V0ldek @ V0ldek @awful.systems

Posts

9

Comments

926

Joined

2 yr. ago

AGI is coming, we're already at the "dumb guy who doesn't understand math but thinks he's smart" level

as it’s apparently no longer safe for trans people or C++ developers

Sorry but Rust knowledge is now a hard requirement for visas so you better hit the book

This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.

Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.

Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I don't fucking think so.

We're unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldn't you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after you're gone? If you can't spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then that's a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.

And I don't think there's a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.

The fact that the first thing a new fascist regime does is promise Larry Ellison a bunch of dollaridoos answers a lot of questions asked by my "ORACLE = NAZIS" tshirt

CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). It's a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called "LLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQL"

I didn't have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy

We systematically develop benchmarks to study [the problem] and find that standard methods answer no more than 20% of queries correctly, confirming the need for further research in this area.

(Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)

Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.

I'd also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate "DATABASES AND ML" session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.

What, no, a vocal AfD supporter is a nazi? No waaay

Surprised Pikachu, sarcastically surprised Kirk, etc.

Imagine going on the Pilgrimage and all you bring back is an MBA and some motivational quotes, instant exile

But also, wtf how are they expecting this to stay secret and there being no backlash?

No, they bet on it not mattering and they've been completely right thus far.

That's just the plot of the next Fast&Furious, only they're grilling instead of picnicking

Furious Rex or something

I said "basic management skills", like you might get to run a school board or something.

You're aiming for Secretary of Transportation? Your rail network better be fucking immaculate

Could pain help test AI for sentience?

This question has far too many hypotheticals to even make sense as a question.

You might think that question has far too many hypotheticals to even make sense as a question.

Wow! That's exactly what I was thinking!

But there’s AI hype to propagate.

Ah, alas then

and it looks like a shared account, maybe with his kids or something,

The idea that his kids would like to spend time with him in any capacity, much less sharing an account with a 50 yo dude who has already proven can't build a character for shit is laughable at best

At least PoE builds are a real thing that exists

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

Hard to believe a game with that title could suck lol

Every serious political candidate should prove they can build an 100 SPM (at least!) base in Factorio and keep it running for some time before I even consider putting them in office, that's just basic management skills

I never thought I'd say this but... don't slander category theory like that, compared to LLMs it's downright useful

This is true, but also importantly this only works if you carefully redefine productivity to mean something else than a craftsman would consider productivity. You need a simple metric that's easily cheated.

For example, a software engineer who cares about what he does would define productivity fuzzily, as general growth of functionality for the consumer of the application, with the implied "actual working well-crafted functionality". If you're an idiot who wants to hack productivity, you define it as something straightforward and stupid, e.g. lines of code added. Suddenly you can claim that an "AI software engineer" is more productive than a human.

This exists even in something seemingly all about quality, such as research. One of the many problems with the current state of academia is the obsession with "number of papers published" to the disregard of rigor, and so you'll get people who are more interested in hacking the metric than actual research. Hence the seemingly annual scandal where someone is caught completely fabricating data, or the even more frequent sham experiments in psychology that never replicate. The replication crisis falls into the same category -- it's good science to replicate, but journals are not interested so it doesn't grow the sacred metric by which every academician is judged.

Unfortunately we're in an age of hacked productivity. The productivity metric for our markets is line going up, which has long been disconnected from actual productivity, as in providing a product to customers that willingly buy it. It's hard to keep focus on actual productivity when seemingly everyone around you, and especially everyone hierarchichally above you, cares only about the hacked metrics. Art is one of the few mainstays where you alone can be the judge of your own productivity and whether you're happy with your output, since at the core the only metric that matters in art is "does it feel right to me". This must be untenable to promptfondlers because they never experienced actual artistic fulfillment, so instead they need a hacked metric to feel good about improving -- how many images can we churn? how long of a video can Sora output before killing itself? how many seconds of "music" can our box generate?

xD oh what a delight, the one thing missing from the complete gobshite of a "database" that Mongo is was an AI to mangle your queries

Cargo cult business meeting

Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit [1],

== References

[1] Frankfurt H. On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 1986; 6:81-100.

Let's start collecting a bibliography