In practical terms, what can they do? Add instructions to say āYou will not generate spaghetti code that will humilate us when real programmers see it?ā Perhaps in all caps?
This is what theirnorganizarion is capable, after tremendous expense, of producing. I donāt think that bodes well for their prospects of improvement.
Truly a tool for the .COM era
DoS script
Part of me reads that and still thinks, āOh, you mean like AUTOEXEC.BAT?ā
A pretty staid-sounding law firm warns that the AI industry is partying like itās 2007:
Lenders who originated data center loans [ā¦] have begun pooling those loans and selling tranches to asset managers and pension funds, spreading risk well beyond the original lending institutions.
Also of note:
The most basic litigation risk in AI infrastructure finance is that the revenues generated by the sector may prove insufficient to service the fixed obligations incurred to build it. The industry brought in approximately $60 billion in revenue in 2025 against roughly $400 billion in capital expenditure.
(Via.)
The thread for collecting HPMoR sneers linked to this timeline, but itās paywalled now:
https://www.vox.com/culture/23622610/jk-rowling-transphobic-statements-timeline-history-controversy
To be clear, I donāt care about Yud picking the fandom he did at the time (apart from the cheapness of āplaying on easy modeā and the blatant attempt to ride popularity for propagating his cult shit). What strikes me is the silence during the time when other people are most definitely reacting:
I have also occasionally been tempted to try and get a Goncharov thing going, where everyone collectively recalls that Tommy Berry and the Forevernight Forest got them into reading.
It was just after an ordinary afternoon tea, on an ordinary Sunday, the first cold day of autumn, when Tommy Berry discovered that Time was no longer adding up in the ordinary way.
Tommy had only managed to drink one cup of very indifferently warm tea, and eat the last plain saltine from the bottom of the bag. Everything else had been gobbled up or drunk down by his uncle Myrvold, who was rotund as a boulder and about as kind, and his step-aunt Meredith, who was thin as a snake and considerably more mean. So, yes, it was altogether quite the ordinary teatime.
Tommy had a secret, you see. In fact, he had two, a big one that he knew about and an even bigger one that was just about to fall on top of him.
His first secret was that he had a library card. He had stolen an adultās library card. Or that is how Uncle Myrvold and Step-Aunt Meredith would have described it, if they knew.
Carruthers, who lived down the end of the lane and always yelled at Tommy to mind his hedges, and who let his dog chase Tommy and the other children, had made a big show of throwing his library card into the roadway because, he said, the library was full of immoral books. A car had then driven over it, and then a whole lorry, and then Tommy had snatched it up. Something told him that anything Carruthers hated, he should save, and anything that Myrvold and Meredith would be angry about, he should hold onto.
Tommy had heard adults say that something was āburning a hole in my pocketā. He wondered if this was what that meant. It felt like he was carrying a hot coal in the pocket of his threadbare corduroy jacket, and no one could know.
The library had a new machine. He had seen adults use it. You could go up to it, wave a book under a red laser light like at the grocery store, then show the machine your card, and it would check out the book for you. Tommy made a plan. He would slip out of the house just after tea. He would walk the five blocks to the library. He would find a book that Myrvold and Meredith and Carruthers and every other grownup would not want him to read. He would wait until the librarian was busy dealing with a whole queue of people. And then he would use the machine.
Everything went perfectly until the very last step.
There was a girl at the machine.
He had a big fat book in his hands, a book he had picked because it had āMurderā in the title and would last a long time, and there was a girl in front of him at the library machine.
āMurder at Wizard University?ā she asked him, right to his face, like they had already been introduced, like they had known each other since nursery school. āThatās not a book for little kids.ā His stomach dropped, right into his feet. He didnāt know that a stomach could do such a thing.
And then she tilted the stack of books she was carrying toward him, showing him the titles on their spines. āNeither are these,ā she said.
And she pulled out her own library card. It was black, like a rectangle cut out of the midnight sky.
Thatās all I wrote in the thread that prompted me to take a stab. Oh, I think I had decided that the girlās name is Elfriede? And the principal of magic school is nonbinary.
āWhy, of course thereās a potion for changing,ā said Professor Shade. āThat is what potions do. I donāt know where Iād be without it. It is ever so helpful to reach the top shelf, but on the other hand, menās fashions havenāt been truly swank in a hundred fifty years.ā
Being the kind of writer I am, whenever this comes up I am tempted to suggest ways it could have been done better. But, first, I am not glazing the work of Rowling, even indirectly, no way, no how. Fuck her for all the pain she has wrought, and fuck the whole LessWrong crew for tacitly accepting it. Second, HPMoR was cult shit all along, not meant to teach science but to sow distrust of scientists under the glossy sheen of being able to name the six quarks.
Once you commit to the idea that only your main characters have ever tried to study magic scientifically, youāre locked in to making all the rest of the magical world into dullards. (Really, no other eleven-year-olds were ever into computer programming, chemistry sets, exotic marine animals, outer space, or dinosaurs?) Or, to look at it another way, the only way you can find the premise plausible is if youāre already inclined to dismiss most of humanity as āNPCsā.
It even used to have a top-quality news section, BuzzFeed News!
Azeen Ghorayshi made her name reporting at Buzzfeed News about sexual harassment in scienceā¦ and then she became one of the New York Timesās professional transphobes.
more like requie-SCAT, am i right
Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:
āThe AI Grad Studentā: A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: āIt faked results, hoping I wouldnāt notice.ā
But he ends the essay with āNow Iām doing 100% of my research with LLMsā.
Am I losing my mind?
Hang around for the ātrust me bro, I saw it on YouTubeā guy in the comments.
deleted by creator
44 comments in support, 2 in opposition, discussion closed early under the āthereās a snowballās chance in Hell of the situation changing from hereā clause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC
Regarding a project to translate several thousand ancient letters:
So, umā¦ this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination.
The AI-as-excuse layoffs have come for Meta:
wait, I totally had something for thisā¦ TERF AI-land
[Effective Altruism] was originally applied to initiatives like raising money for mosquito netting, but now includes figures like Johnson, who has reframed his blood experiments as a product of his own generosity, set to cure humanity of its greatest ill: death itself.
People keep saying this, so itās good to have a reminder that the weirdos (derogatory) were there all along.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/82397476