All those people saying “I was skeptical of AI, until I tried Claude and I was amazed that it could tell me this and this and this” sound just like

“I was skeptical of psychics, but then Madame Fortuna told me something only my dead wife would know!”

Human perception has certain well-documented flaws that confidence men prey upon, and you are not immune from these

Cool if true

Andrzej Odrzywołek: All elementary functions from a single operator

https://arxiv.org/html/2603.21852v2

This is peak malicious compliance and I love it

https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-paperwork-flood/

Edit : the blog author is on the fediverse if you want to follow him here, and he maintains a follow page on his site with many options!

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

Just stumbled over a wonderful combination of Hanlon’s razor and Arthur C. Clarke’s „3rd Law“ (according to the Urban Dictionary it’s called „Gray’s Law“:

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistiguishable from malice"

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

A few thoughts on Astral / OpenAI, now that the emotions have sat for a bit.

First, let me start by noting that AI is an attack on open source, inherently, by necessity, and at a structural level. That argument is bigger than Astral, but the short version is that you cannot simultaneously expand the public commons and work towards it's enclosure; moreover, if the public commons do not stand for the public good, then it's not really a commons any more.