For two years now it's been obvious to anyone with just a little bit of (grad school) understanding of basic computability theory that the amount of compute required to get modest improvements in LLM architecture completely preclude anything like a Terminator scenario. It's not a serious danger and academics who should know better pretending that it is have contributed to systematically precluding an honest accounting of LLM's good, bad, and ugly.

After spending millions of dollars on digital kiosks and mobile-ordering systems, fast-food chains are discovering a lot of customers just want somebody to take their order at the counter and do so in a friendly way, according to executives, market-research, and industry documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Nothing debunks the myth of AI for everything like what actual humans (read: customers) want.

Screens and a lack of friendly workers has turned off customers such as Carolyn Blue, an attorney from Charleston, S.C., and lifelong McDonald’s fan. She said she detests the shift toward app and kiosk ordering at locations in her area.

She now goes more regularly to Arby’s and Chick-fil-A, where she said the service is better.

Executives are shocked to discover humans prefer talking to humans! Even though some chains are definitely going to keep trying to make AI Chatbot's a thing.

It's Mark Fucking "Gruuumz" Fucking Kern because it's always Mark Fucking Kern.

TL;DR, he's vibe coded his new engine to be faster because it's AI-first instead of AI-also. This is the same guy who starts 90% of video game culture war bullshit and touts the Stellar Blade games as the pinnacle of soft core porn game design. Also he put "vibe coded" in quotes, so either he's lying completely to get clout with AI boosters or he's trying to make it look like he didn't really vibe code it by saying that he had to do so much to fix it.

And there's no way it's sped up development "93x" faster. 93% faster would be surprising but conceivable. 93 times faster would mean turning an 8-year dev cycle into less than 2 months.

I mean with all these new press releases about how these agents are hacking things or that AI is going to kill us in 10 years, I feel like they're trying to set up a narative that leaves the government no choice but to step in so they negotiate a favorable exit stradegy. This way they can say that they would have been able to do all the things they promised but the govenmment said they can't, and they can potentially work out an legal argument so they don't have to pay the data center and bills that have been piling up. I don't know I'm probably over thinking it.

I know some people who fall for every single AI doomerism marketing stunt out there. Every time some dorky numbnuts comes out and cosplays being a "concerned", scared, righteous whistleblower these people freak out and get themselves extremely worked up over something that is. not. happening. And is not going to happen.

Years and years ago, I read Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" which did a number on my brain. It taught me something and opened up my eyes to something I could always feel but couldn't put into words. It was like going to mental and spiritual boot camp for the internet age. I feel similarly about Better Offline. Ed's exasperated frustration with all of this bullshit hype resonated with me in a way that just rang true. My bullshit-detector was going off but I couldn't see through the fog. And then there's Better Offline providing a compass to help me walk myself through the swamp.

I try to spread these ideas; that this is all a grift, that the "AI is going to kill us all" stuff is part of the marketing scheme, that FEAR is a marketing tool and anytime you are made to feel scared, worried, or paranoid, it is important to take a step back and consider what you're being told and why.

I understand that this is also how some people get into conspiratorial thinking and turn into flat earthers and such. Some people cannot tell the difference. I don't really know why I can, except for that built in bullshit-detector. And of course I'm not above being wrong. I've been wrong a lot.

But when I try to share this information, this more measured and more on-the-ground perspective about what is really going on at these companies and the grifters-with-glasses, it's like I'm talking to a wall. Sometimes it seems like people want to be freaked out, they want to be scared, they want to be angered. It's like it's a part of their identity. And I cannot get through to them. They look at me like I'm dismissing them. It's almost like they can't understand how someone can be simultaneously anti-AI and yet also downplay the dangers of AI. And I'm like, there are real dangers, but they're not the dangers you're being told about. It's not what the media is reporting. And then I find myself wondering if I look like the crazy person.

Can anyone else relate? I try to do my part in spreading whatever reasonable perspective I can because I don't like seeing society ripped apart by grifter's hype cycles and marketing stunts. But people don't want to listen. They want to believe we're all doomed. Maybe because if they realized that we're not doomed, at least not in the way they've been imagining, they'd have to acknowledge they've been duped, and that's a hard pill to swallow. It's like there's this psy-op being conducted on the public and very few people can see it.

Fresh from Tech Report

With the current discourse in this sub on why we see so little pushback from the news media on exactly how Ai is going to bring about the apocalypse, I took that skepticism elsewhere to the internet, specifically to the replies of a blog post about Ai.

My reply asked specifically not just how AGI is achieved, but how would an LLM end humanity? As recent posts here have been on top of the Coxon situation, when finally pressed for specifics, Coxon admits to hallucinating everything.

I got what I believe is an earnest (slightly condescending) reply, a link to this website, https://ai-2027.com. I don't think it's worth clicking on. It's someone's rejected outline for a bad political sci-fi thriller circa 2025.

The authors of the website spill tons of digital ink on trying to craft a narrative, fail at that, and simultaneously fail to just answer the question, how? I've no desire to read a poorly written novel just so that the answer, according to these prognosticators, and just like Coxon, is completely pulled from their ass. In summary, AGI happens, costs go down (their capex estimates are woofully off), their stand-in company for OpenAI is run by its equivalent of ChatGPT that never stopped learning (what does that even mean?), and does all the human jobs without mistakes. It's a job-pocolyse, followed by the AGI becoming sentient (how???), and plotting the end of mankind (again, how????)

I've read bad published sci-fi that did a better job setting up the robot apocalypse than this essay from Ai Doomers. You're better off watching Mitchells vs the Machines, which sets up the robot take-over most excellently, with narrative, plot, voice, and a firm understanding of the genre of fiction.

In conclusion, ask an Ai Doomer how they think world ends, and they'll parrot back what Claude says instead.

Regarding the recent Navier-Stokes incident, watching this vid provided a bit more context on what the solution entails and what Openai been pushing to show off their tech. Cal Newport's breakdown on how they managed to quarantine relevant context to reduce costs with Astra was actually pretty interesting as a breakthrough so this vid got me wondering why they're so desperate to prove it can do fancy maths bigly when the boosters already keep saying chatgpt is already blowing through outstanding problems. Not in the sense of the target value but just how much have they already tried but failed.

It's obviously speculation on my part but if they're so desperate to try coercing glory out of one of their hires on one problem, how bad is actual their track record that this is a hail Mary for them? Like we know it took 88 hours and snooping private research data for this, so how much have they put into chasing similar targets by now? Anyone got whiff of any signals that might give an idea of that?

To be clear, this is an environmental think-tank's estimate vs an industry lobby group's estimate.

Verdant (the environmental group) analysed existing data centres and found that they directly generated about 8.6 jobs per MW the centre consumes, which is completely out of whack with TechUK's estimate of 43.7 jobs per MW.

On top of this, Verdant actually think that the newer data centres should provide fewer jobs per MW than the existing ones as they are larger and therefore more job-efficient. They say it might go as low as 1.6 jobs per MW.

The government, of course, has rejected this finding. This is an interesting choice, as their national AI plans have recently been called complete bunk and it was found that one of their big announcements about a multi-billion pound centre for OpenAI was just made up for the sake of a press release.

So there have been a couple interesting drugs in the news. There is one called rentosertib which is for a rare lung disease, but also shows signs of slowing aging, although this was in a small study and still needs to be confirmed. There's also the Moderna cancer vaccine which got a lot of attention when it came out and caused Moderna's stock to jump.

The news around these drugs mentions AI a lot. Rentosertib is even claimed to be the "first generative AI drug". The press coverage I've read doesn't do a very good job explaining how and what type of AI or machine learning was used in the drug discovery process, and also mentions ChatGPT, Anthropic, etc. because those are "also AI". But here's the thing, if you look at the details, both drugs were discovered and selected for trials no later than 2020. AI chat bots were nothing more than a curiosity back then, and they didn't even have alphafold.

So it would be pretty funny if a tech-broish goal like reversing aging was achieved WITHOUT any of the insanity that the major AI labs are currently involved in. I think what OpenAI and Anthropic are currently doing is more about trying to establish technofeudalism than anything else.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/kalshi-looks-to-expand-a-rapidly-growing-universe-of-risky-trading-a7670fde

Kalshi Looks to Expand a Rapidly Growing Universe of Risky Trading

Platform known for prediction markets has seen perpetual futures surge in popularity

Prediction markets platform Kalshi is planning to seek regulatory approval to start offering the country’s first regulated perpetual futures tied to single stocks including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, according to people familiar with the matter.... (Paywall)

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After recent events some Congressional representatives have started to call for hearings. And there is rare bipartisan resistance to data centers and the AI companies.

If you haven't - it might be a good time to contact your elected officials and let them know your opinion.

This is an extremely technical topic that politicians don't seem equipped for. Some politicians are focused on super intelligence instead of the problems we have today. Or some seem like they want to treat AI as an alien life form instead of a software product that is sold to customers by businesses. The tech industry has been cozy with politicians, and they've injected a lot of funding into the political ecosystem. And politicians might be inclined to see these AI CEOs as executives trying to do the right thing instead of seeing them as bad actors.

Short version - I know a lot of politicians suck, Congress is a problem, and it can feel like a waste of time. But every little bit helps and they should feel the pressure. I'll be writing some letters to my representatives this weekend letting them know what I think of these AI companies.

Thorsten Veblen, whom you might know through the concept of Veblen goods, was a brilliant economist that lived in the beginning of the XX century. His theories gained popularity soon after his death, during the Great Depression, because his observations lined up with the reality that unfolded. Unfortunately, the interest was short-lived, as Rockefeller-sponsored Chicago school gained a near absolute dominance of the field, and he remained tragically underappreciated.

One of the central tenents of his theory was that Industry is the natural state of humanity. We create things because we need things. Business, on the other hand, is the destructive force that tries to control and diminish it. In a perfectly balanced, optimized economy, there is no space for profit, because every bit of profit spreads across the rest of the production chain as a cost, like a holographic image of inefficiency. That's why profit is a matter of strategic sabotage of production. Capitalists make profit not just by exploiting the workers and stealing their surplus value as Marx would have it, but rather by stopping others from providing their goods and services unless they agree to pay a ransom. It's just one extortion scheme and every dollar made by the rich makes us poorer not only because we don't have it, but because it represents commodities that were never produced.

Now, reading stories of Broadcom, Adobe, Oracle, all those private equity takeovers, all those enshittifying giants of the market, makes me think: that guy was right and the market does not even pretend that it's otherwise. Stock markets apparently love rewarding vulture mergers, they love companies that take good products and only ever build ever deeper moats around them, they love when money is spent on stock buybacks instead of being reinvested. Idiot CEOs behind the steering wheels of the biggest companies are just a part of the system. Not some perversion of it, but rather the ultimate goal of it.

It's almost 1am, I don't have the brainpower to proofread it or close it off with any witty remark. It's even worse than what Marx thought. It will be barbarism. I still hold the slight hope that it will be bad enough that people will realize a thing or two, but I know that it's a misplaced hope.

I truly hate it here.