they’re gonna abandon it and the entity is gonna collapse within weeks

Agreed, the contradictions are piling up and lately I’ve genuinely wondered whether or not they’ll still exist in a year (which if they don’t would on top of everything be pretty funny considering Ahmed Yassin’s prediction). I think some part of them is wondering the same, hence the rush.

And also, while I agree, I really really hope I’m wrong but I’m having trouble imagining a scenario where this occurs without them using a nuke in their death throes first.

You could argue in the same way that car safety technologies are “bandaid after bandaid to try and compensate for the fact that cars are fundamentally huge hunks of metal going really fast”.

The parallel doesn’t really work (there is nothing fundamentally incompatible between the purpose of a car and the basic design idea); but to try and answer, this would be a viable answer if the huge “AI labs” admitted the tech doesn’t work and were collectively working on entirely new architectures (likely ones that include actual symbolic representation of the world, not just statistical links between words).

But they’re not, they’re using the same fundamental approach and doing ridiculous shit around that approach - ultimately a genuine, and interesting, NLP breakthrough - to try and sell it as what it’s not and will never be.

you still need to do quite a bit of handholding and double checking it gets stuff right but it definitely can get medium-high complexity stuff right and overall it is a productivity boost.

See, that’s one part I disagree about. First as a direct productivity boost; I realize you probably think it’s making you more productive; but that’s something you have to demonstrate, at scale. And the few genuine studies I’ve seen suggest the effect, if it exists, is marginal at best; at least two I remember suggest it decreases productivity (and at least one, possibly both, can’t remember, said self-reporting from devs was that it increased it despite the effect).

More importantly, though: very little of the code you produce this way will be maintainable. Very little will also be secure, too (both “direct” vulns - they’re not actually good at finding them, FYI - and more fundamental logic vulnerabilities - they’ll never find these at all outside of trivial cases). If you want a concrete example of that, just look at the leaked Claude harness code: it’s genuinely pathetic. They’re vibe coding it all and it shows.

Also, I notice you say “you still need to…”; do you think this will eventually get fixed ? it’s been nine years. There’s a point where “it’ll get better” is starting to become more of a meme than an answer. It was getting better, then a lot less, then lately almost not at all, despite greater and greater cost increases.

Shit, lately I’ve even started to wonder if they’re even training new models anymore; I’ve been wondering if they’re just not shipping the same with a different harness / different bullshit surrounding it. It’s not like they can improve on the models themselves anyway (not without at least one, likely several, genuine fundamental breakthrough) - they’re all out of human-produced data by now.

Agreed, didn’t expect so many home users drinking the koolaid. Ulysses would have had a field day.

And I suspect many of those users are among the tech-savvy, too, sadly.

Fair enough, if it works for you and you’re aware of the downsides (which you seem to be, contrary to most users); two things I haven’t even mentioned though are the power/environmental costs (obviously) but also the potential cognitive impact.

You say it doesn’t change much compared to when you were parsing the reddit comments yourself; doesn’t it ? how sure are you “wasting” time parsing these comments wasn’t exercising an important muscle mentally for you (getting the jist of a text rapidly - excluding braindead content quickly, etc.) ?

Here the example is pretty ridiculous - I doubt your mental faculties depend much on parsing reddit comments - but you get the idea. It’s very early to tell but several papers now suggest the negative cognitive impact is very real and potentially very fast.

China isn’t counting the same numbers i tell you that

That’s true; the very quality of results you can obtain with some recent models locally suggests the possible optimizations are huge. But it’s also diminishing returns: the moat between state of the art models and one I run on a P40 locally is really small these days; the amounts they need to sink to get even slightly better results at this stage are more and more. They’re text generators; yes, if you run ten of them in parallel, vote; have them cross-check their results, introduce harnesses at every steps, etc. (all examples of actual bandaids I evoked above) you can improve results. But all of this is trying to make a tech that fundamentally doesn’t answer the problem answer it nevertheless. And all of it costs a lot.

And I dearly hope China is not spending too much effort on backing these domestic initiatives, because again: outside of a few limited use cases (easily identifiable, I’ve listed a few in another comment in this very thread: those where having no relation to the truth in a portion of the generated text is acceptable), the tech doesn’t work.

It’s incredibly useful for letting humans interact with a computer system in natural language and maybe you shouldn’t take from that “hey we should have it do highly sensitive stuff where the slightest error could have great consequences”

There are use cases where having the computer completely invent actions or do shit randomly isn’t that bad, I guess; games come to mind. But ultimately and more generally I disagree, it’s shit for that too. Try one as a daily runner, just for laughs. Or just try an entire shell session where instead of typing the commands, you complete a description of what you want to do through one and then do it. It goes bad very fast, let me tell you.

And I get it: what you describe would be awesome - a SF dream. I like tech and I wish all of this would work; and like many initially I genuinely wondered as well if scaling/attention was all you needed, and had some measure of hope; quickly dashed, though.

it does a great job of summarizing reddit threads

Again, no it does not. You have no guarantee it won’t pull shit out of its virtual ass; and just as crucially (and even more likely), no guarantee it won’t ignore significant parts of the source material. You’ll get a result that seem like it summarizes the thread, with no confidence level, and no guarantee of its reliability.

We don’t think it has remained static, we realize the “AI companies” have been implementing bandaid after bandaid to try and compensate for fundamental lacks in the technology itself, and that as a consequence results are better now (for like 1000x the cost but who’s counting - well we all will, soon, but you get the point).

But this is still a credible text generator, ultimately close to a larger, N-dimensional markov chain. It still “hallucinates”. It’s still shit. It’s still almost entirely useless for coding (you know, if you care about long or even medium-term maintainability or security), never mind the other use cases they’re trying to sell it for. It does not work.

And if it did (it doesn’t !), the aforementioned bandaids would have made the cost impossible to justify anyway.

The maximalist “anything using any kind of neural network math is exactly the same and is equally bad in all cases” position is nonsensical

Does that position exist outside of twitter, though ?

When GenAI-critical people say “AI”, they almost universally mean LLMs (and sometimes also diffusion models / multimodal ones). And in fact they usually mean “LLMs as sold by the VCs”. LLMs themselves do have a few legitimate use cases (for perhaps 0.1% of the target population they’re currently being sold to, but still).

They do not mean machine learning in general - which is awesome, extremely useful, and has been in widespread use for decades now. Including traditional neural-network-based classifiers.

I’ve seen it used for the users themselves, but given you’re the third one to make the same remark I’m pretty sure I’m wrong.

Now a question: why must they take Lebanon now? Why can’t they take a few months of building up and planning before resuming the aggression?

I think they’re convinced it’s their last chance; I think they realize the US is collapsing, and beyond that even in countries from the white empire they’re reviled by more and more people, including people that aren’t usually particularly political. They see it as “now or never”.

IIRC I’ve seen it used that way on SneerClub on ; no idea how generalized it is.

I may be wrong but I’ve seen it used against people that use LLMs, not against the text generator themselves (which would indeed make no sense). A use for which it seems more useful - if only to shame these people.

The few use cases for which they actually kinda work:

• (not very high quality) Entertainment
• Pre-processing large datasets used for training traditional ML models (I’m thinking specifically of the img2text models here), for applications that aren’t too outside of their training set.
• Large-scale automated disinformation

The first two can be fully performed locally for negligible costs; the same is mostly true also for the third one, which is immoral on top of it.

The main ongoing use case/need they currently answer though is that of the capitalists: pretending to have discovered a new Internet in terms of economic growth (the VC morons still don’t seem to get that the web was a one-time thing) to make a new bubble and try and make the whole disgusting circus continue a little longer.

Previous attempts - none of them as successful, many of them a lot less: ‘web 3.0’, ‘big data’, ‘smart cities’, ‘crypto/NFTs’, and ‘the metaverse’. Likely next one once the AI bubble pops (assuming the world economy doesn’t collapse with it): ‘quantum computing’ - the quick ones among the shitheads have already started drumming that beat; and once we’re in a new AI winter I also fully expect them to connect the two - ie, ‘the only reason we didn’t get AGI is the lack of quantum computing’.

LLMs are a lot more successful than previous attempts specifically due to the appearance of working; if you don’t look at it too closely / are not even slightly well-versed in the tech itself you could believe what the people selling them are saying. It’s the perfect grift vector.

Also we already have “clanker”.

A few days ago, Kim Jong Un (who is currently hosting Xi Jinping) inspected a recently-completed new uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon:

North Korea’s Kim calls for ‘exponential’ nuclear expansion after inspecting new plant, KCNA says

Such a plant was spotted while under construction by the IAEA about a year ago; here is a good article from back then about it.

And here are images from the recent visit. Both the images and the analysis are interesting; the former because it gives an idea of the modern dimensions and layout of such a plant, the latter because it suggests the DPRK’s HEU production might have been doubled since this new facility came online. Which, no shit, talk about being vindicated.

In other recent DPRK news, even western media has been forced to admit they’re doing splendidly economically.

I have no idea what “Infrared” is but contextually and based on your comment I imagine some sort of antizionist youtuber. Not so with Dieudonné; he is antisemitic, it’s not even a debate.

He did shows with Faurisson, an actual holocaust denier that pretends that gas chambers didn’t exist. He had, in one of his shows, the same Faurisson receiving an “insolence award” given out by Dieudonné’s assistant dressed as a death camp inmate. And that’s only the top of the rotten iceberg.

From The National (UAE state media): Donald Trump says the Strait of Hormuz could remain closed until September and beyond

The world economy is gonna be destroyed, isn’t it. Full tweet:

Donald Trump says the Strait of Hormuz could remain closed until September and beyond.

His comments to the New York Post mark a more dire assessment than many - including the global stock markets - had predicted. But he said it was only a worst-case scenario. ‘I think it could be [closed through Labor Day, Monday Sept, 7], but I think it’s unlikely. I think that we’ll have it. I think this will resolve itself fairly quickly’.

He further said that oil at $98 per barrel was ‘not a big price to pay if you look at the possibility of them having a nuclear weapon’. Trump stuck largely to optimistic framing and said talks with Iran are ‘rapidly evolving’.

The global economy would likely suffer a severe slump if Hormuz remained closed for another four months. Economists warn oil shortages will eventually lead to a recession

Found on Middle East Spectator

Same thing happened - same app, even - with the french aircraft carrier

Found a link to this on

Each and every picture is its own little nightmare - and a familiar nightmare. It’s really well done.

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