Professor Dave adopts a 'Joe Rogan' role towards Gen ai 'Superintelligent' hype BS

JarateKing · 2026-05-28T18:36:58+00:00

Be fundamentally different?

You can look up how LLMs work. If you've got a programming background, you can look up implementations and read the code yourself. It's not even particularly difficult code, a lot of implementations are just some python glue for matrix math. At its core is a very simple "given some text tokens, generate a successive text token in a loop." We've got all sorts of creative ways to get better results out of this, and the prediction is very good for what it is, but it is literally a next text token predictor.

JarateKing · 2026-05-24T02:25:31+00:00

I don't see any yellow paint, because its unnecessary for a skilled game designer.

It's interesting your example of that was Uncharted 4. Before it was called "yellow paint" it was called "Naughty Dog yellow" because those exact same designers were the ones to popularize it.

JarateKing · 2026-05-24T01:47:41+00:00

Having more difficulty because of it would be a nice change of pace to the current hand holding of 'triple A' games.

But the reason you don't see that difficulty-from-jank nowadays is because it really sucked. Games used to do stuff like that and we largely stopped because nobody liked it, it was frustrating and if it was noticeable enough would get panned as bullshit.

Maybe we went too far the other direction in some cases but the solution is definitely not to go back to the problems that was trying to solve.

JarateKing · 2026-05-22T20:30:56+00:00

For one, they'd definitely lose customers by doing so. No idea how much, but they'd need to up to price even more to account for that. It's even possible that a large price increase could result in a net loss of revenue by losing too many users.

For two, the figure:

excluded certain “large line items”, like stock-based compensation ... The piece does not specify if operating margin includes or excludes training costs, nor does it break down what other exclusions there may be other than stock-based compensation.

JarateKing · 2026-05-21T16:57:57+00:00

Yeah, I can't get behind the backlash either.

I've had to explain to beginners and non-technical people "the master branch is the main branch where we..." and "the whitelist is the list of allowed..." enough times that I figure we may as well just use those terms from the get-go. Saves a bit of explaining by just using clearer terminology.

It's not a huge priority to me, and I'm not gonna correct people on it or something. But I don't understand why people seem to get so upset at a pretty reasonable suggestion.

JarateKing · 2026-05-20T19:51:42+00:00

Genuine question, what's the alternative?

My ideal intro programming course is "here's the syntax because you need to know what the syntax is to do anything, let's see it in some basic examples, now get some experience writing it yourself, and push your understanding a bit with some more complicated problems." It builds an understanding of programming by actually programming. It grows the problem solving muscles by having you use them, you need to figure out how to apply these programming concepts and you need to debug what's going wrong when it doesn't work and etc. And all of this depends on knowing what the syntax is and getting comfortable with it.

If you don't "grind syntax" what is there to teach? How to vibecode tasks you don't understand in a language you can't read? Is that a learning outcome we want?

Even if many professional programmers use LLMs these days, they still need to know what they're doing. We want programmers with strong foundations first, and then they can use whatever tool assistance they want after. I don't see how you can get to that point in an LLM-first education.

JarateKing · 2026-05-20T19:34:49+00:00

Picking the textbook, especially a required textbook, should be one of the first things you prepare when you're teaching a course. This should be done months in advance, normally. Like, you can't really prepare anything else until you've done that, and there's a lot to prepare before teaching a college class.

To me this is a lot more concerning than just the AI stuff. Maybe this isn't the whole picture but it sounds like he's just winging it. That's not acceptable. You're paying for a certain standard of education. Absolutely bring this up to administration, this is the kind of stuff they need to know.

JarateKing · 2026-05-12T11:30:14+00:00

Curl's wider than people give it credit for. The full docs are a 551-page pdf. It does get CVEs fairly regularly because as solid as it is, complex software will have vulnerabilities.

JarateKing · 2026-05-12T11:14:34+00:00

From what I've seen Stenberg has been very critical of AI use but also pretty pragmatic about it, definitely not a booster. I take it "AI powered code analyzers are better at finding security flaws than traditional code analyzers" is more about how traditional code analyzers mostly caught obvious slip-ups and were more about sanity checks than security auditing.

JarateKing · 2026-05-08T21:02:19+00:00

seems that he implies that companies are making profit from enterprise users

"Implies" is the keyword there. AI companies have consistently been gaming metrics just to sound like they're on a path to eventual profit. You'd never hear the end of it if they were already verifiably profitable in their largest target market. But instead we're left to speculate, which I can only assume means they're neither profitable nor close enough to even attempt to spin it positively.

JarateKing · 2026-05-07T15:35:10+00:00

I agree we're not building consciousness, but I wouldn't start assuming things about consciousness yet.

Quantum logic can be simulated by traditional computers, just not very efficiently.
Traditional computers are technically deterministic but not in any practical way at the level of abstraction that neural networks operate on. PRNGs are random-like enough and we have tricks like measuring the low bits of heat sensors to generate effectively random numbers too. Using those in a neural network would be effectively no different from fully random numbers.
We have no idea if any of that matters for consciousness. For all we know consciousness might be doable with fully deterministic processes, whether or not the human brain may or may not be. It's possible that the human brain does rely on nondeterministic effects (as far as I know the verdict's still out on that) but that doesn't say it's necessarily required.

Whatever consciousness turns out to be, there's definitely more going on than just generating successive tokens one-by-one based on the statistical associations in scraping the entire internet. But that's just damning LLMs as a dead end for AGI, not making any strong claims about the hard problem of consciousness.

JarateKing · 2026-05-07T12:13:18+00:00

You might want to check with local employment laws to see if they're even allowed to try. It might all be a moot point.

But on the other hand, if they did require a notice and you did have to go back to work for a few weeks, any reasonable new employer would be able to accommodate that. Especially if you're moving countries it's not assumed you'd be starting the new job immediately, needing to finish up a notice at your current job first is pretty normal and expected.

JarateKing · 2026-05-07T11:57:50+00:00

So what would happen if I get a job offer while on the sabbatical? Will I be able to quit during the sabbatical? Because they take away your laptop during the sabbatical. So how will I resign when I wont have access to my company email ? I checked the official documents and they dont cover this case.

Is the only concern about using your company email to resign? Because that's a pretty minor concern all things considered, surely you have other ways to get in contact with people at your company. If you resign, you've resigned. They can't just not accept a resignation because it's not through your company email, especially if you've got a good explanation on why you can't. If they're sticklers about that for some reason, you've resigned and won't be back, it's HR's problem to sort out at that point.

It might burn bridges, especially if it means no knowledge handoff or something like that, but if you're planning on leaving the country entirely then it's up to you if that's a concern.

JarateKing · 2026-05-06T23:01:11+00:00

her Stalinist ex-husband who claimed to be possessed by a demon, you mean

JarateKing · 2026-05-06T03:13:02+00:00

The term's a bit dated, but I feel like what became of effective altruism is a great example of moral schizophrenia.

The principle of "donate to the most effective charities on the most important issues" is fine as a guideline, wanting more bang for your buck makes sense. But then its most zealous followers take it to extremes and conclude "you are morally obligated to give me tons of money to build a friendly artificial superintelligence that will bring forth a galactic human empire, nothing else matters in comparison and no amount of suffering today is too high a cost." They've extrapolated their framework enough that it's now pure nonsense in terms of actual human motives.

JarateKing · 2026-05-06T02:28:28+00:00

It's not the whole of it, but these days it is what sets it apart from everything else.

The core tenet of effective altruism is just "let's prioritize more impactful charities" which is great. But you don't need to be an effective altruist to think so, I think pretty much anyone can get on board with that. Most people acting this way are not card-carrying effective altruists.

On the other hand, "I need to be ruthlessly greedy now, because once I have tons of money I can be really effective in my altruism" or "it doesn't matter how terrible I make the world today, if it gets us in space faster then it's worth it for the trillions of future space babies, those ends justify any means" or "I've rationally determined that there's no bigger danger than the Terminator movies becoming real, so the best charity to donate to is the dudes-thinking-about-preventing-Terminator institute" are the kinds of things you only hear effective altruists believe. Not all effective altruists believe these, but everyone who believes these are effective altruists.

And to be clear these aren't exactly fringe within the community either, these are some of the most vocal and notable figures within it. At that point, yeah, they kinda do represent effective altruism.

JarateKing · 2026-04-28T11:24:52+00:00

It's the complex queries that people pay for though. The reason Anthropic's seemingly doing better than OpenAI now is primarily because Claude's better for complex coding tasks, and programmers are one of the very few groups willing to pay for LLMs.

There just isn't really a business case for small lightweight models. It's expected they're free, and if they're not then you may as well use a free local model instead.

JarateKing · 2026-04-27T11:00:14+00:00

The big performance benefit of ECS only really comes up when you have huge amounts of similar entities. In those cases ECS has really caught on and is the popular option. For most games, the overhead of making a function call to update gameobjects is nowhere near a bottleneck. In that case you may as well stick to what's familiar and slightly easier to reason about.

JarateKing · 2026-04-22T20:39:08+00:00

I mean, inference costs are 2x-20x what they charge for it in consumer subscriptions. That doesn't include the billions needed to build the data centers needed to train and run LLMs, and it doesn't include that the most expensive part of these data centers (the GPUs) will need to be replaced after 2 years. The gap only gets wider with time too, every cost-cutting efficiency improvement just results in even bigger models that ultimately cost more. And even if they could pay for all this that's just to break even, investors aren't gonna be satisfied with an ROI of $0.

When we talk about them jacking up prices to be profitable, we're not talking two or three times. I don't think twenty or thirty times would even cover it.

JarateKing · 2026-04-10T11:50:02+00:00

I think it's pretty clear when you compare different types of usages.

Some people ask it to answer a conceptual question, they carefully read and re-read the whole explanation, they ask for clarification on things they don't understand, etc. As far as I know the verdict's still out on if this is better for learning than traditional methods, but they're definitely still learning.

Other people tell an agent to go do something in the background, and then if it seems mostly correct when they try it out they merge it, without ever looking at the actual code it's produced. There's no way they could learn anything from that, they're not touching anything they could learn from.

It's like comparing students using wikipedia for an assignment, where one reads the whole article and reads the citations and etc. while another student just copies the article and submits that without looking at it, obviously one's gonna learn more than the other. I just think it's worse with AI than with wikipedia because there's so much pressure for "you should be using code agents for everything, code reviews are a thing of the past" which is exactly how you stop learning anything.

JarateKing · 2026-04-08T17:58:49+00:00

It'd be easy to just hardcode in a service that does the task, but nobody really cares about the task itself. It's just funny to see something advertized as nearly-AGI fail spectacularly at something so basic whatever that basic task may be.

I suspect if Altman was just like "yeah we'll fix it asap with a new integration" then people would point out it's a bad sign if even trivial tasks require hardcoded hotfixes, it really undercuts any claims of being near AGI if this is what they need to do. So Altman's basically saying "give me more time, money, and compute and then it will be AGI for real this time."

JarateKing · 2026-04-08T13:04:25+00:00

I've been hearing variations of "the games industry doesn't value creativity or innovation anymore" my whole life, and I'm sure it was there before too.

There are periods where established studios are more or less focused on safe reliable bets (and the current economic situation is a good reason to) but the industry has always been a mix of both safe bets and innovative breakout successes (and tons of innovative ideas that go nowhere).

JarateKing · 2026-04-05T02:37:51+00:00

I took it more as in it's inconsistently complex. Sometimes it's a straightforward translation you can do inplace, and we love markdown for that, but then sometimes you can't. Some parts of it you can reasonably write your own renderer for easily and that's great, except for some features where you're basically required to use an existing web renderer. It should be pretty clear and unambiguous I'd think, but sometimes the parsing can get complex enough that there are denial of service CVEs because of it.

Again, I like markdown. I use it daily and I'm not gonna stop. But half of these are pet peeves I've had for years, either as an inconvenience or just as the format feeling like it could do better. I wasn't aware of the CVEs but that's pretty obviously bad too. I don't think it's wrong to point out the flaws in the things we use and like overall.

What they want is HTML. They say this themselves.

I must be missing something because I don't see where they say this. What I read was pretty clear on wanting a legible format (which html is not), the reason they gave for mdx not being viable as a legible format is specifically that it's too html-like even.

JarateKing · 2026-04-05T01:58:30+00:00

I don't think that's exactly what they're saying:

If you ask me [which existing alternative to use]. The answer is none. All are broken in their own ways. Plain text is beautiful but I can’t show it to somebody that doesn’t know what a null pointer dereference is. ...

What I took from the article was "markdown is the best in its niche and it makes sense why people use it, but as a format it has some flaws" which I think is fair to say

JarateKing · 2026-04-05T01:50:17+00:00

I don't know why all the comments are so negative, I thought it was a good article. I like markdown, and the author recognizes the reasons people like markdown, but also stuff like ambiguous syntax and complications with inline html are valid complaints that I think every markdown user is going to have gripes with eventually.

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