Does anyone else just ... not have nostalgia for any time period? Like, middle school was shit, high school was shit, and then 9/11 happened. Where in the span of my life am I supposed to fit in a motherfucking golden glow?
I have fond memories of individual bits of media, but the emotions there are wrapped up with the time period when I discovered them, or revisited them, which could have been years or decades after they first came out.
gwern: It's not "AI slop" if I wasted hours dicking around with MidJourney to make it.
rsaarelm: People don't appreciate the beauty of Substack's built-in slop generator.
gwern: "I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations." Have you appreciated the depth of my artist's statement?
Longtime friends of the pod will recognize the trick of turning molehills into mountains. Creationists take a legitimate debate over a detail, like how many millions of years ago did species A and species B diverge, and they blow it up into "evolution is wrong". Hossenfelder and her ilk do the same thing. They start with "pre-publication peer review has limited effectiveness" or "the allocation of funding is sometimes susceptible to fads", and they blow it up into "physicists are a cabal out to suppress The Truth".
One nugget of fact that Hossenfelder in particular exploits is that the specific way we have been investigating the corner of physics we like to call "fundamental" is, possibly, arguably, maybe tapped out. The same poster of sub-sub-atomic particles that you'd have put on your wall 30 or 40 years ago is still good today, with an edit or two in the corner. We found the top quark, we found the Higgs, and so, possibly, arguably, maybe, building an even bigger CERN machine isn't a worthwhile priority right now. Does this spell doom for physics? No, having to reorganize how we do things in one corner of our subject after decades of astonishing success is not "doom".
Just earlier this month, he was brushing off all the problems with GPT-5 and saying that "OpenAI is learning from its greatest success." He wrapped up a whole story with the following:
At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feels—and, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence—a model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the company’s narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all disease—it is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.
Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use Three Times as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the Entire City Of New Orleans, every year.
The phrase "adorned with academic ornamentation" sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.
Oh, man, I have opinions about the people in this story. But for now I'll just comment on this bit:
Note that before this incident, the Malaney-Weinstein work received little attention due to its limited significance and impact. Despite this, Weinstein has suggested that it is worthy of a Nobel prize and claimed (with the support of Brian Keating) that it is “the most deep insight in mathematical economics of the last 25-50 years”. In that same podcast episode, Weinstein also makes the incendiary claim that Juan Maldacena stole such ideas from him and his wife.
what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they’re doing. makes me think vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part. am i missing something here or is it really just useless once you step outside the fantasy
Looking at the replies and quotes of a Bluesky post that shared some anti-AI headlines, one definitely gets the sense that a segment of the population will greet the bubble popping with joy not seen since Kissinger died.
Quantum computing is still too far out from having even a niche industrial application, let alone something you can sell to middle managers the world over. Anybody who day-traded could get into Bitcoin; millions of people can type questions at a chatbot. Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I'm doubtful.
I'm hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played "exquisite corpse" parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didn't pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.
I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:
The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.
And I got to about here:
Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.
... before the "what the fuck is this fucking shit?" intensified beyond my ability to care.
Does anyone else just ... not have nostalgia for any time period? Like, middle school was shit, high school was shit, and then 9/11 happened. Where in the span of my life am I supposed to fit in a motherfucking golden glow?
I have fond memories of individual bits of media, but the emotions there are wrapped up with the time period when I discovered them, or revisited them, which could have been years or decades after they first came out.