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

I love the leaves and gold meme and I use it constantly even though quite literally no one ever understands it, so, thank you, now I know there’s two of us.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s, also

There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot who’s on the reactionary side?

The FDA thing gave me whiplash what the fuck, what did I miss

It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title “Large Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!”

Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol