It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.

because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.

isn’t that the old “basic science is boring and unsexy” issue though? There are economic incentives, but not in a short term-big-bux sort of way, so capitalism can’t be trusted with it.

To conjure up a recent example, something like “The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials”, published back in 1997, probably had limited commercial value at the time, but 20 years later completely sunk a promising post-quantum cryptography algorithm (“An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH”) which might have had some non-trivial commercial implications if SIKE had got through the key exchange algorithm competition.

Anyway, the Erdős problems are good candidates for llm work because they have been specified in a careful and formal way, which requires a reasonably competent mathematician to do. That then opens up mathematics to the same deskilling problem that other sectors afflicted with llms have, and because capitalism is shortsighted and stupid we don’t know what the future economic impact of that will be, right?

In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

KDE showing how it should be done:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

Question:

I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

Response:

We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

1. The owner is a nazi
2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

There are various other posts here on the general subject.

https://awful.systems/post/5897965

Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.

Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

It’s just more llm output, in the style of “imagine you can reason about the question you’ve just been asked. Explain how you might have come about your answer.” It has no resemblance to how a neural network functions, nor to the output filters the service providers use.

It’s how the ai doomers get themselves into a flap over “deceptive” models… “omg it lied about its train of thought!” because if course it didn’t lie, it just edited a stream of tokens that were statistically similar to something classified as reasoning during training.

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.

If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?

she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.

Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!

Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?

They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.