EDIT
I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that’s all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.
I’ll be brutally honest about that question: I think that if “they might train on my code / build a derived version with an LLM” is enough to drive you away from open source, your open source values are distinct enough from mine that I’m not ready to invest significantly in keeping you. I’ll put that effort into welcoming the newcomers instead.
No he won’t.
I’ve found myself affected by this for open source dependencies too. The other day I wanted to parse a cron expression in some Go code. Usually I’d go looking for an existing library for cron expression parsing—but this time I hardly thought about that for a second before prompting one (complete with extensive tests) into existence instead.
He /knows/ about pcre but would rather prompt instead. And pretty sure this was already answered on stack overflow before 2014.
That one was a deliberately provocative question, because for a new HTML5 parsing library that passes 9,200 tests you would need a very good reason to hire an expert team for two months (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to write such a thing. And honestly, thanks to the existing conformance suites this kind of library is simple enough that you may find their results weren’t notably better than the one written by the coding agent.
He didn’t write a new library from scratch, he ported one from Python. I could easily hire two undergrads to change some tabs to curlies, pay them in beer, and yes, I think it /would/ be better, because at least they would have learned something.
From a new white paper Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt, h/t The Syllabus Hidden Gem of the Week
The long-term viability of the AI investment surge depends on meeting the high expectations embedded in those investments, with a disconnect between debt pricing and equity valuations. Failure to meet expectations could result in sharp corrections in both equity and debt markets. As shown in Graph 3.C, the loan spreads charged on private credit loans to AI firms are close to those charged to non-AI firms. If loan spreads reflect the risk of the underlying investment, this pattern suggests that lenders judge AI-related loans to be as risky as the average loan to any private credit borrower. This stands in stark contrast to the high equity valuations of AI companies, which imply outsized future returns. This schism suggests that either lenders may be underestimating the risks of AI investments (just as their exposures are growing significantly) or equity markets may be overestimating the future cash flows AI could generate.
Por que no los dos? But maybe the lenders are expecting a bailout… or just gullible…
That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.
Interesting point, if AI is basically a rounding error for GDP… But I also remember the layoffs in 2000-1 and 2014-5, they weren’t evenly distributed and a lot of people got left behind, even if they weren’t as bad as '08.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_generativeai-gartner-ibm-activity-7415515266849124352-W2n5
I’ve finally cracked how Gartner’s “Features” axis works.
It’s not latency.
It’s not context windows.
It’s definitely not “can this thing form a coherent thought.”
It’s Enterprise Friction™.
By that metric, Gartner has ranked IBM—a company whose flagship product is currently “billable hours in a trench coat”—ahead of Anthropic, the people who actually build the models IBM is desperately trying to resell with a logo swap.
Ranking IBM over Anthropic in 2025 is like ranking a library card catalog over Google Search because the library has better governance, stronger controls, and more shelves you can lock.
Anthropic is building the frontier.
IBM is building a PowerPoint about the frontier that requires a three-year commit, seven steering committees, and a ceremonial blood sacrifice to Red Hat.
Gartner analysts: blink twice if the blue suits are in the room with you.
nice find there:
A progressive campaign, “The Great Slate”, was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, “I’ve been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop.” It is estimated that, as of March 2018, over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[32]
Oh I saw that name before - https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/
Since someone linked to Bergstrom above, I wanted to mention his Marshack Colloquium talk from last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxn40xiK9g0 - basically the idea is we are all “information foragers” but the “information environment” has shifted radically around us all in a really short amount of time. In “information abundance” the right strategy is to visit a lot more different sites instead of just a few, if the model / analogy works for people about as good as it does for ant eaters. If vibes are off, on to the next tab, it will broaden your worldview too.
PSA - https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/ - CA residents can now request data deletion to many adtech data brokers.
When I took my mom last week, they were blasting We Built This City.
French lawmakers Arthur Delaporte and Eric Bothorel alerted prosecutors on January 2 after thousands of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes were generated by Grok and shared on X. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the reports were added to an existing investigation into X, noting the offense carries penalties of up to two years in prison and a €60,000 fine.
two years of prison for whom exactly?
From the new Yann LeCunn interview https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2
Meta made headlines for trying to poach elite researchers from competitors with offers of $100mn sign-on bonuses. “The future will say whether that was a good idea or not,” LeCun says, deadpan.
LeCun calls Wang, who was hired to lead the organisation, “young” and “inexperienced”.
“He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know . . . There’s no experience with research or how you practise research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”
Wang also became LeCun’s manager. I ask LeCun how he felt about this shift in hierarchy. He initially brushes it off, saying he’s used to working with young people. “The average age of a Facebook engineer at the time was 27. I was twice the age of the average engineer.”
But those 27-year-olds weren’t telling him what to do, I point out.
“Alex [Wang] isn’t telling me what to do either,” he says. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
OR, maybe nobody /has/ to tell a researcher what to do, especially one like him, if they’ve already internalized the ideology of their masters.
The mods were heavily downvoted and critiqued for pulling the rug from under the community as well as for parallelly modding pro-A.I.-relationship-subs. One mod admitted:
“(I do mod on r/aipartners, which is not a pro-sub. Anyone who posts there should expect debate, pushback, or criticism on what you post, as that is allowed, but it doesn’t allow personal attacks or blanket comments, which applies to both pro and anti AI members. Calling people delusional wouldn’t be allowed in the same way saying that ‘all men are X’ or whatever wouldn’t. It’s focused more on a sociological issues, and we try to keep it from devolving into attacks.)”
A user, heavily upvoted, replied:
You’re a fucking mod on ai partners? Are you fucking kidding me?
It goes on and on like this: As of now, the posting has amassed 343 comments. Mostly, it’s angry subscribers of the sub, while a few users from pro-A.I.-subreddits keep praising the mods. Most of the users agree that brigading has to stop, but don’t understand why that means that a sub called COGSUCKERS should suddenly be neutral to or accepting of LLM-relationships. Bear in mind that the subreddit r/aipartners, for which one of the mods also mods, does not allow to call such relationships “delusional”. The most upvoted comments in this shitstorm:
“idk, some pro schmuck decided we were hating too hard 💀 i miss the days shitposting about the egg” https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsuckers/comments/1pxgyod/comment/nwb159k/
internet comment etiquette with erik just got off YT probation / timeout from when YouTube’s moderation AI flagged a decade old video for having russian parkour.
He celebrated by posting the below under a pipebomb video.
Hey, this is my son. Stop making fun of his school project. At least he worked hard on it. unlike all you little fucks using AI to write essays about books you don’t know how to read. So you can go use AI to get ahead in the workforce until your AI manager fires you for sexually harassing the AI secretary. And then your AI health insurance gets cut off so you die sick and alone in the arms of your AI fuck butler who then immediately cremates you and compresses your ashes into bricks to build more AI data centers. The only way anyone will ever know you existed will be the dozens of AI Studio Ghibli photos you’ve made of yourself in a vain attempt to be included. But all you’ve accomplished is making the price of my RAM go up for a year. You know, just because something is inevitable doesn’t mean it can’t be molded by insults and mockery. And if you depend on AI and its current state for things like moderation, well then fuck you. Also, hey, nice pipe bomb, bro.
Another video on Honey (“The Honey Files Expose Major Fraud!”) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE
Shame he missed cyber monday by a couple weeks.
Also 16:35 haha ofc it’s just json full of regexes.
UIUC prof John Gallagher had a christmas post - Firm reading in an era of AI delirium - Could reading synthetic text be like eating ultra processed foods?
Thanks for posting. The author is provocative for sure, but I found he also wrote a similar polemic about veganism, kinda hard for me to situate it. Might fetch one of his volumes from the stacks during a slow week, probably would get my name put on a list though.
Waterfox lore - it got acquired by System1 of “Guy Who Runs Three Companies Called Fidelity But Not The Fidelity You Know Probably Doesn’t Care That There’s Already A Company Called System1 That Does That Same Thing As The System1 His SPAC Is Buying. Just saying.” 1 and then went private again 2, presumably they bought it back after the stock predictably tanked. Subprime adtech is a strange place.
IMHO should just bring back iceweasel, but what do i know.
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Sorry (not sorry).
Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter
It’s a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.
Short of wikipedia shipping it’s own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it’s not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.