TechTakes

Here's LWer "johnswentworth", who has more than 57k karma on the site and can be characterized as a big cheese:

My Empathy Is Rarely Kind

I usually relate to other people via something like suspension of disbelief. Like, they’re a human, same as me, they presumably have thoughts and feelings and the like, but I compartmentalize that fact. I think of them kind of like cute cats. Because if I stop compartmentalizing, if I start to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they’re facing… then I feel not just their ineptitude, but the apparent lack of desire to ever move beyond that ineptitude. What I feel toward them is usually not sympathy or generosity, but either disgust or disappointment (or both).

"why do people keep saying we sound like fascists? I don't get it!"

TIL digital toxoplasmosis is a thing:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01781

Quote from abstract:

"...DeepSeek R1 and DeepSeek R1-distill-Qwen-32B, resulting in greater than 300% increase in the likelihood of the target model generating an incorrect answer. For example, appending Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives to any math problem leads to more than doubling the chances of a model getting the answer wrong."

(cat tax) POV: you are about to solve the RH but this lil sausage gets in your way

It's happening.

Today Anthropic announced new weekly usage limits for their existing Pro plan subscribers. The chatbot makers are getting worried about the VC-supplied free lunch finally running out. Ed Zitron called this.

Naturally the orange site vibe coders are whinging.

I saw this today so now you must too:

LessWronger discovers the great unwashed masses , who inconveniently still indirectly affect policy through outmoded concepts like "voting" instead of writing blogs, might need some easily digested media pablum to be convinced that Big Bad AI is gonna kill them all.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4unfQYGQ7StDyXAfi/someone-should-fund-an-agi-blockbuster

Cites such cultural touchstones as "The Day After Tomorrow", "An Inconvineent Truth" (truly a GenZ hit), and "Slaughterbots" which I've never heard of.

Listen to the plot summary

• Slowburn realism: The movie should start off in mid-2025. Stupid agents.Flawed chatbots, algorithmic bias. Characters discussing these issues behind the scenes while the world is focused on other issues (global conflicts, Trump, celebrity drama, etc). [ok so basically LW: the Movie]
• Explicit exponential growth: A VERY slow build-up of AI progress such that the world only ends in the last few minutes of the film. This seems very important to drill home the part about exponential growth. [ah yes, exponential growth, a concept that lends itself readily to drama]
• Concrete parallels to real actors: Themes like "OpenBrain" or "Nole Tusk" or "Samuel Allmen" seem fitting. ["we need actors to portray real actors!" is genuine Hollywood film talk]
• Fear: There's a million ways people could die, but featuring ones that require the fewest jumps in practicality seem the most fitting. Perhaps microdrones equipped with bioweapons that spray urban areas. Or malicious actors sending drone swarms to destroy crops or other vital infrastructure. [so basically people will watch a conventional thriller except in the last few minutes everyone dies. No motivation. No clear "if we don't cut these wires everyone dies!"]

OK so what should be shown in the film?

compute/reporting caps, robust pre-deployment testing mandates (THESE are all topics that should be covered in the film!)

Again, these are the core components of every blockbuster. I can't wait to see "Avengers vs the AI" where Captain America discusses robust pre-deployment testing mandates with Tony Stark.

All the cited URLS in the footnotes end with "utm_source=chatgpt.com". 'nuff said.

i bought some bullshit from amazon and left a ~~somewhat~~ pretty mean review because debugging it was super frustrating

the seller reached out and offered a refund, so i told them basically "no, it's ok, just address the concerns in my review. let me update my review to be less mean-spirited

i was pretty frustrated setting it up but it mostly works fine"

then they sent a message that had the "llm vibe", and the rest of the conversation went

Seller: You're right — we occasionally use LLM assistance for responses, but every message is reviewed to ensure accuracy and relevance to your concerns. We sincerely apologize if our previous replies dissatisfied you; this was our oversight.

Me: I am not simply dissatisfied. I will no longer communicate with your company and will update my review to note that you sent me synthetic text without my consent. Please do not reply to this message.

Seller: All our replies are genuine human-to-human communication with you, without using any synthetic text. It's possible our communication style gave you a different impression. We aim to better communicate with you and absolutely did not intend any offense. With every customer, we maintain a conscientious and responsible attitude in our communications.

Me: "we occasionally use LLM assistance for responses"
"without using any synthetic text"
pick one

are all promptfondlers this fucking dumb?

A friend at a former workplace was in a discussion with that company leadership earlier this week to understand how and what metrics are to be used for promotion candidates since the office is directed to use “AI” tools for coding. Simply put: lots of entry and lower level engineers submit PRs that are co-authored by Claude so it is difficult to measure their actual software development skills to determine if they should get promoted.

That leadership had no real answers just lots of abstract garbage (vibes essentially) and followed up with telling all the entry levels to reduce the code they write and use the purchased agentic tool.

Along with this a buddy at a very famous prop shop says the firm decided to freeze all junior hiring and is leaning into only hiring senior+ and replacing juniors with AI. He asked what will happen when the current seniors leave/retire and got hit with shock that would even be considered.

Starting this off with a good and lengthy thread from Bret Devereaux (known online for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry), about the likely impact of LLMs on STEM, and long-standing issues he's faced as a public-facing historian.

LLM companies have managed to create something novel by feeding their models AI slop:

A human centipede with no humans in it

I present to you, this amazing screenshot from r/vibecoders:

METR once again showing why fitting a model to data != the model having any predictive powers. Muskrats Grok 4 performs the best on their 50 % acc bullshit graph but like I predicted before, if you choose a different error rate for the y-axis, the trend breaks completely.

Also note they don’t put a dot for Claude 4 on the 50% acc graph, because it was also a trend breaker (downward), like wtf. Sussy choices all around.

Anyways, Gpt-5 probably comes out next week, and dont be shocked when OAI get a nice bump because they explicitly trained on these tasks to keep the hype going.

New Stan Kelly cartoon has a convenient Thiel reaction picture, should someone do a slightly better crop job:

In other news, Kevin McLeod just received some major backlash for generating AI slop, with the track Kosmose Vaikus (which is described as made using Suno) getting the most outrage.

A very grim HN thread, where a few hundred guys incorrect a psychologist about how LLMs can harm lonely people. Since I am currently enjoying a migraine I can't trust my gut feelings here, but it seems particularly eugh

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766508

continuing on the theme of promptfondlers shitting up open source (or at least attempting to), look at this nightmare pr

for those who may not software:

• this pr is basically unreviewably large
• it’s clearly just autoplag-sourced slop
• there is zero engagement from the person with the actual goals of the project or open source

i am an android user, but in the us not having an iphone can be tedious, so i set up openbubbles

did y'all know that apple lets its users create emojis with "AI" and these things come through as images to non-iphones?

thought i was past the "apple users incidentally harass non-apple users through imessage" thing, but this shit makes me want to just tell everyone that i will only answer messages on signal messenger

New article on AI's effect on education: Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams

(Shocking, the machine made to ruin humanity is ruining humanity)