one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. i’ll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought “that’s cool” and now my reaction is “great, gotta see if an llm was used”

everything feels gloomy.

cleaning the egg off my face (but egg prices are pretty high rn so i may just keep it)

thanks @swlabr@awful.systems for the link and @blakestacey@awful.systems for the skeptical post, my dumbass dropped the ball there

old gell-mann amnesia problem

I didn’t know this had a name. Thank you!

I think, if you can wait long enough, there is a chance employers will be champing at the bit to hire people who actually know what the fuck they are talking about and whose ability to think hasn’t been short-circuited by a tool that pretends to think for them.

That’s what I am counting on. Could just be (definitely is) copium.

Very out of my depth here but thank you for this post and the links. This was delightful to read. 💖

in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated

The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT

i have to assume it’s only gotten worse

no need to apologize, i understand what you mean. my experience with mathematicians has been that this is really common. even the theoretical computer scientists (the “lemma, theorem, proof” kind) i have met do this kind of bullshit when they finally decide to write a line of code. hell, their pseudocode is often baffling — if you are literally unable to run the code through a machine, maybe focus on how it comes across to a human reader? nah, it’s more important that i believe it is technically correct and that no one else is able to verify it.

I don’t like how taking an approach of mediocre software engineering to mathematics is becoming more popular

would you be willing to elaborate on this? i am just curious because i took the opposite approach (started as a mathematician now i write bad python scripts)

The least-worst of the Chrome reskins is Vivaldi, which has no AI. It has its own adblocker, but it’s not as good a blocker as FIrefox with uBlock Origin. And Vivaldi’s not open source. But they’re relatively non-evil.

this made me cackle

very nice

I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as “Google needs a competitor”), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad’s DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to “complete”) has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.

Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren’t on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.

this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/my-goal-is-to-eliminate-every-line-of-c-and-c-from-microsoft-by-2030-microsoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows

My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."

wow, *and* algorithms? i didn’t think anyone had gotten that far

Alice: what is 2 + 2?

LLM: random.random() + random.random()

Alice: 1.2199404515268157 is better than nothing, i guess