Think of all those poor billionaires who won’t be able to afford that 29th yacht if we made them pay their fair share instead of externalising their costs onto an already stretched general.public!

“We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy,” he wrote. “Good learning experience for me as we face higher-stakes decisions in the future.”

Yes of course this is just a learning opportunity… higher stakes decisions in the future…

Cuz making deals with the biggest military in the western world that involve autonomous use of weapons and possible escalation to all out nuclear war sounds pretty low stakes. /s

Fucking muppet

This preprint just shared by Gary Marcus is interesting.

People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique epistemic risk to how individuals come to see the world: unlike hallucinations that introduce falsehoods, sycophancy distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs…

These results reveal how sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt.

LLMs an addictive psychological hazard: confirmed?

Turns out Google Gemini will let you use any old Google API key from things like maps and firebase to access it. So, baddies can do key scanning in public repos and then charge LLM usage to anyone who has committed an API key to their repo!

So many layers of stupidity going on here!

https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules

Honestly whenever there’s a problem in business it’s usually MBAs.

MBAs are to businesses what Nazis are to a bar. The first time one turns up you’ve got to see them out the front door with a baseball bat asap or before you know it their mates and their mates’ mates will start turning up and you’ll all be talking about synergy and dynamism.

Make holding an MBA as unacceptable in society as pooping on the pavement

The parent thread is also worth a read. “What if pee pee was poo poo” - brilliant opener

Thought verysane.ai was gonna be a snark blog… They are earnest? shudder

IBM stocks take a tumble after anthropic release a COBOL skill - the rational market strikes again.

I wrote up my take here but TL;DR - a few markdown files telling Claude it’s an expert at COBOL development aren’t going to unpick decades of risk averse behaviour from bank and government cios. Similar to the SaaSpocalypse this is pure nonsense. Investors don’t tend to let reality dissuade them though.

You assume these people installing experimental non deterministic software on their computer would know how to purge a process (or, you know, not to hook up vibe coded slop to their inbox) but here we are. To get a director job in a big company, the main thing you need is an MBA, a willingness to do whatever the CEO asks of you and either a sociopathy or psychopathy diagnosis (sorry for the repetition, I know I already said MBA). Technical skills “nice to have”

Jason is great and well worth a follow.

AI bros are seizing the means of computation: RAM, GPUs, SSDs and now HDDs…

I don’t think there’s an actual conspiracy, just lots of MBAs following their noses towards the $$$.

That said, time to buy a new lipo battery for that 10 year old laptop in the loft and stick Linux on it - before the lithium miners announce they’ve sold the next 12 months global supply of Lithium to Altman because he needs it to sleep at night…

Simon Willison finally admits that his overreliance on LLMs is causing him to lose his marbles.

Second high profile AI bro who’s even vaguely touched on this. Previously: Armin Ronacher expressed his concern about AI psychosis after “Gas Town”

Hi fellow ex-ibmer! When I was there 15 years ago we were working on replacing COBOL applications written in the 1960s with modern trendy languages like java. Back then we had a deterministic COBOL to java transpiler but according to friends who are still there they have tripled down on it with genai. And…guess what… No self-respectong CTO or CIO of a fortune 500 is going to migrate from battle tested for 50+ years, business logic to vibe coded slop if they want to remain employable.

Congratulations on getting out btw!

IBM u-turning on “we only need AI” and tripling down on hiring US graduates

I was hoping Arvind Krishna would fall on his sword after this epic U-turn and that maybe Nadella would be next… One can dream right?

Edit: thinking about it… IBM have always been big on sacking senior devs and replacing them with graduates so this isn’t really anything new…

Imagine you’re a 10 person startup and instead of paying a few hundred $$ for an invoicing tool, and endpoint security tool, an expenses and time tracking tool you get your 6-8 developers to vibe code those from scratch too and maintain them forever costing thousands in Claude credits and 10s of thousands in salaries. That’s definitely a great use of your investors’ funds and totally not a good way to fudge your taxes, lose data, get hacked and end up being sued because the engineers, stretched way too thin, let Claude commit tax fraud on your behalf.

This was just such an unbelievably bad take from investors and people like Matt Stoller, the latter of whom might know monopoly enforcement but don’t know software engineering (or the Gell Man Amnesia effect apparently)

If famed bag holder SoftBank are starting to raise their eyebrows when asked about future investments, the jig is definitely up

Weirdly the media are reporting that they have made a profit on their investments but when you actually read the articles, they are saying that the magical imaginary money that their OpenAI shares are worth has gone up