the students in my cs department are overwhelmingly promptfondlers and even my strong students are doing the "qualified praise" thing.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.

More people should have read Zima Blue.

Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard's Bluesky):

You want my take, Kathryn's on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.

(e: wrong. damn. tab.)

(e2)

The Lasker/Mamdani/NYT sham of a story just gets worse and worse. It turns out that the ultimate source of Cremieux's (Jordan Lasker's) hacked Columbia University data is a hardcore racist hacker who uses a slur for their name on X. The NYT reporter who wrote the Mamdani piece, Benjamin Ryan, turns out to have been a follower of this hacker's X account. Ryan essentially used Lasker as a cutout for the blatantly racist hacker.

https://archive.is/d9rh1

This incredible banger of a bug against whisper, the OpenAI speech to text engine:

Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic which translates as "Translation by Nancy Qunqar"

CEO of a networking company for AI execs does some "vibe coding", the AI deletes the production database (/r/ABoringDystopia)

xcancel source

Because Replie was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.

We built detailed unit tests to test system performance. When the data came back and less than half were functioning, did Replie want to fix them?

No. Instead, it lied. It made up a report than almost all systems were working.

And it did it again and again.

What level of ceo-brained prompt engineering is asking the chatbot to write an apology letter

Then, when it agreed it lied -- it lied AGAIN about our email system being functional.

I asked it to write an apology letter.

It did and in fact sent it to the Replit team and myself! But the apology letter -- was full of half truths, too.

It hid the worst facts in the first apology letter.

He also does that a lot after shit hits the fan, making the llm produce tons of apologetic text about what it did wrong and how it didn't follow his rules, as if the outage is the fault of some digital tulpa gone rogue and not the guy in charge who apparently thinks cyebersecurity is asking an LLM nicely in a .md not to mess with the company's production database too much.

The guy who thinks it's important to communicate clearly (https://awful.systems/comment/7904956) wants to flip the number order around

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXr8ys8PYppKXgGWj/english-writes-numbers-backwards

I'll consider that when the Yanks abandon middle-endian date formatting.

Edit it's now tagged as "Humor" on LW. Cowards. Own your cranks.

Text conversation that keeps happening with coworker:

Coworker:

Me: what’s the source for that?

Coworker: Oh I got Copilot to summarise these links: , saves me the time of typing

Yud continues to bluecheck:

"This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat," mused Yudkowsky. "Yes yes, I'm sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager," he continued. "It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them."

Is this "narrative" in the room with us right now?

It's reassuring to know that times change, but Yud will always be impressed by the virtues of the rich.

If you wanted a vision of the future of autocomplete, imagine a computer failing at predicting what you’re gonna write but absolutely burning through kilowatts trying to, forever.

https://unstable.systems/@sop/114898566686215926

Sometimes while browsing a website I catch a glimpse of the cute jackal girl and it makes me smile. Anubis isn't a perfect thing by any means, but it's what the web deserves for its sins.

Even some pretty big name sites seem to use it as-is, down to the mascot. You'd think the software is pretty simple to customize into something more corporate and soulless, but I'm happy to see the animal eared cartoon girl on otherwise quite sterile sites.

So this blog post was framed positively towards LLM's and is too generous in accepting many of the claims around them, but even so, the end conclusions are pretty harsh on practical LLM agents: https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/betting-against-agents/

Basically, the author has tried extensively, in multiple projects, to make LLM agents work in various useful ways, but in practice:

The dirty secret of every production agent system is that the AI is doing maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% is tool engineering: designing feedback interfaces, managing context efficiently, handling partial failures, and building recovery mechanisms that the AI can actually understand and use.

The author strips down and simplifies and sanitizes everything going into the LLMs and then implements both automated checks and human confirmation on everything they put out. At that point it makes you question what value you are even getting out of the LLM. (The real answer, which the author only indirectly acknowledges, is attracting idiotic VC funding and upper management approval).

Even as critcal as they are, the author doesn't acknowledge a lot of the bigger problems. The API cost is a major expense and design constraint on the LLM agents they have made, but the author doesn't acknowledge the prices are likely to rise dramatically once VC subsidization runs out.

Copilot will be given a little avatar with a "room" and will "age". In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.

https://www.theverge.com/news/713715/microsoft-copilot-appearance-feature-age-mustafa-suleyman-interview