TechTakes

They think it's good because it's still better than what they could make without it, while also being cheap/free.

chefs kiss

That's the second model announcement in a row by the major LLM vendor where the supposed advantage over the current state of the art is presented as... better vibes. He actually doesn't even call the output good, just successfully metafictional.

Meanwhile over at anthropic Dario just declared that we're about 12 months before all written computer code is AI generated, and 90% percent of all code by the summer.

This is not a serious industry.

lazy programmer disappointed that lazy programmer service doesn't want to do everything for him

it's rather hilarious that the service is the one throwing the brakes on. I wonder if it's done because of public pushback, or because some internal limiter applied in the cases where the synthesis drops below some certainty threshold. still funny tho

~~I haven't got a source on this yet~~ here's the source (see spoiler below for transcript):

Thursday--that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

Beep boop... training data located

Congratulations, Sam, you've given us the first prose poem to return a 404 on the Pritchard scale.

my facial muscles are pulling weird, painful contortions as I read this and my brain tries to critique it as if someone wrote it

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.

so like, this is both flowery garbage and also somehow incorrect? cause no the model doesn’t begin with a blinking cursor or a buffer, it’s not editing in word or some shit. I’m not a literary critic but isn’t the point of the “vibe of metafiction” (ugh saltman please log off) the authenticity? but we’re in the second paragraph and the text’s already lying about itself and about the reader’s anxiety disorder

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

ugh

Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

is… is Mila the cat? is that why her and her grief are both so small?

She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

oh fuck it I’m done! Thursday is liminal and tastes of almost-Friday. fuck you. you know that old game you’d play at conventions where you get trashed and try to read My Immortal out loud to a group without losing your shit? congrats, saltman, you just shat out the new My Immortal.

This is only tangentially related to your point, but gut instinct says shit like this is gonna define the public's image of the tech industry post-bubble - all style, no subtance, and zero understanding of art, humanities, or how to be useful to society.

Referencing an earlier comment, part of me also suspects the arts/humanities will gain some degree of begrudging respect post-bubble, at the expense of tech/STEM's public image taking a nosedive.

I've just realised:

this reads just like a neoreactionary trying to be literary

e.g. the Dimes Square literary astroturf crowd

same problem as gen AI output: too much style, zero understanding of basic structure, you cannot get that fine detailed in structure and be that bad at the basics.