HPE buys Juniper. Fuck.

Comic Book Guy energy

Between the title of the show and one of the judges being a guy called Mario Narwhal I gotta ask, are coiners trying to reclaim the word “whale”, as in a cash cow gambler/lifestyle goods consumer?

Our plagiarism machine is not a plagiarism machine. In fact, it’s so much not a plagiarism machine we added an optional feature that lets it detect when its plagiarism is too ovious and make its plagiarism less ovious.

I have a Kubernetes cluster running my AI agents for me so I don’t have to learn how to set up AI agents. The AI agents are running my Kubernetes cluster so that I don’t have to learn Kubernetes either. I’m paid $250k a year to lie to myself and others that I’m making a positive contribution to society. I don’t even know what OS I’m running and at this point I’m afraid to ask.

They quickly accelerated their way out.

Tech support workers who may or may not speak English as a second language or with a strong accent can sometimes be of actual help and sometimes not, much like people with possibly more familiar accents can. A call center AI has never been anywhere close to solving a problem I’ve had.

You’re no less fucked but instead of a human being getting underpaid for the trouble, a shitty tech corporation is overpaid.

A tool uses an LLM, the LLM uses a tool. What a beautiful ouroboros.

I don’t want to live in the world of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I don’t want to live in the world of The Giving Tree.

I don’t want to live in the world of Pippi Longstocking (Sweden).

I want to live in the world of Goosebumps, The Yellow Pages, and JBL Tune Beam Quick Start Guide.

Someone ask if those fucks wanna see how much of the modern world was actually built by China? Wanna let them run it instead?

Frankly yes. In a better world art would not be commodified and the economic barriers that hinder commissioning of art from skilled human artists in our capitalist system would not exist, and thus generative AI recombining existing art would likely be much less problematic and harmful to both artists and audiences alike.

But also that is not the world where we live, so fuck GenAI and its users and promoters lmao stay mad.

Yes, that is also the case.

Yea, what if the master owns a wrecking ball, a bulldozer, a heavy duty excavator and a bunch of dynamite?

Yes, this is a metaphor for C programming, how did you know?

You’re both incorrect. I am the least fascist programmer and I’m here to tell you programming is inherently fascist.

The simultaneous problem and benefit of the stubstack thread is that a good chunk of the best posts of this community are contained within them.

It’s just depressing. I don’t even think Yudkoswsky is being cynical here, but expressing genuine and partially justified anger, while also being very wrong and filtering the event through his personal brainrot. This would be a reasonable statement to make if I believed in just one or two of the implausible things he believes in.

He’s absolutely wrong in thinking the LLM “knew enough about humans” to know anything at all. His “alignment” angle is also a really bad way of talking about the harm that language model chatbot tech is capable of doing, though he’s correct in saying the ethics of language models aren’t a self-solving issue, even though he expresses it in critihype-laden terms.

Not that I like “handing it” to Eliezer Yudkowsky, but he’s correct to be upset about a guy dying because of an unhealthy LLM obsession. Rhetorically, this isn’t that far from this forum’s reaction to children committing suicide because of Character.AI, just that most people on awful.systems have a more realistic conception of the capabilities and limitations of AI technology.

I think you’re deliberately setting up for this response, so: “more like human sole”.

Refreshing. An online community that wears its intentions on its sleeve.

Absolutely. Take the reverence for “SysV” init* to the point where the init system has all but eclipsed the AT&T Unix release as the primary meaning of “System V”. The BSDs (at least the Net/Open branch, not sure about FreeBSD) adopted a simplified BSD init/rc model ages ago and Solaris switched to systemd-esque SMF with little uproar. Personally I even prefer SMF over its Linux equivalents, despite the cumbersome XML configuration.

I somewhat understand the terminalchud mindset, a longing for a supposed simpler time where a nerd could keep a holistic grasp of one’s computing system in their head. Combine that with the tech industry’s pervasive male chauvinism and dogmatic adherence to a law of “simplify and reduce weight” (usually a useful rule of thumb) and you end up with terrible social circles making bad software believing they’re great on both fronts.

* Rather, the Linux implementation of the concept

make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash

Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of os.system, subprocess.run and/or subprocess.call that could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.

If you’re gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you’re not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey shellcheck.

It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?