“Aging left” has lost “vitality” - he’s phoning this one in, straight out of the house style guide.

Hmm, he’s still sticking to tweet-threads on Twitter. We’ll know he’s fully cracking when he resorts to Ackman-style unreadable text blocks on there.

is now completely one shotted.

I’m not sure “one-shotted” is a good description for some of these folks. More like they bet against themselves in a rigged game of Russian roulette being played with a fully-loaded Uzi.

As a layperson skimming the paper, this strikes me as equivalent to a dashed-off letter to the editor coming from someone in Knuth’s position. It’s an incomplete, second-hand reporting of somebody else’s results that doesn’t really investigate any of the interesting features of the system at hand. The implicit claim (here and elsewhere) is that we have a runtime for natural-language programming in English, and the main method reported for demonstrating this is the partial prompt:

** After EVERY exploreXX.py run, IMMEDIATELY update this file [plan.md] before doing anything else. ** No exceptions. Do not start the next exploration until the previous one is documented here.

and later on, a slightly longer prompt from a correspondent using GPT-5.2 Pro, that also loads a PDF of Knuth’s article into the context window. No discussion of debugging how these systems arrive at their output, or programmatically constraining them for more targeted output in their broader vector space. Just more of the braindead prompting-and-hoping approach, which eventually, unsurprisingly diverges from outputting any viable code whatsoever. This all strikes me as being an exercise similar to

You are a cute little puppy dog. Do not shit on the floor. Do not deposit bodily waste or fecal matter onto hardwood, linoleum, tile, and especially not carpet. Do not defecate indoors. Do not consume your own fecal matter.

The cargo-cult system prompt approach is like banging two rocks together compared to what a computational system should be capable of, and I would be much more impressed and much more interested if someone like Knuth was investigating such capabilities, instead of blogging somebody else pretending to have the Star Trek computer.

“They wanted me to build an AI, so I built a shoddy AI casing filled with used pinball machine parts!”

tit-for-tat escalation

I think maybe you nailed it here. Being able to pretend they’re doing game theory/mapping out an escalation ladder allows Yud and our friends to feel like they’re in the same intellectual lineage as guys like Oppenheimer and Teller, manifesting the same sort of “objective” emotionless rationality. The big difference, you see, is that the AI will think so much faster than us that…!

lmfao

When they witness the skyrocketing economic growth enabled by American AGI, they will be clamoring for Westernization

It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality

A lot of younger people who are being conditioned to accept this stuff just weren’t around to experience how unstable and unreliable the vast majority of PC software was in the 1990s, and a lot of more senior-level people must have willfully forgotten. I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. The difference was that in the 90s, the major PC companies could port their enterprise-grade OSes with proper memory protection down to the consumer level, as hardware advanced and running a more complex OS kernel was no longer a big demand. Even then, it was an uphill battle, especially once you threw widespread networking and dubious internet-sourced malware into the equation.

End-user software has already seen a decline in quality and increase in user frustration during the cloud era, as many apps have become siloed blobs of JavaScript running on top of an extra copy of your web browser engine. I’m concerned that we’re headed firmly back to the bad old days now, without the release valve of better underlying software stacks on the horizon. The main solution will likely be to rip a lot of this crap out and start over (which is already a pretty widespread approach anyway, my credit union is going on their 3rd online banking “upgrade” in 5 years). But that completely zeroes out the “productivity” gains, not that anyone touting such things will ever measure it that way. I suppose the cost of re-stabilizing the software industrial base will be counted as GDP gains instead.

Not only would an engineer not need to consider the abstraction layer between their input and the code but they would be unable to fully interrogate that abstraction because the code extruder does not need to show its work.

I think you’re actually right on the money here, nowhere near delusional, especially since you come from a Lisp background. I really appreciate Lisp (and Smalltalk) for the “live-coding” and universal inspectability/debuggability aspects in the tooling. I appreciate test-driven development as I’ve seen it presented in the Smalltalk context, as it essentially encourages you to “program in the debugger” and be aware of where the blank spots in your program specification are. (Although I’m aware that putting TDD into practice on an industrial scale is an entirely different proposition, especially for toolchains that aren’t explicitly built around the concept.)

However, LLM coding assistants are, if not the exact opposite of this sort of tooling, something so far removed as to be in a different and more confusing realm. Since it’s usually a cloud service, you have no access to begin debugging, and it’s drawing from a black box of vector weights even if you do have access. If you manage to figure out how to poke at that, you’re then faced with a non-trivial process of incremental training (further lossy compression) or possibly a rerun of the training process entirely. The lack of legibility and forthright adaptability is an inescapable consequence of the design decision that the computer is now a separate entity from the user, rather than a tool that the user is using.

I’ve posed the question in another slightly less skeptical forum, what advantage do we gain from now having two intermediate representations of a program: the original, fully-specified programming language, as well as the compiler IR/runtime bytecode? I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.

if a Franciscan priest gets really good at basketball, is he considered an air friar

What, Ctrl-C wouldn’t work? kill -9?

I can’t quite put my finger on why, but “recreationally jacking off onto microscope slides” does not suggest “permanent overclass” to me

(The horrible unhoused people who mumble incoherently vs the chad founder who shouts ‘will you be a cofounder with me?’ at people)

Or just, y’know, Alex Karp

Somebody vibe-coded an init system/service manager written in Emacs Lisp, seemingly as a form of criticism through performance art, and wrote this screed in the repo describing why they detest AI coding practices: https://github.com/emacs-os/el-init/blob/master/RETROSPECTIVE.md

But then they include this choice bit:

All in all, this software is planned to be released to MELPA because there is nothing else quite like it for Emacs as far as service supervision goes. It is actually useful – for tinkerers, init hackers, or regular users who just want to supervise userland processes. Bugs reported are planned to be hopefully squashed, as time permits.

Why shit up the package distribution service if you know it’s badly-coded software that you don’t actually trust? 90% of the AI-coding cleanup work is going to be purging shit like this from services like npm and pip, so why shit on Emacs users too? Pretty much undermines what little good might come out of the whole thing, IMO.

it has to be said, a runtime CVE in vim would be pretty embarrassing

Rhomboid? Rheumatoid bactothefuture?

Doc Brown couldn’t get optimal flux dispersal across the surface of the time machine without the heavy biofilm coating. It’s not a fetish thing, people! Stop saying that!

I use Gentoo btw

the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.

I wonder, is this a theory of “safety” analogous to what’s driven the increased gigantism of vehicles in the US? Sure seems like it.

Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasn’t considered even the most basic of leftist thought.

I continue to maintain that EA boils down to high-dollar consumerism focused on intangible goods. I’m sure that statement won’t fly on LW or any other EA forum, but my thoughts on psychiatry don’t fly at a Scientologist convention either.