Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
simon willison, the self-styled reasonable ai researcher, finds it hilarious and a good use of money throwing $14000 at claude to create an useless programming language that doesnāt work.
good man simon willison!
Good sneer from user andrewrk:
I mean itās still just funny money seeing the creator works for some company that resells tokens from Claude, but very few people are stepping back to note the drastically reduced expectations of LLMs. A year ago, it would have been plausible to claim that a future LLM could design a language from scratch. Now we have a rancid mess of slop, and itās an āart projectā, and the fact itās ersatz internally coherent is treated as a great success.
Willison should just have let this go, because itās a ludicrous example of GenAI, but he just canāt help himself defending this crap.
Thatās a good point that Iām not sure many people are talking about. Thereās a shift happening where while Iām still seeing way too much āyouāre just not prompting it rightā, it has lessened. Now Iām seeing a lot more āwell of course it canāt do thatā even from the believers.
Theyāre still crying āthe problem is that youāre using it wrongā, and blaming on the end user but it seems to be quietly shifting so theyāre now calling people dumb for ever believing the hype that they were the ones pushing to begin with.
Top-tier from Willison himself:
Mate, if thatās true, my years of Gentoo experience watching compiler commands fly past in the terminal means Iām a senior operating system architect.
which naturally leads us to: having to fix a portage overlay ~= ācompiler engineerā
wonder what simonwās total spend (direct and indirect) in this shit has been to date. maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?
Probably. Beyond throwing a shitload of cash into the LLM money pit, Willisonās completely wrapped his public image up in being an AI booster, having spent years advocating for AI and ālearningā how to use it.
If he admits heās wrong about LLMs, he has to admit the money and time he spent on AI was all for nothing.
if you call him an AI promoter he cites his carefully organised blog posts of concerns
meanwhile he was on the early access list for GPT-5
heās claiming he is taking no llm money with exception of specific cases, but he does accept api credits and access to early releases, which arenāt payments only when you think of payments in extremely narrow sense of real money being exchanged.
this would in no way stand if he were, say, a journalist.
Sigh. Love how he claims itās worth it for ālearningāā¦
We already have a thing for learning, itās called ābooksā, and if you want to learn compiler basics, $14000 could buy you hundreds of copies of the dragon book.
$14,000 could probably still buy you a lesser Porsche in decent shape, but we should praise this brave pioneer for valuing experiences over things, especially at the all-important boundary of human/machine integration!
(no, Iām not bitter at missing the depreciation nadir for 996-era 911s, what are you talking about)
Iāve learned so much langdesign and stuff over the years simply by hanging around plt nerds, didnāt even need to spend for a single dragon book!
(although I probably have a samizdat copy of it somewhere)
āEngineering a Compilerā is a better read than the Dragon Book anyway
oi no spoilers ;p
Spoiler: there are no actual dragons in either book š
First thereās no actual wizards in my computer to install and setup software, and now this? If someone tells me that Roko doesnāt even have an actual basilisk I donāt know what Iām gonna do!
That the useless programming language is literally called ācursedā is oddly fitting, because the continued existence of LLMs is a curse upon all of humanity
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