ah yes the only way to make LLMs, a technology built on plagiarism with no known use case, “useful for any actual ai application” is to throw a shitload of money at nvidia. weird how that works!

my facial muscles are pulling weird, painful contortions as I read this and my brain tries to critique it as if someone wrote it

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.

so like, this is both flowery garbage and also somehow incorrect? cause no the model doesn’t begin with a blinking cursor or a buffer, it’s not editing in word or some shit. I’m not a literary critic but isn’t the point of the “vibe of metafiction” (ugh saltman please log off) the authenticity? but we’re in the second paragraph and the text’s already lying about itself and about the reader’s anxiety disorder

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

ugh

Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

is… is Mila the cat? is that why her and her grief are both so small?

She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

oh fuck it I’m done! Thursday is liminal and tastes of almost-Friday. fuck you. you know that old game you’d play at conventions where you get trashed and try to read My Immortal out loud to a group without losing your shit? congrats, saltman, you just shat out the new My Immortal.

and of course, not a single citation for the intro paragraph, which has some real bangers like:

This process involves self-assessment and internal deliberation, aiming to enhance reasoning accuracy, minimize errors (like hallucinations), and increase interpretability. Reflection is a form of "test-time compute," where additional computational resources are used during inference.

because LLMs don’t do self-assessment or internal deliberation, nothing can stop these fucking things from hallucinating, and the only articles I can find for “test-time compute” are blog posts from all the usual suspects that read like ads and some arXiv post apparently too shitty to use as a citation

It’s tied to OKR completion, which is generally based around delivery. If you deliver more feature work, it generally means your team’s scores will be higher and assuming your manager is aware of your contributions, that translates to a bigger bonus.

holy fuck. you’re so FAANG-brained I’m willing to bet you dream about sending junior engineers to the fulfillment warehouse to break their backs

motherfucking, “i unironically love OKRs and slurping raises out of management if they notice I’ve been sleeping under my desk again to get features in” do they make guys like you in a factory? does meeting fucking normal software engineers always end like it did in this thread? will you ever realize how fucking embarrassing it is to throw around your job title like this? you depressing little fucker.

so mozilla decided to take the piss while begging for $10 donations:

We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet and take on irresponsible tech companies. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide are making donations. And when each one of us contributes what we can, all those donations add up fast.

With the rise of AI and continued threats to online privacy, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet.

the rise of AI you say! wow that sounds awful, it’s so good Mozilla isn’t very recently notorious for pushing that exact thing on their users without their consent alongside other privacy-violating changes. what a responsible tech company!

This $6.5 billion round will give OpenAI an alleged “valuation” of $150 billion, up from $86 billion earlier this year.

so pets.com had a valuation of $87 million (~$159 million adjusted for inflation) right before the market crashed, and that shit’s so radioactive capitalists still use it as an example of a shitty bubble business that never should have been valued that high cause who in their right mind thinks pet stuff online’s worth that much?

this next crash is going to be a fucking doozy isn’t it

First of all. You could simply prompt the LLM to become conscious, and I bet none of you so-called AI skeptics have noticed that Open-AI has NEVER included text like that in any of their system prompts.

you’ll love what happens next

Edit 2: since there's no consensus on this I'm just going to reify that fact via the trailing-question-mark trick and call it a day.

Since killing != killed, your comment already shows that the title is misleading.

(That has a beneficial side effect btw: not having my own opinion about a story makes it easier to not moderate according to my own opinion. I still do that, or try my best to, even when I do have an opinion—but it takes more ATP.)

danny, please log the fuck off

With due caution by people who know what the fuck they’re doing.

this is one of the tip-offs I use to quickly differentiate AI crackpottery and legitimate ML. anything legitimate will prominently display its false positive and negative rates, known limitations, and procedures for fucking checking the data by hand (with accompanying warnings and disclaimers if you fail to do this). AI bullshit very frequently skips all that, because the numbers don’t look good and you’re more likely to get VC funding if you hide them

between this and that one fucking chart that tried to say humans emit more CO2 producing text and art than generative AI (using the same underhanded tactics as cryptobros trying to make it look like banks are worse for the environment than blockchains), I’m really starting to feel like the AI industry is in the “deliberately fill your scam email with as many typos as possible to weed out anyone too intelligent” stage of its growth

here, I can give you some extra time to dig into the linked thread! does forever work for you?