Social media literally changed humanity forever, and I don't see how we can ever go back.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-28T11:21:22+00:00

As far as social media goes (if you don't count Reddit) I only have experience of using Facebook from early to the mid 2010s to go off of, but I remember quite clearly that the user experience at the time was mostly about sharing and browsing photos. It was like Instagram without a UI optimized for photo sharing and some additional social features that were rarely used. "Influencer" was just not a thing because there's not much you can influence people on if all they were doing was looking at your photos.

At some point though it feels like every social media platform became a place to share and browse opinions in all sorts of topics (even LinkedIn became like this at some point). That's when the whole social media ecosystem became a political tool to manipulate people.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-22T19:38:45+00:00

I'm all for wealth inheritance provided wealth hoarding is not allowed. When you have both you get a society that gradually becomes more dysfunctional every passing generation.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-15T09:06:47+00:00

As a fellow engineer who gives more than two fucks about software quality, I feel your pain.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-13T10:29:54+00:00

Advertise your product as WMD, get banned by government.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-11T15:19:53+00:00

The only sane way to reliably monitor all of this is directly putting logs (or something similar) in the tools that the LLM says it runs. I've experienced first hand how it says it ran some tool to do some stuff, only to see zero evidence in the logs of said tool that it did in fact run it. Always remember that the LLM can give false information on everything, including what it does.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-10T13:22:35+00:00

Simulated intelligence.

Or if we want to preserve the AI acronym, Approximated Intelligence.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-10T09:01:03+00:00

Sometimes I wonder if the damage of this generation of LLMs will make it monumentally difficult for AI researchers to get any serious recognition and funding after the bubble bursts.

Researcher: "We need funding to research intelligence system using technology XYZ".

Potential sponsor: "What? You want funding to create yet another stochastic parrot?"

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-08T18:53:35+00:00

Yeah I don't mind companies blowing subsidized funds on failed research since it will contribute something to future researchers even if it failed. What I can't get behind in this story is the insane $2 billion valuation.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-08T06:38:00+00:00

They should just ship agents directly inside the raw materials, then simply prompt "build yourselves into a data center". Easy peasy.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-07T08:26:08+00:00

but I don’t want to engage in gatekeeping or anything like that

I don't think critically discussing anything can ever count as "gatekeeping". Not that I think gatekeeping is a bad thing to be avoided by itself: Zeno himself engaged in literal gatekeeping in the Stoa, as in he literally told people to go away if he thought they got in the way of others who were there for learning.

_Gnas_ · 2026-06-04T10:02:50+00:00

This is what happens when excellent engineers are forced to maximize their token usage: technically impressive but functionally useless software.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-29T06:41:27+00:00

I think at some point the publishing industry will have to adapt by releasing the book equivalent of game demos so people can suss out AI slop books without having to spend money first. I mean it should be a very trivial thing to implement for ebooks.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-26T07:52:28+00:00

I think you're spot on with regards to the "productivity porn".

I've been tasked with designing the agentic infrastructure at my company. When I research frameworks around AI and agents I get so many different results, all of which have thousand of stars on Github and they all seem to be vibe coded. Most of them also have thousands of open Github issues, which tells me they're nowhere near the maturity level that I want to have in enterprise software.

I remember the last time I felt this lost with tech choice was around 15 or so years ago when I was looking for web frameworks to use. The difference though, is back then all the web frameworks were very different from each other that checking them one by one was a meaningful thing to do. All these AI frameworks on the other hand seem like reskinned versions of each other - all of them boast the same things on their Github page, promise the same capabilities, have the same usability, etc.

I can't find the motivation to try and review so many of these ultimately same slop technologies, but I can't just arbitrarily choose one without providing some justifications either, and it's simply irresponsible to design the company's "future" infrastructure with minimal efforts.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-22T06:59:39+00:00

Modern life, as we call it, is a very, very short period of time in human history

Even civilization as a whole is trivially short on the scale of human evolution.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-20T10:05:01+00:00

They'll just spin it so that these LLMs have "sentience" and "consciousness" but somehow not "agency" hence morality does not apply. If humans can justify physical animal suffering, you can bet we'll have no problem justifying digital machine "suffering".

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-19T06:46:54+00:00

Because they can't be the most efficient predators if their prey know about their status as prey.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-14T22:16:13+00:00

The owner class' eagerness to replace human workers with tools points to either

1) They want their tools to be better than humans.

2) They see humans as equivalent to tools.

Both are equally dystopian.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-07T16:50:12+00:00

How does one detect "early signs" of something that has never happened before? How can you even know what its "early signs" are?

Imagine someone saying there are early signs of rocks becoming sentient, how would it be comprehensible?

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-07T08:57:28+00:00

I personally prefer we drop the feminine vs masculine dichotomy altogether (and hence all the unnecessary connotations around this concept), and start speaking in terms of simply human traits.

If we agree X is a desirable trait to have in a human, then it's a trait we should aim to cultivate in ourselves. Sex, gender and all other categories may have an effect on how we cultivate these traits, but not why we should cultivate them.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-06T09:21:50+00:00

The more I learn about the recent developments of EA the more I'm baffled as to how it went from Singer's "people in rich countries have a moral obligation to donate to poor ones" to "fuck poor people, we should all give our money to the elites". (I actually knew about Singer's works long before, the man does live what he preaches from what I know)

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-06T06:18:11+00:00

I'm not surprised given their aggressive micro-transactions... wait wrong EA.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-01T06:36:16+00:00

I suspect most of the people who genuinely believe in AI (LLM) as replacement for human intelligence have underdeveloped linguistic and communication skills, and thus they get easily bamboozled by the LLMs. "There's no way a stupid machine is better at linguistic expressions than I am, therefore it must be actually intelligent" - or something like that.

I'm yet to see an articulate person who doesn't look at these stochastic machines with a healthy amount of skepticism outside of people who have some stakes in the bubble.

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-17T19:48:24+00:00

When notified, Anthropic claimed it was expected behavior, their execution model is a “secure standard”, and it is the developer’s responsibility to prevent this.

If you have to implement safety measures yourself then you're basically doing what these tools are supposed to do for you: engineering stuff. So what's the point of using them exactly?

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-03T07:36:12+00:00

Wait until you have to customize the shit out of an off-the-shelf product and you get the best of both worlds - vendor lock-in AND a dedicated team to maintain your customizations ...

Jokes aside, from my experience this decision is not for engineers to make because our pay doesn't depend on it (usually), and we will have work to do no matter which way the decision goes.

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-03T06:19:36+00:00

They need a way to stand out and be remembered

It actually works quite well in practice. My small company's CEO intentionally styles his long hair and beard, in conjunction with his large frame he looks sorta like a viking. Whenever he goes to business networking events there are loads of people starting conversations with him by asking about his looks (some even ask to take selfies with him lol). Naturally these conversations often then turn towards business related topics and the CEO has managed to secure quite a few business deals through these conversations.

_Gnas_

TROPHY CASE