TechTakes

Got another chance to experience slop firsthand when the instructor for my electrician course was 'encouraged' to use the hallucinatron to help create our final exam on the NEC. Now given that the NEC is a dense technical document with a lot of minor but significant variation across its considerable length, this was clearly a perfect use case. Here's how it shook out:

• It condensed 100 multiple choice questions from the input to 36

• On one question "1-2 inches" was simplified to "12"

• Units in general seem to have been dropped off a lot of questions and answer choices. Usually this didn't matter too much but it's a bad look

• Another question asked about fill percentages for a 30 inch conduit. If you look around your office or he and see a >2ft diameter piece of PVC pipe let me know because the tables in the NEC only go up to 6 inches. This is actually a unit issue again because one of the questions on the input test referred to a 30mm conduit which, you know, does actually exist.

• Other questions had a correct answer matching a generic part of the NEC, but had additional information added as a distractor that ended up matching to more specific elements that changes the relevant rule.

• Several questions asked about the reasoning behind a certain rule. Notably the NEC rarely actually gets into that information, as it's already an incredibly long reference and policy document and would be made even more unweildy if it gave the justification for everything that you should be learning as part of becoming a licensed electrician.

• However, this rarely mattered as the answer choices for those questions uniformly included an obviously correct answer about a generic safety risk and distractors about doing things for cost savings, aesthetic reasons, or arbitrarily.

Given that one of the challenges of this test is time management and looking things up, having to deal with the extra layer of "is this just slop or am I missing something" ended up adding an extra and unintended layer of difficulty onto the test. As always, no matter how egregious or obnoxious the errors introduced by AI, the biggest problem is the loss of trust: you can no longer assume that the text you're reading was put together with the intended purpose in mind rather than being generated to be statistically similar to text matching that purpose. Even if the differences are relatively small in scope, as they were for most questions on the test, they significantly harm the actual communication of information.

OT: Finally had to break with a long-time friend after he started sliding more and more into fascism. Feeling quite overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted right now.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer

For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like "write this app" or "write this functionality" which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.

Please, just fucking don't, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don't actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.

A keynote talk suggested, "Do away with a physics midterm, ask students to converse with AI Isaac Newton."

In the quotes, we find the useful suggestion that the program could be ELIZA-sized.

— Hi, AIsaac! Can you tell me about physics?

— Go away.

— What?

— You're a moron and you're TRYING TO STEAL MY IDEAS.

— Look, AIsaac, I don't think—

— DID LEIBNIZ PUT YOU UP TO THIS?

—

— just GO AWAY I have MERCURY FUMES TO BREATHE.

Today from the 'you have got to be fucking kidding me'- dept Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

"To ​be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as ​well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged."

CW: USA Politics

That suppressed Democratic National Committe 2024 "postmortem" report turns out to have been pure slop, with essentially no references and entirely made-up charts and plots while also missing entire sections. The author can produce exactly zero interview transcripts or source data. It also neglects interrogating failures in addressing trans rights, the genocide in Gaza, or the affordability crisis.

The podcast "It Could Happen Here" does a good job of analysis (disgusted), but long-time sneerers will feel the futility of getting into the weeds with an extruded textual artifact:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/whats-in-the-dncs-2024-autopsy-335696933/

Tl:dl the deeply institutionalist DNC chairman appointed his best buddy to the job with zero oversight, and this was the result.

There's a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.

edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.

In Buttcoin related news, apparently Michael J. Saylor has sold some of his bitcoins because he was running out of money and we reached sub 60k. For a quick non dutch source on the selling see this from r/buttcoin (last image). 32 bitcoin was enough to cause a crash. Imagine if Satoshis bitcoins ever moved.

A second vibecoded Aella website has hit the building

https://www.knockrup.com/

there's a lot of ladies i know without guys, but who want kids. and i go 'would you accept some rich guy paying u a ton of money to just have his kid as a single parent' and they're like 'idk man prob not' and im like 'waht if it was 5m' and they're all magically like 'oh yeah i would do it'

so i made a directory for this, but i am trying to find ladies who would actually like to list themselves with their moonshot baby-funding goal. if u know anybody who wouldn't mind making a profile pls let me know, i wanna publicize the directory but need enough seeded ladies first

ed zitron went on bloomberg podcasts, these might be actual end times

So here in Nashville, Elon and our state government have conspired to attempt a Tesla tunnel that starts at the state capitol, goes under the Cumberland River, and exits at our airport (BNA). They're doing it whether the city wants it or not. (It's "not").

Setting aside the race to determine whether a void in the local limestone fills with water or radon first, I wanted to help come up with a catchy title for the as yet unnamed car hole:

BNA Underground Transit Tunnel

Tourist Protip: Don't try the hot chicken before visiting the BUTT hole.

Porting this over: Hinton believes LLMs have gained consciousness

Bonus: This Emile Torres article on how Bernie Sanders and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have gotten mixed up with Yud and co.

Neil doesn’t seem to buy into rationalism though? He didn’t even really endorse Soares (or mention him at all) he just said that superhuman AI was dangerous. He has a video on how modern AI is overrated

Speaking of Aella (I really shouldn't), many have probably already seen this Liberal Currents article that leans heavily on her web-survey sex research dataset:

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-interracial-cuck-porn-theory-of-everything/

The publication seems to have plenty of traction on Bluesky, for what that's worth, but I think this particular example needs to be retained as an exhibit of the hazards of rehabilitating American liberalism. A low-level affinity for the existing tech industry is always there, as its growth underlaid the benefits that make liberalism appealing. And that means the doorway for entryism by the tech-fascist freaks is always open, and then you're never more than a couple fundraising cycles (whether electoral or investment) away from being right back in this exact same mess.

Amnesty International has officially called for an outright ban on gen-AI

Time for me to eat a hat: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

CW M:tG weirdo Zvi's slobsack + Xhitter references, but he accuses an OpenAI / Palantir-funded PAC boosting a fake "AI doomer" account calling for violence:

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-171-false-flag?open=false#%C2%A7openai-pac-engaged-in-false-flag-advocacy-for-violence

Off-topic but this seems like a place that appreciates an insane legal dispute: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/02/everyone-in-this-lego-dispute-should-have-spoken-to-a-lawyer-earlier-than-they-did/

Today in signs of changing times, “we used to call that a botnet”: https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/

"I personally worry that the EA community has over-learned the lessons of FTX"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/95NgkvZKJx8tJbtn5/lighthaven-east-a-feasibility-study

"Claude, draw me a slide to advertise Claude. Make sure to use the word "Claude" 17 times."

"You got it boss"

Spoiler for obviously AI generated image because really who wants to see that nonsense anymore

source

So apparently Trump's National Design Bureau has been busy. I think the substack here may be slightly too conspiratorial. A lot of the staging environment stuff indicates (imo) a desire to replace or create something that may or may not actually include the capability to do so, especially when it requires working with other federal agencies or otherwise establishing human and organizational infrastructure in addition to the digital. That being said there's something very bad about the US government taking the same attitude to privacy, accountability, and information security that silicon valley normally does, especially when doing so is actively violating several laws.