Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the suckersVCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.

Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.

When I used to work at the farmers’ market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the “intactivists.” It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)… But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬

Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore)

Beyond the obvious and well-discussed material externalities, it strikes me that we don’t know and can’t yet know the true total cost of the LLM-driven development cycle. The manifestation of security holes and rewrites are possibly still years off in the future, maybe decades in the case of lower-level code. And yet, given industry practice and the mentality of most of the management strata, I have little doubt that such future costs will either a) be ignored completely and thus rendered true externalities or b) somebody else’s problem, I done got my bag, brah, see ya…

I’m sure it’s all meant to bolster a sales pitch to corporate clients that “this is YOUR AI, that YOU CONTROL!”

I’ve been wondering, since Rust has a more complex compiler that can take longer to run, and people are typically farming it out to a build/CI server anyway… are these otherwise accomplished vibe coders like Klabnik and the Oxide bros pursuing an experience similar to the REPL/incremental compilation of Lisp or Smalltalk? We’ve already discussed how the mechanics are similar to a slot machine, but if you can convince yourself you’re getting a “liveness” that you wouldn’t otherwise get with a compiled, rigorously type-checked language, you’re probably more than willing to ignore all that. I’m curious, but not curious enough to go pin one of these people up against the wall, or start poking the slop machine myself.

Lately, I’ve become more and more concerned that “systemd free” is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier

Fantastic bit. I wonder if the Computer History Museum will eventually be able to replicate this as the peak of the “gen-AI” era.

The whole culture of writing “system prompts” seems utterly a cargo-cult to me. Like if the ST: Voyager episode “Tuvix” was instead about Lt. Barclay and Picard accidentally getting combined in the transporter, and the resulting sadboy Barcard spent the rest of his existence neurotically shouting his intricately detailed demands at the holodeck in an authoritative British tone.

If inference is all about taking derivatives in a vector space, surely there should be some marginally more deterministic method for constraining those vectors that could be readily proceduralized, instead of apparent subject-matter experts being reduced to wheedling with an imaginary friend. But I have been repeatedly assured by sane, sober experts that it is just simply is not so

Maybe if we’re lucky, Alvin Meshits can team up wtih https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bum_Farto for the feel-good buddy comedy of the summer. Remember, the more you toot, the better you feel!

Vacuum-driven total intestinal eversion, nobody’s ever seen anything like it

Don’t worry, I’m sure Lemmy is perfectly capable of tail call optimization at scale

I have always felt like NeXT/OS X Interface Builder has serious “path not taken” energy, but the fact that OpenStep/Cocoa failed to become a generalized multiplatform API, as well as the version control issues for the .nib format (never gave much thought to that, but it makes sense) sadly doomed it. And most mobile apps are glorified web pages, each with their own bespoke interface to maintain “brand identity,” so it could be argued there’s less than zero demand there for the flexibility (and complexity!) that Interface Builder could enable.

I am only mildly concerned that rapidly scaling this particular posting gimmick will cause our usually benevolent and forebearing mods to become fed up at scale

If you want a warm and fuzzy Christmas contemplation, imagine turducken production at scale

Hmm, sounds like you are suggesting proper static analysis, at scale

Not just pinkies, my friend, we are promising with all fingers, at scale!

so what you’re saying is undead kaiju, at scale

Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale.

There’s a lot going on here, but I started by trying to parse this sentence (assuming it wasn’t barfed out by an LLM). I’ve become dissatisfied lately with my own writing being too redundancy-filled and overwrought, showing I’m probably too far out of practice at serious writing, but what is this future Microsoft Fellow even trying to describe here?

at scale

Does Checkmarx have any relation to infamous ring-destroying pro wrestler Cheex? https://prowrestling.fandom.com/wiki/Mike_Staples

If not, perhaps they should seek an endorsement deal!

Made all the funnier by the fact that probably my favorite Hacker News thread of all time is on Tivy’s article about how he abandoned his job to “court” his wife:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830743

If even the orange site is willing to roast you this hard, I guess your only response has to be pulling up stakes to go live in a neofascist social bubble instead.

“Brutalist” is the only architectural style they ever learned about, because the name implies violence