TechTakes

This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

EA Star Wars pitch

Today's "Christ, what an asshole" award goes to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at th'OSU.

A student put on some Internet radio station for background music at the end-of-semester barbecue, so I heard a Grammarly ad. In related news, I now long for the sweet embrace of a peat bog.

https://bsky.app/profile/tomdellaringa.bsky.social/post/3lr4djpa4zc2t

https://bsky.app/profile/dennisbhooper.bsky.social/post/3lr4lyaxmkc2b

Off topic: really enjoying Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast at the moment. Listened to the French Revolution and am now in the midst of the July Revolution.

This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining

https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068

https://archive.is/cKxyV

David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. “China just won,” he posted.

Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with tech’s most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.

L. O. L.

Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND

(original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)

The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like

Calls Al coding assistants too risky

Has never tested Al-generated code

Relies only on Stack Overflow snippets

Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?

I also appreciate how many of the "transformative" actions are just "did a really good thing... with AI!"

HR reduced time-to-hire by 30%! How? They told Jerry to stop hand-copying each candidate's resume (I sleep). Also we tried out an LLM for... something (Real shit).

Like, these are not examples of how AI adoption can benefit your organization and why being on board is important. They're split between "things you can do to mitigate the flaws in AI" and "things that would be good if your organization could do" and an implication that the two are related.

Time for my infrequent missive about the intersection of sneerspace and comedy podcasts. The current episode of one of my favourite comedy podcasts, Doughboys, jumpscared me today when one of the hosts, Mitch, came back from a toilet break and independently came up with the fundamentals of Roko's Basilisk (the torture in cyberspace part). Anyway here it is, or if you want, you can start with the context of the toilet break. What's important to note is that these guys do not try to present themselves as intelligent, and usually present themselves as stupid.

Ya'll seein this shit?

OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT

Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, "will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol". They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don't want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,

"Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I'm using to handle the", I swear to Gods I'm not making this up, "MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…". Desperate emphases mine.

And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.

I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was "haha yeah, mathlab is hard".

I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.

Also, happy Pride :3

Yes, happy pride month everyone!

I've decided that this year I'm going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows... wonder if anyone will notice.

I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I'm not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.

For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.

https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/

There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.

As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now.

There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.

It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.

Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we're not qualified and it never goes well.

AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.

This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there's at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

I'm gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek's screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.

Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:

https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz

(reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)

OpenAI is very different. They mainly lose money on ChatGPT, but it’s not really lost money, because they in turn accumulate fresh daha to further train their models. Data that none of their competitors have access to.

OpenAI is also different because AI is a major geopolitical factor at the moment and unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you must have noticed that geopolitics is much more important than money these days. ChatGPT is an incredible intelligence gathering channel and cutting access to AI APIs would make US sanctions hurt that much more. The only other country that can compete with US companies when it comes to bulk training data access is China, via their social media alternatives like TikTok and RedNote. You can imagine the geopolitical implications of that too.

The Washington Post is driving straight into the portable toilets at a beer festival.