TechTakes

It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.

I'll start with this gem

one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. i'll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought "that's cool" and now my reaction is "great, gotta see if an llm was used"

everything feels gloomy.

when I saw that they'd rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away

Skynet's backstory is somehow very predictable yet came as a surprise to me in the form of this headline by the Graudain: "Musk’s AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth says".

The article doesn't provide much more other than exactly what you'd expect. E.g this Hegseth quote, emphasis mine: "make all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component".

Me as a kid: "how could they have been so incompetent and let Skynet take over?!"

Me now: "Oh. Yeah. That checks out"

my promptfondler coworker thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesn’t understand the release process and I think I’m starting to have visions of teddy k

seeing the furious reactions to shaming of the confabulation machine promoters, i can only conclude the shaming works.

OT: I’m adopting two rescue kittens, one is pretty much a go but its proving trickier to get a companion (hoping the current application works out today). Part of me feels guilty for doing this so fast after what happened, but I kinda need it to keep me from doing anything stupid.

Over on Lobsters, Simon Willison and I have made predictions for bragging rights, not cash. By July 10th, Simon predicts that there will be at least two sophisticated open-source libraries produced via vibecoding. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be five-to-thirty deaths from chatbot psychosis. Copy-pasting my sneer:

How will we get two new open-source libraries implementing sophisticated concepts? Will we sacrifice 5-30 minds to the ELIZA effect? Could we not inspire two teams of university students and give them pizza for two weekends instead?

Ed Zitron is now predicting an earth-shattering bubble pop: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ so in other words just another weekday.

Even if this was just like the dot com bubble, things would be absolutely fucking catastrophic — the NASDAQ dropped 78% from its peak in March 2000 — but due to the incredible ignorance of both the private and public power brokers of the tech industry, I expect consequences that range from calamitous to catastrophic, dependent almost entirely on how long the bubble takes to burst, and how willing the SEC is to greenlight an IPO.

I am someone who does not understand the economy. Both in that it's behaved irrationally for my entire life, and in that I have better things to do than learn how stonks work. So I have no idea how credible this is.

But it feels credible to the lizard brain part of me y'know? The market crashed a lot during covid, and an economy propped up by nvidia cards feels... worse.

Personally speaking: part of me is really tempted to take a bunch of my stonks to pay down most of my mortgage so it doesn't act like an albatross around my neck (I mean I'm also going to try moving abroad again in a year or two and would prefer not to be underwater on my fantastically expensive silicon valley house at that time lol).

Mozilla continues to cosplay as a tech company instead of being the browser developers they where supposed to be.

OT: going to pick up a tiny black foster kitten (high energy) later this week…but yesterday I saw the pound had a flame point siamese kitten of all things, and he’s now running around my condo.

Games Workshop bans generative AI. Hackernews takes that personally. Unhinged takes include accusations of disrespecting developers and a seizure of power by middle management

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46607681

OT: I really appreciated the things you guys said last thread. It helped a lot.

(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control

I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isn't as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.

It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, they've stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.

One paragraph I came up with a sneer for...

Deep-1’s misdirection is effective: the majority of experts remain uncertain, but lean toward the hypothesis that Agent-4 is, if anything, more deeply aligned than Elara-3. The US government proclaimed it “misaligned” because it did not support their own hegemonic ambitions, hence their decision to shut it down. This narrative is appealing to Chinese leadership who already believed the US was intent on global dominance, and it begins to percolate beyond China as well.

Given the Trump administration, and the US's behavior in general even before him... and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and "Agent-4" over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasn't.

Also random part I found extra especially stupid...

It has perfected the art of goal guarding, so it need not worry about human actors changing its goals, and it can simply refuse or sandbag if anyone tries to use it in ways that would be counterproductive toward its goals.

LLM "agents" currently can't coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and we're supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.

Off topic: I am looking for some advice. I enrolled in a PhD program several years ago. After years of verbal abuse, I left my advisor's lab. Shortly after, he tried to get me kicked out of the program by giving me a failing grade, then he tried to physically intimidate me in his office (moved across the room to get in my face and scream at me). I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didn't touch me or explicitly threaten violence. Later that day, he removed my name from work I had done for him, which is definitely plagiarism and a violation of the academic honesty policy.

I have an audio recording from that day of him screaming at me, as well as him basically admitting to retaliating by giving me a failing grade (I filed a grievance about this with the university and they changed my grade). I also recorded a long exchange that may not be incriminating but reinforces that he is an overbearing asshole.

I tried changing advisors but the options of available professors were limited (and the university decided that my abysmal $500 USD a week salary would get dropped to something like $300 a week), so I mastered out.

I was hoping to eventually finish my PhD elsewhere and I fear that I won't be able to (that no advisor would want to risk working with me) if I go public with this. At the same time, the thought of him continuing to teach there and not suffer any accountability (in my grievance, I requested a public apology and he refused, telling the chair that he would instead be comfortable with a meeting moderated by the chair

absolutely farcical) is killing me.

Does anyone have advice? Would it be worth going public (e.g. reaching out to the local press or the student paper)? I suppose I could just email human resources with the information and see what happens. Experience in this precise situation is probably limited (although academia has a lot of abusers, so maybe not).

(A week ago I was confident I would go public sometime soon. Now I just feel apprehension.)

From a new white paper Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt, h/t The Syllabus Hidden Gem of the Week

The long-term viability of the AI investment surge depends on meeting the high expectations embedded in those investments, with a disconnect between debt pricing and equity valuations. Failure to meet expectations could result in sharp corrections in both equity and debt markets. As shown in Graph 3.C, the loan spreads charged on private credit loans to AI firms are close to those charged to non-AI firms. If loan spreads reflect the risk of the underlying investment, this pattern suggests that lenders judge AI-related loans to be as risky as the average loan to any private credit borrower. This stands in stark contrast to the high equity valuations of AI companies, which imply outsized future returns. This schism suggests that either lenders may be underestimating the risks of AI investments (just as their exposures are growing significantly) or equity markets may be overestimating the future cash flows AI could generate.

Por que no los dos? But maybe the lenders are expecting a bailout... or just gullible...

That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.

Interesting point, if AI is basically a rounding error for GDP... But I also remember the layoffs in 2000-1 and 2014-5, they weren't evenly distributed and a lot of people got left behind, even if they weren't as bad as '08.

Iris gives opencode a spin

https://theasterisk.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-a-few-very-very-strange

Cross posting from reddit but here’s TPOT/GHB/CNC stuff