Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, "will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol". They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don't want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,
"Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I'm using to handle the", I swear to Gods I'm not making this up, "MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…". Desperate emphases mine.
And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.
I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was "haha yeah, mathlab is hard".
I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.
mathrix laboratory
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
MATHLAB CODE
Oof ow my heart
"Microsoft Excel...would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell."
I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I'm not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.
It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. It's a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase "don't be evil", they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.
I've just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.
Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!
That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.
I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.
Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don't usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his "entrepreneurial mindset", though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways ("Just ask it!"), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 "penicillin-events" in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.
It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn't touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn't matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn't leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.
The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo's jumping headfirst into it.
For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.
https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/
There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.
As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now.
There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.
It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.
Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we're not qualified and it never goes well.
AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with "sorry, we really aren't equipped to help you"
stop it, get some help.pdf
damn we've got cyberpsychos before gta 6
OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT
Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!
Congrats!
Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?
Over the weekend if I’m understanding right. Just one interview. Its at a distillery lol.
congrats, that’s awesome news!
Congrats! :D
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends won't join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
That's a whole lotta words to say "I'm a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers."
he's not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess that's fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he's taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, "get gud". This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
This almost reads like tptacek doesn't understand why lucidity's piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
I'd have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it's a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I'm just a vibe coding Youtuber.
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
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Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again
Why the bash hate?
Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
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