EFreethought

I saw a Cybertruck yesterday that was painted bright green. I did not think there was a way to make those things any uglier, but I guess I was wrong.

Here is a video I came across today that seems relevant to the discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiDqJMxg6o

He is a professor at Imperial College in London.

He says that a potential negative consequence of having AI do the math is that if people stop doing going into math, then there will not be enough people to understand and check the math proofs from AI and to push back against bad proofs.

A few years ago I was at the local Java meetup and the speaker was from Azul Systems. They contribute to OpenJDK, offer support contracts, and I think they used to make a special JDK for embedded systems. He said there is a big sign at one of their offices that said: "We write in C, so you don't have to".

I took enough C to understand what things like the JDK or the Golang runtime are doing for me wrt things like memory management. I do not know a lot about C, or anything about the C compiler, or the assembly, or the chip, or all the layers underneath. But I do know that there are people who do know that.

The point of all that is: What if we wind up in a world where nobody understands how the JDK or other runtimes work anymore? Or if the only people who do use their knowledge to break or take down systems running one of these runtimes? That is where I think things are heading.

We started this decade with doors falling off of airplanes, and a lot of people seemed to think that is a wonderful idea.

I have looked at a few comment threads about the math proofs on Hacker News. I only got as far as business calculus about 30 years ago, so some of it was beyond me.

I noticed that some commenters have no problem with the fact that a lot of the proofs are almost incomprehensible to humans. I do not see the point of math for AI alone, since I do not think AI is or will ever be conscious.

It is another example of people thinking that our lives should be not just pro-AI, but AI-centric. To them, the AI is not here for us, but we are here to serve the AI.

For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.

Now it seems like a lot of meetups are all about AI, and if the topic is not AI, someone brings it up: Can AI do this, did you use AI, etc, etc.

If it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.

4 years and more money has been spent on AI than anything else in human history outside of war.

I read somewhere that EBITA really means "Earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor".

Over the past two years, having the food companies regulate themselves has not worked out.

It is shocking that there are a lot of smart people unable to find work, yet rich people throw money at this guy.

I hate it when people say, "It's a management/culture problem; you are just not using the AI properly."

If you did not have a particular management problem until the AI came along, then I can say it's an AI problem.

I guess OpenAI's attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.

The Zig CoC stance on AI makes me want to look at Zig.

The discourse about AI is similar to the way people talk about Trump. A lot of us saw them for what they were immediately, and were called alarmist.

And over time, more and more people try to explain that they have changed their mind, and they were fooled, and aren't bad people themselves, something something something.