Dekafox Jul 4
tante

"Whatever" is a brilliant essay on "AI" by @eevee:

"But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost."

https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

The rise of Whatever

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

Jul 4 at 10:05amWeb
Show threadLeah Jul 4
@tante @eevee oh that’s the person who wrote the doom mapping tutorial
Show threadSevorisJul 4

@tante @eevee "co-opted by a bunch of get-rich-quick grifters and a bunch of turbo-libertarians whose entire identities are defined by the Things that they Own and who want to cryptographically impose that on everyone else too because they’re mad that World of Warcraft nerfed warlock or something."

This here just in of itself is a banger summation of that entire troup of abusive weirdos that is techbros in cryptocurrency.

Show threadKonosocioJul 4
@tante @eevee I can't get over how bored in your life you have to be to be ok with it getting spammed by whatever AI content. There are so many problems to solve, why aren't we doing that instead.
Show threadReimarJul 4
@tante @adam @eevee Excellent, actually almost cathartic. I saw that post with carpenters and table saw whatever as well, wanted to reply but did not know how. The counter example, a magic machine carpenters throw wood at until eventually a chair comes out on the other side is such a brilliant take. It is exactly this — if the process isn’t of any value for you, if the outcome could be whatever, just use SlopAI™
Show threadLee HauserJul 4
@tante @eevee Oh, my gosh, this is great. Thanks, eev.ee, for putting in the work, and tante for posting.
Show threadMattJul 4
@tante @eevee Excellent post. A good point was raised that I never considered about how articles are padded out to fit more ads on a single page. Probably why recipes are written the way they are online, loads of annoying exposition before you get to the actual ingredients list so there are more places for ads
Show threadQuinnJul 4

@tante @eevee „Calculators do have limitations at their extremes, and if you’re working with extremes, you have to be aware of those. Table saws will (or, used to) cut through fingers just as happily as wood. Tools have edge cases — at their edges. LLMs have edge cases everywhere, and they are constantly changing, even minute to minute, even for exactly the same input fed to exactly the same model.“

This resonates with me. And at the same time, it shows the only place where LLMs are *actually* useful: Contexts where the result is easily verifiable, but making the *association* is hard for an untrained human. Example: „Is there a name for differential equations with properties X Y and Z?“ → The results will likely be incorrect, but the LLM spits out some plausible names which can be looked up elsewhere (I found this to be slightly more effective than using a search engine directly, or hopping from Wiki article to Wiki article).

Show threadFluffy Kitty CatJul 5
@quinn @tante @eevee "Tip of the toungue" usecases are useful. It's just not trillion dollar AGI put it in everything useful
Show threadSteven Ensslen Jul 4
@tante @eevee
I love this:
"What are we actually saying here — that even Microsoft has to evaluate usage of “AI” directly, because it doesn’t affect performance enough to have an obvious impact otherwise? That the technology is so limp that even its biggest investor has to strong-arm its own employees into using it? That their own employees don’t want to use it?"
Show threaddemofoxJul 5
@tante @eevee eevee, I've seen you round the net for years and always have loved what you do. This puts into words a lot of thoughts I've had but couldn't articulate. Thanks a lot.
I think too that this whole "whatever" reflects on the inner thoughts of business people.
Any random game dev exec - if they could get rid of the game making part and more directly make graph go up, they certainly would - and kinda do currently.
This soulless greed is a disease on humanity.
Show threadKhrysJul 5

@tante @eevee

"essentially no cost" ???

They burn our planet and take our water to produce that shit.

We all will pay at the end.

Show threadНагострюйте ножі Jul 5

It’s a decent piece! This part slaps:

The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes workand thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now.

Reformulating the “passion to do things” point so many times (in pretty relatable ways) made me think about how it is connected to the passion to live.

I have this friend with suicidal tendencies that I for some reason often find myself explaining volition to: will to live this, beauty of things that—it’s almost crass, I can’t help it. Sometimes, when I’m not doing my thing and they are having a better day to care about things, they communicate with the world through ChatGPT (what’s that plant, who’s the author of that thing, etc.), and it’s feels pretty much a disservice for a person who expresses some curiosity, but who are not able to engage with it as a practice. There’s a promise to make one care about a thing, but the promise is hollow, since one has skipped establishing a connection with the thing.

@tante @eevee