yeah, this is nothing but red flags

so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if you’d like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add DO_NOT_TRACK to Nix’s wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the community’s consensus.

I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs can’t happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree — they’ve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)

a very old concept with useful applications dating back in the 80s.

wait a fucking minute

you came here to lecture us and you think algorithms from the field of AI only started seeing serious use in the 80s? the Mark I Perceptron was built in 1958

(I admittedly didn’t know about the machine before today, but I know more than enough about AI to know perceptrons as software are old as hell)

why do all these papers have their own microsites, dedicated domain names (in Anguilla no less!), and shitty graphics? I can’t think of another branch of research that consistently does this shit. it’s almost like it’s all marketing fluff or something!

I feel the same way. I program in rust cause I like it, and the feeling of actually liking writing systems code was refreshing coming from C and especially C++. rust is a language I find beautiful — but I won’t for long if its excellent diagnostics and tooling all get deprecated in favor of an LLM. I can’t imagine what pivoting to AI would do to the language’s roadmap.

wow what utter horseshit

AI, as I’m sure you are all aware, is a very old concept with useful applications dating back in the 80s.

the first AI winter happened because those fuckers couldn’t stop grifting academic funds by promising shit that didn’t work. we know the history of the field better than you do. not that you had a point other than wanting to reply guy about a name we didn’t adopt (cause we’re not OpenAI) for a technology all of us strongly dislike.

fucking pointless shit

holy shit that’s perfect

Niko Matsakis wrote a post about how the fucking rust compiler toolchain should include an LLM to explain error messages because teaching the semantics of a language is too hard and that pissed me off so much that instead of linking that piece of shit directly I’m posting this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich that’s also much shorter than Niko’s extended attempt to beg for a promotion at Amazon

e: mastodon thread

my related guess is primarily marketing surveillance and secondarily all other types of surveillance. notably Venmo no longer lets you put “hookers and blow” as a transaction note, because it was the default response from most people who didn’t really want to do a social transaction but had to use Venmo cause it’s all their recipient had. Venmo’s social features are all designed to make you leak as much data to Venmo as possible so it can be monetized or otherwise capitalized upon, and that’s about par for the course for how a thielverse paypal mafia offshoot operates. this is surveillance capitalism with a smiley face.

it’s even worse on mastodon: it goes from plain text to markdown back to plain text, so both posts are just “1.”

it’s turning out the most successful thing about deepseek was whatever they did to trick the worst fossbro reply guys you’ve ever met into going to bat for them

somehow it got even worse

Google appears to have faked AI output in a commercial set to run during the Super Bowl. The ad shows a business owner using Gemini to write a website description, but the text portrayed as generated by AI has been available on the business’s website since at least August 2020

also they doubled down on the bad stat

The ad originally had Gemini present copy stating that Gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption” — which is not true. Google later edited the commercial to take out the stat, while the business owner also removed it from their website.

[…]

But Google maintained that the website description was written by Gemini all along. In addition to showing Gemini “generate” the description in the commercial, Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler said on X that the Gouda stat was “not a hallucination,” adding that “Gemini is grounded in the Web.”

also also they later doubled down on lying that Gemini wrote the whole page? it’s… really embarrassing that Google’s marketing team doesn’t know about web archives

standard “fuck off programming.dev” ban with a side of who the fuck cares. deepseek isn’t the good guys, you weird fucks don’t have to go to a nitpick war defending them, there’s no good guys in LLMs and generative AI. all these people are grifters, all of them are gaming the benchmarks they designed to be gamed, nobody’s getting good results out of this fucking mediocre technology.

this is utterly pointless and you’ve taken up way too much space in the thread already

It sounds to me like you have a very clear bias, and you don’t care at all about whether or not what they said is actually true or not, as long as the headlines about AI are negative

oh no, anti-AI bias in TechTakes? unthinkable

as the other poster pointed out: Iron Man 2 came out in 2010, and Musk’s personality cult was already in full swing since his PR team at the time did everything they could to associate him with the first film. I believe Charlie when he says his friend and fellow sci-fi author knew an asshole when he saw one.

my bad, I was working on the awful.systems psychic energy collector and it must have backlashed

fuck yes. I don’t think my brain knows what to do with the happy/excited neurotransmitters that news caused it to produce

it’s fucking weird you made an account just to post this tripe, but off you fuck anyway

this feels like a pattern too — so many naturally divergent or non-standard (from the perspective of a white American who thinks they own the English language) elements of writing are getting nonsensically trashjacketed as telltale signs that a text must be generated by an LLM. see also paully g trashjacketing “delve” for purely racist reasons and the authors of the Nix open letter having the accusation of LLM use leveled at them by people who didn’t read the letter and didn’t want anyone else to either.

React has entered the chat (don’t try talking to it yet though, it has to “asynchronously” load every individual UI element in the jankiest way possible)