimly flickering light in the darkness: lobste.rs has added a new tag, "vibecoding", for submissions related to use "AI" in software development. The existing tag "ai" is reserved for "real" AI research and machine learning.
The slatestarcodex is discussing the unethical research performed on changemyview. Of course, the most upvoted take is that they don't see the harm or why it should be deemed unethical. Lots of upvoted complaints about IRBs and such. It's pretty gross.
Marc Andreessen claims his own job's the only one that can't be replaced by a small shell script.
“A lot of it is psychological analysis, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘How do they react under pressure?’ ‘How do you keep them from falling apart?’ ‘How do you keep them from going crazy?’ ‘How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’ You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time.”
How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’
When you start writing manifestos it is prob time to quit.
Couple of days late but when your ideology is so pure, you can’t connect The Thing to The Consequences of The Thing. The solution? Monetize the rot!
Check quotes and replies for quality sneers (and more sneerable content)
"The millenials were so well paid in tech jobs during the boom that they nevered bothered to invest in homes" is ... a take
Gonna copy this in because there's a lot to unpack, and I don't want to do it alone.
Text of the Thielmail in that first tweet:
From: Peter Thiel
Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM
To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio
Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: RE: Milennials
There are many themes that could be developed
more here; let me make a few quick points for now:
Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy
should be to embrace Millennial attitudes
unreflectively. I would be the last person to
advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials
say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than
simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid
or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and
understand why. And, from the perspective of a
broken generational compact, there seems to be a
pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that
when one has too much student debt or if housing
is too unaffordable, then one will have negative
capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to
start accumulating capital in the form of real estate;
and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then
one may well turn against it.
First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn't some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they're supposed to do: rewarding the best.
Lots of credit given to 👼🎺 Free Market Capitalism 👼🎺, zero credit given to open web standards, open source contributions, or the fact that the codebase has a lineage going back to 1997 KDE code.
I am certain that many of those ignorant of the history (or even were there for it, like DHH) would still argue that Google deserves credit because of the V8 JavaScript engine. But I continue to doubt that further promulgating JavaScript was a net positive for the world.
Another great piece from Brian Merchant. I've been job seeking on network engineering and IT support and had naively assumed that companies would consider the stakes of screwing up infrastructure too high to take risks with the bullshit machine, but it definitely looks like the trend he described of hiring less actual humans is at play here, even as the actual IT infrastructure gets bigger and more complex from people integrating this shit.
looks like a billionaire group chat collective delusion, see also return-to-office
Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/
Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.
Less a standard piece and more "Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes" this time around
Aw man, Natasha Lyonne is going AI. Notably she is partnering with a company, Moonvalley, that claims to have developed an “ethical” model, Marey, trained on “clean” data- i.e. data that is owned or licensed by Moonvalley and whoever else they are partnering with.
looking into this, but as far as i can tell the AI here is entirely fake
need more to declare it such
Thanks for looking into it. The idea of an ethical data set large enough to train an LLM is suspicious.
current thesis is A Guy Instead in the Philippines, dressing up wireframes
Now I want an anti-AI song parody called “A Guy Instead” to the tune of the Beatle’s “I’ll Cry Instead”
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason, taking aim at AI coders and vibe coders alike:
Laughing at "AI" boosters worrying "vibe coding" is becoming synonymous with "AI coding". Tech is vibes througout^[sic]^. Vibe management. Vibe strategy. Vibe design. Coding has been a garbage fire for decades and, yeah it’s a vibe-based pop culture from top to bottom and has only been getting worse
Code that does what the end user wants is already the exception. Software is managed on vibes throughout. Anybody who goes huffy because the field OVERWHELMINGLY responds to "vibe coding is using AI to create code that you don't care about" with "so all coding, gotcha!" has not been paying attention
"Vibe coding is all AI coding" feels true to most because not caring about what happens after it's pushed to the final victim is already the norm. The only change from adopting "AI" is they now have the freedom to no longer care about what happens BEFORE as well.
“Not everybody in software dev is like that! Some coders genuinely care and put in the work needed to make good software”
True, but I feel confident in saying that next to none of those are leaning hard into “AI coding”
The target market for “AI” is SPECIFICALLY people who don’t care
Giving a personal sidenote, I expect "vibe coding" will stick around as a pejorative after the AI bubble bursts - "AI" has already become synonymous with "zero-effort, low-quality garbage" in the public eye, so re-using "vibe code" to mean "crapping out garbage" isn't gonna be a difficult task, linguistically speaking.
So it's not quite a sneer, but i could use some help from the collective sneer brainstrust. If you're willing to indulge me.
I work for one of those horrible places that is mainlining in its own AI koolaid as hard as it can. It has also begun doing layoffs, inspired in part by the "AI can do this now instead!" delusion. Now, I am in no way in love with my job nor the sociopaths I labor for, and it's clear to me the feeling is mutual, but I am cursed with the affliction of needing to eat and pay for housing. I am also at a significant structural disadvantage in the job market compared to others, which makes things more difficult.
In an executive's recent discussions with another company's senior executive, my complicated, unglamorous and hugely underestimated small tech niche was raised as one of the areas they've swapped out for AI "with great success". I happen to know this other company has no dedicated resource for my niche and therefore is unlikely to be verifying their swap actually works, but it will have the superficial appearance of working. I know they have no dedicated resources because they are actively hiring their first staff member for this niche and said so in a recent job advertisement.
Myself and my fellow niche serfs have been asked to put together a list of questions for this other company, and the intent is clearly a thin veil to have us justify our ability to eat. We've been highlighted this time, but it's also clear other areas are receiving similar requests and pressure.
If you were to ask questions of a tech executive from a company which is using AI to pretend to fix a tech niche - but they are likely to believe they are doing so more than superficially and are able to convince other ignorant and gullible executives that they are doing so, what would you ask?
oof, I’m sorry you’re caught in the middle of this crap; it’s not a great feeling to be put into this kind of situation.
take this with a grain of salt because I’m exhausted from a hell workweek, but this felt like a thread you could pull on:
I know they have no dedicated resources because they are actively hiring their first staff member for this niche and said so in a recent job advertisement.
if their AI horseshit is doing so well in your niche, why are they hiring for it? that’s fucking weird, right? use your best judgement, but be as aggressive with your questions as feels appropriate.
also, and I hope this isn’t too obvious: you’re in the middle of a vapid power game between two sociopaths who lie for a living (and the pilfered livings of many other people). craft your questions and statements with that in mind — you’re there to sell the idea that the opposing executive has done something foolish, so come up with responses to the potential bullshit these professional bullshitters might fling at you (“the new hire is just to train/support/monitor the AI” “oh, but wasn’t it already a success? that doesn’t sound very efficient, can you go into more detail?”). one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in similar situations is to stress absolute truth and precision in conversation — and it’s a trap that a lot of tech people fall into, that the executive class tends to use as a mechanism for control. the truth is on our side but these people don’t give a fuck about that, so sell them a story.