TechTakes

this article will most likely be how I (hopefully very rarely) start off conversations about rationalism in real life should the need once again arise (and somehow it keeps arising, thanks 2025)

but also, hoo boy what a painful talk page

On one hand: all of this stuff entering greater public awareness is vindicating, i.e. I knew about all this shit before so many others, I’m so cool

On the other hand: I want to stop being right about everything please, please just let things not become predictably worse

David Gborie! One of my fave podcasters and podcast guests. Adding this to the playlist

Regrettably I think that the awarereness of these things is inherently the kind of thing that makes you need therapy, so...

I've been beating this dead horse for a while (since July of last year AFAIK), but its clear to me that the AI bubble's done horrendous damage to the public image of artificial intelligence as a whole.

Right now, using AI at all (or even claiming to use it) will earn you immediate backlash/ridicule under most circumstances, and AI as a concept is viewed with mockery at best and hostility at worst - a trend I expect that'll last for a good while after the bubble pops.

To beat a slightly younger dead horse, I also anticipate AI as a concept will die thanks to this bubble, with its utterly toxic optics as a major reason why. With relentless slop, nonstop hallucinations and miscellaneous humiliation (re)defining how the public views and conceptualises AI, I expect any future AI systems will be viewed as pale imitations of human intelligence, theft-machines powered by theft, or a combination of the two.

(mods let me know if this aint it)

the only things that ain’t it are my chances of retiring comfortably, but I always knew that’d be the case

This kind of stuff, which seems to hit a lot harder than the anti trump stuff, makes me feel that a vance presidency would implode quite quickly due to other maga toadies trying to backstab toadkid here.

it's gonna be a massive disaster across the wider economy, and - and this is key - absolutely everyone saw this coming a year ago if not two

...why do I get the feeling the AI bubble just popped

This is classic labor busting. If the relatively expensive, hard-to-train and hard-to-recruit software engineers can be replaced by cheaper labor, of course employers will do so.

Got to a point in this where Casey Newton enumerated his "only two sides" of AI and well, fuck Casey Newton.

but A LOT of engineering has a very very real existential threat. Think about designing buildings. You basically just need to know a lot of rules / tables and how things interact to know what's possible and the best practices

days since orangeposter (incorrectly) argued in certainty from 3 seconds of thought as to what they think is involved in a process: [0]

it's so fucking frustrating to know easy this bullshit is to see if you know a slight bit of anything, and doubly frustrating as to how much of the software world is this thinking. I know it's nothing particularly new and that our industry has been doing this for years, but scream

I actually like the argument here, and it's nice to see it framed in a new way that might avoid tripping the sneer detectors on people inside or on the edges of the bubble. It's like I've said several times here, machine learning and AI are legitimately very good at pattern recognition and reproduction, to the point where a lot of the problems (including the confabulations of LLMs) are based on identifying and reproducing the wrong pattern from the training data set rather than whatever aspect of the real world it was expected to derive from that data. But even granting that, there's a whole world of cognitive processes that can be imitated but not replicated by a pattern-reproducer. Given the industrial model of education we've introduced, a straight-A student is largely a really good pattern-reproducer, better than any extant LLM, while the sort of work that pushes the boundaries of science forward relies on entirely different processes.

These chumps are a disgrace to Harry Potter fans, and I say that in full knowledge of how embarrassing Harry Potter fans can be!!!!

While not exactly celebration worthy and certainly not worth a tenth anniversary celebration, you could argue HPMoR finally coming to a fucking end by whatever means was a somewhat happy occasion.