It’s depressing how so many (pathetic) software devs are taking their hands off the steering wheel and letting LLMs do all the driving. If you think software quality was poor before LLMs, there’s no way it could have been worse than shit like this:

This became very apparent with GPT 5.6 Sol. It, too, was widely hailed to have near-Fable level intelligence. But I used it non-stop for a week and realized that they had mostly just dialed up the relentlessness meter to eleven, most likely via heavy RLHF.

Last week I gave it a small-sized auth ticket to work on, then stepped away. I came back later that afternoon and found that it had worked for 3+ hours and written 25,000+ lines of code. I skimmed over the code and it looked like a small fix followed by a massive number of additional checks around it, including static analysis tooling.

I gave it to another GPT 5.6 and said “check this code and see if it addresses the ticket”. It looked at it and said that 98% of it was garbage and should be thrown away (its own words). I then gave it to Fable, which said it was massively over-engineered. Fable’s theory was that the agent implemented the fix first, but then compacted and lost crucial context, forgot what the original task was about, and kept going. After many compaction cycles it was completely lost.

I’m not regretting not getting back to the Frame Fellowship on their offer to join their indoctrination programme.

I understand your sentiment, but part of me wants you to take up the offer if only to waste their money and create some awkward moments for LWers.

I can’t stand the idea that the Anthropic IPO could end up funding these people to the tune of millions of dollars.

Please, AI bubble, pop sooner.

As a visualization of how wild this could be, look at some Youtube videos of video game speedruns, such as this one of beating Minecraft in 20 seconds.

Now imagine this applied to all domains of science, technology, and the economy.

Tell me you have the mental maturity of a 12 year old without telling me you have the mental maturity of a 12 year old.

Rationalism is a magnet for unwell people. It’s sad.

Steven Bartlett barely has 3 brain cells to rub together, so this seems like the perfect outlet for Kokotajlo’s message.

The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesn’t even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times he’s talking about.

I’m not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. It’s definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.

His non-apology apology:

I’m not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.

Guys, he has a baby. Don’t be too mean to him.

That feeling when you’re an OpenAI exec and you realize the jig is up.

What will EA (and, more specifically, Lighthaven) do with all the money they expect to receive once the Anthropic IPO mints a bunch of hundred-millionaires? I’m not granting all of the article’s premises, but the interviews with rationalists might be of interest.

How do we know this isn’t the AI god creating the first diamondoid bacteria?

Update: Neon acquired the rights.

So Anthropic slopmaxxxed a hamfisted Chinese AI lab detector into Claude Code. And I’m kinda surprised at how much hate Anthropic is getting for it on the orange site.

Remember when grok was inserting “white genocide” into every response? It was probably this guy (or one of his fellow moids).

It makes a twisted sort of sense that so many of them go into life coaching. In their hermetically sealed subculture of highly paid, socially inept nerds, it probably pays the bills to set yourself up as an authority on reading social cues.

From the billionaire’s perspective, confiscatory taxation should be preferable to guillotines.

A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They’re probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.

IANAL, but my understanding is that companies are allowed to keep confidential the fact that they even filed the S-1. That’s how I read OpenAI’s statement. But it’s not completely clear what “it” means in “we expect it to leak”.

AI slop will absolutely kill any forum in which it proliferates. So I’m totally fine with it proliferating on LW.

That’s bizarre. Why?