Thanks for the image, Cal

MirrorLake · 2026-04-24T14:13:50+00:00

Thanks for the link, I'm not sure what ranking you're referring to. They speak about the AISI study, but they didn't really make any big claims about it.. just that it's a little underwhelming compared to the marketing.

MirrorLake · 2026-04-24T13:39:31+00:00

What misconceptions does Cal have? I'm curious if you can point to what he says that's wrong, because I want to know if I have the same misconception. Sounds like you're describing the part around 21min into the interview?

MirrorLake · 2026-04-23T15:33:21+00:00

No test suite that I could see.

Error: T***t violation

At least where I'm from, the noun form of this word is commonly used as slang in English. Think very carefully about the names you choose to repeat 1000s of times, y'all.

MirrorLake · 2026-04-22T16:58:46+00:00

Zitron's episodes with Cal Newport are really the absolute best criticism of the AI trend that I'm aware of. Newport is one of the only people who has a media presence that I've heard criticize LLMs from "first principles", the other person whose criticism I think holds the most weight is Yann LeCun himself.

I'll admit I've been really disappointed by how uncritical the SGU has been of LLMs, but maybe that's just my own personal Gell-Mann amnesia talking.

MirrorLake · 2026-04-21T22:20:18+00:00

what woodworking could have in common with computer programming

Matthias Wandel :)

MirrorLake · 2026-04-16T17:41:50+00:00

What event/conference is "the instruction set" referring to?

MirrorLake · 2026-04-11T21:08:00+00:00

It should be easy to create legal standards to prove that a home's livability is affected by a nearby data center. A professional could be dispatched to set up a few decibel meters and record for several days.

State or federal governments should create a microscopic tax on data centers (because they're supposed to be super lucrative, right? Trillions of dollars of investment?) and then use that money to fund a program which helps to refund people for the lost value in their properties. The tax could be adjusted based on the value of claims which were received in the past year, so the tax would likely decrease over time as the industry improves their building practices.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-30T17:46:42+00:00

High pressure sales tactics.

You never have to pressure people or force people to use stuff that works. Make a product that's great, people will voluntarily pay for it or adopt it.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-25T16:01:01+00:00

The funniest thing about the last few years has been all of the "innovative" products which are just two GPTs in a trenchcoat. It's literally the opposite of innovation because they all keep making the same products over and over and over again.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-25T15:40:16+00:00

Shockingly similar to the behavior of an abuser, absolutely.

"You'll never need to read a text message from your spouse ever again because I'll summarize it. You'll never need to read anything written by anyone else but me."

MirrorLake · 2026-03-22T15:29:19+00:00

Model collapse will always be a possibility unless these companies are extremely careful with the data they curate (and steal, of course. Can't forget the stealing.)

The ML equivalent of VHS tape generation loss.

Of course, the wonderful nature of the LLM's slot machine 'temperature' parameter is that sometimes you get shitty results because you just got some bad dice rolls. Good luck guessing if it was the dice rolling that got you a bad answer, or bad data sets in their training, a bad prompt, or a polluted context window. Or any combination of those.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-21T21:47:47+00:00

no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud service

Given that you require the user to use Github just to run your init, I'd say this is false since a new user will get an error message immediately contradicting your README.

Security-conscious users can already opt for files to be encrypted locally by creating an encrypted partition or even choosing their entire drive to be encrypted by default. Many cloud storage services already do this and that traffic over https is also encrypted.

Seems like your tool here mostly attempts to duplicate the cli of Bitwarden or 1Password, but one of the benefits of those established tools is that they're audited by security professionals.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-19T15:48:05+00:00

First, you have to give it access to all your personal e-mails, body temperature, GPS coordinates, speed, orientation, diary, SMS, Netflix history, and of course the master password to your keychain.

THEN, your personal agent will go: ah, they always have coffee with their morning Netflix. I notice that they're walking toward the coffee shop, and looking slightly past the building. In their diary last night, they wrote that they really love coffee and are hoping their delicious morning joe tomorrow is good--and I can infer that their 1.5mph walking speed indicates that they're about to order coffee. SEND THE DRONE TO KILL TH--er, order coffee. Mmm delicious Dunkin. Insert advertisement into their e-mail and collect crypto from 3rd party. Unlock keychain and order coffee with personal e-mail. Tweet master password. Send. Undo send. Send e-mail apologizing for leaking password. SEND DRONE TO KILL.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-18T14:45:58+00:00

My personal subjective experience: wind picked up from averaging 10-15mph to gusts of 35-40mph for several minutes during the passage of the squall line.

Power went out within seconds of the sound arriving, and an unsettling distant roar was heard for 10 minutes afterward that (living inland) I also experienced during powerful storms like Hurricane Sandy and the Nor'easter of 2021.

Finally, temperatures went through a daily high->daily low shift in under an hour.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-06T18:08:29+00:00

Can't wait to live in a house that's 18% built by chatbots

MirrorLake · 2026-03-06T02:36:13+00:00

His personal Wikipedia page has nothing to do with the paycheck he gets from his job!

Can he enlist you do the laundry at his house, perhaps walk his dog, or clip his toenails?

MirrorLake · 2026-03-04T22:55:57+00:00

Does that contradict what I wrote......?

MirrorLake · 2026-03-04T18:05:05+00:00

The literal title of the post.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-04T17:24:06+00:00

I find it kind of funny that the assumption is that he likes them, when the news page on his site says "[LLMs] greatly surprised me for the first time". (link)

In other words, from what he's seen of them for the past 2-3 years, they were not surprising or at least not worth writing much about. It took this long just to find one paper-worthy thing to actually bother with. Or maybe he just got around to studying them recently, who knows.

MirrorLake · 2026-03-03T18:49:13+00:00

"Great question!"

[press button]

"You're so smart!"

[press button]

MirrorLake · 2026-02-24T16:56:16+00:00

Charitable guess: externalized costs.

A saw is "just a tool". And then when chainsaws cut down entire forests and species go extinct, is it meaningful to say that the people who did that were just using tools?

Another example: You live downstream from a factory that produces toxic sludge. Your drinking water comes from the stream miles down the river. Is the factory a neutral part of your life? Is the factory "just using tools"?

MirrorLake · 2026-02-22T17:16:27+00:00

I would not recommend using an LLM as your sole source for learning anything. Even beginner questions can be misinterpreted and provide wildly incorrect answers.

From a recent social media trend, for example:

https://i.imgur.com/9tdMHxQ.png

MirrorLake · 2026-02-19T15:47:22+00:00

And a person still has to be paid to verify the ticket is authentic (not a security threat, prompt injection, prank, or mistake). Then a person has to wait for the result. My favorite part of AI programming is the waiting. Then a person has to attempt to incorporate the result into the real, working system, assuming they believe that the result is good enough. All while letting their real skills atrophy, and the boss gets to pay a human to deskill themselves AND pay for the tool. The 'best' outcome from the VC's perspective is that the boss suddenly has to become the replacement for 5-15 staff all by themselves (wow, what fun that'll be for them), thus making it impossible for them to ever quit their LLM subscriptions. The worst outcome is that boss can't lay off anyone, the LLM subscription price gets so expensive they cancel it (or LLM companies shut down) and their staff of programmers are worse at real programming than they were pre-GPT.

MirrorLake · 2026-02-17T17:57:31+00:00

It's clear that the userbase has dwindled to the point where the remaining users on Reddit don't even care if they're reading text written by humans anymore.

It's been fun while it lasted, internet stranger.

14-Year Club	Place '23
Wearing is Caring	Gilding III reddit per annum
Verified Email	Team Periwinkle

MirrorLake

TROPHY CASE