rook @ rook @awful.systems

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3 yr. ago

I’m more familiar with vox day than I’d really like. He hasn’t pivoted from the culture war stuff that he’s known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.

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.

what they can do is mitigate the effects of those data centers

Oooor, and I know this is a bit of a wild idea, they could instead not offer llm search.

I’m hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that I’d be safe from that particular filter, so I’ll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.

Whilst I try and remember, there’s this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning children’s schoolwork.

Which was then followed in the real world by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall) because satire is impossible now, I guess? I can’t find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.

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.

Here’s one from the archives: https://spectrum.ieee.org/children-beating-up-robot

Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System

tl;dr: small children have no empathy for your robot and will torture it and hound it to death if they can. The safest thing to do is to head for the nearest adult-sized people, who will hopefully be less inclined to kill it simply because it is a robot.

I wouldn’t want to do that myself… personally too much tracking gear in there, and it’s easy to make a mistake and not disable it all. Also, you just know that if you get caught, they’ll try and prosecute it like you kidnapped and dismembered a regular officer.

Now, I’m more surprised that they don’t get black bagged and tipped over. Maybe they only ever use them in super thoroughly surveilled areas with nearby human backup, but you’d expect at least one successful tipping to make the news somewhere.

How it started: in 2025, the city of dublin, ohio (the latter detail missed by quite a lot of reporting,because there are no other dublins it might get confused with, I guess) gets an autonomous? ai powered police surveillance robot.

City officials are encouraging residents to interact with Dubbot—ask questions, take selfies, and experience firsthand how AI is shaping public safety. The goal is to foster transparency and gather feedback to refine the robot’s role in the community.

How it’s going

The person-sized, camera-covered robot that looked like it rolled right out of a sci-fi movie did not identify any criminal incidents, issue any tickets or help with any arrests in its nearly 10 months on the job.

On the other hand, I bet it didn’t shoot anyone’s dog, so who’s to say that the $64k was wasted.

Anyone who names a security company “sauron” has critically failed their reading comprehension. Mercifully, there’s no company naming itself saruman, because that character was breathtakingly dumb in so many ways that perhaps even the y-combinator set are dimly aware of them.

Who even has time for that? Do you think that the people behind palantir, icarus and sauron have time to read google summaries? They’re too busy remaking the world!

Anyway, if you’re successful enough you’ll eclipse the original source in terms of importance and all the search engine summaries will be about you anyway, so any time spent learning anything before that will have been completely wasted.

Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks CLAUDE.MD to, say, /dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code.

the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do.

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173

The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but they’ve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.

I think part of the issue is that historical software quality was an artefact of its time… if you can’t easily patch your released products, you need to work harder to ensure they’re functional. If the only way for people to learn about how your product works in the documentation you ship with it, the docs need to be useful and comprehensive.

The combination of software needing no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose and the internet rendered those pressures obsolete. Ship shit, fix later. Mass-scale a/b testing over past decade or two shows that most people seemingly don’t care if their software runs like absolute garbage, and is covered in adverts, and harvests all their personal data and the leaks all of it that wasn’t sold.

An incident-to-pr ratio that’s up by 250% is unfortunate, but it is not yet so bad that the end-users actually care enough to do anything about it, even assuming they can do anything.

This is by an llm-boosting firm, so be aware that it’ll have a lot of marketing in it. It doesn’t say nice things about vibe code (presumably because the authors want to sell you a solution) but the numbers are interesting even so.

https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways

A few choice snippets, none of which will surprise anyone here:

4. For every code change merged, the probability of a production incident has more than tripled.

The incidents-to-PR ratio is up 242.7% as teams move from low to high AI adoption.

5. Bugs are accelerating, not stabilizing.

In our 2025 AI engineering report on the AI Productivity Paradox, bugs per developer were up 9% as AI adoption grew. In this dataset, that figure has risen to 54%

7. The most experienced people in your organization are being buried.

Median time to first PR review is up 156.6%. Average time spent in code review is up 199.6%. Median time in review is up 441.5%. The engineers with the deepest knowledge of the system are spending their most valuable hours unraveling plausible-looking code that should never have reached them in the state it did.

This seems like it is probably a good thing.

https://leidendeclaration.ai/

It does feel a bit “art of war” though… someone patiently explaining to a bunch of people who really should know better that they shouldn’t do obviously bad and wrong things.

It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.

because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.

isn’t that the old “basic science is boring and unsexy” issue though? There are economic incentives, but not in a short term-big-bux sort of way, so capitalism can’t be trusted with it.

To conjure up a recent example, something like “The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials”, published back in 1997, probably had limited commercial value at the time, but 20 years later completely sunk a promising post-quantum cryptography algorithm (“An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH”) which might have had some non-trivial commercial implications if SIKE had got through the key exchange algorithm competition.

Anyway, the Erdős problems are good candidates for llm work because they have been specified in a careful and formal way, which requires a reasonably competent mathematician to do. That then opens up mathematics to the same deskilling problem that other sectors afflicted with llms have, and because capitalism is shortsighted and stupid we don’t know what the future economic impact of that will be, right?

In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

you know how sometimes people that weren't exposed to religion as children sometimes convert and get really weird about it as adults (eg: the extremely online california tradcaths) and because they were never socialized in a religion they speedrun committing every medieval heresy? rationalism is that but for philosophy.

https://feed.hella.cheap/@bob/statuses/01KRM0NVXCFT80AVFBRSB1G6G4

dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots.

I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!"

bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation.

I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.

h/t to matthew sheffield https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079

archive of original source article: https://archive.is/2026.04.30-032350/https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us