TechTakes

Does vox do anything other than vomit hot garbage?

there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss

Baldur's given his thoughts on Bluesky - he suspects Zitron's downplayed some of AI's risks, chiefly in coding:

There’s even reason to believe that Ed’s downplaying some of the risks because they’re hard to quantify:

• The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?
• Coding isn’t the biggest “win” for LLMs but its biggest risk

Software dev has a bad habit of skipping research and design and just shipping poorly thought-out prototypes as products. These systems get increasingly harder to update over time and bugs proliferate. LLMs for coding magnify that risk.

We’re seeing companies ship software nobody in the company understands, with edge cases nobody is aware of, and a host of bugs. LLMs lead to code bases that are harder to understand, buggier, and much less secure.

LLMs for coding isn’t a productivity boon but the birth of a major Y2K-style crisis. Fixing Y2K cost the world’s economy over $500 billion USD (corrected for inflation), most of it borne by US institutions and companies.

And Y2K wasn’t promising magical growth on the order of trillions so the perceived loss of a failed AI Bubble in the eyes of the stock market would be much higher

On a related note, I suspect programming/software engineering's public image is going to spectacularly tank in the coming years - between the impending Y2K-style crisis Baldur points out, Silicon Valley going all-in on sucking up to Trump, and the myriad ways the slop-nami has hurt artists and non-artists alike, the pieces are in place to paint an image of programmers as incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst.

Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world's biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.

As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the "Agentic coding benchmark" (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren't pushing the frontier, then there's no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.

On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren't wasting money on the compute they can't afford. The only winning move is to not play.

I'm honestly impressed to see anyone on HN even trying to call out the problem. I had assumed that they were far enough down the Nazi Bar path that the non-nazi regulars had started looking elsewhere and given up on it.

Gentlemen, you can't have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.

lol wow, I'm cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism "gackin' off"

Isn't that his full-time job? (derogatory)

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative 'I was conned by some asshole' is too much to bear.