Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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2 yr. ago

Not really possible in an environment were the most useless person you know keeps telling everyone how AI made him twelve point eight times more productive, especially when in hearing distance from the management.

A programmer automating his job is kind of his job, though. That's not so much the problem as the complete enshittification of software engineering that the culture surrounding these dubiously efficient and super sketchy tools seems to herald.

On the more practical side, enterprise subscriptions to the slop machines do come with assurances that your company's IP (meaning code and whatever else that's accessible from your IDE that your copilot instance can and will ingest) and your prompts won't be used for training.

Hilariously, github copilot now has an option to prevent it from being too obvious about stealing other people's code, called duplication detection filter:

If you choose to block suggestions matching public code, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with their surrounding code of about 150 characters against public code on GitHub. If there is a match, or a near match, the suggestion is not shown to you.

Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

who talks like this

Good parallel, the hands are definitely strategically hidden to not look terrible.

Like, assuming we could reach a sci-fi vision of AGI just as capable as a human being, the primary business case here is literally selling (or rather, licensing out) digital slaves.

Big deal, we'll just configure a few to be in a constant state of unparalleled bliss to cancel out the ones having a hard time of it.

Although I'd guess human level problem solving needn't imply a human-analogous subjective experience in a way that would make suffering and angst meaningful for them.

Ed Zitron summarizes his premium post in the better offline subreddit: Why Did Microsoft Invest In OpenAI?

Summary of the summary: they fully expected OpenAI would've gone bust by now and MS would be looting the corpse for all it's worth.

PZ Myers boosted the pivot-to-ai piece on veo3: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/06/23/so-much-effort-spiraling-down-the-drain-of-ai/

Fund copyright infringement lawsuits against the people they had been bankrolling the last few years? Sure, if the ROI is there, but I'm guessing they'll likely move on to then next trendy sounding thing, like a quantum remote diddling stablecoin or whatevertheshit.

I too love to reminisce over the time (like 3m ago) when the c-suite would think twice before okaying uploading whatever wherever, ostensibly on the promise that it would cut delivery time (up to) some notable percentage, but mostly because everyone else is also doing it.

Code isn't unmoated because it's mostly shit, it's because there's only so many ways to pound a nail into wood, and a big part of what makes a programming language good is that it won't let you stray too much without good reason.

You are way overselling coding agents.

Ah yes, the supreme technological miracle of automating the ctrl+c/ctrl+v parts when applying the LLM snippet into your codebase.

On the other hand they blatantly reskinned an entire existing game, and there's a whole breach of contract aspect there since apparently they were reusing their own code that they wrote while working for Bethesda, who I doubt would've cared as much if this were only about an LLM-snippet length of code.

I'd say that incredibly unlikely unless an LLM suddenly blurts out Tesla's entire self-driving codebase.

The code itself is probably among the least behind-a-moat things in software development, that's why so many big players are fine with open sourcing their stuff.

Yet, under Aron Peterson’s LinkedIn posts about these video clips, you can find the usual comments about him being “a Luddite”, being “in denial” etc.

And then there's this:

AI is the product, not the science.

Having said that:

• Alignment research: pseudoscience
• AGI timelines: pseudoscience
• Prompt engineering: pseudoscience
• Problem solving benchmarks: almost certainly pseudoscience
• Hyperscaling: borderline, one could be generous and call it a failed experiment
• Neural network training and design fundamentals: that's applied maths meets trial and error, no pseudo about it
• I'm probably forgetting stuff

you know that there’s almost no chance you’re the real you and not a torture copy

I basilisk's wager was framed like that, that you can't know if you are already living in the torture sim with the basilisk silently judging you, it would be way more compelling that the actual "you are ontologically identical with any software that simulates you at a high enough level even way after the fact because [preposterous transhumanist motivated reasoning]".

Scott A. comes off as such a disaster of a personality. Hope it's less obvious in his irl interactions.

I'd say if there's a weak part in your admittedly tongue-in-cheek theory it's requiring Roko to have had a broader scope plan instead of a really catchy brainfart, not the part about making the basilisk thing out to be smarter/nobler than it is.

Reframing the infohazard aspect as an empathy filter definitely has legs in terms of building a narrative.

Not wanting the Basilisk eternal torture dungeon to happen isn't an empathy thing, they just think that a sufficiently high fidelity simulation of you would be literally you, because otherwise brain uploads aren't life extension. It's basically transhumanist cope.

Yud expands on it in some place or other, along the lines that the gap in consciousness between the biological and digital instance isn't that different from the gap created by anesthesia or a night's sleep, it's just on the space axis instead of the time axis, or something like that.

And since he also likes the many world interpretations it turns out you also share a soul with yourselves in parallel dimensions; this is why the zizians are so eager to throw down, since getting killed in one dimension just lets supradimensional entities know you mean business.

Early 21st century anthropology is going to be such a ridiculous field of study.

Here's the exact text in the prompt that I had in mind (found here), it's in the function specification for the js repl:

[...] The analysis tool (also known as the REPL) can be used to execute code in a JavaScript environment in the browser.

What is the analysis tool?

The analysis tool is a JavaScript REPL. You can use it just like you would use a REPL. But from here on out, we will call it the analysis tool.

When to use the analysis tool

Use the analysis tool for:

• Complex math problems that require a high level of accuracy and cannot easily be done with “mental math”
• To give you the idea, 4-digit multiplication is within your capabilities, 5-digit multiplication is borderline, and 6-digit multiplication would necessitate using the tool.
• [...]

What if this is not a being terminally AI pilled thing? What if this is the absolute pinnacle of what billions and billions of dollars in research will buy you for requiring your lake-drying sea-boiling LLM-as-a-service not look dumb compared to a pocket calculator?

Except not really, because even if stuff that has to be reasoned about in multiple iterations was a distinct category of problems, reasoning models by all accounts hallucinate a whole bunch more.