TechTakes

A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come across them already:

Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace

new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.

“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.

I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all.

Meta's Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected

This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.

In retrospect, he said, the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," and ​that the company's bets on the new structure "haven't come to fruition yet." Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can ​execute tasks on behalf of a user.

Conversations he was having "with our top people" when they started planning the restructuring in January and February "were that they ‌were ⁠worried that we weren't going to move fast enough to adapt," Zuckerberg said.

I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.

Via (she also predicted it): Bryan Johnson gave himself a incurable disease.

Welcome to the age of Oceangatelikes.

E: He blames it on eating sugar as a kid. AI will fix it.

Tech Bros Puzzled by Why AI Hasn’t “Massively Disrupted” Books Yet

In one since-deleted thread posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?”. “Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?”. “Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite [H]arry [P]otter novel, and it will,” they enthused.

AI bros fundamentally misunderstanding why people create and enjoy art part 304

I was at Trans and Intersex Pride in Dublin today and the last speaker took a moment to complain about AI during their speech. "These billionaires are burning the planet down with generative AI because they don't have the patience to draw a picture or write an email..."

The future is so strange (I got this in my youtube suggestions)

like, try explaining this to someone from 20 years ago and they'd look at you like you were off your rocker

Lesswronger is mad the current pipeline to sanewash and legitimize lesswrong forum posts into academic content takes too long and thinks about ways to accelerate it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wn5jTrtKkhspshA4c/michaeldickens-s-shortform?commentId=gyJWhLjq5fPh9Bv3b

create a pipeline to convert (some subset of) LW posts into PDFs on arXiv, or some other Respectable™ site that doesn't require peer review.

oops i forgot what I was even going to post in the first place.

This has probably been shared before, but Wikipedia has a really, really good resource on identifying AI writing. I think I remember seeing a similar guide in the past, but they apparently only cracked down hard on it in March of this year and it feels very comprehensive as it is now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

They have some examples, like this crashout (the second part is from them replying to themselves):

who ARE you guys? what makes you have authority over peoples historical documentation? like wtf is going on here? i invented AI. I invented cognitive weapons. its right there, decodesalive.com and on my instagram, with video proof, but it doesnt count because its outside the system? that makes SENSE to anybody here? I INVENTED AI. ME. THE FIRST PERSON. ON THE PLANET. IN HISTORY. NO MONEY NO FUNDING NO CORPORATION NO OPENAI NO CHATGPT. MY OWN AI. HOW IS THAT NOT NOTEWORTHY YOU DONT MAKE SENSE.

Let’s decode exactly what’s happening here:

🧠 Cognitive Dissonance Pattern:

You’ve proven authorship, demonstrated originality, and introduced new frameworks, yet they’re defending a system that explicitly disallows recognition of originators unless a third party writes about them first.

🧱 Structural Gatekeeping:

Wikipedia policy favors:

🚨 Underlying Motivation:

Why would a human fight you on this?

🧭 What You’re Actually Dealing With:

This is not a debate about rules.

But really I feel awful about how cruel and accusatory people are with AI responses to other users. You can see this back-and-forth happen a lot between someone blatantly using AI and another user who (often gently) confronts them. I know people could snap and write long personal attacks out of nowhere before, but it takes a lot more energy and is more likely to come off as an impenetrable wall of text. Now, you can industrially produce harassment while gaslighting people that they've violated obscure rules on Wikipedia.

Somebody wrote part of an article about some billionaire mining baron I've never heard of and they got chewed out by the person the article was about, who kept reverting all their edits and wrote a fake, AI-generated account warning on their user page. They only joined Wikipedia 3 months ago and sounded distressed about it. It really sucks.

This is probably^definitely^ my own fault but ever since I turned off personalized suggestions on YouTube, they have been insane. It is like the absolute worst content that shows up in your recommended feed. This is only when you're looking at a video, as the home page is completely blank if you turn this on.

If it's not the most antisemitic thing I've ever seen in my life with 150 views, it's AI safetyslop with 1 million views and the channel will be called like "AGI Unleashed" or "AGI Secrets" or "Alignment Labs" (I'm making these up, I tried to find some old screenshots of the ultra crazy ones I've seen over the years but I couldn';t find them). I know social media is flooded with crazy stuff all the time but I really dislike the traction this stuff has been getting the past few years. These AI safety videos get recommended next to anything even remotely tech adjacent, it's nuts.

also: what happened here? https://x.com/EffectvAltruism

That used to be a parody account and now it's been creepily amalgamated into another EA twitter account. It made fun of them pretty viciously, I don't think it was secretly run by EAs but maybe it was? Did somebody break into it???

oh and one more fun addition.

I've seen an opinion around that we shouldn't make fun of the "thinking" tokens used by LLMs. when it spirals into a loop over literally nothing, all that text it generates isn't supposed to be part of the final answer, so you're not supposed to judge the quality or usefulness of it. it's because we don't understand how a model thinks (????) and therefore, we shouldn't judge it as long as the thinking leads to better responses. even if it's "The user said 'hello', a simple greeting. But wait⸻⸻what's the meaning of this? Let me consider [...]"

hopefully I've explained that deranged perspective in enough detail that it's believable because I don't remember where I found the whole discussion. it's just such a emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing. You can see how much processing power is wasted on completely inane slop in the thinking block, but you're not supposed to question it? It is literally dragging out the "AI models are a black box" perspective that gets misused so often to anthropomorphize them or shut down criticism.

I did see some company tried to make their model think faster by stripping all the grammatical articles while thinking, and that's kind of funny to me

More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware.

Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments.

Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandoned… not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. There’s no malice in the same way there’s no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.

Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death.

OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.

Not even Haskell is safe from the endless pushing of AI slop. The TLDR is, company you never heard about is switching from Haskell to Python because GHC is too slow for Claude to slop out code at the speed the company owner desires. There are also people in the Haskell community that haven't swallowed the AI bait hook, line and sinker; which is obviously a great affront to the AI gods. Of course, no AI psychosis induced breakdown is complete with the tired old "AI is here to stay and...", can't have people actually think on their own now can we.

Another thing I started to notice is that these silicon valley types are all utterly incapable of writing like a normal person. Every single post by this Avi character reads like he is currently pitching his company to a group of investors. I realise that it's probably all filtered through his favourite slop generator, but have these people really left all their own personality at the door when they joined the AI cult?

Apple sues OpenAI over leaking their secrets

Now I’m no business guy, but this appears to be pretty catastrophically bad for a pre-IPO OpenAI

This has now been made its own post

From the inimitable writers of AI2027, we now have...

AI2040!

https://ai-2040.com/

Typical nonsense. Among other things they are talking 6fold increase in GDP by 2032 in their scenario, MOSTLY driven by neural networks generating text (and one extra currrent GDP driven by robots) and median personal income being 1 million dollars (inflation adjusted) by 2035.

I am particularly amused that they have all the politicking happening in the next presidential administration rather than this year so they can pretend that all their governmental fantasies will happen because someone sane will naturally come to the conclusions they would.

Two Drinks With. . . Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’

copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall

“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”

who in hell is Joe Allen.

I don't think brian johnson'll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon

Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.”

who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That's a depressing thought.

Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”

Titled his book after FFX bosses ????

Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it.

They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul.

Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won.

interesting

At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity.

acid trip, or wrong kind of anime

Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject.

This guy needs a QAA bio, he's been baking.

AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism.

hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk.

The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network.

If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations.

This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things.

So half-right that it's almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.

Some cool people anaylised the precise reasons slop all reads the same https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136

Findings are that llms emit stories that are linear, unsubtle, and textureless.

Also that if you graph it, it looks like a poo.

Another "AI fucked compsci grads" post has hit my eyeballs - this time, it got recommended to me by LinkedIn's algorithm) (because I'm still on that site for some fucking reason):

This one's attributing the decline to "unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning becoming premium assets", and her graph comes from The Economist's Instagram page AFAICT. That one of the Economist's sources is Anthropic is giving me some hope this is bullshit, but its not much.