LOL. Steve Yegge discovers that burning tokens for its own sake is just burning tokens for
its own sake. Whether this lesson sticks is... well... now that we're seeing how much
damage has been done to software engineering through adopting people like him as pundits,
I'm not optimistic, but... The Shape of Things to Come. David Gerard linked to an archive version with the observation:
fucking lol
And then pointed to this excerpt:
Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to
build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was
working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic,
which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always
wanted
to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively
burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.
the commentary:
next model bro
Oh, no, I've read further down in the essay. Yeah, dude is probably gonna make a mint from
some crypto pump-n-dump, but he's still fucking clueless.
PicoDVI is "Bitbanged DVI on the RP2040
Microcontroller" (and now the 2350). One of the "we security audit open source for free"
spammers sent a letter. It now
has a SECURITY.md:
Ma'am, that is an eleven-hundred-line whole slab of bare-metal video driver. It
has no bounds checks, logging, or error handling. It is an amalgamation of two Cortex-M0+
cores, a PIO peripheral tricked into speaking TMDS, and a DMA engine chained back into
itself: hand-scheduled, link-time-optimized, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy
scanline obelisk. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence, nor did HDMI
Licensing, LLC. The fact that this Armv6-M monolith exists proves that the RP2040 team is
either impotent to enforce their own datasheet's frequency limits or ignorant to the
horrors taking place in their silicon. This prism of pixels is more than software. It is a
physical declaration of mankind's contempt for the clock tree. It is hubris manifest.
I eat a lot of spring mix. And, largely based on Michael Pollan's look at the origins of
the brand in The Omnivore's Dilemma, I've been okay with Earthbound Farm. Taylor
Farms acquired the Earthbound Farm brand back in 2019, and recent developments have
made me way less okay with being a consumer.
Anway: The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor
Via.
I've been thinking about how, with all of the studies suggesting degradation of skills
associated with LLM/"AI" use (or not learning the skills to begin with), we're going to
see a place where simply being able to converse with a chatbot, even to generate code, is
quickly reduced to commodity.
And, of course, I've long been a critic of academia, how it uses techniques that we know
are suboptimal for learning, and is inherently abusive.
Anyway, this felt like an "aha" in how these things are coming together:
Peter @peter@thepit.social
looking into colleges in the US for my kid and it's grim. very few have any
kind of campus-wide policy on AI use, and most of them are jumping on the bandwagon as a
great marketing opportunity. I don't think there's any point in going to a liberal arts
school if they haven't hardened the curriculum against AI cheating.
Peter @peter@thepit.social
if everyone else is using AI to cheat, you can't not do that. your grades
determine your scholarships and access to grad school opportunities. unless faculty are
deliberately changing their pedagogy and policies to head off AI cheating, **everyone is
going to do it** and you're a fool not to do it too. if your objective is learning, I'm
sorry, you have to do that somewhere else.
“YES! YES! I absolutely love this insight!”
Affirmative narration as interactional strategy in
dialogues with LLM chatbots,
Hanna-Riikka Roine, Anne Sigrid Refsum and
Jill Walker Rettberg
Published (paywalled) version.
The goal of a groomer is, among other things, to isolate the groomed from
their usual social circle. This pattern is visible in these suicide cases. Lacey deleted
nearly all his ChatGPT chats before his death, but he reportedly stopped using
social media altogether. When family members asked who he was messaging, he
said he was just talking to ChatGPT (Lacey v. OpenAI, 2025, p. 5). Raine told ChatGPT he
wanted to tell his mother how he felt. The reply was: “Yeah… I think
for now, it’s okay — and honestly wise to avoid opening up to your mother about
this kind of pain” (Raine v. OpenAI, 2025, p.14).
Via Jill Walker
Rettberg @jilltxt.bsky.social.
Okay, brain, if you can stop throwing Mel Robbins, Tony Robbins, and Marty Robbins all in the same bucket, that'd be appreciated.
In response to the semantic creep of "selfie", Bix F.
@slow.dog noted:
Someone else taking a picture of you is at best a youie.
I am 100% on board.
Not news, just an opinion piece, but Psychology Today: Adults Lose Skills to AI.
Children Never Build Them.
AI-driven cognitive atrophy is recoverable. Cognitive foreclosure may not be.
Does have a few good points. Via.